Academic literature on the topic 'Domestication – congresses'

Cultural Confidence is the cornerstone of China’s Rise. It is crucial to build a pluralistic and dialogical external discourse system on how to disseminate Chinese values to the world. Based on Eco-translatology, this study takes the CE translation of the 20th CPC National Congress Report as an example to explore how to fully tap into Cultural Confidence and achieve communicative purposes in the international publicity translation represented by political texts. It is found that translators often choose translation strategies such as literal translation, liberal translation, amplification and omission, domestication and foreignization, synthesization, annotations and so on to achieve the adaptation and selection of translation in three dimensions: language, culture and communication. It would promote full communication between source and target cultures in order to enhance the international influence and communication power of Chinese discourse.

The Andean region is the centre of origin and domestication of at least 9 species of native root and tuber crops in addition to several species of native potatoes. Within this group, Mauka – also known as Miso or Taso ‒ (Mirabilis expansa Ruíz & Pav.) Standl. ‒ Nyctaginaceae) is one of the least well known, despite having much potential. It is cultivated at high altitudes (2300 to 3500 m a.s.l.) in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia and is thought to be of pre-Inca origin. Mauka is characterized by its high nutritional value due to substantial levels of protein, calcium and phosphorus, as well as secondary metabolites with nutraceutical properties of varied application. It also has good potential as a forage plant. Based on ethnobotanical knowledge and scientific investigations, this review presents advances in the agronomic understanding of Mauka since its discovery five decades ago in several isolated rural Bolivian communities. The information presented covers both Andean and non-Andean countries. It includes results from journals on natural resources, botany, agronomy, and the congress minutes from botanical, agronomic and phytogenetic resources conferences. Theses on Mauka specifically and on phytogenetic resources in general were also reviewed. Books and manuals were reviewed in the libraries of the International Potato Center, INIAP-Ecuador, INIA-Peru and universities. The plant is described with emphasis on its agronomic traits and according to its propagation forms (seed or vegetative); in terms of its agroecology, phenology, growth dynamics and their indices, crop management, harvest and post-harvest processes. It is concluded that important advances in the understanding of the agronomy of Mauka have been accomplished. Furthermore, the review highlights aspects requiring further research, in order to develop improved production technologies to ensure its future use and conservation.

Kepemimpinan boarding school identik dengan peran seorang kyai. Masyarakat yang patriarki, dan narasi ekstrimis yang melegitimisasi konsep domestikasi meletakkan perempuan sebagai masyarakat kelas dua. Begitu juga dengan nyai, diposisikan sebagai pendampaing kyai dan pengatur kebutuhan dometik di boarding school saja. Dengan latar kondisi yang sedemikian rupa, maka keberadaan nyai sebagai sosok baru dalam boarding school dewasa ini menarik untuk dianalisis. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan antropologi gender. Adapun perspektif life history digunakan untuk menjelaskan persoalan individual dan bagaimana relevansinya dalam pembentukan budaya dan masyarakat secara umum. Metode pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan wawancara dan observasi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa; pertama, perempuan dan jejaring kekuasaan di boarding school dimulai dari diadakannya kongres KUPI pertama pada 2017. Kedua, kecakapan perempuan dalam memimpin boarding school Mahasina didukung oleh keterlibatan nyai dalam politik praktis, pendidikan formal dan informal, serta pengalaman tergabung dengan NGO yang bergerak dalam pemberdayaan perempuan. Perempuan dan jejaring kekuasaan yang dibangun di boarding school ini membentuk kesadaran masyarakat. Bahwa perempuan dan laki-laki memiliki hak yang sama dalam kepemimpinan termasuk didalamnya kepemimpinan agama. [The leadership of the boarding school is identical to the role of a kyai. A patriarchal society, and extremist narratives that legitimize the concept of domestication place women in a second-class society. Likewise, nyai are positioned as kyai's companion and regulator of domestic needs in boarding schools. With the background of such conditions, the existence of nyai as a new figure in boarding schools today is interesting to analyze. This study uses a gender anthropological approach. The life history perspective is used to explain individual problems and how they are relevant to the formation of culture and society in general. Methods of data collection are done by using an interview and observation. The results showed that women and power networks in boarding schools started from holding the first KUPI congress in 2017. Second, women's skills in leading the Mahasina boarding school are supported by the involvement of nyai in practical politics, formal and informal education, as well as their experience of joining NGOs engaged in empowering women. Women and the power network built in this boarding school form public awareness. That women and men have equal rights in leadership, including religious leaders. Keywords: boarding school network; woman; student; KUPI

This article seeks to point out that, the inclusion of a theological term – that is ‘reconciliation’ (at the request of F.W. de Klerk on behalf of the National Party) to what was supposed to be the ‘Truth Commission’ (Boesak & DeYoung 2012; Stevens Franchi & Swart 2006) – was for the purpose of taming the work of this commission and using reconciliation to merely reach some political accommodation which did not address the critical questions of justice, equality, and dignity which are prominent in the biblical understanding of reconciliation (Boesak 2008; Boesak & DeYoung 2012:1; Lephakga 2015; Terreblanche 2002). However, it is important to point out that, the problem was not the theological word – that is ‘reconciliation’– but the understanding and interpretation of it in South Africa. This is because previously in South Africa the Bible was made a servant to ideology (Lephakga 2012, 2013; Moodie 1975; Serfontein 1982) and thus domesticated for the purposes of subjection and control (Boesak & DeYoung 2012). As such, this article contends that, the call for the inclusion of ‘reconciliation’ within the ‘truth commission’ was not to allow reconciliation to confront the country with the demands of the gospel but to blunt the process of radical change (Boesak & DeYoung 2012). Therefore, this article will point out that the shortcomings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) need to be understood against the following events which occurred between the period 1989 to 1995: (1) the fall of the Soviet Union (Cronin 1994:2–6); (2) the National Party’s (NP) and South African business sector’s interest in negotiations with the African National Congress (ANC) (Cronin 1994:2–6; Mkhondo 1993:3–43; Terreblanche 2002:51–124); (3) the elite compromise (Terreblanche 2002:51–124); and the sudden passing of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, no 34 of 1995 (TRC, Vol. 1998). This paper will use the story of Zacchaeus to contend that the TRC should have allowed Zacchaeus (so to speak) to testify in order to hear from him what reconciliation means (Boesak & DeYoung 2012:64). This is because, on