Journal articles on the topic 'Domestic film trade'

AbstractThe objective of this study is to investigate the effects of trade barriers and cultural distance on the domestic market share in the film industry. We analyze panel data with both two-stage least squares and instrumental-variable methods. These methods can separate the effects of time-invariant measures of trade barriers and cultural difference from country-specific effects. This improvement in the estimation method and the use of a more appropriate measure of trade barriers in the film industry enable us to produce empirical results that are consistent with theoretical arguments. Based on the panel data collected from 30 countries for the period 2001–2013, the empirical results herein indicate that the cultural distance, as well as market size, is an important factor for the domestic market share. Trade barriers are also shown to be a significant factor, but the magnitude of their impact on the domestic market share is much smaller than that of the market size.

Private owners of culturally significant works are legally entitled to refuse to permit third parties, including cultural heritage institutions (CHIs), to access those works. This situation is particularly problematic for CHIs when the cultural works at issue are immaterial works that are supported on unstable physical platforms, such as cellulose acetate film, cellulose tapes or early computer software. Ideally, these cultural works should undergo urgent digital preservation processes in order to preserve and protect the public interest in accessing its cultural heritage. If property is culturally important, a private owner's ability to withhold it from third party access may conflict with the human right to participate in cultural life, as affirmed in international human rights law. Noting however that human rights law also provides that ‘no-one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property’, a balance between the property rights of the owner and the public interest in culture is essential. This article proposes amendments to copyright law and domestic trade law as possible ways to provide this balance. This article focuses on New Zealand law and its earliest immaterial cultural works, but the arguments could be extended to other cultural works and to other jurisdictions.

Fitri Agustina, Nachnul Ansori, dan Tegar Pradana F.AProgaram Studi Teknik Industri, Universitas Trunojoyo MaduraJl. Raya Telang Po Box 2 Kamal, Bangkalan Madura 69162, IndonesiaE-mail: fitri_agoesti@yahoo.co.id, nachnul@gmail.comABSTRAKPenentuan kompetensi inti industri kreatif yang bercirikan pemanfaatan kreatifitas, ketrampilan serta bakat individu merupakan proses pemilihan yang sangat krusial. Hal ini dikarenakan output dari industri kreatif berupa produk ataupun pemanfaatan daya kreasi dan daya cipta individu yang semakin variatif dan berkembang. Untuk bisa melakukan penentuan kompetensi inti maka dilakukan pemetaan industri kreatif terlebih dahulu. Kajian dalam penelitian ini berupa pemetaan industri kreatif beserta penentuan kompetensi inti industri kreatif Kabupaten Bangkalan berdasarkan multi-kriteria pada variabel produk domestik bruto (PDB), jumlah ketenagakerjaan, perdagangan internasional dan jumlah perusahaan. Metode yang digunakan berupa integrasi Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) dan metode perankingan Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE). Hasil yang didapatkan dari pemetaan industri kreatif di Bangkalan terdiri dari subsektor pasar seni dan barang antik, kerajinan, desain fesyen, video/film dan fotografi serta penerbitan dan percetakan. Sedangkan subsektor kerajinan dipilih sebagai kompetensi inti yang diunggulkan.Kata kunci: industri kreatif, kompetensi inti daerah, MCDM, AHP, PROMETHEEABSTRACTDetermining core competence for creative industry which is characterized by utilizing creativity, skill and individual talent is the crucial selection process. It is because the output of creative industry as well as products and utilization of creativity are rapidly developed. This research discusses about mapping creative industry and determining core competence for creative industry in Bangkalan district based on the variable of gross domestic product, number of worker, international trade and number of firm. The method adopted for core competence determination is an integrated Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE). The result of mapping creative industry shows that art, craft, design, video or film and publishing are included in it. Meanwhile craft subsector is determined as a core competence that is focused in Bangkalan district.Keywords: creative industry, core competence, MCDM, AHP, PROMETHEE

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to focus on the influence of domestic legal traditions on dispute behavior, which has been widely examined in the conflict literature, within the World Trade Organization (WTO). States with a civil legal tradition hold treaties and agreements in high esteem. Therefore, they will be more likely to file trade complaints and pursue adjudication when compared to states with common or mixed legal traditions. Design/methodology/approach – The hypotheses in this study have been tested using a quantitative test with data from the WTO regarding trade disputes. Findings – While civil law states are more likely to file complaints, they are less likely to pursue adjudication over a negotiated settlement. Originality/value – This study brings to light how domestic legal systems affect state behavior within an international legal body.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify factors that have led to the rebirthing of the illicit cultivation of tobacco in Australia known as chop-chop. Limited research has been conducted on the Commonwealth policing of tobacco-related criminal activity, but no prior studies have investigated domestic cultivation since the tobacco farming ceased legal production. Design/methodology/approach To fill the void of the literature, this study used data collected from Australian Government publications, court cases and newspapers to develop an understanding of the financial aspects and policing of the rebirth of chop-chop. Newspaper articles for a range of publications for a two-year period were used to examine policing efforts to disrupt criminals engaged in domestic cultivation of tobacco. Findings As tobacco was first legally grown in Australia, authorities have always faced the problems associated with the illicit cultivation of tobacco. Findings indicate that as a result of the increased number of successful interception of illicit tobacco at the border, the domestic cultivation of chop-chop is growing as criminal enterprises find alternative means to fund their activities. Originality/value The paper improves upon a neglected topic by offering a current contribution to a topic looking at the illicit tobacco, chop-chop trade.

Since the dawn of democracy South Africa has embarked in a process of dismantling protectionist business and trade policies, and made the countrys stream of commerce one of the preferred globally. The countrys sound competition and trade policies, natural resource endowments, market size and regional influence, attracted foreign businesss and foreign direct invetsment (FDI). Equally the country has been under pressure to protect the domestic industries from injurious competition and business, through sector specific laws, anti-dumping and countervailing duties laws, investment and competition regime. The concern has been the likilelihood of the introduction of trade and competition barriers, and the allienation of FDI. This paper critically examines the impact the countrys antidumping and competition law and practice upon foreign direct investment. Domestic industries have never been shy file anti-dumping and anti-competition suits against foreign companies, sometimes even against the public interest outcry. Relevant examples of these suits include the famous Wal-Mart anti-competition case, and recently the Brazilian frozen fowl meat anti-dumping case.

Abstract. Trace organic compounds from pharmaceutical and personal care products are often not fully removed during wastewater treatment, resulting in discharge of these emerging pollutants to surface and groundwater. Fate and transformation of trace organics has primarily been investigated in larger activated sludge wastewater treatment facilities; almost no research has been done on passively aerated fixed-bed bio-filters that are used in decentralized facilities that serve smaller communities. Four laboratory-scale, packed-bed, recirculating-media filter systems were constructed to evaluate the removal of ibuprofen, naproxen, and triclosan. The media (or packed bed) provided support for the development of the fixed film and the needed porosity for air and water movement. Effluent from a local residential septic tank effluent gravity (STEG) system was used as the wastewater supply. This supply had greater than 100 ppb concentrations of ibuprofen, naproxen, and triclosan. Three of the media filters were spiked (nominal 0.1 ppm) with ibuprofen, naproxen, or triclosan to better represent the wastewater from a rural healthcare facility; the fourth media filter received wastewater as produced by the STEG system and served as a non-spiked control. Overall, the mean removal of ibuprofen, naproxen, and triclosan from the wastewater solution was 94%, 84%, and 83%, respectively. At the end of the study, samples of the fixed film were analyzed to discern whether removal was by sorption or biodegradation. It was determined that sorption of the three trace organic compounds into the biofilm accounted for only 0.12% of the ibuprofen, 0.20% of the naproxen, and 1.41% of the triclosan. These results indicate that biodegradation is the primary removal mechanism for these compounds. Keywords: Ibuprofen, Microbial degradation, Naproxen, PPCPs, Recirculating media filters, Triclosan.

Domestic politics theories of international political economy and the recent disruptions in international cooperation and trade apparently induced by domestic discontent have shown the crucial role domestic forces play in influencing governmental preferences. This article contributes to this theoretical school, first, by assessing seminal works on the ideational, material, and institutional dimensions of domestic politics, and second, by conceptualising the ‘societal approach’ to fill a major gap in domestic politics theorising. The societal approach asks under which conditions value-based societal ideas, domestic institutions, and material interests matter in shaping governmental preferences. When do ideas prevail over interests and vice versa? How do they interact with each other and with domestic institutions? The societal approach includes all three domestic variables as potential driving forces for governmental preferences and conceives them both as individual and as interacting forces. Most importantly, it complements domestic politics theories by proposing hypotheses on the conditions for the influence of each variable on governmental preferences. The article brings together previously conceived parts of the societal approach and considerably expands it.

AbstractIn this article, we explore the conditions under which firms engage in transnational lobbying and foreign venue shopping in the framework of WTO dispute settlement. Classical World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement cases mostly originate in domestic firms instigating their public authorities to bring a complaint against foreign trade barriers incompatible with WTO law. In recent years, however, we have witnessed the rise of WTO cases in which firms get a foreign government to file a case against its own authorities. By analysing transnational lobbying by EU firms in the WTO footwear case filed by China against the EU, and by US firms in the WTO gambling case Antigua brought against the US, we highlight the increasing resemblance between trade disputes and investment disputes.

Despite the sharply increasing remittances in developing countries (especially in the AsiaPacific region), the relationship between remittances and domestic investment in recipient countries has not been fluently evidenced. This paper aims to fill the empirical gap in the Asia-Pacific region by investigating the impact of remittances on domestic investment with a sample including nineteen developing countries based on time series data from 1980 to 2015. However, our findings contradict some evidence from other regions. The results robustly confirm that remittances have a negative impact on domestic investment in these countries. Our results also indicate that the annual GDP per capita growth, official development assistance, domestic credit, gross saving, and inflation have a positive impact on domestic investment, however, we conclude that the impact of trade openness on domestic investment has a negative sign in the study period. The paper also provides some policy suggestions with regard to remittance flows in this region.

In 2018, the United States (US) Administration initiated several trade actions, including tariffs on China for unfair trade practices outlined by the US Trade Representative (USTR). In response, China filed requests for consultations with the World Trade Organization (WTO) and has implemented or threatened to implement increased tariffs on US products. In this article, the implications of current and potential US trade actions and responses by China on the US and global economy are estimated. We employ a dynamic supply chain model based on the widely used Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) Data Base and model. Our analysis finds that US gross domestic product (GDP) would be reduced by a projected –0.86 per cent in 2030 (or US$227.8 billion in 2017 dollars), as the role of the USA in global supply chains declines significantly. China’s GDP would also decline considerably by 2.84 per cent as a result of the actions imposed against it, while the rest of the world gain, as they fill the gaps left by US and Chinese producers. JEL: F16, C68

Kaolin particle films are used as a means of pest control in some commercial apple orchards in the Maritime provinces; however, no studies to date have evaluated the impact of these particle films on leaf gas exchange under the region's growing conditions. Also previously unexplored is the gas exchange response of blackberry leaves to kaolin particle films and the question of whether leaf gas exchange response varies according to the leaf surface of particle film application. A study consisting of an apple field trial and a blackberry greenhouse trial was conducted during the 2005 growing season in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Canada, with the aims of 1) characterizing the leaf temperature and gas exchange responses [net photosynthesis, stomatal conductance (g s), intercellular CO2, and transpiration] of ‘Ginger Gold’ apple [Malus ×sylvestris (L.) Mill var. domestica (Borkh.) Mansf.] leaves to a kaolin particle film (95% kaolin clay) applied at various leaf residue densities under the province's growing conditions, 2) characterizing the leaf temperature and gas exchange responses of ‘Triple Crown’ blackberry (Rubus L. subgenus Rubus Watson) leaves to treatment of adaxial or abaxial surfaces with the kaolin particle film at various leaf residue densities, and 3) determining whether the gas exchange response of apple and blackberry leaves to the kaolin particle film varies according to leaf temperature. Leaf gas exchange measurements were taken under conditions of ambient CO2, saturated light, moderate (apple) or high (blackberry) relative humidity levels and leaf temperatures ranging from 26 to 39 °C (apple) and 15 to 41 °C (blackberry). When the particle film was applied to both the adaxial and abaxial surfaces of apple leaves at kaolin residue densities of 0.5 to 3.7 g·m−2, leaf temperature was reduced by up to 1.1 °C (P = 0.005) and g s was increased (P = 0.029) relative to leaves with trace (<0.5 g·m−2) levels of kaolin deposits. No other effects of kaolin leaf residue density on apple leaf gas exchange were found, nor were any interactions of leaf temperature × residue level (P > 0.05). When applied to a fixed area on the adaxial or abaxial surfaces of blackberry leaves at kaolin residue densities of 0.5 to 10.8 g·m−2, the particle film did not alter leaf temperature or gas exchange (P > 0.05). No interactions of leaf temperature × residue level or leaf temperature × leaf surface × residue level were found to affect blackberry leaf gas exchange (P > 0.05).

Imposing temporary trade barriers (TTBs) as remedy actions against imports has become popular among global countries in recent decades. Many countries have employed these trade barriers to protect domestic firms from possible injury by unfair international trade. This study evaluated the main factors that influenced the implementation of TTBs in the forest products industry from 1995 to 2015 for two scenarios: a global and developing countries scenario; and a paper and non-paper products scenario. A two-step sample selection model was employed to assess the determinants of the decision to impose TTBs and the frequency to implement TTBs for the scenario of global and developing countries. From the perspective of forest products, determinants of applying TTBs on paper and non-paper products were examined with the probit regression. For the scenario of global and developing countries, the import, employment in agriculture, forest coverage rate, inflation, and GDP per capita were significant determinants. For the scenario of paper and non-paper products, variables of the forest area, imports, exports, GDP per capita, tariff rate, expenditure on education, and employment in agriculture were significant. The results show that a country with a large per capita GDP is more likely to file more TTBs against others. One implication is that countries should be cautious to impose TTBs, as it may cause the attention to shift from the inefficiencies of domestic forest firms to the unfair trade actions of exporters.

The article builds on James Morrow’s theoretical formulation on asymmetric alliances, which contends that alliances are formed as a result of a security–autonomy trade-off between great powers and minor powers. It expands Morrow’s theory by showing that in the absence of a common threat or shared interests, the trade-off tends to leave a deficit in a weaker state’s net benefits from the alliance. I argue that side payments fill in the deficit in gains for weaker states. The article highlights the importance of domestic political constraints in shaping leaders’ alliance policies. I use the US–Pakistan alliance as a case study to probe the argument. The analysis presented here shows that the alliance, formed in 1954, was a result of a strategic trade-off between the United States and Pakistan. The case provides support to the argument that side payments played a crucial role in cementing the alliance.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the trade performance, revealed comparative advantage and trade specialisation indices of Indian pharmaceutical in the post-modified Indian Patent Act. Design/methodology/approach – The main data sources for this paper are United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, PROWESS of Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, Government of India reports and Reserve Bank of India databases. Revealed comparative advantage index (RCAI) and trade specialisation coefficient (TSC) have been calculated in the study. Findings – India is ranked third in regard of TCS, far behind Ireland and Israel. While Ireland has moved up the value chain faster after 1995, Israel has moved up swiftly after 2000 through global production network and supply chain. The Indian pharmaceutical industry, on the other hand, has largely capitalised on its low-cost production of generic drugs and a large domestic market. The RCAI also supports the results of TSC. India is positioned at 11th place, far behind Ireland, which stands tall at the top with distantly followed by Israel, Switzerland, Belgium, the UK, etc. Practical implications – The study shows the policy implications for future sustainable development of the industry as the new IPR regime has given opportunities as well as threats to both domestic pharmaceutical companies as well as the multinational corporations. The Indian pharmaceutical industry can be a good learning experience for other developing countries hopeful to enter the global market for generic drugs. Originality/value – There are no major studies providing detailed analyses of India’s comparative advantage vis-à-vis other leading exporters of pharmaceutical products in the world. This study endeavours to fill this gap. It also attempts to capture recent trends in exports and imports during the global recession period.

Abstract Although Ethiopia is one of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC), there is a lack of empirical studies about the determinants of its external indebtedness. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining the macroeconomic determinants of the external indebtedness of Ethiopia between 1981 and 2016, using the two- and three-gap models as a theoretical framework and an autoregressive distributed lag bound testing approach. The result shows that in the long run, the savings-investment gap, trade deficit, fiscal deficit, and debt service have a positive and significant impact on external indebtedness. However, the growth rate of gross domestic product, trade openness, and inflation negatively and significantly affect the external indebtedness of the country. These results coincide with the predictions of the two- and three-gap models of the theoretical framework. The study argues that appropriate macroeconomic, social, and supply-side policies are essential to reducing the external indebtedness of Ethiopia.

Ornamental fishes are the most popular pet throughout the world and high demand for these fishes has made them an important component of the world fish trade. India contributes a very meager percentage to the world ornamental fish trade; but considering the high ichthyofaunal diversity it has the potential to compete with the world’s leading ornamental fish producers in the near future. Sundarban Biosphere Reserve has abundant waterbodies with rich fish diversity. Although some research has been carried out on ichthyofaunal resources of the Sundarban; detailed documentation on freshwater indigenous ornamental ichthyofaunal resources of this region is still not available. To fill this knowledge gap, the present study has been conducted to list the indigenous ornamental ichthyofaunal resources of the Sundarban Biosphere Reserve along with their conservation status and their prospective utilization for improved livelihood of local communities. Eighty four species belonging to 11 orders, 28 families and 59 genera were collected from the study area with species representing the order Cypriniformes dominating the ichthyofauna. Nine species have been listed as Near Threatened in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™. Indigenous fish species of the Sundarban having great potential to support domestic as well as the international ornamental fish trade from India in near future. The ornamental fish species would also be able to generate alternate livelihood options for the impecunious communities of the Sundarban. However, serious concern must also be paid to the conservation of these fish species as some of them are under near threatened categories of IUCN Red list.