the one hand, this commission made an extraordinary move when it appointed a Christian priest (which is unusual in the history of these commissions – Boesak & DeYoung 2012; Lephakga 2015; Stevens et al. 2006; Terreblanche 2002), namely Desmond Tutu (Boesak 2008; Boesak & DeYoung 2012; Lephakga 2015; Stevens et al. 2006; Terreblanche 2002), as its chair and on the other hand, the chair – that is Desmond Tutu – made another extraordinary move when he Christianised the whole process of this commission when he opened most of the sessions with prayer, invoking the name of Jesus Christ (for forgiveness), and inviting the Holy Spirit to guide the proceedings of this commission (Boesak & DeYoung 2012; Lephakga 2015). However this commission invoked the name of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit for the purpose of forgiveness but ignored what Jesus Christ is asking in terms of justice which is clearly illustrated in the Story of Zacchaeus (Boesak & DeYoung 2012; Lephakga 2015). Therefore, this article will argue that if Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit were invited into the processes of this commission, then Zacchaeus too should have been allowed to testify – so to say.Keywords: Reconciliation; TRC; Negotiated Settlement; Soviet Union; National Party; African National Congress; Domestication; Elite Compromise; Impunity; Apartheid; Capitalism; Democracy

Artiklis vaadeldakse eellugu nähtusele, mida Andrei Azov nimetas „bukvalistide kukutamiseks“ ning mis viis pooleks sajandiks nn nõukogude tõlkekoolkonna monopolini. Selle nähtuse algust näeme 1934. aastas, mil ilmusid ja said professionaalse arutelu objektiks silmapaistavate vene filoloog-tõlkijate Gustav Špeti ja Boriss Jarho novaatorlikud võõrapärastavad tõlked ja samal ajal seoses Nõukogude kirjanike esimese kongressiga leidis aset toores heteronoomia sissetung tõlkevälja ning tekkis sellest heteronoomiast kasu lõikav kriitiline diskursus. Olulisemate filoloog-tõlkijate hukkumine suure terrori ajal aitas kaasa kriitikute võidukäigule tõlkijate üle ja sealhulgas vene tõlkeajaloo retrospektiivsele moonutamisele, mida käesolev artikkel püüab parandada. Toetudes Lawrence Venuti tuntud teooriale võõrapärastavast ning kodustavast tõlkest, on seda dihhotoomiat diferentseeritud vastavalt nõukogude heteronoomsetele tingimustele. The article discusses the pre-history of what Andrey Azov famously called “the overthrow of the literalists”, and the beginning of the half-a-century domination of the “Soviet school of translation” in Russia. It aims to locate and scrutinise the moment when the previous translation trend, later pejoratively labelled as “literalism”, gave way to the “Soviet school”. In the post-war years, the Russian translators Evgeny Lann and Georgy Shengeli were subjected to harsh criticism as “literalists” by the literary critic, translator and translation theorist Ivan Kashkin. In the official history of Soviet translation as outlined in the Literary Encyclopedia (1968), they were presented as key figures of a translation trend, also labelled “formalist” and “technologically exact”, both post- and pre-war. This version of the history of Soviet translation, still resounding even in Azov’s study (2013), is strongly distorted and needs to be rewritten in a more analytical way. Primarily, the term “literalists”, that was used loosely and pejoratively at the time, can by no means serve as instrumental today. One of the most adequate self-labels of this trend in translation that had its heyday throughout the 1930s, notably in the activities of the Academia publishing house and the Commission for the Study of Literary Translation at the Moscow State Academy of Art Sciences (GAKhN), is “artistically scientific”. In order to describe the trend adequately it should be noted that the “nomination” of Lann and Shengeli as “literalists” and the main targets of post-war criticism owes primarily to the fact that the much more influential key figures of this “school”, mentioned in the Literary Encyclopedia (1934) as the “best present-day translators” – Mikhail Kuzmin, Adrian Pyotrovsky, Boris Yarkho, Mikhail Petrovsky – had either died (Kuzmin) or fallen victim to the great purges that hit also the GAKhNovites, including Gustav Shpet. Their names became unmentionable, while the translation projects and discussions of the 1930s associated with them could not be properly considered in translation histories. In order to reconstruct the true history of Soviet translation they have to be restored to their rightful place. The pivotal point that marked both the acme of the “artistically scientific” translation, as well as the beginning of its demise, was the year 1934. It famously saw the First All-Union Congress of Writers at which translation was declared not the “private domain of a couple of literary pedants, not the academic theme for a philologist’s thesis, but an affair of utmost state importance”. Integration of translation into Stalinist national politics (discussions at the Writers’ Congress were centred on the interests of Soviet nationalities and on praising the free translations made by poets) resulted in a drastic decline of autonomy in the field and in the competition between critics profiting from the heteronomy concerning who would define the true “Soviet translation” and thus have the power to judge. The brilliant samples of scientifically founded translations of classics that appeared in 1934 – Boris Yarkho’s rendition of the medieval romance La Chanson de Roland and Gustav Shpet’s new Russian Dickens and Shakespeare (both to become virtually erased from the history of Soviet translation later on) became the focal point of the dispute over what “Soviet translation” should be. The article reconstructs both Yarkho’s and Shpet’s philologically based translation premises and the conflicting reception of their work by fellow philologists and by politically motivated critics. The transcript of a 1934 discussion held after Evgeny Lann’s report on the principles of the new Dickens translations preserved in the archives clearly shows that, at the time, all discussants, including Kashkin, addressed not Lann but Shpet as the real source of these principles and that it was only after Shpet’s arrest and death that the spearhead of criticism was aimed at Lann (who, unlike Shpet, unfortunately lacked the philological and spiritual stamina and weight to confront it decisively). As for Yarkho’s attempt to invent a Russian poetic diction adequate for rendering French syllabic verse and the heterogeneous style of the medieval war epic, it was both daring and philologically grounded and had been highly praised as a model “Soviet translation” by major philologists working in the field of translation, e.g. Mikhail Alexeev, Alexander Smirnov and Rosalia Shor. At the same time, critics trying to speak in accordance with the political line would criticise it harshly, programmatically declaring their preference for the outdated free-verse translation into Russian made by de la Barthe. In the history of Soviet translation, the transition from the “artistically scientific” or, to use a more familiar term, foreignising trend that had been flourishing throughout the 1930s and given brilliant practical as well as theoretical results, to a domesticating, ahistorical “Soviet school” that lacked theoretical reflection was not a natural evolution. Instead, it constituted a brutal intrusion of heteronomy into the field of translation, the triumph of politically oriented literary critics over professional translators and philologists that was strongly facilitated by the fact that many of the latter were repressed and, consequently, their names and works were erased from the history of Soviet translation.

For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Castro, Fidel. “Speech Given by Fidel Castro, at the Ceremony Marking the Birthday of Elian Gonzalez and the Fourth Anniversary of the Battle of Ideas, Held at ‘Marcello Salado’ Primary School in Cardenas, Matanzas on December 5, 2003.” 15 Aug. 2004 http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org.uk/fidel_castro3.htm>. Cuban American National Foundation. Official Website. 2004. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.canf.org/2004/principal-ingles.htm>. De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha For Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. “Elian Jokes.” Hypercenter.com 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.hypercenter.com/jokes/elian/index.shtml>. “Elian’s Home Page.” 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://elian.8k.com>. Everard, Jerry. Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State. London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Fernández, Damián J. Cuba and the Politics of Passion. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. Hernández, Camilo. “Cronología de Elián.” E-mail. 2000. Received 6 May 2000. “If Elian Gonzalez Was Jewish.” Lori’s Mishmash Humor Page. 2000. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/6174/jokes/if-elian-was-jewish.htm>. John, Michael. Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez. MaxGo, 2000. “Liberty for Elián.” Official Save Elián Website 2000. June 2003 http://www.libertyforelian.org>. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Ramos, Jorge. La otra cara de América: Historias de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos que están cambiando a Estados Unidos. México, DF: Grijalbo, 2000. Rodden, Lois. “Elian Gonzalez.” Astrodatabank 2000. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.astrodatabank.com/NM/GonzalezElian.htm>. Rowe, John Carlos. 2002. The New American Studies. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2002. “The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez.” July 2004. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.revlu.com/Elian.html>. Senauth, Frank. A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez. Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.

Introduction Children are beginning to use digital technologies at younger and younger ages. The emerging trend of very young children (babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers) using Internet connected devices, especially touch screen tablets and smartphones, has elicited polarising opinions from early childhood experts. At present there is little actual research about the risks or benefits of tablet and smartphone use by very young children. Current usage recommendations, based on research into passive television watching which claims that screen time is detrimental, is in conflict with advice from education experts and app developers who commend interactive screen time as engaging and educational. Guidelines from the health professions typically advise strict time limits on very young children’s screen-time. Based for the most part on policy developed by the American Academy of Paediatrics, it is usually recommended that children under two have no screen time at all (Brown), and children over this age have no more than two hours a day (Strasburger, et al.). On the other hand, early childhood education guidelines promote the development of digital literacy skills (Department of Education). Further, education-based research indicates that access to computers and the Internet in the preschool years is associated with overall educational achievement (Bittman et al.; Cavanaugh et al; Judge et al; Neumann). The US based National Association for Education of Young Children’s position statement on technology for zero to eight year-olds declares that “when used intentionally and appropriately, technology and interactive media are effective tools to support learning and development” (NAEYC). This article discusses the notion of Digitods—a name for those children born since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 who have ready access to touchscreen technologies since birth. It reports on the limited availability of evidence-based research about these children’s ICT use concluding that current research and recommendations are not grounded in the everyday life of very young children and their families. The article then reports on the beginnings of a research project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled Toddlers and Tablets: exploring the risks and benefits 0-5s face online. This research project recognises that at this stage it is parents who “are the real experts in their toddlers’ use of screen technologies. Accordingly, the project’s methodological approach draws on parents, pre-schoolers and their families as communities of practice in the construction of social meaning around toddlers’ use of touch screen technology. Digitods In 2000 Bill Gates introduced the notion of Generation I to describe the first cohort of children raised with the Internet as a reality in their lives. They are those born after the 1990s and will, in most cases; have no memory of life without the Net. [...] Generation I will be able to conceive of the Internet’s possibilities far more profoundly than we can today. This new generation will become agents of change as the limits of the Internet expand to include educational, scientific, and business applications that we cannot even imagine. (Gates)Digitods, on the other hand, is a term that has been used in education literature (Leathers et al.) to describe those children born after the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. These children often begin their lives with ready access to the Internet via easily usable touch screen devices, which could have been designed with toddlers’ touch and swipe movements in mind. Not only are they the youngest group of children to actively engage with the Internet they are the first group to grow up with a range of mobile Internet devices (Leathers et al.). The difference between Digitods and Gates’s Generation I is that Digitods are the first pre-verbal, non-ambulant infants to have ready access to digital technologies. Somewhere around the age of 10 months to fourteen months a baby learns to point with his or her forefinger. At this stage the child is ready to swipe and tap a touch screen (Leathers et al.). This is in contrast to laptops and PCs given that very young children often need assistance to use a mouse or keyboard. The mobility of touch screen devices allows very young children to play at the kitchen table, in the bedroom or on a car trip. These mobile devices have, of course, a myriad of mobile apps to go with them. These apps create an immediacy of access for infants and pre-schoolers who do not need to open a web browser to find their favourite sites. In the lives of these children it seems that it has always been possible to touch and swipe their way into games, books and creative and communicative experiences (Holloway et al. 149). The interactivity of most pre-school apps, as opposed to more passive screen activities such as watching television shows or videos (both offline or online), requires toddlers and pre-schoolers