<p>Cv. Mas Kirana merupakan salah satu varietas pisang yang populer, umumnya tumbuh di Indonesia dan merupakan pendukung utama industri dan perdagangan pisang domestik dan ekspor. Kendala dan masalah utama yang berkaitan dengan penanganan pascapanen pisang segar adalah umur simpan dan penanganan pascapanen yang kurang tepat. Ada kebutuhan untuk menemukan cara penyimpanan yang tepat untuk memperpanjang umur simpan dan mempertahankan kualitas buah pada kemasan ritel untuk pasar domestik. Kemasan Atmosfir termodifikasi (MAP) adalah teknik yang ideal dan dikenal memiliki potensi besar untuk memperpanjang umur simpan pasca panen pisang dengan kalium Permanganat (KMnO4) sachet sebagai penyerap etilen yang digunakan dalam MAP untuk menyerap produksi etilen endogen. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengevaluasi umur simpan dan kualitas buah dalam kemasan MAP, dengan atau tanpa penyerap etilen (KMnO4). Data diperoleh dari analisis fisik, kimia dan evaluasi sensori yang dianalisis dengan analisis sidik ragam dan uji Duncan (p&lt;0.05) untuk mendapatkan pengaruh nyata rata-rata perlakuan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa umur simpan buah pisang yang dikemas dalam White Stretch Film (WSF) dengan KMnO4 (MAP aktif) pada suhu 28 °C dapat memperpanjang sampai 10 hari dibandingkan dengan 6 hari untuk pisang kontrol yang dikemas dalam WSF tanpa KMnO4 (MAP pasif). Perlakuan WSF dengan KMnO4 menunda susut bobot, warna, total padatan terlarut, dan vitamin C dibanding pisang kontrol tanpa KMnO4. Kualitas organoleptik atau sensori (warna, aroma, dan rasa) buah yang matang penuh untuk kemasan WSF tanpa atau dengan KMnO4 sangat baik.</p><p>Kata kunci :Kemasan atmosfir termodifikasi aktif, kalium permanganat, penyerap etilen, pisang</p><p>English Version Abstract</p><p>Cv. Mas Kirana is one of popular banana variety commonly grown in Indonesia and the mainstay of banana industry for both domestic and export trades. Major constraints and problem associated with postharvest handling of fresh banana are short shelf life and lack of postharvest handling. There is a need to find appropriate storage method in order to extend the storage life to mantain the fruit quality for retail packaging for domestic market. Modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) packaging is an ideal preservation technique and is known to have great potential to extending the postharvest life of banana with potassium permanganate (KMnO4) sachets as ethylene absorbent were used in MAP to absorb endogenously produced ethylene. The purpose of this study was to evaluated for fruit quality and shelf life under MAP packaging, with or without an ethylene absorber (KMnO4). The data obtained from physico chemical analysis and sensory evaluation were analyzed statically for analysis of variance with Duncan test (p&lt;0.05) was used to detect significant differences for the treatment means. The results indicate that the shelf life of fruits packed under White Stretch Film (WSF) with KMnO4 (active MAP) at 28 °C could be extended up to 10 days compared to 6 days for banana control packed under WSF without KMnO4 (passive MAP). WSF with KMnO4 treatments delayed weight loss, colour, total soluble solids (TSS), and ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) as compared to control banana without KMnO4. Sensory quality (colour, aroma, and taste) of fully ripe fruits of both WSF without or with KMnO4 was very good.</p><p>Keywords : Active modified atmosfir packaging, potassium permanganate, ethylene absorbent, banana</p>

The author of the article analyzes existing methods of seizing three-dimensional and latent (two-dimensional) shoeprints, described in the forensic scientific literature, which are used in Ukraine and abroad. Attention is drawn to the fact that methods of seizing traces that have been used for a long time are a subject to minor changes, despite the development of scientific and technological progress. The author names a reason for such a phenomenon: the lack of exchange in experience with countries that use modern tools and techniques for forensic analysis, one of which is a crime scene fingerprint film lift pad. The crime scene fingerprint lift pad is most often used when seizing latent (two-dimensional) shoe prints during inspection of a crime scene. However, attention is drawn to the problem of further suitability of seized traces for carrying out forensic examination as well as to peculiarities of storing seized materials. According to the author, trace damage is associated with two groups of factors: removal of a trace with violation of a technique and removal of a trace by means of poor-quality material. The author describes several types of crime scene fingerprint lift pad which is used to seize evidence of trace evidence nature. The author notes that along with the development of technology, trace evidence methods should be advanced as well. There is an urgent need to analyze the market of imported fingerprints, its efficiency, specificity of forensic situations, weather conditions, etc. There is also a need to share experiences in the use of such materials by forensic expert subdivisions. The question as to improving domestic production of fingerprint products, increasing the cost for purchasing high-quality materials also arises. Such an approach will fix the situation with quality of a crime scene processing and collection of evidence which will have a positive impact on detection of crimes and identification of perpetrators. The author emphasizes the relevance of this study and need for new theoretical and practical developments.

This study investigated the effect of exchange rates management on manufacturing sector in Nigeria from 1986-2019. Secondary data used in the analysis were sourced from Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin, (2020) and World Development Indicators, (2020). Stationarity and orders of integration of the variables were examined with both Augmented-Dicky-Fuller (ADF) and Philip-Perron (PP) unit root tests. Having disaggregated manufacturing sector output into oil and non-oil source, two different models emerged. The results of Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bound test for co-integration revealed that the variables under oil sector model were co-integrated, while there was no evidence of co-integration in non-oil model. ARDL technique of estimation results showed that, both in the short-run and long-run, real exchange rates negatively and significantly impacted on oil manufacturing sector, while real interest rates negatively and significantly influenced the sector in the short-run. In the non-oil model, it was found that, both in the short-term and long-term, while real exchange rates negatively and significantly impacted on the sector, inflation produced positive and significant effect. Authority in Nigeria should improve on trade competitiveness of Nigeria with other countries via empowering the domestic currency to improve on domestic manufacturing sector performance.

：Approximately 200 million people in Africa derive high-quality and low-cost proteins from fish. However, the consumption of fish is not fully exploited to combat the “triple burden” of malnutrition—obesity, undernutrition, and micronutrient deficiencies which are the leading causes of poor health in the region. There is still limited knowledge on quantitative information to guide policy makers in developing evidence-based actions that can improve the availability of and access to nutritious food for healthy and sustained diets among children and care givers. In this paper, we review the available literature with the aim of assessing and quantifying the extent to which fish contributes towards fighting food and nutrition insecurity in the Eastern Africa subregion. Key results reveal the region is characterized by fish supply deficits, and hence, low levels of fish consumed per person. Nonetheless, the increase in fish imports, and the growing supply of fish from aquaculture are likely to improve the per-capita fish intake. Fish trade is generally bidirectional, with exports exceeding imports in value terms, while significant challenges still hinder domestic and intra-regional fish trade. The Eastern Africa region is projected to realize increased fish consumption from 4.80 kg in 2013 to 5.49 kg by 2022. Rising population growth and income levels imply that the region will need 2.49 million tonnes of fish to fill the demand–supply gaps. We recommend that food security and nutritional programmes should recognize the potential of fish in providing essential micronutrients from the aspects of improved dietary quality, nutritional status, and general wellbeing of the region’s fast growing population.

The Great East Japan Earthquake hit the Tohoku district Pacific coast at March 11, 2011. This earthquake exceeded by far the earthquake scale, tsunami height, and damage size that had been assumed conventionally by a specialty committee located in Japan’s Central Disaster Prevention Council. To fill in the gap between earthquakes that had been assumed conventionally and the reality that was witnessed with their own eyes in this earthquake, trace investigations for gigantic earthquakes and tsunamis in old age are currently being carried out [18]. Under these circumstances, this paper focuses on the problem of unexpected disasters based on the viewpoint of Business Continuity Management (BCM), referring to survey results, which were immediately conducted among domestic companies after this earthquake. Characteristics of the problem of unexpected disasters are to have to solve two problems: how to assume unexpected events and the delay of “current recoverable time” that occurs as a result.

Purpose – Over the years most of the developing countries have failed to collect enough revenues to finance their budgets. As a result, they have to face the problem of twin deficits and to rely on external and domestic debt to finance their developmental activities. The positive effects of public debt relate to the fact that in resource-starved economies debt financing (if done properly) leads to higher growth and adds to their capacity to service and repay external and internal debt. The negative effects work through two main channels – i.e., “Debt Overhang” and “Crowding Out” effects. The purpose of this paper is to examine the consequences of public debt for economic growth and investment for the Philippines. Design/methodology/approach – The present study examines the consequences of public debt for economic growth and investment for the Philippines during the period 1975-2010, by using autoregressive distributed lag technique. Findings – The results reveal that in the Philippines, public external debt has negative and significant relationship with economic growth and investment confirming the existence of “Debt Overhang effect”. But due to insignificant relationships of debt servicing with investment and economic growth, the existence of the crowding out hypothesis could not be confirmed. The domestic debt has a negative relationship with investment and positive relationship with economic growth. Research limitations/implications – First and foremost implication of the study is that heavy reliance on external debt must be discouraged. Therefore, in order to accelerate economic growth, developing countries must adopt those policies that are likely to result in reducing their debt burden, and it must not be allowed to reach unsustainable level. In the case of domestic debt, the present study finds that investment is negatively affected by domestic debt due to the crowding out effect; yet real GDP has a positive relationship with domestic debt. Thus, if policy makers want to use domestic debt as a tool to stimulate real GDP then it must keep an eye on the consequences of domestic debt on the investment. Practical implications – First and foremost implication of the study is that heavy reliance on external debt must be discouraged. Therefore, in order to accelerate economic growth, the Philippines must adopt those policies that are likely to result in reducing their debt burden, and external debt it must not be allowed to reach unsustainable level. In the case of domestic debt, the present study finds that investment is negatively affected by domestic debt due to the crowding out effect; yet real GDP has a positive relationship with domestic debt. Thus, if policy makers want to use domestic debt as a tool to stimulate real GDP then it must keep an eye on the consequences of domestic debt for on the investment. Social implications – It also follows from the estimation results that population growth rate is harmful for the economic growth. So in order to stimulate the growth performance, it must adopt effective population control policies. Similarly, since openness and investment are growth enhancing so there is need for the trade and investment supportive policies. Originality/value – From the review of literature on the issue, it can be broadly summarized that most of the studies are on the relationship of external debt and economic growth, neglecting domestic debt entirely or mentioning it in the passing. Second, most of these studies have been conducted by using panel data. However, as the different countries vary in socio-economic conditions so it is better to conduct the country specific study. The present study is an attempt to fill these gaps in the existing literature.

Purpose Climate change has become one of the most important development challenges worldwide. It affects various sectors, with agriculture the most vulnerable. In Ethiopia, climate change impacts are exacerbated due to the economy’s heavy dependence on agriculture. The Ethiopian Government has started to implement its climate-resilient green economy (CRGE) strategy and reduce CO2 emissions. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of CO2 emission on agricultural productivity and household welfare. Design/methodology/approach This study aims to fill these significant research and knowledge gaps using a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model to investigate CO2 emissions’ impact on agricultural performance and household welfare. Findings The results indicate that CO2 emissions negatively affect agricultural productivity and household welfare. Compared to the baseline, real agricultural gross domestic product is projected to be 4.5% lower in the 2020s under a no-CRGE scenario. Specifically, CO2 emissions lead to a decrease in the production of traded and non-traded crops, but not livestock. Emissions also worsen the welfare of all segments of households, where the most vulnerable groups are the rural-poor households. Originality/value The debate in the area is not derived from a rigorous analysis and holistic economy-wide approach. Therefore, the paper fills this gap and is original by value and examines these issues methodically.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the macroeconomic determinants of Port wine exports, taking into account the diversity and various quality levels associated with this product. Design/methodology/approach Port wine is a fortified wine only produced in Portugal. In the period 2006-2014, an extended gravity model is applied to data on the exports of the top 20 importing countries, accounting for 94 per cent of total exports. The authors base their empirical strategy on the Hausman–Taylor estimator (1971), overcoming endogeneity and accounting for time invariant variables. They estimate the impact of several factors on the total trade of Port wine, namely: gross domestic product (GDP), GDP per capita, tariffs, exchange rates, distance from original supplier, mutual language familiarity, landlockedness, wine consumption per capita and presence of Portuguese emigrants, all measured in volume and value terms, and for each of the four categories (Standard, High Standard, Vintage and Aged). Findings The findings show that the quantity and value of total Port wine exports are positively determined by overall GDP per capita, the presence of a Portuguese emigrant community (which implies that to some degree a common language and culture are shared), while exports are negatively influenced by landlockedness. In contrast to the traditional gravity model, distance from the source of supply does not appear to be a significant determinant, a fact explained by the specific and singular nature of Port wine and by the long tradition of this product in international markets. In addition, the results revealed specific determinants for specific product categories – such as GDP for aged Port and wine consumption per capita for high standard, vintage and aged Port, suggesting that Portugal needs to increase its exports of high-quality Port wine to markets that exhibit a tendency towards increased wine consumption per capita and are coming to be considered large and fast-growing economies. Originality/value This paper extends the literature, by respecifying the typical gravity model for aggregate goods to permit the analysis of wine exports. There has been relatively little application of this model to assess the determinants of the wine trade, and when it has been used, generally it has been in studies focusing on aggregate wine trade between countries. This paper seeks to fill this gap by focusing on the determinants of exports of a specific wine – Port wine, which is an internationally recognised product, with a clear internal product differentiation according to distinct quality levels – and in this regard provides new insights into the international patterns of trade in wine.

The priority task for Kazakhstan is to increase the competitiveness of the national economy. The formation of competitive advantages of industries and enterprises of agro-industrial complex is of particular importance in scientific aspects and in business practice. Scientifically based technologies of agricultural production envisage production and sale of agricultural products and food products in the required volumes, which are competitive on domestic and foreign markets. The authors note that one of the main problems in processing of raw materials is the low output of final goods from raw unit. In order to fill export niches and ensure import substitution, new export-oriented sectors of the agro-industrial complex have been studied. In particular, in processing industry, the transition to international quality standards for technical and technological re-equipment of production, as well as expanding the range of food products and creating equal conditions for competition with main trading partners in the Eurasian Economic Union remains relevant. The results of the study allowed us to conclude that it is necessary to make amendments in matters of technical regulation, trade, protection of competition, information, customs and border services, improve organizational and economic structure of agricultural sector in the following priority areas of management: development of integration in AIC, agro-industrial entities performing procurement functions, storage, transportation, processing and marketing, organization of agricultural markets, ensuring formation of effective material resources. Thus, it can be stated that increasing the competitiveness of agricultural products depends on many factors, the observance of which is an indispensable condition for the recovery of the industry's economy.

The priority task for Kazakhstan is to increase the competitiveness of the national economy. The formation of competitive advantages of industries and enterprises of agro-industrial complex is of particular importance in scientific aspects and in business practice. Scientifically based technologies of agricultural production envisage production and sale of agricultural products and food products in the required volumes, which are competitive on domestic and foreign markets. The authors note that one of the main problems in processing of raw materials is the low output of final goods from raw unit. In order to fill export niches and ensure import substitution, new export-oriented sectors of the agro-industrial complex have been studied. In particular, in processing industry, the transition to international quality standards for technical and technological re-equipment of production, as well as expanding the range of food products and creating equal conditions for competition with main trading partners in the Eurasian Economic Union remains relevant. The results of the study allowed us to conclude that it is necessary to make amendments in matters of technical regulation, trade, protection of competition, information, customs and border services, improve organizational and economic structure of agricultural sector in the following priority areas of management: development of integration in AIC, agro-industrial entities performing procurement functions, storage, transportation, processing and marketing, organization of agricultural markets, ensuring formation of effective material resources. Thus, it can be stated that increasing the competitiveness of agricultural products depends on many factors, the observance of which is an indispensable condition for the recovery of the industry's economy.

Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and works of art, as well as symbols, names, images, and designs that are used in commerce. Intellectual property is divided into two categories industrial property, which includes inventions (patents), trademarks industrial designs, and geographic indications of source; and copyright which includes literary and works of art such as novels, poems and plays films, musical works, works of art such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs. Rights related to copyright include those of performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms in their recordings, and those of broadcasters in their radio and television programmes. 1883 marked the birth of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, the first major international treaty designed to help the people from one country obtain protection in other countries for their intellectual creations in the form of industrial property rights, known as: inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs. In 1886, copyright entered the international arena with the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. The aim of this Convention was to help nationals of its member States obtain international protection of their right to control, and receive payment for the use of their creative works such as: novels, short stories, poems plays; songs, operas, musicals, sonatas; and drawings, paintings sculptures, architectural works. The Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) was adopted in 1952 and formalised in 1955, as a complementary agreement to the Berne Convention. The UCC membership included the United States, and many developing countries that did not wish to comply with the Berne Convention, since they viewed its provisions as overly favourable to the developed world. Patent Cooperation Treaty, signed on June 19,1970, provides for the filing of a single international patent application which has the same effect as national applications filed in the designated countries. An applicant seeking protection may file one application and request protection in as many signatory states as needed. On November 6, 1925, the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Deposit of Industrial Designs was adopted within the framework of the Paris Convention. Under the provisions of the Hague Agreement, any person entitled to effect an international deposit has the possibility of obtaining, by means of a single deposit protection for his industrial designs in a number of States with a minimum of formalities and of expense. The system of international registration of marks is governed by two treaties, the Madrid Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Marks, which dates from 1891, and the Protocol Relating to the Madrid Agreement that was adopted in 1989. It entered into force on December 1, 1995, and came into operation on April 1, 1996. The reason for adopting the much more recent Protocol, following the original Madrid Agreement of 1891 (last amended at Stockholm in 1967), was the absence from the Madrid Union of some of the major countries in the trademark field, for example, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The Protocol is intended to make the Madrid system acceptable to more countries. The Rome Convention consists basically of the national treatment that a State grants under its domestic law to domestic performances, phonograms and broadcasts. Apart from the rights guaranteed by the Convention itself as constituting that minimum of protection, and subject to specific exceptions or reservations allowed for by the Convention, performers, producers of phonograms and broadcasting organisations to which the Convention applies, enjoy in Contracting States the same rights as those countries grant to their nationals. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is an international organisation dedicated to promoting the use and protection of works of the human spirit. These works, intellectual property, are expanding the bounds of science and technology and enriching the world of the arts. Through its work, WIPO plays an important role in enhancing the quality and enjoyment of life, as well as creating real wealth for nations. In 1974, WIPO became a specialised agency of the United Nations system of organisations, with a mandate to administer intellectual property matters recognised by the member states of the UN. With headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, WIPO is one of the 16 specialised agencies of the United Nations system of organisations. It administers 21 international treaties dealing with different aspects of intellectual property protection. The Organisation counts 177 nations as member states. One of the successes of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations was the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS Agreement), which came into effect on 1 January 1995, and up to date it the most comprehensive multilateral agreement on intellectual property. The TRIPS Agreement is a minimum standards agreement, which allows Members to provide more extensive protection of intellectual property if they wish so. Members are left free to determine the appropriate method of implementing the provisions of the Agreement within their own legal system and practice On January 1, 1996, an Agreement Between the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization entered into force. It provides for cooperation concerning the implementation of the TRIPS Agreement, such as notification of laws and regulations and legal-technical assistance and technical co-operation in favour of developing countries. In the 21st century intellectual property will play an increasingly important role at the international stage. Works of the mind - intellectual property such as inventions, designs, trademarks, books, music, and films, are now used and enjoyed on every continent on the earth. In the new millennium international protection of intellectual property rights faces many new challenges; one of the most urgent is the need for states to adapt to and benefit from rapid and wide-ranging technological change, particularly in the field of information technology and the Internet.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between financial development and economic growth for five major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South (BRICS) during 1993 to 2014 using banking sector and stock market development indicators. Design/methodology/approach To begin with, the study first examined some of the principal indicators of financial development and macroeconomic variables of the selected economies. Next, using generalized method of moment system estimation (SYS-GMM), the relationship between financial development and growth is investigated. The banking sector development indicators used in the study include size of the financial intermediaries, credit to deposit ratio (CDR) and domestic credit to private sector (CPS), whereas the stock market development indicators are value of shares traded and turnover ratio. Also, some macroeconomic control variables such as inflation, exports and the enrolment in secondary education were used. Findings The examination of the principal indicators of financial development and macroeconomic variables have shown considerable differences between the selected economies. Results from the dynamic one-step SYS-GMM estimates confirm that in presence of turnover ratio, all the selected banking development indicators such as size of financial intermediaries, CDR and CPS are positively significantly determining economic growth. Similarly, in presence of all the selected banking sector development indicators, value of shares traded is found to be positively significantly associated with economic growth. However, the same is not true when turnover ratio is regressed in presence of banking sector variables. Overall, the evidence suggests that banking sector development and stock market development indicators are complementary to each other in stimulating economic growth. Practical implications A positive association between financial development and growth indicates that the policymakers should take necessary measures toward simultaneous development of both banking sector as well as stock market for inducing growth. Originality/value The present paper attempts to examine the relationship between financial development and growth using both banking sector and stock market development indicators which has not been attempted before for BRICS. Also, most of the existing studies are found in case of developed economies. This paper tries to fill this void by studying five major emerging economies.