to pay careful attention, think about things and act purposefully (Leathers et al.). It is this interactivity which is the main point of difference, one which holds the potential to engage and educate our youngest children. It should be noted within this discussion about Digitods that, while the trope Digital Natives tends to homogenise an entire generation, the authors do not assume that all children born today are Digitods by default. Many children do not have the same privileged opportunities as others, or the (parental) cultural capital, to enable access, ease of use and digital skill development. In addition to this it is not implied that Digitods will be more tech savvy than their older siblings. The term is used more to describe and distinguish those children who have digital access almost since birth—in order to differentiate or tease out everyday family practices around these children’s ICT use and the possible risks and benefits this access affords babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers. While the term Digital Native has also been criticised as being a white middle class phenomenon this is not necessarily the case with Digitods. In the Southeast Asia and the Pacific region developed countries like Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Singapore have extremely high rates of touchscreen use by very young children (Child Sciences; Jie; Goh; Unantenne). Other countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia have moved to a high smart phone usage by very young children while at the same time have only nascent ICT access and instruction within their education systems (Unantenne). The Digitod Parent Parents of Digitods are usually experienced Internet users themselves, and many are comfortable with their children using these child-friendly touch screen devices (Findahl). Digital technologies are integral to their everyday lives, often making daily life easier and improving communication with family and friends, even during the high pressure parenting years of raising toddlers and pre-schoolers. Even though many parents and caregivers are enabling very young children’s use of touch screen technologies, they are also concerned about the changes they are making. This is because very young children’s use of touch screen devices “has become another area where they fear possible criticism and in which their parental practices risk negative evaluation by others” (Holloway et al). The tensions between expert advice regarding young children’s screen-time and parents’ and caregivers’ own judgments are also being played out online. Parenting blogs, online magazines and discussion groups are all joining in the debate: On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them. Parents end up treating tablets like precision surgical instruments, gadgets that might perform miracles for their child’s IQ and help him win some nifty robotics competition—but only if they are used just so. (Rosin)Thus, with over 80 000 children’s apps marketed as educational in the Apple App Store alone, parents can find it difficult to choose apps that are worth purchasing (Yelland). Nonetheless, recent research regarding Australian children shows that three to five year olds who access touch screen devices will typically have five or more specific apps to choose from (5.23 on average) (Neumann). With little credible evidence or considered debate, parents have been left to make their own choices about the pros and cons of their young children’s access to touch screens. Nonetheless, one immediate benefit that comes to mind is toddlers and pre-schoolers video chatting with dispersed family member—due to increased globalisation, guest worker arrangements, FIFO (fly-in fly-out) workforces and family separation or divorce. Such clear benefits around sociability and youngsters’ connection with significant others make previous screen-related guidelines out of date and no longer contextually relevant. Little Research Attention Family ownership of tablet devices as well as touch screen phones has risen dramatically in the last five years. With very young children being loaned these technologies by mum or dad, and a tendency in Australia to rely on market-orientated research regarding ownership and usage, there is very little knowledge about touch screen usage rates for very young Australian children. UK and US usage figures indicate that over the last few years there has been a five-fold increase in tablet uptake by zero to eight year olds (Ofcom; Rideout). Although large scale, comparative Australian data is not available, previous research regarding older children indicates that Australia is similar to high use countries like some Scandinavian nations and the UK (Green et al.). In addition to this, two small research projects in Australia, with under 160 participant families each, indicate that two thirds of these children (0-5) use touchscreen devices (Neumann; Coenenna et. al.). Beyond usage figures, there is also very limited evidence-based research about very young children’s app use. Interactive technologies available via touch screen technologies have been available domestically for a very short time. Consequently, “valid scientific research has not been completed and replicated due to [the lack of] available time” (Leathers el al. 129) and longitudinal studies which rely on an intervention group (in this case exposure to children’s apps) and a control group (no exposure) are even fewer and more time-consuming. Interestingly, researchers have revisited the issue of passive screen viewing. A recent 2015 review of previous 2007 research, which linked babies watching videos with poor language development, has found that there was statistical and methodological issues with the 2007 study and that there are no strong inferences to be drawn between media exposure and language development (Ferguson and Donellan). Thus, there seems to be no conclusive evidence-based research on which to inform parents and educators about the possible downside or benefits of touch screen use. Nonetheless, early childhood experts have been quick to weigh in on the possible effects of screen usage, some providing restrictive guidelines and recommendations, with others advocating the use of interactive apps for very young children for their educational value. This knowledge-gap disguises what is actually happening in the lives of real Australian families. Due to the lack of local data, as well as worldwide research, it is essential that Australian researchers obtain a comprehensive understanding about actual behaviour around touch screen use in the lives of children aged between zero and five and their families. Beginning Research While research into very young children’s touch screen use is beginning to take place, few results have been published. When researching two to three year olds’ learning from interactive versus non-interactive videos Kirkorian, Choi and Pempek found that “toddlers may learn more from interactive media than from non-interactive video” (Kirkorian et al). This means that the use of interactive apps on touch screen devices may hold a greater potential for learning than passive video or television viewing for children in this age range. Another study considered the degree to which