An important factor in the development of tourism within transboundary territories may be unique tourist resources, or special areas. Border territories often turn into gambling zones, especially in those cases when the industry of gambling entertainment is prohibited in neighboring countries. In addition, a tourist product can be formed on the basis of unique tourist resources, united by a common idea or historical plot. You can get to know them only by traveling from a neighboring or nearby country. Tourists are attracted to the border space by duty-free trade, a large selection of goods, lower prices, convenient opening hours. On the basis of the Agreement, the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic will contribute to expanding cooperation in the field of tourism in order to familiarize citizens of their states with achievements in the field of economics, social development, culture, nature and sights, as well as historical monuments and national traditions of the peoples of the three countries. The parties will cooperate in the development of international tourism on the basis of equality, mutual benefit and, in order to increase the tourist flow, facilitate the simplification of visa and customs formalities, exchange lists of travel agencies. The Parties will facilitate the exchange of experience in all areas of international and domestic tourism, promote cooperation between the national tourism administrations of the Parties and other organizations involved in tourism and its development. The parties will also facilitate the dissemination of tourist information to attract the flow of tourists through the publication of promotional materials, the exchange of information, print media, exhibitions, films and the holding of various symposia and seminars. The parties will provide mutual assistance in the training of personnel of tourist complexes and facilitate the exchange of specialists of the relevant tourism authorities, assist the relevant departments and interested organizations in the creation of joint ventures and in the implementation of other investment projects in the tourism sector. The parties through the relevant tourism authorities will exchange views on cooperation, work experience in activities in international tourism organizations.

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the spillover effect of 14 US key macroeconomic news on the first two moments of 12 Asian stock market returns. Design/methodology/approach – The authors collect market expectation and actual scheduled announcements data for 14 key US's macroeconomic announcements from January 2002 to April 2012 from Bloomberg. The dataset consists of six groups: monetary policy and general macroeconomic indicators: the Federal Reserve's target interest rates (FOMC), gross domestic product (GDP), and leading indicator (LI); price indicators: consumer price index (CPI) and producer price index (PPI); business indicator: housing starts (HS) and industrial production (IP); consumption indicators: retail sales (RS) and consumer confidence level (CONSUM); labor market indicators: non-farm payroll (NFP), unemployment level (UE), and jobless claim (JOB); and external sector indicators: current account (CA) and trade balance (TB). The authors also collect daily opening and closing data of 12 Asian stock markets. Following Dow Jones classification, the authors divide them into two groups: five developed markets (Japan, Hong Kong, Republic of Korea, Singapore and Taiwan), and seven emerging markets (China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand). The MA-EGARCH (1,1) model is used for the empirical test. Findings – First, the authors find that stronger than expected news from the USA is associated with higher conditional mean and lower conditional variance of the Asian stock market returns, in general. Second, the Asian stock markets tend to put more weight on information relating to the US labor market than the other news as this indicator reveals much information about the underlying health of the US economy since full employment is the most important mandate for the US administration and policy makers. Third, in responding to the US news, the Asian emerging markets seem to respond stronger to the US news than the Asian developed markets both in terms of the number of responses and the magnitude of the reaction. This suggests that this could be seen as evidence that emerging markets are more dependent on the information content of the US news than the developed markets. Fourth, the US news is absorbed gradually leading to persisting volatility responses in the Asian stock markets. Originality/value – The authors fill a gap in the extant literature in investigating the speeds of the news absorption across the Asia region by examining the spillover effects across three time horizons, namely daily, overnight and intraday.

Purpose Recent studies regarding auditor experience generally focus on auditor overall experience in accounting, auditing, finance and related fields (Hardies et al., 2014), auditor sector and domain experience (Bedard and Biggs, 1991; Hammersley, 2006), auditor experience as CPA (Ye et al., 2014; Sonu et al., 2016) or big N experience (Chi and Huang, 2005; Gul et al., 2013; Zimmerman, 2016) or auditors’ international working experience (Chen et al., 2017). But there is little attention paid to where auditors obtained their experience from? And how do auditors with government experience affect audit quality (AQ)? This paper aims to present the effect of auditors with government experience on AQ. Design/methodology/approach The authors used Turkish publicly traded firms in Borsa Istanbul between the year 2008 and 2015 to test the hypothesis. The sample comprises 1,067 observations and eight years. Two main proxies of government experience are used in this paper. The first proxy is auditor’s government experience in the past. The second proxy is the continuous variable which is “the logarithmic value of the number of years of government experience”. Further, auditor overall experience in auditing, accounting, finance and other related fields are also used as a control variable. Audit reporting aggressiveness, audit reporting lag and discretionary accruals are used as proxies of AQ. Besides this, the authors adopted the model to estimate the probability of selecting a government-experienced auditor, and they presented the regression results with the addition of inverse Mills ratio. Findings The main findings are consistent with conjecture. Government-experienced auditors do not enhance AQ. They are aggressive, and they complete audit work slowly and they cannot detect discretionary accruals effectively. Spending more time in a government agency makes them more aggressive and slow, and they do not detect earnings management practices. The Heckman estimation results regarding the variable of interest are also consistent with the main estimation results. In addition, the authors found in predicting government-experienced auditor choice that family firms, domestic firms and firms that reported losses (larger firms, older firms) are more (less) likely to choose government-experienced auditors. Research limitations/implications This study has some limitations. The authors used a small sample to test the impact of government-experienced auditors on AQ because of data access problems. Much data used in this study were collected manually. Earnings quality was calculated using only discretionary accruals. Real activities manipulation was not used as the proxy of AQ in this paper. The findings from emerging markets might not generalize to the developed countries because the Turkish audit market is developing compared to Continental Europe or USA. Practical implications The findings are considered for independent audit firms. Audit firms may employ new graduates and train them to offer more qualified audit work for their clients. The results do not mean that government-experienced auditors should not work in an audit firm, or that they should not establish an audit firm. It is clear that government-experienced auditors provide low AQ in terms of audit reporting aggressiveness, audit report lag and discretionary accruals. But as they operate more in the independent audit sector, they will become successful and provide qualified audit work. One other thing we can say is that it is perhaps better for government-experienced auditors to work in the tax department of independent audit firms. Originality/value This paper tries to fill the gap in the literature regarding the effect of auditor experience on AQ and concentrates on a different type of experience: Auditors with government experience.

Abstract Zootherapy plays a role in healing practices in Mozambican society. Although several studies have focused on ethnobotany and traditional medicine in the country, little research has been conducted on the use of reptiles in zootherapy. The aim of this study was therefore to fill this gap by assessing the reptile species traded for traditional medicine in the Xipamanine and Xiquelene Markets in Maputo, Mozambique. We found that few reptile species are traded domestically for traditional medicine and that their use appears to be in decline in Mozambique. Our findings also suggest that the domestic trade of reptiles for traditional medicines in Maputo markets is unlikely to have a significant impact on the conservation of reptiles in Mozambique. However, we suggest that international trade with South Africa is likely having a larger impact, given observations of Mozambican nationals selling a diverse range of fauna in urban traditional medicine markets in Johannesburg and Durban.

The kids in our house are making a public comeback. They are surfacing from the private recesses of the house out into the more communal space of the family lounge room. After years of being holed-up in their bedrooms they are back – thanks to pay TV. Foxtel has presented them with a smorgasbord of programs, tempting enough to entice even the most die-hard gamer or teenage recluse out of the bedroom and into the throes of lounge room politics. In some ways, our newly populated lounge room is reminiscent of David Morley’s Family Television with television viewing “situated firmly within the politics of the living room”(19). This article explores the notion that the introduction of pay TV in Australia challenges the general movement towards an individualisation of media consumption in the family home. Due to pay TV’s limitations of one outlet per household, children and teenagers are leaving the privacies of their own bedrooms and returning to the family lounge room. With this return, many family members are having to relearn the art of sharing (or getting your fair share of) this limited resource. This situation may also be a particularly Australian one, as it seems that pay TV with its multi-channel viewing is more readily available on multiple television sets within homes in other countries (Tidhar, Chava and Nossek 16) Family television viewing seems to be part of a relatively recent (round the hearth) tradition, which followed from the family piano, phonograph and the radio. These traditions re-established the home and family as a place where parental authority overrode the dangers of the outside world. Radio broadcasters in the 1940s endorsed the family radio as a way to promote family togetherness because (as they saw it) “the house and hearth have [had] been largely given up in favour of a multitude of other interests and activities outside, with the consequent disintegration of family ties and affections” (Lewis qtd. in Flichy 158). Television viewing followed suit as another round-the-hearth family tradition during the earlier period of domestic television. David Morley (1986) explored the domestic consumption of television in the context of everyday family life during this time, a time when only one television set was available to most families – a time when dads, and the occasional mum, ruled the television viewing habits of the family. Morley’s approach to television viewing was one in which the household (or family) was central to interpreting the television audience; where there were gendered regimes of watching and program choice which often reflected existing power relationships in the home. Today most Australian families have more than one television set (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), leading the way to more individualised and fragmented modes of television watching within Australian homes. The introduction of computers, the Internet and video consoles in many family homes seems to have further dispersed family members to more private spaces in the family home, diffusing existing conflict surrounding the family television. Therefore, "if television once brought the family together around the hearth, now domestic technologies permit the dispersal of family members to different rooms or different activities within the same space" (Livingstone 128). The geographical migration of the television set, along with new digital technologies, to the bedrooms and secondary living spaces in many family homes has brought with it new dynamics for social space within the household and a “reciprocal (re)construction of the meanings and functions of both the technological objects and the domestic spaces they inhabit” (Caron 3). Equipping bedrooms with television and digital technologies has the ability to change the room’s conventional usage – both spatially and temporally. In this way our 11-year-old’s bedroom has been transformed into a specialised bedroom culture – a gamer’s paradise. By locating a television and game console in this bedroom the technologies are identified as personal property while at the same time allowing for a space that functions as both communal and private, for sharing with siblings and friends and solitary gaming. The upside of this general movement towards a separate bedroom culture (or private media spaces) is that there are more spaces to engage with media technologies and therefore more viewing choice for family members. These extra media spaces have freed up the lounge room possibly allowing for more harmony and accord within the family, while at the same time bringing about the opportunity for some family members to retreat from the social togetherness of family television viewing. However, with the limitations of one outlet per household in Australian pay TV, the lounge room has again become the focus of family television viewing in some Australian homes. With over twenty percent of Australian homes now subscribing to pay TV (Australian Film Commission) some Australian families may again be experiencing the togetherness (and the inevitable struggles) of sharing one television set. In the days when one television set was the norm, Morley explored the way in which family viewing habits reflected existing power relationships in the home, focussing mainly on issues concerned with gender and class in the UK home. Twenty years later, in our house on the other side of the world, similar battles are taking place – Dragonball Z vs. Ocean Girl, Robot Wars vs. Buffy and World Series Cricket vs. Changing Rooms. However, unlike Morley’s Family Television the results of these gendered battles are too close to call. Perhaps, with forty or more channels to choose from, and programs designed to appeal to specific family members, the stakes are even higher and the battle has only just begun. Today’s media-rich home environments, with multiple television sets and digital technologies, seem to have gone some way to resolving household conflicts over television viewing allowing for more choice and individualisation of media consumption. However, the introduction of pay TV in Australia has seen a return to the living room politics of family television viewing somewhat reminiscent of Morley’s Family Television where sharing the family television reflected and highlighted existing family power relationships and struggles. Works Cited Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Australia in Brief: Way of Life. Commonwealth of Australia. 2 March 2003 <http://www.dfat.gov.au/aib2001/media.php>. Australian Film Commission. Get the Picture: Fast Facts. 2002. 3 March 2003 <http://www.afc.gov.au/GTP/wptvfast.php>. Caron, Andre. "New Communication Technologies in the Home: A Qualitative Study on the Introduction, Appropriation and Uses of Media in the Family." Young People and the Media. Sydney: International Forum of Researchers, 2000. Livingstone, Sonia. "The Meaning of Domestic Technologies: A Personal Construct Analysis of Familial Gender Relations." Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. Eds. Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch. London: Routledge, 1992. 113-30. Morley, D. Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Pleasure. London: Routledge, 1986. Tidhar, Chava E., and Hillel Nossek. "All in the Family: The Integration of a New Media Technology in the Family." Communications 27 (2002): 15-34. Links http://www.afc.gov.au/GTP/wptvfast.htmlhttp://www.dfat.gov.au/aib2001/media.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Holloway, Donell. "Sharing Foxtel" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/06-sharingfoxtel.php>. APA Style Holloway, D. (2003, Apr 23). Sharing Foxtel. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/06-sharingfoxtel.php>

Abstract Environmental sustainability is a core aspect of the proposed future EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Policy changes must not compromise socioeconomic development in low-income countries, whereas the extensification of EU agriculture may also create trade opportunities abroad. We apply a global agricultural-economic model to assess EU–African trade-related impacts of potential, environmentally motivated CAP changes. Restrictions on livestock density and nitrogen application reveal reduced EU production levels of meat. This lowers the EU's agricultural environmental burden and share in agricultural trade flows to Africa. However, overall food supply in Africa is not projected to deteriorate substantially, as imports from other world regions and increasing domestic production fill the gap. While this weakens the global emission reduction potential, net livestock producers in Africa may benefit from increasing producer prices. How far potentials for domestic production and trade can be used in African regions depends at least partly on their competitiveness vis-á-vis substituting importers.

In recent years, various approaches to transnational regulation of business conduct have evolved as an alternative to the command-and-control model focusing on conduct of domestic businesses and the soft law approach of international human rights law to regulate corporations. On reviewing the potential of five such approaches (i.e., polycentric governance, extraterritorial regulation, proposed international treaty, reform of corporate laws, and rebalancing of trade-investment agreements), this article makes two arguments. First, although polycentric governance is critical to fill regulatory deficits of state-based regulation, this approach should not ignore or weaken further the role and relevance of states in regulating businesses, given the dynamic relation between state-based and other regulatory approaches. Second, greater attention should be paid to nonhuman rights regulatory regimes to change the corporate culture, which tends to externalize human rights issues. The increasing focus on the role of corporate laws and trade-investment agreements should be seen in this context. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 17 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Abstract: The recently developed microeconomic model of one-way international flows in films and television programs is shown to be a specific application of a more general model of trade in media products. Predictions of the general model are consistent with observed international flows for other media, geographic flows of media products within countries, and intertemporal flows of media products across distribution channels. The general tendency is for product to flow from large to small markets unless impeded by policy-created barriers. Earlier explanations for one-way international flows do not similarly generalize, but cultural explanations and the microeconomic model are complementary to each other. The role of market size in determining media trade flows and the effect of domestic media policies on the growth and relative sizes of national media markets should be considered in the formation of trade policies for media industries. Résumé: Dans cet article, nous discutons du modèle micro-économique récemment développé sur la circulation internationale unidirectionnelle de films et d'émissions de télévision. Nous montrons que ce modèle est l'application spécifique d'un modèle plus général d'échanges en produits médiatiques. Ce modèle plus général explique davantage que le cinéma et la télévision. En effet, il s'applique aux circulations internationales observées pour d'autres médias, à la circulation à l'intérieur d'un pays, et aux fluctuations temporelles dans les échanges de produits médiatiques entre pays. En général, les produits tendent à circuler des grands marchés aux petits, dans les cas où il n'y a pas de politiques pour faire obstacle à de tels échanges. Des explications antérieures à la nôtre pour la circulation internationale en sens unique ne généralisent pas de la même manière. Nous croyons que les explications culturelles et le modèle micro-économique sont très complémentaires. Avant de formuler des politiques d'échange pour les industries médiatiques, il est ainsi nécessaire de tenir compte de certaines questions; il faut notamment être conscient de la grandeur du marché, et des effets que les politiques domestiques ont produits sur les marchés médiatiques nationaux.

The article analyses legal regulation of trade secret phenomenon in Ukrainian legislation as well as initiates ways of above-mentioned legislation improvement. Due to the process of information society formation in Ukraine, the issues of security and protection of rights for information resources of different access level enter into in the foreground of scientific discussions. Thus, there is intensive growth practical interest to trade secrets and other related concepts. One type of confidential information is the so-called �trade secret�. The issue of protection of trade secrets is not in fact a matter of protection of information security, because one of the main characteristics that determines the mode of access to trade secrets is the ownership of this information. The article describes the development of legislation devoted to trade secret at the contemporary stage as well as emergence of essential economic and legal conditions in Ukraine for practical implementation of legal mechanisms of commercially valuable information security and protection. The above-mentioned factors determine urgency of the issue. So called �trade secret� is a king of classified information. The issue of trade secret protection at is core is not in the framework of information security; by virtue of the fact that the key characteristic that influences the access mode to trade secret is the right of ownership of this information. The definition of trade secrets given in the Civil Code of Ukraine is formulated taking into account modern international legal approaches to the understanding of trade secrets (TRIPS and NAFTA) and at the appropriate legal and technical level, although not without certain shortcomings. This definition has a cross-sectoral significance in the system of legislation of Ukraine and is applied when clarifying the content and qualifications of not only civil but also labor, administrative, criminal, procedural and other legal relations. The aim of the article is to analyze domestic legislation in order to expose the essence of trade secret and related concepts. The author determines that the establishing of information constituting a commercial secret list, which cannot be restricted to business entities access, is not sufficient. There is the need at the level of legislation to establish a special mechanism and general criteria for determining information as s trade secret. It would help citizens to exercise their right to file requests to private business corporation. During the writing of the article the following conclusions were reached. In the case of crimes against trade secrets, in fact, the criminality of the act is determined not by law, but by order of the owner of the information or the head of the enterprise, which is not a legal act. In our opinion, this situation is absurd, especially given the imperfection of the legislation governing the ownership of information. Therefore, two ways to solve the problem can be proposed, either by legislatively establishing an exhaustive list of information that can be declared a trade secret, or by abolishing criminal liability

Previous studies most often viewed domestic FDI policy as the major influence on FDI inflows in a developing country. However, FDI needs to be understood in the context of international business because it relocates production internationally. This implies FDI cannot be isolated from international economic circumstances. Liberalisation, Globalisation (WTO), World Recovery and Global financial crisis are treated as different global policy periods in this study that have led to a lot of changes in international trade, investment flows and in the business environment. Hence, this paper attempts to fill the gap in the existing literature by modeling the global policy period wise impact on FDI inflows in India. The paper examines FDI trends in India during 1991-2013, using dummy variables to estimate the exogenous structural breaks, caused by different of global policy periods. It reveals there have been lots of variations in terms of FDI levels and growth rates during different global policy periods. Especially, after the pre-crisis bubble had burst there has been a drastic fall after Global Financial crisis, when for the first time the growth rate has become negative. The best period was liberalisation and world recovery period helped a lot in giving a boost to FDI. While FDI recession puts a premium on maintaining a welcoming investment climate, Indian policy makers should consider global policy keenly along with the improvement of domestic policy towards attracting FDI.

In this paper, simulation of a linear Fresnel rooftop mounted concentrating solar collector is presented. The system is modeled with the transient system (trnsys) simulation program using the typical meteorological year file containing the weather parameters of four different cities in Australia. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to determine the heat transfer mechanism in the microconcentrating (MCT) collector. Ray trace simulations using soltrace (NREL) were used to determine optical efficiency. Heat loss characteristics determined from CFD simulation were utilized in trnsys to assess the annual performance of the solar cooling system using an MCT collector. The effect of the different loads on the system performance was investigated, and from trnsys simulations, we found that the MCT collector achieves a minimum 60% energy saving for both domestic hot water usage and high temperature solar cooling and hot water applications.

Abstract Background A question of epidemiological relevance in Chagas disease studies is to understand Trypanosoma cruzi transmission cycles and trace the origins of (re)emerging cases in areas under vector or disease surveillance. Conventional parasitological methods lack sensitivity whereas molecular approaches can fill in this gap, provided that an adequate sample can be collected and processed and a nucleic acid amplification method can be developed and standardized. We developed a duplex qPCR assay for accurate detection and quantification of T. cruzi satellite DNA (satDNA) sequence in samples from domestic and sylvatic mammalian reservoirs. The method incorporates amplification of the gene encoding for the interphotoreceptor retinoid-binding protein (IRBP), highly conserved among mammalian species, as endogenous internal amplification control (eIAC), allowing distinction of false negative PCR findings due to inadequate sample conditions, DNA degradation and/or PCR interfering substances. Results The novel TaqMan probe and corresponding primers employed in this study improved the analytical sensitivity of the assay to 0.01 par.eq/ml, greater than that attained by previous assays for Tc I and Tc IV strains. The assay was tested in 152 specimens, 35 from 15 different wild reservoir species and 117 from 7 domestic reservoir species, captured in endemic regions of Argentina, Colombia and Mexico and thus potentially infected with different parasite discrete typing units. The eIACs amplified in all samples from domestic reservoirs from Argentina and Mexico, such as Canis familiaris, Felis catus, Sus scrofa, Ovis aries, Equus caballus, Bos taurus and Capra hircus with quantification cycles (Cq’s) between 23 and 25. Additionally, the eIACs amplified from samples obtained from wild mammals, such as small rodents Akodon toba, Galea leucoblephara, Rattus rattus, the opossums Didelphis virginiana, D. marsupialis and Marmosa murina, the bats Tadarida brasiliensis, Promops nasutus and Desmodus rotundus, as well as in Conepatus chinga, Lagostomus maximus, Leopardus geoffroyi, Lepus europaeus, Mazama gouazoubira and Lycalopex gymnocercus, rendering Cq’s between 24 and 33. Conclusions This duplex qPCR assay provides an accurate laboratory tool for screening and quantification of T. cruzi infection in a vast repertoire of domestic and wild mammalian reservoir species, contributing to improve molecular epidemiology studies of T. cruzi transmission cycles.

The article examines the existing problems of the current state of management and development of micro, small and medium enterprises in Ukraine and in the world, in particular, in the field of services. Statistical and scientific sources on the specified problems are analyzed. The important social and economic role, competitive advantages of small and medium enterprises in comparison with big business and the reasons of their insufficient efficiency are emphasized. The share of value added in the gross domestic product produced by micro and small enterprises in Ukraine in comparison with the EU countries is singled out and the main reasons for the lag are identified. The analysis of the effectiveness of the simplified system of taxation of microbusiness, in particular, individual entrepreneurs working in the fields of services, trade, catering and IT, revealed tax evasion and the existence of unequal conditions for paying taxes by different categories of taxpayers. These calculations show that significant amounts of income of simplistic entrepreneurs working in the field of information technology are not taxed at all. The international and domestic experience on the issue of removing microbusiness from the shadows by introducing the mandatory use of registrars of settlement operations has been studied. It was emphasized that, in the context of decentralization, the crucial role in overcoming the shortcomings of the simplified taxation system should be played by local authorities, which are interested in establishing clear rules for fiscalization of individual entrepreneurs to fill local budgets with taxes. In order to find common economically sound solutions that are acceptable to all parties, it is proposed to create working groups of representatives of local authorities and microbusiness. In order to increase the efficiency of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises at the local community level, a number of measures are recommended that will increase the number of entrepreneurs and jobs, increase revenues to local budgets and improve the well-being of community residents. The government should create investment infrastructure for micro, small and medium-sized businesses with favorable conditions, and entrepreneurs should pay taxes politely.

The energy generation landscape is changing, pushed by stricter regulations for emissions control and green energy generation. The limitations of renewable energy sources, however, require flexible energy production sources to supplement them. Micro gas turbine based combined heat and power plants, which are used for domestic applications, can fill this gap if they become more reliable. This can be achieved with the use of an engine monitoring and diagnostics system: real-time engine condition monitoring and fault diagnostics results in reduced operating and maintenance costs and increased component and engine life. In order to allow the step change in the connection of small engines to the grid, a fleet monitoring system for micro gas turbines is required. A proposed framework combines a physics-based model and a data-driven model with machine learning capabilities for predicting system behavior, and includes a purpose-developed diagnostic tool for anomaly detection and classification for a multitude of engines. The framework has been implemented on a fleet of micro gas turbines and some of the lessons learned from the demonstration of the concept as well as key takeaways from the general literature are presented in this paper. The extension of fleet monitoring to optimal operation and production planning in relation to the needs of the grid will allow the micro gas turbines to fit in the future green energy system, connect to the grid, and trade in the energy market. The requirements on the system level for the widespread use of micro gas turbines in the energy system are addressed in the paper. A review of the current solutions in fleet monitoring and diagnostics, generally developed for larger engines, is included, with an outlook into a sustainable future.

Wandering is an embodied movement through a landscape, cityscape, or soundscape; it is a venture that one may undertake voluntarily or reluctantly. It is similar to wayfaring and roaming, and different to walking. As a metaphor and as a figuration of subjectivity, wandering allows for a number of non-linear engagements: loitering, overhearing, wildflowering, meandering, even time travel. When coupled with an act of memory or imagination, wandering can instigate wondering, and vice versa. It can refer to the physical movement of the body through space or the abstract wandering of the mind through time; more often than not, it is both.The contributions to this special issue on ‘Wandering’ take up the theme in ways that demonstrate how straying from prescribed pathways and patterns of movement can be a transformative experience: one that renders new ways of thinking, reading, gaming, communicating, and being. For the authors featured here, wandering is deeply affectual, at times intimate and empowering, at other times disorientating, melancholy, and compulsive. Wandering provokes an awareness of the ambiances of everyday life, a response to the repression of desire, trauma, and historical violence. Wandering, of course, is traditionally associated with the city, and many of the articles here extend this scholarship, while others move the discussion of wandering to the natural environment. Historically, wandering has been connected to patriarchal, colonial modes of exploring and mapping, of claiming and naming places. Yet these articles suggest that wandering, as a mode of resistance—as a mobility that is ideologically charged—can provide new ways of being beyond heteronormativity and outside the hold of linear boundaries. In wandering rather than waiting, the wanderer inscribes opposing devices into her narrative: her movement is infused with gendered meaning and is well-equipped to reveal the relational, discursive operations of identity.Indeed, in the feature article, Ingrid Horrocks challenges neo-liberal versions of travel through an account of her ongoing research into female wandering and travel writing; her most recent book Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814 presents an extensive consideration of the many complexities she outlines here, including the need to disentangle mobility from its frequent ideological equation with liberty. Horrocks explains, for example, how reluctant wandering in eighteenth and nineteenth century British literature requires a more flexible and nuanced understanding of wandering as a form of displacement. For Horrocks, the interdisciplinary field of mobilities studies is particularly illuminating. This framework allows for a tracing of the significance of both the symbolic representations of wandering in narrative and the historical conditions and lived experiences of the writers that produced wandering texts. Horrocks’s work reveals that deeper investigation into the histories of different mobilities is significant for modern conceptualisations of travel that equate movement with freedom of choice; such neo-liberal ideologies of mobility elide the structural forces and inequalities that might compel one to move—to leave home in search of work, companionship, or food. Kristina Deffenbacher also challenges conventional travel narratives—in this case, the road narrative—in her article, “Mapping Trans-Domesticity in Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto.” Deffenbacher develops the term “trans-domesticity” to explain how the film challenges not only notions of home but also understandings of domestic spaces and practices. Specifically, Deffenbacher reads Breakfast on Pluto as a queer diaspora narrative that destabilises normative bonds and structures, and in doing so, transforms the traditional road story where the protagonist leaves home in search of autonomy and independence. Reading against earlier interpretations of the protagonist’s behaviour as apolitical, Deffenbacher suggests that homemaking in public, transient spaces is a queer reclamation of domestic space through the act of wandering, which enables connection rather than dislocation.The protagonist in Breakfast in Pluto creates a home in London, and global neo-liberal London is the site of investigation in “Wandering and Placemaking in London: Iain Sinclair’s Literary Methodology.” Here, Kirsten Seale and Emily Potter examine how psychogeographer Iain Sinclair’s wandering moves beyond the chronicling of place to engage in placemaking that is materially entangled with the transformative conditions of place. Sinclair’s wandering, as Seale and Potter demonstrate, acts upon the city as much as it is an act within the city. Sinclair’s writing about London’s decrepitude contributes to a contemporary aesthetic of urban decay that is cultivated and commodified in high-end locales—an extra-textual consequence that points to the position of Sinclair’s wanderings as “more-than-literary.” In other words, Sinclair’s texts materialise versions of place that operate outside the assemblage of literary production, thereby constituting spatial events.Devin Proctor wanders in another quintessential city in “Wandering in the City: Time, Memory, and Experience in Digital Game Space.” Proctor traverses the physical, the virtual, and the temporal in his exploration of downtown New York, as constructed in the videogame Assassin’s Creed: Rogue. Accompanying Proctor on his wanderings is the memory—or the future projection—of Michel de Certeau, whose musings from the top of the World Trade Center—not-yet-built in the time of the game, not-yet-destroyed in the time of de Certeau, existing only in memory in Proctor’s own time—inform the exploration of space. Proctor wonders whether it is possible to truly wander in a controlled space, where even apparent acts of spatial disobedience—scaling buildings, running along walls—are within the “rules” of the game. For Proctor, disavowing the designed narrative of the game—ignoring quests, not seeking to progress or level up but instead simply wandering—allows the digital space to take on different meanings, and to become, in fact, another space: one that is a colourful vista of memory, fiction, and experience.In “Adapting to Loiterly Reading: Agatha Christie’s Original Adaptation of 'The Witness for the Prosecution'", Alistair Rolls takes up the theme of wandering by applying the notion to re-reading Christie’s short story “The Witness for the Prosecution” in a way that is prompted by Sarah Phelps’s screen adaptation for BBC One. Rolls applies Armelle Blin-Rolland’s notion of “vortical” reading: a model of adaptation in which no version of a text is privileged as the correct one but instead part of a textual multiplicity. Through this lens, Rolls argues that Christie’s short story can be appreciated by a wandering reader who undertakes loiterly reading, thereby moving against the grain of crime fiction: a genre, which, through its focus on the revelatory end, usually speeds a reader to a resolution. A wandering reader might see, for instance, the fetishistic narrative and partially-repressed pre-textual truths. Therefore, Phelps’s adaptation, which uses a framing device by adding a new beginning and end to the narrative, complements, rather than undercuts, Christie’s original. In this article, Rolls enacts his own form of loiterly reading. Melanie Pryor examines the work of another well-known wanderer in “Dark Peripatetic Walking as Radical Wandering in Cheryl Strayed’s Memoir Wild.” Pryor adopts John Brabour’s notion of the dark peripatetic, a kind of itinerant wandering often associated with isolation from society. Pryor transforms the notion’s negative connotations, arguing instead that, in women’s memoir, wandering in the wilderness is an act of “radical self-containment”. Pryor draws attention to the way that Strayed’s memoir offers a counterpoint to traditional patriarchal narratives of domination and colonisation of the natural world. Instead, Strayed’s writing positions her as a witness to the natural world and her own physical and internal transformation. Pryor draws our attention to the way that even Strayed’s name, changed after her divorce, suggests an empowered wandering from the traditional confines of domestic life. Like Pryor, Susan Davis in “Wandering and Wildflowering: Walking with Women into Intimacy and Ecological Action” locates wandering, not as it traditionally has occurred in the city, but in a natural ecosystem: in this case, the wallum bushland behind the beaches of South East Queensland, Australia. This complex ecosystem, Davis explains, is at once resilient, thriving in soil corrosive as battery acid, but also fragile, unable to re-grow once destroyed; yet few pay attention to this landscape. Davis presents an historical account of Australian poet Judith Wright’s and artist and writer Kathleen McArthur’s relationship with each other and this coastal heathland, arguing that both wandering and “wildflowering” provoked in the women a new artistic and ecological vision. Attuning to the more-than-human world allowed these artists to value what still is, Davis argues, a largely invisible landscape; this new vision prompted ecological activism and conservation.In “Wandering in and out of Place: Modes of Searching for the Past in Paris, Moscow, and St Petersburg”, Katherine Brabon suggests that wandering in a place can also be a mode of wandering in the past. In her analysis of W.G. Sebald’s, Patrick Modiano’s, and her own work, Brabon points to the way that the narrator’s embodied movement through place is haunted by traces of historical trauma and violence. Landscape, infused with memory and emotion, provokes a compulsive wandering; the narrators in the works Brabon describes appear almost doomed to wander in search of a past available only in fragments. These are themes Brabon also explores in her novel, The Memory Artist, which won the Vogel Literary Award in 2016, and which complements the exegetical discussion presented here. In “Wandering a Metro: Actor-Network Theory Research and Rapid Rail Infrastructure Communication”, Nicholas Richardson wanders Montreal’s underground Métro, asking of the fifty-year-old train system the Latourian question, “What do you do for a city and its people?” By wandering the Métro and interviewing its other wanderers, commuters, and workers, Richardson is able to observe the actor-network within which the train operates. Through this process, he comes to understand what a train system like Montreal’s might bring to a city such as Sydney. Richardson’s wandering is as much methodological and metaphorical as it is physical, and he does not seek to end either aspect of his foray at a finish line. Instead of drawing us towards the finality of conclusions, Richardson’s wandering opens up multiple avenues. The actor-network of the Métro is comprised not just of the train itself and its immediate users but also the artworks and architecture that give character to its spaces. Ultimately, the influence of the Métro and its actor-network spread beyond the boundaries of the train system itself; the Métro functions—as one of Richardson’s respondents puts it—as the “connective tissue” of the city. Whereas Richardson awaits an answer to his question, “What do you do for a city and its people?”, Rowan Wilken, in “Walkie-Talkies, Wandering, and Sonic Intimacy”, is concerned with the act of listening itself when urban wanderers come into contact with the sonic environments in which they live. Wilken extends the notion of wandering to the ambient soundscape by analysing two artworks, Saturday by Sabrina Raff and Walk That Sound by Lukatoyboy. Wilken positions these artworks in an avant-garde artistic tradition, the Situationist International, which emerged in the 1960s, and which proposed the use of walkie-talkies to enable urban wandering, an act of engaging with place designed to create more authentic “situations” to counteract social alienation brought about by Capitalism. The more contemporary artworks at the heart of Wilken’s analysis extend this tradition by inviting the reader to attune to overheard conversations, and form what Wilken, in an application of Dominic Pettman’s notion, calls sonic intimacy. Wilken suggests that in these works the act of overhearing invites an aural connection with strangers. Yet, such acts also evoke a disturbing undercurrent of surveillance and the Panopticon. AcknowledgementsThe editors would like to acknowledge the time, care, and insight of the reviewers who provided feedback on this issue. This often unrewarded labour deserves recognition and thanks.