the young children could navigate to and use apps on touch screen devices by observing and analysing YouTube videos of infants and young children using touch screens (Hourcade et al.). It was found that between the ages of 12 months and 17 months the children filmed seemed to begin to “make meaningful use of the tablets [and] more than 90 per cent of children aged two [had] reached this level of ability” (1923). The kind of research mentioned above, usually the preserve of psychologists, paediatricians and some educators, does not, however, ground very young children’s use in their domestic context—in the spaces and with those people with whom most touch screen usage takes place. With funding from the Australian Research Council Australian, Irish and UK researchers are about to adopt a media studies (domestication) approach to comprehensively investigate digital media use in the everyday lives of very young children. This Australian-based research project positions very young children’s touch screen use within the family and will help provide an understanding of the everyday knowledge and strategies that this cohort of technology users (very young children and their parents) have already developed—in the knowledge vacuum left by the swift appropriation and incorporation of these new media technologies into the lives of families with very young children. Whilst using a conventional social constructionist perspective, the project will also adopt a co-creation of knowledge approach. The co-creation of knowledge approach (Fong) has links with the communities of practice literature (Wegner) and recognises that parents, care-givers and the children themselves are the current experts in this field in terms of the everyday uses of these technologies by very young children. Families’ everyday discourse and practices regarding their children’s touch screen use do not necessarily work through obvious power hierarchies (via expert opinions), but rather through a process of meaning making where they shape their own understandings and attitudes through experience and shared talk within their own everyday family communities of practice. This Toddlers and Tablets research is innovative in many ways. It seeks to capture the enthusiasm of young children’s digital interactions and to pioneer new ways of ‘beginnings’ researching with very young children, as well as with their parents. The researchers will work with parents and children in their broad domestic contexts (including in and out-of-home activities, and grandparental and wider-family involvement) to co-create knowledge about young children’s digital technologies and the social contexts in which these technologies are used. Aspects of these interactions, such as interviews and observations of everyday digital interactions will be recorded (audio and video respectively). In addition to this, data collected from media commentary, policy debates, research publications and learned articles from other disciplinary traditions will be interrogated to see if there are correlations, contrasts, trends or synergies between parents’ construction of meaning, public commentary and current research. Critical discourse tools and methods (Chouliaraki and Fairclough) will be used to analyse verbatim transcripts, video, and all written materials. Conclusion Very young children are uniquely dependent upon others for the basic necessities of life and for the tools they need, and will need to develop, to claim their place in the world. Given the ubiquitous role played by digital media in the lives of their parents and other caregivers it would be a distortion of everyday life for children to be excluded from the technologies that are routinely used to connect with other people and with information. In the same way that adults use digital media to renew and strengthen social and emotional bonds across distance, so young children delight in ‘Facetime’ and other technologies that connect them audio-visually with friends and family members who are not physically co-present. Similarly, a very short time spent in the company of toddlers using touch screens is sufficient to demonstrate the sheer delight that these young infants have in developing their sense of agency and autonomy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk). Media, communications and cultural studies are beginning to claim a space for evidence based policy drawn from everyday activities in real life contexts. Research into the beginnings of digital life, with families who are beginning to find a way to introduce these technologies to the youngest generation, integrating them within social and emotional repertoires, may prove to be the start of new understandings into the communication skills of the preverbal and preliterate young people whose technology preferences will drive future development – with their parents likely trying to keep pace. Acknowledgment This research is supported under Australia Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP150104734). References Bittman, Michael, et al. "Digital Natives? New and Old Media and Children's Outcomes." Australian Journal of Education 55.2 (2011): 161-75. Brown, Ari. "Media Use by Children Younger than 2 Years." Pediatrics 128.5 (2011): 1040-45. Burr, Vivien. Social Constructionism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2003. Cavanaugh, Cathy, et al. "The Effects of Distance Education on K–12 Student Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis." Naperville, Ill.: Learning Point Associates, 2004. 5 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.ncrel.org/tech/distance/index.html›. Child Sciences and Parenting Research Office. Survey of Media Use by Children and Parents (Summary). Tokyo: Benesse Educational Research and Development Institute, 2014. Coenena, Pieter, Erin Howiea, Amity Campbella, and Leon Strakera. Mobile Touch Screen Device Use among Young Australian Children–First Results from a National Survey. Proceedings 19th Triennial Congress of the IEA. 2015. Chouliaraki, Lilie and Norman Fairclough. Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. Department of Education. "Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia." Australian Government, 2009. Ferguson, Christopher J., and M. Brent Donnellan. "Is the Association between Children’s Baby Video Viewing and Poor Language Development Robust? A Reanalysis of Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff (2007)." Developmental Psychology 50.1 (2014): 129. Findahl, Olle. Swedes and the Internet 2013. Stockholm: The Internet Infrastructure Foundation, 2013. Fong, Patrick S.W. "Co-Creation of Knowledge by Multidisciplinary Project Teams." Management of Knowledge in Project Environments. Eds. E. Love, P. Fong, and Z. Irani. Burlington, MA: Elsevier, 2005. 41-56. Gates, Bill. "Enter 'Generation I': The Responsibility to Provide Access for All to the Most Incredible Learning Tool Ever Created." Instructor 109.6 (2000): 98. Goh, Wendy W.L., Susanna Bay, and Vivian Hsueh-Hua Chen. "Young School Children’s Use of Digital Devices and Parental Rules." Telematics and Informatics 32.4 (2015): 787-95. Green, Lelia, et al. "Risks and Safety for Australian Children on the Internet: Full Findings from the AU Kids Online Survey of 9-16 Year Olds and Their Parents." Cultural Science Journal 4.1 (2011): 1-73. Holloway, Donell, Lelia Green, and Carlie Love. "'It's All about the Apps': Parental Mediation of Pre-Schoolers' Digital Lives." Media International Australia 153 (2014): 148-56. Hourcade, Juan Pablo, Sarah Mascher, David Wu, and Luiza Pantoja. Look, My Baby Is Using an iPad! An Analysis of YouTube Videos of Infants and Toddlers Using Tablets. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2015. Jie S.H. "ICT Use Statistics of Households and Individuals in Korea." 10th World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Meeting (WTIM-12). Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA), 25-7 Sep. 2012.Judge, Sharon, Kathleen Puckett, and Sherry Mee Bell. "Closing the Digital Divide: Update from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study." The Journal of Educational Research 100.1 (2006): 52-60. Kirkorian, H., K. Choi, and Pempek. "Toddlers' Word Learning from Contingent and Non-Contingent Video on Touchscreens." Child Development (in press). Leathers, Heather, Patti Summers, and Desollar. Toddlers on Technology: A Parents' Guide. Illinois: AuthorHouse, 2013. NAEYC. Technology and Interactive Media as Tools in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8 [Position Statement]. Washington: National Association for the Education of Young Children, the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College, 2012. Neumann, Michelle M. "An Examination of Touch Screen Tablets and Emergent Literacy in Australian Pre-School Children." Australian Journal of Education 58.2 (2014): 109-22. Ofcom. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report. London, 2013. Rideout, Victoria. Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America 2013. San Francisco: Common Sense Media, 2013. Rosin, Hanna. "The Touch-Screen Generation." The Atlantic, 20 Apr. 2013. Strasburger, Victor C., et al. "Children, Adolescents, and the Media." Pediatrics 132.5 (2013): 958-61. Unantenne, Nalika. Mobile Device Usage among Young Kids: A Southeast Asia Study. Singapore: The Asian Parent and Samsung Kids Time, 2014. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wenger, Etienne. "Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems." Organization 7.2 (2000): 225-46. Yelland, Nicola. "Which Apps Are Educational and Why? It’s in the Eye of the Beholder." The Conversation 13 July 2015. 16 Aug. 2015 ‹http://theconversation.com/which-apps-are-educational-and-why-its-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-37968›.

While the television cooking genre has evolved in numerous ways to withstand competition and become a constant feature in television programming (Collins and College), it has been argued that audience demand for televisual cooking has always been high because of the daily importance of cooking (Hamada, “Multimedia Integration”). Early cooking shows were characterised by an instructional discourse, before quickly embracing an entertainment focus; modern cooking shows take on a more competitive, out of the kitchen focus (Collins and College). The genre has continued to evolve, with celebrity chefs and ordinary people embracing transmedia affordances to return to the instructional focus of the early cooking shows. While the television cooking show is recognised for its broad cultural impacts related to gender (Ouellette and Hay), cultural capital (Ibrahim; Oren), television formatting (Oren), and even communication itself (Matwick and Matwick), its role in the widespread adoption of television captions is significantly underexplored. Even the fact that a cooking show was the first ever program captioned on American television is almost completely unremarked within cooking show histories and literature.A Brief History of Captioning WorldwideWhen captions were first introduced on US television in the early 1970s, programmers were guided by the general principle to make the captioned program “accessible to every deaf viewer regardless of reading ability” (Jensema, McCann and Ramsey 284). However, there were no exact rules regarding captioning quality and captions did not reflect verbatim what was said onscreen. According to Jensema, McCann and Ramsey (285), less than verbatim captioning continued for many years because “deaf people were so delighted to have captions that they accepted almost anything thrown on the screen” (see also Newell 266 for a discussion of the UK context).While the benefits of captions for people who are D/deaf or hard of hearing were immediate, its commercial applications also became apparent. When the moral argument that people who were D/deaf or hard of hearing had a right to access television via captions proved unsuccessful in the fight for legislation, advocates lobbied the US Congress about the mainstream commercial benefits such as in education and the benefits for people learning English as a second language (Downey). Activist efforts and hard-won legal battles meant D/deaf and hard of hearing viewers can now expect closed captions on almost all television content. With legislation in place to determine the provision of captions, attention began to focus on their quality. D/deaf viewers are no longer just delighted to accept anything thrown on the screen and have begun to demand verbatim captioning. At the same time, market-based incentives are capturing the attention of television executives seeking to make money, and the widespread availability of verbatim captions has been recognised for its multimedia—and therefore commercial—applications. These include its capacity for information retrieval (Miura et al.; Agnihotri et al.) and for creative repurposing of television content (Blankinship et al.). Captions and transcripts have been identified as being of particular importance to augmenting the information provided in cooking shows (Miura et al.; Oh et al.).Early Captions in the US: Julia Child’s The French ChefJulia Child is indicative of the early period of the cooking genre (Collins and College)—she has been described as “the epitome of the TV chef” (ray 53) and is often credited for making cooking accessible to American audiences through her onscreen focus on normalising techniques that she promised could be mastered at home (ray). She is still recognised for her mastery of the genre, and for her capacity to entertain in a way that stood out from her contemporaries (Collins and College; ray).Julia Child’s The French Chef originally aired on the US publicly-funded Public Broadcasting System (PBS) affiliate WBGH from 1963–1973. The captioning of television also began in the 1960s, with educators creating the captions themselves, mainly for educational use in deaf schools (Downey 70). However, there soon came calls for public television to also be made accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing—the debate focused on equality and pushed for recognition that deaf people were culturally diverse (Downey 70).The PBS therefore began a trial of captioning programs (Downey 71). These would be “open captions”—characters which were positioned on the screen as part of the normal image for all viewers to see (Downey 71). The trial was designed to determine both the number of D/deaf and hard of hearing people viewing the program, as well as to test if non-D/deaf and hard of hearing viewers would watch a program which had captions (Downey 71). The French Chef was selected for captioning by WBGH because it was their most popular television show in the early 1970s and in 1972 eight episodes of The French Chef were aired using open—albeit inconsistent—captions (Downey 71; Jensema et al. 284).There were concerns from some broadcasters that openly captioned programs would drive away the “hearing majority” (Downey 71). However, there was no explicit study carried out in 1972 on the viewers of The French Chef to determine if this was the case because WBGH ran out of funds to research this further (Downey 71). Nevertheless, Jensema, McCann and Ramsey (284) note that WBGH did begin to re-broadcast ABC World News Tonight in the 1970s with open captions and that this was the only regularly captioned show at the time.Due to changes in technology and fears that not everyone wanted to see captions onscreen, television’s focus shifted from open captions to closed captioning in the 1980s. Captions became encoded, with viewers needing a decoder to be able to access them. However, the high cost of the decoders meant that many could not afford to buy them and adoption of the technology was slow (Youngblood and Lysaght 243; Downey 71). In 1979, the US government had set up the National Captioning Institute (NCI) with a mandate to develop and sell these decoders, and provide captioning services to the networks. This was initially government-funded but was designed to eventually be self-sufficient (Downey 73).PBS, ABC and NBC (but not CBS) had agreed to a trial (Downey 73). However, there was a reluctance on the part of broadcasters to pay to caption content when there was not enough evidence that the demand was high (Downey 73—74). The argument for the provision of captioned content therefore began to focus on the rights of all citizens to be able to access a public service. A complaint was lodged claiming that the Los Angeles station KCET, which was a PBS affiliate, did not provide captioned content that was available elsewhere (Downey 74). When Los Angeles PBS station KCET refused to air captioned episodes of The French Chef, the Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness (GLAD) picketed the station until the decision was reversed. GLAD then focused on legislation and used the Rehabilitation Act to argue that television was federally assisted and, by not providing captioned content, broadcasters were in violation of the Act (Downey 74).GLAD also used the 1934 Communications Act in their argument. This Act had firstly established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and then assigned them the right to grant and renew broadcast licenses as long as those broadcasters served the ‘‘public interest, convenience, and necessity’’ (Michalik, cited in Downey 74). The FCC could, argued GLAD, therefore refuse to renew the licenses of broadcasters who did not air captioned content. However, rather than this argument working in their favour, the FCC instead changed its own procedures to avoid such legal actions in the future (Downey 75). As a result, although some stations began to voluntarily caption more content, it was not until 1996 that it became a legally mandated requirement with the introduction of the Telecommunications Act (Youngblood and Lysaght 244)—too late for The French Chef.My Kitchen Rules: Captioning BreachWhereas The French Chef presented instructional cooking programming from a kitchen set, more recently the food genre has moved away from the staged domestic kitchen set as an instructional space to use real-life domestic kitchens and more competitive multi-bench spaces. The Australian program MKR straddles this shift in the cooking genre with the first half of each season occurring in domestic settings and the second half in Iron Chef style studio competition (see Oren for a discussion of the influence of Iron Chef on contemporary cooking shows).All broadcast channels in Australia are mandated to caption 100 per cent of programs aired between 6am and midnight. However, the 2013 MKR Grand Final broadcast by Channel Seven Brisbane Pty Ltd and Channel Seven Melbourne Pty Ltd (Seven) failed to transmit 10 minutes of captions some 30 minutes into the 2-hour program. The ACMA received two complaints relating to this. The first complaint, received on 27 April 2013, the same evening as the program was broadcast, noted ‘[the D/deaf community] … should not have to miss out’ (ACMA, Report No. 3046 3). The second complaint, received on 30 April 2013, identified the crucial nature of the missing segment and its effect on viewers’ overall enjoyment of the program (ACMA, Report No. 3046 3).Seven explained that the relevant segment (approximately 10 per cent of the program) was missing from the captioning file, but that it had not appeared to be missing when Seven completed its usual captioning checks prior to broadcast (ACMA, Report No. 3046 4). The ACMA found that Seven had breached the conditions of their commercial television broadcasting licence by “failing to provide a captioning service for the program” (ACMA, Report No. 3046 12). The interruption of captioning was serious enough to constitute a breach due, in part, to the nature and characteristic of the program:the viewer is engaged in the momentum of the competitive process by being provided with an understanding of each of the competition stages; how the judges, guests and contestants interact; and their commentaries of the food and the cooking processes during those stages. (ACMA, Report No. 3046 6)These interactions have become a crucial part of the cooking genre, a genre often described as offering a way to acquire cultural capital via instructions in both cooking and ideological food preferences (Oren 31). Further, in relation to the uncaptioned MKR segment, ACMA acknowledged it would have been difficult to follow both the cooking process and the exchanges taking place between contestants (ACMA, Report No. 3046 8). ACMA considered these exchanges crucial to ‘a viewer’s understanding of, and secondly to their engagement with the different inter-related stages of the program’ (ACMA, Report No. 3046 7).An additional complaint was made with regards to the same program broadcast on Prime Television (Northern) Pty Ltd (Prime), a Seven Network affiliate. The complaint stated that the lack of captions was “Not good enough in prime time and for a show that is non-live in nature” (ACMA, Report No. 3124 3). Despite the fact that the ACMA found that “the fault arose from the affiliate, Seven, rather than from the licensee [Prime]”, Prime was also found to also have breached their licence conditions by failing to provide a captioning service (ACMA, Report No. 3124 12).The following year, Seven launched captions for their online catch-up television platform. Although this was a result of discussions with a complainant over the broader lack of captioned online television content, it was also a step that re-established Seven’s credentials as a leader in commercial television access. The 2015 season of MKR also featured their first partially-deaf contestant, Emilie Biggar.Mainstreaming Captions — Inter-Platform CooperationOver time, cooking shows on television have evolved from an informative style (The French Chef) to