If thinking about home necessitates thinking about “place, space, scale, identity and power,” as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2) suggest, then thinking about home themes in popular music makes no less a conceptual demand. Song lyrics and titles most often invoke dominant readings such as intimacy, privacy, nurture, refuge, connectedness and shared belonging, all issues found within Blunt and Dowling’s analysis. The spatial imaginary to which these authors refer takes vivid shape through repertoires of songs dealing with houses and other specific sites, vast and distant homelands, communities or, less tangibly, geographical or cultural settings where particular relationships can be found, supporting Blunt and Dowling’s major claim that home is complex, multi-scalar and multi-layered. Shelley Mallett’s claim that the term home “functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another…and with places, spaces and things” (84) is borne out heavily by popular music where, for almost every sentiment that the term home evokes, it seems an opposite sentiment is evoked elsewhere: familiarity versus alienation, acceptance versus rejection, love versus loneliness. Making use of conceptual groundwork by Blunt and Dowling and by Mallett and others, the following discussion canvasses a range of meanings that home has had for a variety of songwriters, singers and audiences over the years. Intended as merely partial and exploratory rather than exhaustive, it provides some insights into contrasts, ironies and relationships between home and gender, diaspora and loss. While it cannot cover all the themes, it gives prominence to the major recurring themes and a variety of important contexts that give rise to these home themes. Most prominent among those songs dealing with home has been a nostalgia and yearning, while issues of how women may have viewed the home within which they have often been restricted to a narrowly defined private sphere are almost entirely absent. This serves as a reminder that, while some themes can be conducive to the medium of popular music, others may be significantly less so. Songs may speak directly of experience but not necessarily of all experiences and certainly not of all experiences equally. B. Lee Cooper claims “most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement” (93). Notions of home have generally proved both formulaic and emotionally-charged. Commonly understood patterns of meaning and other hegemonic references generally operate more successfully than alternative reference points. Those notions with the strongest cultural currency can be conveyed succinctly and denote widely agreed upon meanings. Lyrics can seldom afford to be deeply analytical but generally must be concise and immediately evocative. Despite that, this discussion will point to diverse meanings carried by songs about home. Blunt and Dowling point out that “a house is not necessarily nor automatically a home” (3). The differences are strongly apparent in music, with only a few songs relating to houses compared with homes. When Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962 of “little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” she was certainly referring to houses, not homes, thus making it easier to bypass the relationships which might have vested the inhabitants with more warmth and individuality than their houses, in this song about conformity and homogeneity. The more complex though elusive concept of home, however, is more likely to feature in love songs and to emanate from diasporal songs. Certainly these two genres are not mutually exclusive. Irish songs are particularly noteworthy for adding to the array of music written by, or representational of, those who have been forced away from home by war, poverty, strife or other circumstances. They manifest identities of displacement rather than of placement, as studied by Bronwen Walter, looking back at rather than from within their spatial imaginary. Phil Eva claims that during the 19th Century Irish émigrés sang songs of exile in Manchester’s streets. Since many in England’s industrial towns had been uprooted from their homes, the songs found rapport with street audiences and entered popular culture. For example, the song Killarney, of hazy origins but thought to date back to as early as 1850, tells of Killarney’s lakes and fells, Emerald isles and winding bays; Mountain paths and woodland dells… ...her [nature’s] home is surely there. As well as anthropomorphising nature and giving it a home, the song suggests a specifically geographic sense of home. Galway Bay, written by A. Fahy, does likewise, as do many other Irish songs of exile which link geography with family, kin and sometimes culture to evoke a sense of home. The final verse of Cliffs of Doneen gives a sense of both people and place making up home: Fare thee well to Doneen, fare thee well for a while And to all the kind people I’m leaving behind To the streams and the meadows where late I have been And the high rocky slopes round the cliffs of Doneen. Earlier Irish songs intertwine home with political issues. For example, Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin vows to Erin that “In exile thy bosum shall still be my home.” Such exile resulted from a preference of fleeing Ireland rather than bowing to English oppression, which then included a prohibition on Irish having moustaches or certain hairstyles. Thomas Moore is said to have set the words of the song to the air Coulin which itself referred to an Irish woman’s preference for her “Coulin” (a long-haired Irish youth) to the English (Nelson-Burns). Diasporal songs have continued, as has their political edge, as evidenced by global recognition of songs such as Bayan Ko (My Country), written by José Corazon de Jesus in 1929, out of love and concern for the Philippines and sung among Filipinos worldwide. Robin Cohen outlines a set of criteria for diaspora that includes a shared belief in the possibility of return to home, evident in songs such as the 1943 Welsh song A Welcome in the Hillside, in which a Welsh word translating roughly as a yearning to return home, hiraeth, is used: We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth When you come home again to Wales. However, the immensely popular I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, not of Irish origin but written by Thomas Westendorf of Illinois in 1875, suggests that such emotions can have a resonance beyond the diaspora. Anti-colonial sentiments about home can also be expressed by long-time inhabitants, as Harry Belafonte demonstrated in Island in the Sun: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun. Though I may sail on many a sea, Her shores will always be home to me. War brought a deluge of sentimental songs lamenting separation from home and loved ones, just as likely to be parents and siblings as sweethearts. Radios allowed wider audiences and greater popularity for these songs. If separation had brought a longing previously, the added horrors of war presented a stronger contrast between that which the young soldiers were missing and that which they were experiencing. Both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to songs long since sung which originated in such separations, but these also had a strong sense of home as defined by the nationalism that has for over a century given the contours of expectations of soldiers. Focusing on home, these songs seldom speak of the details of war. Rather they are specific about what the singers have left behind and what they hope to return to. Songs of home did not have to be written specifically for the war effort nor for overseas troops. Irving Berlin’s 1942 White Christmas, written for a film, became extremely popular with US troops during WWII, instilling a sense of home that related to familiarities and festivities. Expressing a sense of home could be specific and relate to regions or towns, as did I’m Goin’ Back Again to Yarrawonga, or it could refer to any home, anywhere where there were sons away fighting. Indeed the American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, written by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmour, was sung by both Northerners and Southerners, so adaptable was it, with home remarkably unspecified and undescribed. The 1914 British song Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello and Lena Ford was among those that evoked a connection between home and the military effort and helped establish a responsibility on those at home to remain optimistic: Keep the Homes fires burning While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of home, There’s a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come Home. No space exists in this song for critique of the reasons for war, nor of a role for women other than that of homemaker and moral guardian. It was women’s duty to ensure men enlisted and home was rendered a private site for emotional enlistment for a presumed public good, though ironically also a point of personal hope where the light of love burned for the enlistees’ safe return. Later songs about home and war challenged these traditional notions. Two serve as examples. One is Pink Floyd’s brief musical piece of the 1970s, Bring the Boys Back Home, whose words of protest against the American war on Viet Nam present home, again, as a site of safety but within a less conservative context. Home becomes implicated in a challenge to the prevailing foreign policy and the interests that influence it, undermining the normal public sphere/private sphere distinction. The other more complex song is Judy Small’s Mothers, Daughters, Wives, from 1982, set against a backdrop of home. Small eloquently describes the dynamics of the domestic space and how women understood their roles in relation to the First and Second World Wars and the Viet Nam War. Reinforcing that “The materialities and imaginaries of home are closely connected” (Blunt and Dowling 188), Small sings of how the gold frames held the photographs that mothers kissed each night And the doorframe held the shocked and silent strangers from the fight. Small provides a rare musical insight into the disjuncture between the men who left the domestic space and those who return to it, and we sense that women may have borne much of the brunt of those awful changes. The idea of domestic bliss is also challenged, though from the returned soldier’s point of view, in Redgum’s 1983 song I Was Only Nineteen, written by group member John Schuman. It touches on the tragedy of young men thrust into war situations and the horrific after-affects for them, which cannot be shrugged off on return to home. The nurturing of home has limits but the privacy associated with the domestic sphere has often concealed the violence and mental anguish that happens away from public view. But by this time most of the songs referring to home were dominated once more by sentimental love, often borne of travel as mobility rose. Journeys help “establish the thresholds and boundaries of home” and can give rise to “an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home” (Mallett 78). Where previously songsters had sung of leaving home in exile or for escape from poverty, lyrics from the 1960s onwards often suggested that work had removed people from loved ones. It could be work on a day-by-day basis, as in A Hard Day’s Night from the 1964 film of the same name, where the Beatles illuminate differences between the public sphere of work and the private sphere to which they return: When I’m home, everything seems to be alright, When I’m home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah and reiterated by Paul McCartney in Every Night: And every night that day is through But tonight I just want to stay in And be with you. Lyrics such as these and McCartney’s call to be taken “...home to the Mull of Kintyre,” singled him out for his home-and-hearth messages (Dempsey). But work might involve longer absences and thus more deepfelt loneliness. Simon and Garfunkel’s exemplary Homeward Bound starkly portrays a site of “away-ness”: I’m sittin’ in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination… Mundaneness, monotony and predictability contrast with the home to which the singer’s thoughts are constantly escaping. The routine is familiar but the faces are those of strangers. Home here is, again, not simply a domicile but the warmth of those we know and love. Written at a railway station, Homeward Bound echoes sentiments almost identical to those of (Leaving on a) Jet Plane, written by John Denver at an airport in 1967. Denver also co-wrote (Take Me Home) Country Roads, where, in another example of anthropomorphism as a tool of establishing a strong link, he asks to be taken home to the place I belong West Virginia, mountain momma, Take me home, Country Roads. The theme has recurred in numerous songs since, spawning examples such as Darin and Alquist’s When I Get Home, Chris Daughtry’s Home, Michael Bublé’s Home and Will Smith’s Ain’t No Place Like Home, where, in an opening reminiscent of Homeward Bound, the singer is Sitting in a hotel room A thousand miles away from nowhere Sloped over a chair as I stare… Furniture from home, on the other hand, can be used to evoke contentment and bliss, as demonstrated by George Weiss and Bob Thiele’s song The Home Fire, in which both kin and the objects of home become charged with meaning: All of the folks that I love are there I got a date with my favourite chair Of course, in regard to earlier songs especially, while the traveller associates home with love, security and tenderness, back at home the waiting one may have had feelings more of frustration and oppression. One is desperate to get back home, but for all we know the other may be desperate to get out of home or to develop a life more meaningful than that which was then offered to women. If the lot of homemakers was invisible to national economies (Waring), it seemed equally invisible to mainstream songwriters. This reflects the tradition that “Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm” (Mallett 75). Few songs have offered the perspective of the one at home awaiting the return of the traveller. One exception is the Seekers’ 1965 A World of Our Own but, written by Tom Springfield, the words trilled by Judith Durham may have been more of a projection of the traveller’s hopes and expectations than a true reflection of the full experiences of housebound women of the day. Certainly, the song reinforces connections between home and intimacy and privacy: Close the door, light the lights. We’re stayin’ home tonight, Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights. Let them all fade away, just leave us alone And we’ll live in a world of our own. This also strongly supports Gaston Bachelard’s claim that one’s house in the sense of a home is one’s “first universe, a real cosmos” (qtd. in Blunt and Dowling 12). But privacy can also be a loneliness when home is not inhabited by loved ones, as in the lyrics of Don Gibson’s 1958 Oh, Lonesome Me, where Everybody’s going out and having fun I’m a fool for staying home and having none. Similar sentiments emerge in Debbie Boone’s You Light up My Life: So many nights I’d sit by my window Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Home in these situations can be just as alienating as the “away” depicted as so unfriendly by Homeward Bound’s strangers’ faces and the “million people” who still leave Michael Bublé feeling alone. Yet there are other songs that depict “away” as a prison made of freedom, insinuating that the lack of a home and consequently of the stable love and commitment presumably found there is a sad situation indeed. This is suggested by the lilting tune, if not by the lyrics themselves, in songs such as Wandrin’ Star from the musical Paint Your Wagon and Ron Miller’s I’ve Never Been to Me, which has both a male and female version with different words, reinforcing gendered experiences. The somewhat conservative lyrics in the female version made it a perfect send-up song in the 1994 film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. In some songs the absentee is not a traveller but has been in jail. In Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree, an ex-inmate states “I’m comin’ home. I’ve done my time.” Home here is contingent upon the availability and forgivingness of his old girl friend. Another song juxtaposing home with prison is Tom Jones’ The Green, Green Grass of Home in which the singer dreams he is returning to his home, to his parents, girlfriend and, once again, an old oak tree. However, he awakes to find he was dreaming and is about to be executed. His body will be taken home and placed under the oak tree, suggesting some resigned sense of satisfaction that he will, after all, be going home, albeit in different circumstances. Death and home are thus sometimes linked, with home a euphemism for the former, as suggested in many spirituals, with heaven or an afterlife being considered “going home”. The reverse is the case in the haunting Bring Him Home of the musical Les Misérables. With Marius going off to the barricades and the danger involved, Jean Valjean prays for the young man’s safe return and that he might live. Home is connected here with life, safety and ongoing love. In a number of songs about home and absence there is a sense of home being a place where morality is gently enforced, presumably by women who keep men on the straight and narrow, in line with one of the women’s roles of colonial Australia, researched by Anne Summers. These songs imply that when men wander from home, their morals also go astray. Wild Rover bemoans Oh, I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer… There is the resolve in the chorus, however, that home will have a reforming influence. Gene Pitney’s Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa poses the dangers of distance from a wife’s influence, while displaying opposition to the sentimental yearning of so many other songs: Dearest darlin’, I have to write to say that I won’t be home anymore ‘cause something happened to me while I was drivin’ home And I’m not the same anymore Class as well as gender can be a debated issue in meanings attached to home, as evident in several songs that take a more jaundiced view of home, seeing it as a place from which to escape. The Animals’ powerful We Gotta Get Outta This Place clearly suggests a life of drudgery in a home town or region. Protectively, the lyrics insist “Girl, there’s a better life for me and you” but it has to be elsewhere. This runs against the grain of other British songs addressing poverty or a working class existence as something that comes with its own blessings, all to do with an area identified as home. These traits may be loyalty, familiarity or a refusal to judge and involve identities of placement rather than of displacement in, for instance, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Ferry Cross the Mersey: People around every corner, they seem to smile and say “We don’t care what your name is, boy. We’ll never send you away.” This bears out Blunt and Dowling’s claim that “people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home” (252). It also resonates with some of the region-based identity and solidarity issues explored a short time later by Paul Willis in his study of working class youth in Britain, which help to inform how a sense of home can operate to constrict consciousness, ideas and aspirations. Identity features strongly in other songs about home. Several years after Neil Young recorded his 1970 song Southern Man about racism in the south of the USA, the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, responded with Sweet Home Alabama. While the meaning of its lyrics are still debated, there is no debate about the way in which the song has been embraced, as I recently discovered first-hand in Tennessee. A banjo-and-fiddle band performing the song during a gig virtually brought down the house as the predominantly southern audience clapped, whopped and stamped its feet. The real meanings of home were found not in the lyrics but in the audience’s response. Wally Johnson and Bob Brown’s 1975 Home Among the Gum Trees is a more straightforward ode to home, with lyrics that prescribe a set of non-commodified values. It is about simplicity and the right to embrace a lifestyle that includes companionship, leisure and an enjoyment of and appreciation of nature, all threatened seriously in the three decades since the song’s writing. The second verse in which large shopping complexes – and implicitly the consumerism they encourage – are eschewed (“I’d trade it all tomorrow for a little bush retreat where the kookaburras call”), is a challenge to notions of progress and reflects social movements of the day, The Green Bans Movement, for instance, took a broader and more socially conscientious attitude towards home and community, putting forward alternative sets of values and insisting people should have a say in the social and aesthetic construction of their neighbourhoods as well as the impacts of their labour (Mundey). Ironically, the song has gone on to become the theme song for a TV show about home gardens. With a strong yet more vague notion of home, Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, was more prone to commodification and has been adopted as a promotional song for Qantas. Nominating only the desire to travel and the love of freedom as Australian values, both politically and socially innocuous within the song’s context, this catchy and uplifting song, when not being used as an advertisement, paradoxically works for a “diaspora” of Australians who are not in exile but have mostly travelled for reasons of pleasure or professional or financial gain. Another paradox arises from the song Home on the Range, dating back to the 19th century at a time when the frontier was still a strong concept in the USA and people were simultaneously leaving homes and reminiscing about home (Mechem). Although it was written in Kansas, the lyrics – again vague and adaptable – were changed by other travellers so that versions such as Colorado Home and My Arizona Home soon abounded. In 1947 Kansas made Home on the Range its state song, despite there being very few buffalo left there, thus highlighting a disjuncture between the modern Kansas and “a home where the buffalo roam” as described in the song. These themes, paradoxes and oppositional understandings of home only scratch the surface of the wide range of claims that are made on home throughout popular music. It has been shown that home is a flexible concept, referring to homelands, regions, communities and private houses. While predominantly used to evoke positive feelings, mostly with traditional views of the relationships that lie within homes, songs also raise challenges to notions of domesticity, the rights of those inhabiting the private sphere and the demarcation between the private and public spheres. Songs about home reflect contexts and challenges of their respective eras and remind us that vigorous discussion takes place about and within homes. The challenges are changing. Where many women once felt restrictively tied to the home – and no doubt many continue to do so – many women and men are now struggling to rediscover spatial boundaries, with production and consumption increasingly impinging upon relationships that have so frequently given the term home its meaning. With evidence that we are working longer hours and that home life, in whatever form, is frequently suffering (Beder, Hochschild), the discussion should continue. In the words of Sam Cooke, Bring it on home to me! References Bacheland, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 93-106. Dempsey, J.M. “McCartney at 60: A Body of Work Celebrating Home and Hearth.” Popular Music and Society 27.1 (Feb. 2004): 27-40. Eva, Phil. “Home Sweet Home? The Culture of ‘Exile’ in Mid-Victorian Popular Song.” Popular Music 16.2 (May 1997): 131-150. Hochschild, Arlie. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan/Holt, 1997. Mallett, Sonia. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52.1 (2004): 62-89. Mechem, Kirke, “The Story of ‘Home on the Range’.” Reprint from the Kansas Historical Quarterly (Nov. 1949). Topeka, Kansas: Kansas State Historical Society. 28 May 2007 http://www.emporia.edu/cgps/tales/nov2003.html>. Mundey, Jack. Green Bans and Beyond. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Nelson-Burns, Lesley. Folk Music of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and America. 29 May 2007 http://www.contemplator.com/ireland/thoerin.html>. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge, 2001. Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>. APA Style Varney, W. (Aug. 2007) "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>.