become more entertaining in their approach (MKR). As Oren identifies, this has seen a shift in the food genre “away from the traditional, instructional format and towards professionalism and competition” (Oren 25). The affordances of television itself as a visual medium has also been recognised as crucial in the popularity of this genre and its more recent transmedia turn. That is, following Joshua Meyrowitz’s medium theory regarding how different media can afford us different messages, televised cooking shows offer audiences stylised knowledge about food and cooking beyond the traditional cookbook (Oren; ray). In addition, cooking shows are taking their product beyond just television and increasing their inter-platform cooperation (Oren)—for example, MKR has a comprehensive companion website that viewers can visit to watch whole episodes, obtain full recipes, and view shopping lists. While this can be viewed as a modern take on Julia Child’s cookbook success, it must also be considered in the context of the increasing focus on multimedia approaches to cooking instructions (Hamada et al., Multimedia Integration; Cooking Navi; Oh et al.). Audiences today are more likely to attempt a recipe if they have seen it on television, and will use transmedia to download the recipe. As Oren explains:foodism’s ascent to popular culture provides the backdrop and motivation for the current explosion of food-themed formats that encourages audiences’ investment in their own expertise as critics, diners, foodies and even wanna-be professional chefs. FoodTV, in turn, feeds back into a web-powered, gastro-culture and critique-economy where appraisal outranks delight. (Oren 33)This explosion in popularity of the web-powered gastro culture Oren refers to has led to an increase in appetite for step by step, easy to access instructions. These are being delivered using captions. As a result of the legislation and activism described throughout this paper, captions are more widely available and, in many cases, now describe what is said onscreen verbatim. In addition, the mainstream commercial benefits and uses of captions are being explored. Captions have therefore moved from a specialist assistive technology for people who are D/deaf or hard of hearing to become recognised as an important resource for creative television viewers regardless of their hearing (Blankinship et al.). With captions becoming more accessible, accurate, financially viable, and mainstreamed, their potential as an additional television resource is of interest. As outlined above, within the cooking show genre—especially with its current multimedia turn and the demand for captioned recipe instructions (Hamada et al., “Multimedia Integration”, “Cooking Navi”; Oh et al.)—this is particularly pertinent.Hamada et al. identify captions as a useful technology to use in the increasingly popular educational, yet entertaining, cooking show genre as the required information—ingredient lists, instructions, recipes—is in high demand (Hamada et al., “Multimedia Integration” 658). They note that cooking shows often present information out of order, making them difficult to follow, particularly if a recipe must be sourced later from a website (Hamada et al., “Multimedia Integration” 658-59; Oh et al.). Each step in a recipe must be navigated and coordinated, particularly if multiple recipes are being completed at the same times (Hamada, et al., Cooking Navi) as is often the case on cooking shows such as MKR. Using captions as part of a software program to index cooking videos facilitates a number of search affordances for people wishing to replicate the recipe themselves. As Kyeong-Jin et al. explain:if food and recipe information are published as linked data with the scheme, it enables to search food recipe and annotate certain recipe by communities (sic). In addition, because of characteristics of linked data, information on food recipes can be connected to additional data source such as products for ingredients, and recipe websites can support users’ decision making in the cooking domain. (Oh et al. 2)The advantages of such a software program are many. For the audience there is easy access to desired information. For the number of commercial entities involved, this consumer desire facilitates endless marketing opportunities including product placement, increased ratings, and software development. Interesting, all of this falls outside the “usual” parameters of captions as purely an assistive device for a few, and facilitates the mainstreaming—and perhaps beginnings of acceptance—of captions.ConclusionCaptions are a vital accessibility feature for television viewers who are D/deaf or hard of hearing, not just from an informative or entertainment perspective but also to facilitate social inclusion for this culturally diverse group. The availability and quality of television captions has moved through three stages. These can be broadly summarised as early yet inconsistent captions, captions becoming more widely available and accurate—often as a direct result of activism and legislation—but not yet fully verbatim, and verbatim captions as adopted within mainstream software applications. This paper has situated these stages within the television cooking genre, a genre often remarked for its appeal towards inclusion and cultural capital.If television facilitates social inclusion, then food television offers vital cultural capital. While Julia Child’s The French Chef offered the first example of television captions via open captions in 1972, a lack of funding means we do not know how viewers (both hearing and not) actually received the program. However, at the time, captions that would be considered unacceptable today were received favourably (Jensema, McCann and Ramsey; Newell)—anything was deemed better than nothing. Increasingly, as the focus shifted to closed captioning and the cooking genre embraced a more competitive approach, viewers who required captions were no longer happy with missing or inconsistent captioning quality. The was particularly significant in Australia in 2013 when several viewers complained to ACMA that captions were missing from the finale of MKR. These captions provided more than vital cooking instructions—their lack prevented viewers from understanding conflict within the program. Following this breach, Seven became the only Australian commercial television station to offer captions on their web based catch-up platform. While this may have gone a long way to rehabilitate Seven amongst D/deaf and hard of hearing audiences, there is the potential too for commercial benefits. Caption technology is now being mainstreamed for use in cooking software applications developed from televised cooking shows. These allow viewers—both D/deaf and hearing—to access information in a completely new, and inclusive, way.ReferencesAgnihotri, Lalitha, et al. “Summarization of Video Programs Based on Closed Captions.” 4315 (2001): 599–607.Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Investigation Report No. 3046. 2013. 26 Apr. 2017 <http://www.acma.gov.au/~/media/Diversity%20Localism%20and%20Accessibility/Investigation%20reports/Word%20document/3046%20My%20Kitchen%20Rules%20Grand%20Final%20docx.docx>.———. 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