Being a celebrity sure ain’t what it used to be. Or, perhaps more accurately, the process of maintaining a stable star persona isn’t what it used to be. With the rise of new media technologies—including digital photography and video production, gossip blogging, social networking sites, and streaming video—there has been a rapid proliferation of voices which serve to articulate stars’ personae. This panoply of sanctioned and unsanctioned discourses has brought the coherence and stability of the star’s image into crisis, with an evermore-heightened loop forming recursively between celebrity gossip and scandals, on the one hand, and, on the other, new media-enabled speculation and commentary about these scandals and gossip-pieces. Of course, while no subject has a single meaning, Hollywood has historically expended great energy and resources to perpetuate the myth that the star’s image is univocal. In the present moment, however, studios’s traditional methods for discursive control have faltered, such that celebrities have found it necessary to take matters into their own hands, using new media technologies, particularly Twitter, in an attempt to stabilise that most vital currency of their trade, their professional/public persona. In order to fully appreciate the significance of this new mode of publicity management, and its larger implications for contemporary subjectivity writ large, we must first come to understand the history of Hollywood’s approach to celebrity publicity and image management.A Brief History of Hollywood PublicityThe origins of this effort are nearly as old as Hollywood itself, for, as Richard DeCordova explains, the celebrity scandals of the 1920s threatened to disrupt the economic vitality of the incipient industry such that strict, centralised image control appeared as a necessary imperative to maintain a consistently reliable product. The Fatty Arbuckle murder trial was scandalous not only for its subject matter (a murder suffused with illicit and shadowy sexual innuendo) but also because the event revealed that stars, despite their mediated larger-than-life images, were not only as human as the rest of us, but that, in fact, they were capable of profoundly inhuman acts. The scandal, then, was not so much Arbuckle’s crime, but the negative pall it cast over the Hollywood mythos of glamour and grace. The studios quickly organised an industry-wide regulatory agency (the MPPDA) to counter potentially damaging rhetoric and ward off government intervention. Censorship codes and morality clauses were combined with well-funded publicity departments in an effort that successfully shifted the locus of the star’s extra-filmic discursive construction from private acts—which could betray their screen image—to information which served to extend and enhance the star’s pre-existing persona. In this way, the sanctioned celebrity knowledge sphere became co-extensive with that of commercial culture itself; the star became meaningful only by knowing how she spent her leisure time and the type of make-up she used. The star’s identity was not found via unsanctioned intrusion, but through studio-sanctioned disclosure, made available in the form of gossip columns, newsreels, and fan magazines. This period of relative stability for the star's star image was ultimately quite brief, however, as the collapse of the studio system in the late 1940s and the introduction of television brought about a radical, but gradual, reordering of the star's signifying potential. The studios no longer had the resources or incentive to tightly police star images—the classic age of stardom was over. During this period of change, an influx of alternative voices and publications filled the discursive void left by the demise of the studios’s regimented publicity efforts, with many of these new outlets reengaging older methods of intrusion to generate a regular rhythm of vendible information about the stars.The first to exploit and capitalize on star image instability was Robert Harrison, whose Confidential Magazine became the leading gossip publication of the 1950s. Unlike its fan magazine rivals, which persisted in portraying the stars as morally upright and wholesome, Confidential pledged on the cover of each issue to “tell the facts and name the names,” revealing what had been theretofore “confidential.” In essence, through intrusion, Confidential reasserted scandal as the true core of the star, simultaneously instituting incursion and surveillance as the most direct avenue to the “kernel” of the celebrity subject, obtaining stories through associations with call girls, out-of-work starlettes, and private eyes. As extra-textual discourses proliferated and fragmented, the contexts in which the public encountered the star changed as well. Theatre attendance dropped dramatically, and as the studios sold their film libraries to television, the stars, formerly available only on the big screen and in glamour shots, were now intercut with commercials, broadcast on grainy sets in the domestic space. The integrity—or at least the illusion of integrity—of the star image was forever compromised. As the parameters of renown continued to expand, film stars, formally distinguished from all other performers, migrated to television. The landscape of stardom was re-contoured into the “celebrity sphere,” a space that includes television hosts, musicians, royals, and charismatic politicians. The revamped celebrity “game” was complex, but still playabout: with a powerful agent, a talented publicist, and a check on drinking, drug use, and extra-marital affairs, a star and his or her management team could negotiate a coherent image. Confidential was gone, The National Inquirer was muzzled by libel laws, and People and E.T.—both sheltered within larger media companies—towed the publicists’s line. There were few widely circulated outlets through which unauthorised voices could gain traction. Old-School Stars and New Media Technologies: The Case of Tom CruiseYet with the relentless arrival of various news media technologies beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the present, maintaining tight celebrity image control began to require the services of a phalanx of publicists and handlers. Here, the example of Tom Cruise is instructive: for nearly twenty years, Cruise’s publicity was managed by Pat Kingsley, who exercised exacting control over the star’s image. With the help of seemingly diverse yet essentially similar starring roles, Cruise solidified his image as the cocky, charismatic boy-next-door.The unified Cruise image was made possible by shutting down competing discourses through the relentless, comprehensive efforts of his management company; Kingsley's staff fine-tuned Cruise’s acts of disclosure while simultaneously eliminating the potential for unplanned intrusions, neutralising any potential scandal at its source. Kingsley and her aides performed for Cruise all the functions of a studio publicity department from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Most importantly, Cruise was kept silent on the topic of his controversial religion, Scientology, lest it incite domestic and international backlash. In interviews and off-the-cuff soundbites, Cruise was ostensibly disclosing his true self, and that self remained the dominant reading of what, and who, Cruise “was.” Yet in 2004, Cruise fired Kingsley, replaced her with his own sister (and fellow Scientologist), who had no prior experience in public relations. In essence, he exchanged a handler who understood how to shape star disclosure for one who did not. The events that followed have been widely rehearsed: Cruise avidly pursued Katie Holmes; Cruise jumped for joy on Oprah’s couch; Cruise denounced psychology during a heated debate with Matt Lauer on The Today Show. His attempt at disclosing this new, un-publicist-mediated self became scandalous in and of itself. Cruise’s dismissal of Kingsley, his unpopular (but not necessarily unwelcome) disclosures, and his own massively unchecked ego all played crucial roles in the fall of the Cruise image. While these stumbles might have caused some minor career turmoil in the past, the hyper-echoic, spastically recombinatory logic of the technoculture brought the speed and stakes of these missteps to a new level; one of the hallmarks of the postmodern condition has been not merely an increasing textual self-reflexivity, but a qualitative new leap forward in inter-textual reflexivity, as well (Lyotard; Baudrillard). Indeed, the swift dismantling of Cruise’s long-established image is directly linked to the immediacy and speed of the Internet, digital photography, and the gossip blog, as the reflexivity of new media rendered the safe division between disclosure and intrusion untenable. His couchjumping was turned into a dance remix and circulated on YouTube; Mission Impossible 3 boycotts were organised through a number of different Web forums; gossip bloggers speculated that Cruise had impregnated Holmes using the frozen sperm of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. In the past, Cruise simply filed defamation suits against print publications that would deign to sully his image. Yet the sheer number of sites and voices reproducing this new set of rumors made such a strategy untenable. Ultimately, intrusions into Cruise’s personal life, including the leak of videos intended solely for Scientology recruitment use, had far more traction than any sanctioned Cruise soundbite. Cruise’s image emerged as a hollowed husk of its former self; the sheer amount of material circulating rendered all attempts at P.R., including a Vanity Fair cover story and “reveal” of daughter Suri, ridiculous. His image was fragmented and re-collected into an altered, almost uncanny new iteration. Following the lackluster performance of Mission Impossible 3 and public condemnation by Paramount head Sumner Redstone, Cruise seemed almost pitiable. The New Logic of Celebrity Image ManagementCruise’s travails are expressive of a deeper development which has occurred over the course of the last decade, as the massively proliferating new forms of celebrity discourse (e.g., paparazzi photos, mug shots, cell phone video have further decentered any shiny, polished version of a star. With older forms of media increasingly reorganising themselves according to the aesthetics and logic of new media forms (e.g., CNN featuring regular segments in which it focuses its network cameras upon a computer screen displaying the CNN website), we are only more prone to appreciate “low media” forms of star discourse—reports from fans on discussion boards, photos taken on cell phones—as valid components of the celebrity image. People and E.T. still attract millions, but they are rapidly ceding control of the celebrity industry to their ugly, offensive stepbrothers: TMZ, Us Weekly, and dozens of gossip blogs. Importantly, a publicist may be able to induce a blogger to cover their client, but they cannot convince him to drop a story: if TMZ doesn’t post it, then Perez Hilton certainly will. With TMZ unabashedly offering pay-outs to informants—including those in law enforcement and health care, despite recently passed legislation—a star is never safe. If he or she misbehaves, someone, professional or amateur, will provide coverage. Scandal becomes normalised, and, in so doing, can no longer really function as scandal as such; in an age of around-the-clock news cycles and celebrity-fixated journalism, the only truly scandalising event would be the complete absence of any scandalous reports. Or, as aesthetic theorist Jacques Ranciere puts it; “The complaint is then no longer that images conceal secrets which are no longer such to anyone, but, on the contrary, that they no longer hide anything” (22).These seemingly paradoxical involutions of post-modern celebrity epistemologies are at the core of the current crisis of celebrity, and, subsequently, of celebrities’s attempts to “take back their own paparazzi.” As one might expect, contemporary celebrities have attempted to counter these new logics and strategies of intrusion through a heightened commitment to disclosure, principally through the social networking capabilities of Twitter. Yet, as we will see, not only have the epistemological reorderings of postmodernist technoculture affected the logic of scandal/intrusion, but so too have they radically altered the workings of intrusion’s dialectical counterpart, disclosure.In the 1930s, when written letters were still the primary medium for intimate communication, stars would send lengthy “hand-written” letters to members of their fan club. Of course, such letters were generally not written by the stars themselves, but handwriting—and a star’s signature—signified authenticity. This ritualised process conferred an “aura” of authenticity upon the object of exchange precisely because of its static, recurring nature—exchange of fan mail was conventionally understood to be the primary medium for personal encounters with a celebrity. Within the overall political economy of the studio system, the medium of the hand-written letter functioned to unleash the productive power of authenticity, offering an illusion of communion which, in fact, served to underscore the gulf between the celebrity’s extraordinary nature and the ordinary lives of those who wrote to them. Yet the criterion and conventions through which celebrity personae were maintained were subject to change over time, as new communications technologies, new modes of Hollywood's industrial organization, and the changing realities of commercial media structures all combined to create a constantly moving ground upon which the celebrity tried to affix. The celebrity’s changing conditions are not unique to them alone; rather, they are a highly visible bellwether of changes which are more fundamentally occurring at all levels of culture and subjectivity. Indeed, more than seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin observed that when hand-made expressions of individuality were superseded by mechanical methods of production, aesthetic criteria (among other things) also underwent change, rendering notions of authenticity increasingly indeterminate.Such is the case that in today’s world, hand-written letters seem more contrived or disingenuous than Danny DeVito’s inaugural post to his Twitter account: “I just joined Twitter! I don't really get this site or how it works. My nuts are on fire.” The performative gesture in DeVito’s tweet is eminently clear, just as the semantic value is patently false: clearly DeVito understands “this site,” as he has successfully used it to extend his irreverent funny-little-man persona to the new medium. While the truth claims of his Tweet may be false, its functional purpose—both effacing and reifying the extraordinary/ordinary distinction of celebrity and maintaining DeVito’s celebrity personality as one with which people might identify—is nevertheless seemingly intact, and thus mirrors the instrumental value of celebrity disclosure as performed in older media forms. Twitter and Contemporary TechnocultureFor these reasons and more, considered within the larger context of contemporary popular culture, celebrity tweeting has been equated with the assertion of the authentic celebrity voice; celebrity tweets are regularly cited in newspaper articles and blogs as “official” statements from the celebrity him/herself. With so many mediated voices attempting to “speak” the meaning of the star, the Twitter account emerges as the privileged channel to the star him/herself. Yet the seemingly easy discursive associations of Twitter and authenticity are in fact ideological acts par excellence, as fixations on the indexical truth-value of Twitter are not merely missing the point, but actively distracting from the real issues surrounding the unsteady discursive construction of contemporary celebrity and the “celebretification” of contemporary subjectivity writ large. In other words, while it is taken as axiomatic that the “message” of celebrity Twittering is, as Henry Jenkins suggests, “Here I Am,” this outward epistemological certainty veils the deeply unstable nature of celebrity—and by extension, subjectivity itself—in our networked society.If we understand the relationship between publicity and technoculture to work as Zizek-inspired cultural theorist Jodi Dean suggests, then technologies “believe for us, accessing information even if we cannot” (40), such that technology itself is enlisted to serve the function of ideology, the process by which a culture naturalises itself and attempts to render the notion of totality coherent. For Dean, the psycho-ideological reality of contemporary culture is predicated upon the notion of an ever-elusive “secret,” which promises to reveal us all as part of a unitary public. The reality—that there is no such cohesive collective body—is obscured in the secret’s mystifying function which renders as “a contingent gap what is really the fact of the fundamental split, antagonism, and rupture of politics” (40). Under the ascendancy of the technoculture—Dean's term for the technologically mediated landscape of contemporary communicative capitalism—subjectivity becomes interpellated along an axis blind to the secret of this fundamental rupture. The two interwoven poles of this axis are not unlike structuralist film critics' dialectically intertwined accounts of the scopophilia and scopophobia of viewing relations, simply enlarged from the limited realm of the gaze to encompass the entire range of subjectivity. As such, the conspiratorial mindset is that mode of desire, of lack, which attempts to attain the “secret,” while the celebrity subject is that element of excess without which desire is unthinkable. As one might expect, the paparazzi and gossip sites’s strategies of intrusion have historically operated primarily through the conspiratorial mindset, with endless conjecture about what is “really happening” behind the scenes. Under the intrusive/conspiratorial paradigm, the authentic celebrity subject is always just out of reach—a chance sighting only serves to reinscribe the need for the next encounter where, it is believed, all will become known. Under such conditions, the conspiratorial mindset of the paparazzi is put into overdrive: because the star can never be “fully” known, there can never be enough information about a star, therefore, more information is always needed. Against this relentless intrusion, the celebrity—whose discursive stability, given the constant imperative for newness in commercial culture, is always in danger—risks a semiotic liquidation that will totally displace his celebrity status as such. Disclosure, e.g. Tweeting, emerges as a possible corrective to the endlessly associative logic of the paparazzi’s conspiratorial indset. In other words, through Twitter, the celebrity seeks to arrest meaning—fixing it in place around their own seemingly coherent narrativisation. The publicist’s new task, then, is to convincingly counter such unsanctioned, intrusive, surveillance-based discourse. Stars continue to give interviews, of course, and many regularly pose as “authors” of their own homepages and blogs. Yet as posited above, Twitter has emerged as the most salient means of generating “authentic” celebrity disclosure, simultaneously countering the efforts of the papparazzi, fan mags, and gossip blogs to complicate or rewrite the meaning of the star. The star uses the account—verified, by Twitter, as the “real” star—both as a means to disclose their true interior state of being and to counter erastz narratives circulating about them. Twitter’s appeal for both celebrities and their followers comes from the ostensible spontaneity of the tweets, as the seemingly unrehearsed quality of the communiqués lends the form an immediacy and casualness unmatched by blogs or official websites; the semantic informality typically employed in the medium obscures their larger professional significance for celebrity tweeters. While Twitter’s air of extemporary intimacy is also offered by other social networking platforms, such as MySpace or Facebook, the latter’s opportunities for public feedback (via wall-posts and the like) works counter to the tight image control offered by Twitter’s broadcast-esque model. Additionally, because of the uncertain nature of the tweet release cycle—has Ashton Kutcher sent a new tweet yet?—the voyeuristic nature of the tweet disclosure (with its real-time nature offering a level of synchronic intimacy that letters never could have matched), and the semantically displaced nature of the medium, it is a form of disclosure perfectly attuned to the conspiratorial mindset of the technoculture. As mentioned above, however, the conspiratorial mindset is an unstable subjectivity, insofar as it only exists through a constant oscillation with its twin, the celebrity subjectivity. While we can understand that, for the celebrities, Twitter functions by allowing them a mode for disclosive/celebrity subjectivisation, we have not yet seen how the celebrity itself is rendered conspiratorial through Twitter. Similarly, only the conspiratorial mode of the follower’s subjectivity has thus far been enumerated; the moment of the follower's celebrtification has so far gone unmentioned. Since we have seen that the celebrity function of Twitter is not really about discourse per se, we should instead understand that the ideological value of Twitter comes from the act of tweeting itself, of finding pleasure in being engaged in a techno-social system in which one's participation is recognised. Recognition and participation should be qualified, though, as it is not the fully active type of participation one might expect in say, the electoral politics of a representative democracy. Instead, it is a participation in a sort of epistemological viewing relations, or, as Jodi Dean describes it, “that we understand ourselves as known is what makes us think there is that there is a public that knows us” (122). The fans’ recognition by the celebrity—the way in which they understood themselves as known by the star was once the receipt of a hand-signed letter (and a latent expectation that the celebrity had read the fan’s initial letter); such an exchange conferred to the fan a momentary sense of participation in the celebrity's extraordinary aura. Under Twitter, however, such an exchange does not occur, as that feeling of one-to-one interaction is absent; simply by looking elsewhere on the screen, one can confirm that a celebrity's tweet was received by two million other individuals. The closest a fan can come to that older modality of recognition is by sending a message to the celebrity that the celebrity then “re-tweets” to his broader following. Beyond the obvious levels of technological estrangement involved in such recognition is the fact that the identity of the re-tweeted fan will not be known by the celebrity’s other two million followers. That sense of sharing in the celebrity’s extraordinary aura is altered by an awareness that the very act of recognition largely entails performing one’s relative anonymity in front of the other wholly anonymous followers. As the associative, conspiratorial mindset of the star endlessly searches for fodder through which to maintain its image, fans allow what was previously a personal moment of recognition to be transformed into a public one. That is, the conditions through which one realises one’s personal subjectivity are, in fact, themselves becoming remade according to the logic of celebrity, in which priority is given to the simple fact of visibility over that of the actual object made visible. Against such an opaque cultural transformation, the recent rise of reactionary libertarianism and anti-collectivist sentiment is hardly surprising. ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1994.Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. Dean, Jodi. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Jenkins, Henry. “The Message of Twitter: ‘Here It Is’ and ‘Here I Am.’” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 23 Aug. 2009. 15 Sep. 2009 < http://henryjenkins.org/2009/08/the_message_of_twitter.html >.Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984.Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image. New York: Verso, 2007.

The Harry Potter (HP) Fan Fiction (FF) phenomenon offers an opportunity to explore the nature of fame and the work of fans (including the second author, a participant observer) in creating and circulating cultural products within fan communities. Matt Hills comments (xi) that “fandom is not simply a ‘thing’ that can be picked over analytically. It is also always performative; by which I mean that it is an identity which is (dis-)claimed, and which performs cultural work”. This paper explores the cultural work of fandom in relation to FF and fame. The global HP phenomenon – in which FF lists are a small part – has made creator J K Rowling richer than the Queen of England, according to the 2003 ‘Sunday Times Rich List’. The books (five so far) and the films (three) continue to accelerate the growth in Rowling’s fortune, which quadrupled from 2001-3: an incredible success for an author unknown before the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997. Even the on-screen HP lead actor, Daniel Radcliffe, is now Britain’s second wealthiest teenager (after England’s Prince Harry). There are other globally successful books, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Narnia collection, but neither of these series has experienced the momentum of the HP rise to fame. (See Endnote for an indication of the scale of fan involvement with HP FF, compared with Lord of the Rings.) Contemporary ‘Fame’ has been critically defined in relation to the western mass media’s requirement for ‘entertaining’ content, and the production and circulation of celebrity as opposed to ‘hard news’(Turner, Bonner and Marshall). The current perception is that an army of publicists and spin doctors are usually necessary, but not sufficient, to create and nurture global fame. Yet the HP phenomenon started out with no greater publicity investment than that garnered by any other promising first novelist: and given the status of HP as children’s publishing, it was probably less hyped than equivalent adult-audience publications. So are there particular characteristics of HP and his creator that predisposed the series and its author to become famous? And how does the fame status relate to fans’ incorporation of these cultural materials into their lives? Accepting that it is no more possible to predict the future fame of an author or (fictional) character than it is to predict the future financial success of a book, film or album, there is a range of features of the HP phenomenon that, in hindsight, helped accelerate the fame momentum, creating what has become in hindsight an unparalleled global media property. J K Rowling’s personal story – in the hands of her publicity machine – itself constituted a magical myth: the struggling single mother writing away (in longhand) in a Scottish café, snatching odd moments to construct the first book while her infant daughter slept. (Comparatively little attention was paid by the marketers to the author’s professional training and status as a teacher, or to Rowling’s own admission that the first book, and the outline for the series, took five years to write.) Rowling’s name itself, with no self-evident gender attribution, was also indicative of ambiguity and mystery. The back-story to HP, therefore, became one of a quintessentially romantic endeavour – the struggle to write against the odds. Publicity relating to the ‘starving in a garret’ background is not sufficient to explain the HP/Rowling grip on the popular imagination, however. Instead it is arguable that the growth of HP fame and fandom is directly related to the growth of the Internet and to the middle class readers’ Internet access. If the production of celebrity is a major project of the conventional mass media, the HP phenomenon is a harbinger of the hyper-fame that can be generated through the combined efforts of the mass media and online fan communities. The implication of this – evident in new online viral marketing techniques (Kirby), is that publicists need to pique cyber-interest as well as work with the mass media in the construction of celebrity. As the cheer-leaders for online viral marketing make the argument, the technique “provides the missing link between the [bottom-up] word-of-mouth approach and the top-down, advertainment approach”. Which is not to say that the initial HP success was a function of online viral marketing: rather, the marketers learned their trade by analysing the magnifier impact that the online fan communities had upon the exponential growth of the HP phenomenon. This cyber-impact is based both on enhanced connectivity – the bottom-up, word-of-mouth dynamic, and on the individual’s need to assume an identity (albeit fluid) to participate effectively in online community. Critiquing the notion that the computer is an identity machine, Streeter focuses upon (649) “identities that people have brought to computers from the culture at large”. He does not deal in any depth with FF, but suggests (651) that “what the Internet is and will come to be, then, is partly a matter of who we expect to be when we sit down to use it”. What happens when fans sit down to use the Internet, and is there a particular reason why the Internet should be of importance to the rise and rise of HP fame? From the point of view of one of us, HP was born at more or less the same time as she was. Eleven years old in the first book, published in 1997, Potter’s putative birth year might be set in 1986 – in line with many of the original HP readership, and the publisher’s target market. At the point that this cohort was first spellbound by Potter, 1998-9, they were also on the brink of discovering the Internet. In Australia and many western nations, over half of (two-parent) families with school-aged children were online by the end of 2000 (ABS). Potter would notionally have been 14: his fans a little younger but well primed for the ‘teeny-bopper’ years. Arguably, the only thing more famous than HP for that age-group, at that time, was the Internet itself. As knowledge of the Internet grew stories about it constituted both news and entertainment and circulated widely in the mass media: the uncertainty concerning new media, and their impact upon existing social structures, has – over time – precipitated a succession of moral panics … Established commercial media are not noted for their generosity to competitors, and it is unsurprising that many of the moral panics circulating about pornography on the Net, Internet stalking, Web addiction, hate sites etc are promulgated in the older media. (Green xxvii) Although the mass media may have successfully scared the impressionable, the Internet was not solely constructed as a site of moral panic. Prior to the general pervasiveness of the Internet in domestic space, P. David Marshall discusses multiple constructions of the computer – seen by parents as an educational tool which could help future-proof their children; but which their children were more like to conceptualise as a games machine, or (this was the greater fear) use for hacking. As the computer was to become a site for the battle ground between education, entertainment and power, so too the Internet was poised to be colonised by teenagers for a variety of purposes their parents would have preferred to prevent: chat, pornography, game-playing (among others). Fan communities thrive on the power of the individual fan to project themselves and their fan identity as part of an ongoing conversation. Further, in constructing the reasons behind what has happened in the HP narrative, and in speculating what is to come, fans are presenting themselves as identities with whom others might agree (positive affirmation) or disagree (offering the chance for engagement through exchange). The genuinely insightful fans, who apparently predict the plots before they’re published, may even be credited in their communities with inspiring J K Rowling’s muse. (The FF mythology is that J K Rowling dare not look at the FF sites in case she finds herself influenced.) Nancy Baym, commenting on a soap opera fan Usenet group (Usenet was an early 1990s precursor to discussion groups) notes that: The viewers’ relationship with characters, the viewers’ understanding of socioemotional experience, and soap opera’s narrative structure, in which moments of maximal suspense are always followed by temporal gaps, work together to ensure that fans will use the gaps during and between shows to discuss with one another possible outcomes and possible interpretations of what has been seen. (143) In HP terms the The Philosopher’s Stone constructed a fan knowledge that J K Rowling’s project entailed at least seven books (one for each year at Hogwarts School) and this offered plentiful opportunities to speculate upon the future direction and evolution of the HP characters. With each speculation, each posting, the individual fan can refine and extend their identity as a member of the FF community. The temporal gaps between the books and the films – coupled with the expanding possibilities of Internet communication – mean that fans can feel both creative and connected while circulating the cultural materials derived from their engagement with the HP ‘canon’. Canon is used to describe the HP oeuvre as approved by Rowling, her publishers, and her copyright assignees (for example, Warner Bros). In contrast, ‘fanon’ is the name used by fans to refer the body of work that results from their creative/subversive interactions with the core texts, such as “slash” (homo-erotic/romance) fiction. Differentiation between the two terms acknowledges the likelihood that J K Rowling or her assignees might not approve of fanon. The constructed identities of fans who deal solely with canon differ significantly from those who are engaged in fanon. The implicit (romantic) or explicit (full-action descriptions) sexualisation of HP FF is part of a complex identity play on behalf of both the writers and readers of FF. Further, given that the online communities are often nurtured and enriched by offline face to face exchanges with other participants, what an individual is prepared to read or not to read, or write or not write, says as much about that person’s public persona as does another’s overt consumption of pornography; or diet of art house films, in contrast to someone else’s enthusiasm for Friends. Hearn, Mandeville and Anthony argue that a “central assertion of postmodern views of consumption is that social identity can be interpreted as a function of consumption” (106), and few would disagree with them: herein lies the power of the brand. Noting that consumer culture centrally focuses upon harnessing ‘the desire to desire’, Streeter’s work (654, on the opening up of Internet connectivity) suggests a continuum from ‘desire provoked’; through anticipation, ‘excitement based on what people imagined would happen’; to a sense of ‘possibility’. All this was made more tantalising in terms of the ‘unpredictability’ of how cyberspace would eventually resolve itself (657). Thus a progression is posited from desire through to the thrill of comparing future possibilities with eventual outcomes. These forces clearly influence the HP FF phenomenon, where a section of HP fans have become impatient with the pace of the ‘official’/canon HP text. J K Rowling’s writing has slowed down to the point that Harry’s initial readership has overtaken him by several years. He’s about to enter his sixth year (of seven) at secondary school – his erstwhile-contemporaries have already left school or are about to graduate to University. HP is yet to have ‘a relationship’: his fans are engaged in some well-informed speculation as to a range of sexual possibilities which would likely take J K Rowling some light years from her marketers’ core readership. So the story is progressing more slowly than many fans would choose and with less spice than many would like (from the evidence of the web, at least). As indicated in the Endnote, the productivity of the fans, as they ‘fill in the gaps’ while waiting for the official narrative to resume, is prodigious. It may be that as the fans outstrip HP in their own social and emotional development they find his reactions in later books increasingly unbelievable, and/or out of character with the HP they felt they knew. Thus they develop an alternative ‘Harry’ in fanon. Some FF authors identify in advance which books they accept as canon, and which they have decided to ignore. For example, popular FF author Midnight Blue gives the setting of her evolving FF The Mirror of Maybe as “after Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and as an alternative to the events detailed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, [this] is a Slash story involving Harry Potter and Severus Snape”. Some fans, tired of waiting for Rowling to get Harry grown up, ‘are doin’ it for themselves’. Alternatively, it may be that as they get older the first groups of HP fans are unwilling to relinquish their investment in the HP phenomenon, but are equally unwilling to align themselves uncritically with the anodyne story of the canon. Harry Potter, as Warner Bros licensed him, may be OK for pre-teens, but less cool for the older adolescent. The range of identities that can be constructed using the many online HP FF genres, however, permits wide scope for FF members to identify with dissident constructions of the HP narrative and helps to add to the momentum with which his fame increases. Latterly there is evidence that custodians of canon may be making subtle overtures to creators of fanon. Here, the viral marketers have a particular challenge – to embrace the huge market represented by fanon, while not disturbing those whose HP fandom is based upon the purity of canon. Some elements of fanon feel their discourses have been recognised within the evolving approved narrative . This sense within the fan community – that the holders of the canon have complimented them through an intertextual reference – is much prized and builds the momentum of the fame engagement (as has been demonstrated by Watson, with respect to the band ‘phish’). Specifically, Harry/Draco slash fans have delighted in the hint of a blown kiss from Draco Malfoy to Harry (as Draco sends Harry an origami bird/graffiti message in a Defence against the Dark Arts Class in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as an acknowledgement of their cultural contribution to the development of the HP phenomenon. Streeter credits Raymond’s essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as offering a model for the incorporation of voluntary labour into the marketplace. Although Streeter’s example concerns the Open Source movement, derived from hacker culture, it has parallels with the prodigious creativity (and productivity) of the HP FF communities. Discussing the decision by Netscape to throw open the source code of its software in 1998, allowing those who use it to modify and improve it, Streeter comments that (659) “the core trope is to portray Linux-style software development like a bazaar, a real-life competitive marketplace”. The bazaar features a world of competing, yet complementary, small traders each displaying their skills and their wares for evaluation in terms of the product on offer. In contrast, “Microsoft-style software production is portrayed as hierarchical and centralised – and thus inefficient – like a cathedral”. Raymond identifies “ego satisfaction and reputation among other [peers]” as a specific socio-emotional benefit for volunteer participants (in Open Source development), going on to note: “Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon [… for example] science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized ‘egoboo’ (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity”. This may also be a prime mover for FF engagement. Where fans have outgrown the anodyne canon they get added value through using the raw materials of the HP stories to construct fanon: establishing and building individual identities and communities through HP consumption practices in parallel with, but different from, those deemed acceptable for younger, more innocent, fans. The fame implicit in HP fandom is not only that of HP, the HP lead actor Daniel Radcliffe and HP’s creator J K Rowling; for some fans the famed ‘state or quality of being widely honoured and acclaimed’ can be realised through their participation in online fan culture – fans become famous and recognised within their own community for the quality of their work and the generosity of their sharing with others. The cultural capital circulated on the FF sites is both canon and fanon, a matter of some anxiety for the corporations that typically buy into and foster these mega-media products. As Jim Ward, Vice-President of Marketing for Lucasfilm comments about Star Wars fans (cited in Murray 11): “We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact someone is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that’s not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.” Slash fans would beg to differ, and for many FF readers and writers, the joy of engagement, and a significant engine for the growth of HP fame, is partly located in the creativity offered for readers and writers to fill in the gaps. Endnote HP FF ranges from posts on general FF sites (such as fanfiction.net >> books, where HP has 147,067 stories [on 4,490 pages of hotlinks] posted, compared with its nearest ‘rival’ Lord of the rings: with 33,189 FF stories). General FF sites exclude adult content, much of which is corralled into 18+ FF sites, such as Restrictedsection.org, set up when core material was expelled from general sites. As an example of one adult site, the Potter Slash Archive is selective (unlike fanfiction.net, for example) which means that only stories liked by the site team are displayed. Authors submitting work are asked to abide by a list of ‘compulsory parameters’, but ‘warnings’ fall under the category of ‘optional parameters’: “Please put a warning if your story contains content that may be offensive to some authors [sic], such as m/m sex, graphic sex or violence, violent sex, character death, major angst, BDSM, non-con (rape) etc”. Adult-content FF readers/writers embrace a range of unexpected genres – such as Twincest (incest within either of the two sets of twin characters in HP) and Weasleycest (incest within the Weasley clan) – in addition to mainstream romance/homo-erotica pairings, such as that between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. (NB: within the time frame 16 August – 4 October, Harry Potter FF writers had posted an additional 9,196 stories on the fanfiction.net site alone.) References ABS. 8147.0 Use of the Internet by Householders, Australia. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ e8ae5488b598839cca25682000131612/ ae8e67619446db22ca2568a9001393f8!OpenDocument, 2001, 2001>. Baym, Nancy. “The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication.” CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. S. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. 138-63. Blue, Midnight. “The Mirror of Maybe.” http://www.greyblue.net/MidnightBlue/Mirror/default.htm>. Coates, Laura. “Muggle Kids Battle for Domain Name Rights. Irish Computer. http://www.irishcomputer.com/domaingame2.html>. Fanfiction.net. “Category: Books” http://www.fanfiction.net/cat/202/>. Green, Lelia. Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hearn, Greg, Tom Mandeville and David Anthony. The Communication Superhighway: Social and Economic Change in the Digital Age. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. Houghton Mifflin. “Potlatch.” Encyclopedia of North American Indians. http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/ na_030900_potlatch.htm>. Kirby, Justin. “Brand Papers: Getting the Bug.” Brand Strategy July-August 2004. http://www.dmc.co.uk/pdf/BrandStrategy07-0804.pdf>. Marshall, P. David. “Technophobia: Video Games, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics.” Media International Australia 85 (Nov. 1997): 70-8. Murray, Simone. “Celebrating the Story the Way It Is: Cultural Studies, Corporate Media and the Contested Utility of Fandom.” Continuum 18.1 (2004): 7-25. Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 2000. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html>. Streeter, Thomas. The Romantic Self and the Politics of Internet Commercialization. Cultural Studies 17.5 (2003): 648-68. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge UP. Watson, Nessim. “Why We Argue about Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.net Fan Community.” Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. Ed. Steven G. Jones. London: Sage, 1997. 102-32. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia, and Carmen Guinery. "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>. APA Style Green, L., and C. Guinery. (Nov. 2004) "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>.

In post-socialist China, gender norms are marked by rising divorce rates (Kleinman et al.), shifting attitudes towards sex (Farrer; Yan), and a growing commercialisation of sex (Zheng). These phenomena have been understood as indicative of market reforms unhinging past gender norms. In the socialist period, the radical politics of the time moulded women as gender neutral even as state policies emphasised their feminine roles in maintaining marital harmony and stability (Evans). These ideas around domesticity bear strong resemblance to pre-socialist understandings of womanhood and family that anchored Chinese society before the Communists took power in 1949. In this pre-socialist understanding, women were categorised into a hierarchy that defined their rights as wives, mothers, concubines, and servants (Ebrey and Watson; Wolf and Witke). Women who transgressed these categories were regarded as potentially dangerous and powerful enough to break up families and shake the foundations of Chinese society (Ahern). This paper explores the extent to which understandings of Chinese femininity have been reconfigured in the context of China’s post-1979 development, particularly after the 2000s.The popular television dramas Chinese Style Divorce (2004, Divorce), Dwelling Narrowness (2009, Dwelling), and Divorce Lawyers (2014, Lawyers) are set against this socio-cultural backdrop. The production of these shows is regulated by the China State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), who has the power to grant or deny production and distribution permits. Post-production, the dramas are sold to state-owned television stations for distribution (Yu 36). Haiqing Yu summarises succinctly the state of Chinese media: “Chinese state manipulation and interference in the media market has seen the party-state media marketized but not weakened, media control decentralized but not reduced, and the media industry commercialized but not privatized” (42). Shot in one of the biggest cities in Shandong, Qingdao, Divorce focuses on Doctor Song Jianping and his schoolteacher wife Lin Xiaofeng and the conflicts between Song and Lin, who quits her job to become a stay-at-home mom after her husband secures a high-paying job in a foreign-invested hospital. Lin becomes paranoid and volatile, convinced that their divorced neighbour Xiao Li is having an affair with Song. Refusing to explain the situation, Song is willing to give her a divorce but fights over guardianship of their son. In the end, it is unconfirmed whether they reconcile or divorce. Divorce was recognised as TV Drama of the Year in 2004 and the two leads also won awards for their acting. Reruns of the show continue to air. According to Hui Faye Xiao, “It is reported that many college students viewed this TV show as a textbook on married life in urban settings” (118). Dwelling examines the issue of skyrocketing housing prices and the fates of the Guo sisters, Haizao and Haiping, who moved from rural China to the competitive economically advanced metropolis. Haiping is obsessed with buying an apartment while her younger sister becomes the mistress of a corrupt official, Song Siming. Both sisters receive favours from Song, which leads to Haiping’s success in purchasing a home. However, Haizao is less fortunate. She has a miscarriage and her uterus removed while Song dies in a car accident. Online responses from the audience praise Dwelling for its penetrating and realistic insights into the complex web of familial relationships navigated by Chinese people living in a China under transformation (Xiao, “Woju”). Dwelling was taken off the air when a SARFT official criticised the drama for violating state-endorsed “cultural standards” in its explicit discussions of sex and negative portrayals of government officials (Hung, “State” 156). However, the show continued to be streamed online and it has been viewed and downloaded more than 100 million times (Yu 34). In Lawyers, Luo Li and Chi Haidong are two competing divorce lawyers in Beijing who finally tie the knot. Chi was a happily married man before catching his wife with her lover. Newly divorced, he moves into the same apartment building as Luo and the drama focuses on a series of cases they handle, most of which involve extramarital affairs. Lawyers has been viewed more than 1.6 billion times online (v.qq.com) and received the China Huading award for “favourite television drama” in 2015. Although these dramas contain some conventional elements of domestic melodramas, such as extramarital affairs and domestic disputes, they differ from traditional Chinese television dramas because they do not focus on the common trope of fraught mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships.Centred on the politics of family ethics, these hugely popular dramas present the transformation in gender norms as a struggle between post-socialist and pre-socialist understandings of femininity. On the one hand, these dramas celebrate the emergence of a post-socialist femininity that is independent, economically successful, and sexually liberated, epitomising this new understanding of womanhood in the figures of single women and mistresses. On the other hand, the dramas portray these post-socialist women in perpetual conflict with wives and mothers who propound a pre-socialist form of femininity that is sexually conservative and defined by familial relationships, and is economically less viable in the market economy. Focusing on depictions of femininity in these dramas, this paper offers a comparative analysis into the extent to which gender norms have been reconfigured in post-socialist China. It approaches these television dramas as a pedagogical device (Brady) and pays particular attention to the ways through which different categories of women interrogated their rights as single women, mistresses, wives, and mothers. In doing so, it illuminates the politics through which a liberal post-socialist femininity unleashed by market transformation is controlled in order to protect the integrity of the family and maintain social order. Post-Socialist Femininity Unleashed: Single Women and Mistresses A woman’s identity is inextricably linked to her marital status in Chinese society. In pre-socialist China, women relied on men as providers and were expected to focus on contributing to her husband’s family (Ebrey and Watson; Wolf and Witke). This pre-socialist positioning of women within the private realm of the family, though reinterpreted, continued to resonate in the socialist period when women were expected to fulfil marital obligations as wives and participate in the public domain as revolutionaries (Evans). While the pressure to marry has not disappeared in post-socialist China, as the derogatory term “leftover women” (single women over the age of 27) indicates, there are now more choices for single women living in metropolitan cities who are highly educated and financially independent. They can choose to remain single, get married, or become mistresses. Single women can be regarded as a threat to wives because the only thing holding them back from becoming mistresses is their morals. The 28-year-old “leftover woman” Luo Li (Lawyers) is presented as morally superior to single women who choose to become mistresses (Luo Meiyuan and Shi Jiang) and therefore deserving of a happy ending because she breaks up with her boss as soon as she discovers he is married. Luo Li quits to set up a law firm with her friend Tang Meiyu. Both women are beautiful, articulate, intelligent, and sexually liberated, symbolising unleashed post-socialist femininity. Part of the comic relief in Lawyers is the subplot of Luo’s mother trying to introduce her to “eligible” bachelors such as the “PhD man” (Episodes 20–21). Luo is unwilling to lower her standards to escape the stigma of being a “leftover woman” and she is rewarded for adhering to her ideals in the end when she convinces the marriage-phobic Chi Haidong to marry her after she rejects a marriage proposal from her newly divorced ex-lover. While Luo Li refuses to remain a mistress, many women do not subscribe to her worldview. Mistresses have existed throughout Chinese history in the form of concubines and courtesans. A wealthy and powerful man was expected to have concubines, who were usually from lower socio-economic backgrounds (Ebrey and Watson; Liu). Mistresses, now referred to as xiaosan, have become a heated topic in post-socialist China where they are regarded as having the power to destroy families by transgressing moral boundaries. Some argue that the phenomenon is a result of the market-driven economy where women who desire a financially stable life use their sexuality to seek rich married men who lust for younger mistresses as symbols of power. Ruth Y.Y. Hung characterises the xiaosan phenomenon as a “horrendous sex trade [that is] a marker of neoliberal market economies in the new PRC” (“Imagination” 100). A comparison of the three dramas reveals a transformation in the depiction of mistresses over the last decade. While Xiao Li (Divorce) is never “confirmed” as Song Jianping’s mistress, she flirts with him and crosses the boundaries of a professional relationship, posing a threat to the stability of Song’s family life. Although Haizao (Dwelling) is university-educated and has a stable, if low-paying job, she chooses to break up with her earnest caring fiancé to be the mistress of the middle-aged Song Siming who offers her material benefits in the form of “loans” she knows she will never be able to repay, a fancy apartment to live in, and other “gifts” such as dining at expensive restaurants and shopping at big malls. While the fresh-faced Haizao exhibits a physical transformation after becoming Song’s mistress, demonstrated through her newly permed hair coupled with an expensive red coat, mistresses in Lawyers do not change in this way. Dong Dahai’s mistress, the voluptuous Luo Meiyuan is already a successful career woman who flaunts her perfect makeup, long wavy hair, and body-hugging dresses (Episodes 12–26). She exudes sexual confidence but her relationship is not predicated on receiving financial favours in return for sexual ones. She tells Dong’s wife that the only “third person” in a relationship is the “unloved” one (Episode 15). Another mistress who challenges old ideas of the power dynamic of the rich man and financially reliant young woman is the divorced Shi Jiang, Tang Meiyu’s former classmate, who becomes the mistress of Tang’s husband (Cao Qiankun) without any moral qualms, even though she knows that her friend is pregnant with his child. A powerful businesswoman, Shi is the owner of a high-end bar that Cao frequents after losing his job. Unable to tell his wife the truth, he spends most days wandering around and is unable to resist Shi’s advances because she claims to have loved him since their university days and that she understands him. In this relationship, Shi has taken on the role traditionally assigned to men: she is the affluent powerful one who is able to manipulate the downtrodden unemployed man by “lending” him money in his time of need, offering him a job at her bar (Episode 17), and eventually finding him a new job through her connections (Episodes 23–24). When Cao leaves home after Tang finds out about the affair, Shi provides him with a place to stay (Episode 34). Because the viewers are positioned to root for Tang due to her role as the female lead’s best friend, Shi is immediately set up as one of the villains, although she is portrayed in a more sympathetic light after she reveals to Cao that she was forced to give up her son to her ex-husband in America (who cheated on her) in order to finalise her divorce (Episode 29).The portrayal of different mistresses in Lawyers signals a transformation in the representation of gender compared to Divorce and Dwelling, because the women are less naïve than Haizao, financially well-off because of their business acumen, and much more outspoken and determined to fight for what they want. On the surface these women are depicted as more liberated and free from gender hierarchies and sexual oppression. Hung describes xiaosan as “an active if constrained agent . . . whose new mode of life has become revealingly defensible and publicly acceptable in socioeconomic terms that reflect the moral changes that follow economic reforms” (“State” 166). However, the closure of these storylines suggest that although more complex reasons for becoming a mistress have been explored in the new drama, mistresses are still regarded as a threat to social stability and therefore punished, challenging Hung’s argument about the “acceptability” of mistresses in post-socialist China. Post-Socialist Femininity Restrained: Wives and MothersCountering these liberal forms of post-socialist femininity are portrayals of righteous wives and exemplary mothers. These depictions articulate a moral positioning grounded in pre-socialist and socialist understandings of a woman’s place in Chinese society. These portrayals of moral women check the transgressive powers of single women and mistresses with the potential to break families up. More importantly, they remind the audience of desired gender norms that retain the integrity of the family and anchor a society undergoing rapid transformation.The three dramas portray wives who are stridently righteous in their confrontations with women they perceive as a threat to their families. These women find moral justification for the violence they inflict on transgressors from cultural understandings of their rights as wives. Lin Xiaofeng (Divorce) repeatedly challenges Xiao Li to explain the “logic” underlying her actions when she discovers that Xiao accompanied Song Jianping to a wedding (Episode 14). The “logic” Lin refers to is a cultural understanding that it is her right as wife to accompany Song to public events and not Xiao’s. By transgressing this moral boundary, Xiao accords Lin the moral authority to cast doubt on her abilities as a doctor in a public confrontation. It also provides moral justification for Lin to slap Xiao when she suggests that Lin is an embarrassment to her husband, an argument that underscores Lin’s failure and challenges her moral authority as wife. Jiang Miaomiao (Dwelling) draws on similar cultural understandings when she appears at the apartment Haizao shares with Song Siming (Episode 33). Jiang positions herself in the traditional role of a wife as a household manager (Ebrey) whose responsibilities include paying Song’s mistresses. She puts Haizao into a subordinate position by arguing that since Haizao is less than a mistress and slightly better than a prostitute, she is not worth the money Song has given her. When Haizao refuses to return the money a tussle ensues, causing Haizao to have a miscarriage. Likewise, Miao Jinxiu (Lawyers) draws on similar cultural understandings of a wife’s position when she laments popular arguments that depict mistresses such as Luo Meiyuan as usurping the superior position of wives like herself who are less attractive and able to navigate the market economy. Miao describes these arguments as “inverting black into white” (Episode 19). She publicly humiliates Luo by throwing paint on her at a charity event (Episode 17) and covers Luo’s car with posters labelling Luo a “slut,” “prostitute,” and “shameless” (Episode 18). Miao succeeds in “winning” her husband back. The public violence Miao inflicts on Luo and her success in protecting her marriage are struggles to reinforce the boundaries defining the categories of wife and mistress as these limits become increasingly challenged in China. In contrast to the violent strategies that Lin, Jiang, and Miao adopt, Tang Meiyu resists Shi Jiang’s destructive powers by reminding her errant husband of the emotional warmth of their family. She asks him, “Do you still remember telling me what the nicest sound is at home?” For Cao, the best sounds are Tang’s laughter, their baby’s cries, the sound of the washing machine, and the flushing of their leaky toilet (Episode 43). The couple reconciles and even wins a lottery that cements their “happy ending.” By highlighting the warmth of their family, Tang reminds Cao of her rightful place as wife, restrains Shi from breaking up the couple, and protects the integrity of the family. It is by drawing on deeply entrenched cultural understandings of the rights of wives that these women find the moral authority to challenge, restrain, and control the transgressive powers of mistresses and single women. The dramas’ portrayals of mothers further reinforce the sense that there is a need to restrain liberal forms of post-socialist femininity embodied by errant daughters who transgress the moral boundaries of the family. Lin Xiaofeng’s mother (Divorce) assumes the role of the forgiving wife and mother. She not only forgives Lin’s father for having an affair but raises Lin, her husband’s love child, as her own (Episode 23). On her deathbed, she articulates the values underlying her acceptance of this transgression, namely that one needs to be “a little kinder, more tolerant, and a little muddleheaded” when dealing with matters of the family. Her forgiveness bears fruit in the form of the warm companionship and support she enjoys with Lin’s father. This sends a strong pedagogical message to the audience that it is possible for a marriage to remain intact if one is willing to forgive. In contrast, Haizao’s mother (Dwelling) adopts the role of the disciplinary mother. She attempts to beat Haizao with a coat hanger when she finds out that her daughter is pregnant with Song Siming’s child (Episode 31). She describes Haizao’s decision as “the wrong path” and is emphatic that abortion is the only way to right this wrong. She argues that abortion will allow her daughter to start life anew in a relationship she describes as “open and aboveboard,” which will culminate in marriage. When Haizao rejects her mother’s disciplining, her lover dies in a car accident and she has a miscarriage. She loses her ability to speak for two months after these double tragedies and pays the ultimate price, losing her reproductive abilities. Luo Li’s mother (Lawyers), Li Chunhua, extends this pedagogical approach by adopting the role of public counsellor as a talk show host. Li describes Luo’s profession as “wicked” because it focuses on separating the family (Episode 9). Instead, she promotes reconciliation as an alternative. She counsels couples to remain together by propounding traditional family values, such as the need for daughters-in-law to consider the filial obligations of sons when managing their relationship with their mothers-in-law (Episode 25). Her rising ratings and the effectiveness of her strategy in bringing estranged couples like Miao Jinxiu and Dong Dahai back together (Episode 26) challenges the transgressive powers of mistresses by preventing the separation of families. More importantly, as with Haizao’s and Lin’s mothers, the moral force of Li’s position and the alternatives to divorce that she suggests draw on pre-socialist and socialist understandings of family values that underscore the sanctity of marriage to the audience. By reminding errant daughters of deeply embedded cultural standards of what it means to be a woman in Chinese society, these mothers are moral exemplars who restrain the potentiality of daughters becoming mistresses. ConclusionMarket reforms have led to a transformation in understandings of womanhood in post-socialist China. Depictions of mistresses and single women as independent, economically successful, and sexually liberated underscores the emergence of liberal forms of post-socialist femininity. Although adept at navigating the new market economy, these types of post-socialist women threaten the integrity of the family and need to be controlled. Moral arguments articulated by wives and mothers restrain the potentially destructive powers of post-socialist womanhood by drawing on deeply embedded understandings of the rights of women shaped in pre-socialist China. It is by disciplining liberal forms of post-socialist femininity such that they fit back into deeply embedded gender hierarchies that social order is restored. By illuminating the moral politics undergirding relationships between women in post-socialist China, the dramas discussed underscore the continued significance of television as a pedagogical device through which desired gender norms are popularised. These portrayals of the struggles between liberal forms of post-socialist femininity and conservative pre-socialist understandings of womanhood as lived in everyday life serve to communicate the importance of protecting the integrity of the family and maintaining social stability in order for China to continue to pursue development. ReferencesAhern, Emily. “The Power and Pollution of Chinese Women.” Women in Chinese Society. Eds. Margery Wolf et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1975. 193–214. Brady, Anne-Marie. Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. China Huading Award. “Top 100 TV Series Satisfaction Survey.” 9 Aug. 2015. Chinese Style Divorce. Writ. Wang Hailing. Dir. 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Hung, Ruth Y.Y. “The State and the Market: Chinese TV Serials and the Case of Woju (Dwelling Narrowness).” boundary 2 38.2 (2011): 155–187. ———. “Imagination in the Box: Woju’s Realism and the Representation of Xiaosan.” Television, Sex and Society: Analyzing Contemporary Representations. Eds. Basil Glynn et al. New York: Continuum, 2012. 89–105. Kleinman, Arthur, et al. “Introduction: Remaking the Moral Person in a New China.” Deep China: What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us about China Today. Eds. Arthur Kleinman et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. 1–35.Liu, Jieyu. “Gender and Sexuality.” Understanding Chinese Society. 2nd ed. Ed. Xiaowei Zang. London: Routledge, 2016. 53–66. Wolf, Margery, and Roxane Witke, eds. Women in Chinese Society. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1975. Xiao, Fuxing. “Woju Is a Sting Aimed at Reality.” ChinaNews.com.cn, 19 Nov. 2009. Xiao, Hui Faye. Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2014. 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The scan is both the quick glance and the measured study, it is a survey of the exterior and an interrogation of hidden interiors. Practices of scanning are a response to the increased number of things to consider and the reduced amount of time to consider them. Scanning demarcates that which is seen as relevant, interesting and important into ever increasing ‘to do’ lists, at the same time dismissing that which is not. These questions of importance or relevance are often decided through cursory glances and greater consideration is regularly left for ‘later’. Scanning engages questions about surveillance, about the way in which we surveil our self and our surrounds, and about the way we submit our self and our surrounds to surveillance by others. In many ways scanning has an impact on the way in which authority is practiced, in creative practice, scholarship and daily life. Our feature article in this issue is by Lelia Green who discusses the way in which scanning radio frequencies, and particularly the shared environment created by the Royal Flying Doctor’s Service radio service, drew together a community of remote West Australians. “Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia” reflects upon the way scanning shared communication signals provided virtual connections at times lost by the introduction of technologies that provided more direct communication modes, such as the telephone. Lelia’s article demonstrates the scan as a reading practice often enabled by, or employed to negotiate, communication technologies. This is one theme that runs throughout this edition of M/C Journal. Simultaneously, “Scanning the Satellite” highlights the everyday nature of scanning, locating it within a history of communication developments that emphasise the ordinary status of scanning as a reading practice for engaging with the world around. This is the second theme that connects the articles in this edition. The scan is in itself nothing new; both the quick glance and the measured study are common practices. The articles gathered in this edition of M/C Journal consider scanning as a principal mode of engaging with the world. A quick glance at the morning weather, a hurried reading of a passing crowd, the habitual assessment of ourselves and our surroundings, an observation to ensure that everything is in its place. These are the practices of the scan that inform our everyday choices. They may be quick, habitual and disengaged, or, equally, measured, considered interrogations. The scan often evokes questions of surveillance, as Alexis Harley explores in “Resurveying Eden: Panoptica in Imperfect Worlds.” Examining the power relationship imposed by surveillance, Harley compares three observed states: the Bible’s Eden, Thomas More’s Utopia and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Angelika Melchior also explores scanning as a mode of surveillance in “Tag and Trace Marketing”. Considering the Radio Frequency Identification tag (RFID), Melchior explores both the privacy concerns raised, and new business opportunities offered, by a technology that allows items to be continually scanned post-sale. In each of these texts surveillance is an intrusive practice that produces self-consciousness in the participants of both utopian and dystopian societies. Yet the self-consciousness that is so forcefully evoked through the practices of surveillance is provocatively abstracted by the commonplace practices of the scan. Here, the power relationships that are so familiar to discourses of surveillance are played out not by the ‘all-seeing powerful eye’ but by the practices that constitute the scan. They are the methods we apply when we scan our selves, our natural environments, our social environments, and, increasingly, our communications environments. The scan is a learnt short hand for accessing that which we consider important or interesting, alongside that which is in need of greater consideration. Our attention is particularly directed towards the ways in which we scan our communications environments. The broad range of communications content, platforms and technologies has produced an enormous communications environment to scan. There are channels to surf, sites to visit, stations to tune in to, pages to scroll, inboxes to clear, list-servs to read, blogs to catch up on; and all before lunch! Scanning our communications environments allows us to designate and relegate information that we consider to be not-for-us, for later consumption, of great newsworthiness or interest, or for immediate consumption. The cover image for this edition of M/C Journal, Julia Hennock’s “Future Perfect”, presents a speculative technological device so amenable to the scan: it shows a lens capable of producing perfect vision in all conditions. Her image is a reminder that scanning is very much a technological practice, and as changes to our media and communication environments encourage new scans, new tools will emerge to assist us in our response. Considering the scan as a technological practice is an element explored also in Yonatan Vinitsky’s film PANDEMONIUM. Vinitsky uses a flat bed scanner to capture 40 images of a man’s face, editing these together into a work that challenges the purposes of a domestic scanner. Jolting and at times erratic, Vinitsky encourages viewers to scan the film itself, glimpsing the still images as they pass. Robin Rimbaud’s “Scan and Deliver” also considers the constructive properties of the scan. Finding that the scan inevitably uncovers much superfluous information, Rimbaud constructed soundscapes from the excess data, discerning useful patterns from what is otherwise ostensibly random noise. Each of these creative texts considers the scan as a productive practice. This theme is also present in Charlene Elliot’s “Colour™: Law and the Sensory Scan”. Elliot positions the scan as the fundamental experience of the brand, where the emotive identity of a product or business is ideally conjured through a glimpse of colour. Colour trademarks attempt to compress a broad range of information, emotion and association into a form that can be scanned. These trademarks rely on the act of the scan to cut through cluttered advertising environs; colours draw attention, take no time to absorb and cut across cultural boundaries, they’re ideal for the scan. Michelle Kelly’s “Eminent Library Figures: A Reader” similarly considers the way the scan can deal with excesses of information. Discussing the function of the Cutter-Sanborn library classification system, Kelly considers the implications for authorship of the reduction of information into a scannable code – the author numbers written on the spine of a book. These numbers offer the potential of two types of scanning activity. Reducing author detail to a short string of characters, Cutter-Sanborn numbers allow the books in a collection to be quickly surveyed, individual copies to be located and their position amidst a collection specified. Representing a broader dataset, however, these numbers invite what Kelly refers to as an “analytical scan”, deeper investigation and further extrapolation of their meaning. Recognising the scan as a legitimate form of reading practice is a theme present in many of the articles in this edition of M/C Journal. Elizabeth Delaney’s “Scanning the Front Pages: The Schapelle Corby Judgment” examines the newspaper coverage of the Schapelle Corby case by looking at the front pages of Australian tabloid papers. As with Elliot’s piece, the scan is revealed here as an everyday activity, an ordinary practice used to trace a path through a saturated information environment. As a reading practice, the scan allows this material to be accessed quickly, it allows people to fit the consumption of information into their daily lives. Studying the way newspapers capitalise on the scan reveals the implications of editorial decisions that facilitate this reading practice. These methods go beyond the use of ‘screaming headlines’ to sell their message, using the ‘naturalised’ habits of the scanning reader to purposefully present their position. Henk Huijser turns to consider the implications for tertiary education of the ordinariness and prevalence of this reading practice. “Are Scanning Minds Dangerous Minds, or Merely Suspicious Minds? Harnessing the Net Generation’s Ability to Scan” considers the shifts in tertiary education delivery and assessment modes needed to respond to a student body more familiar with the scan than the deep read. After all, if scanning is a practice that can be learnt, it is a useful pedagogical tool and process that should be taught. In many regards scanning seems a poor response to what is often rich and valuable information. But it does allow for the filtering of information. Stephanie Dickison’s “So Many Books, So Little Time” playfully addresses the baneful outcome experienced by the reader adept at the scan: the every growing, personalised “to do list.” Dickison shows how scanning provides readers with some simple choices – to accept or reject, to classify as urgent or non-urgent – in the creation of a list for planned future consumption. Here, the scan is the quick glance for the later considered study. And with so much scannable information available why should we not, we argue, scan a lot rather than read a little? As we are constantly scanning, we are, after all, constantly reading and ultimately negotiating with, interacting with, learning from, and understanding about a whole range of environments. Positioning the scan as a legitimate and worthwhile reading practice shows that literacy (in terms of reading, writing and pedagogical practices) is perhaps equally a matter of breadth as it is of depth. Acknowledgments We thank Laura Marshall and Louise Firth for their work in copyediting the articles for this issue. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Joshua, and Adam Swift. "Scan." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Green, J., and A. Swift. (Aug. 2005) "Scan," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/00-editorial.php>.