Journal articles on the topic 'Electric power production Australia Technological innovations'

Electric energy production in small-scale hydropower stations is attractive from both an ecological and an economical point of view. Technological innovations and measures to lessen environmental impacts make small-scale hydropower stations inexpensive and justified energy sources that provide renewable energy on an independent basis and help not only to protect the environment but also to weaken human dependence on fossil fuels. This study is devoted to finding solutions based on renewable energy technologies and innovations in Uzbekistan. This article is devoted to the development of a water wheel experimental model for the micro-hydroelectric power station. Experimental studies were carried out on the basis of this model and obtained results were used in the preliminary calculations. The results from the calculations showed that the installation can generate 7-11 kWh of electricity per hour, about 168-264 kWh of electricity per day and 61 to 96 MWh of electricity per year.

The publication presents heat and electricity management in the Polish steel industry. The paper is based on actual data on heat and electricity consumption and intensity by processes in the steel industry in Poland in Industry 4.0 conditions. Two steel production processes are used in Poland: EAF Electric Arc Furnace and BOF Basic Oxygen Furnace. The analysis is an analysis of actual data is used to characterise the electricity and heat consumption by processes in the Polish steel industry. The analysis shows that the EAF technology is always more electricity intensive and the BOF technology more heat intensive. On the basis of conducted analysis, it can be concluded that pro-environmental innovations in the steel industry should first aim to reduce the electricity consumption of EAF technology and the heat consumption of BOF. An analysis of data for Poland for the period 2004–2020 shows that both cases occurred. The study shows that the heat consumption of BOF technologies has been steadily decreasing since 2010, and the electricity consumption of EAF technologies has been decreasing throughout the period under review. It can be concluded from this that the Polish steel industry is adapting to pro-environmental requirements and, through the introduction of technological innovations, is moving towards the concept of sustainable steel production according to green steel principles. The decrease in energy intensity (means electricity) of steel produced according to EAF technology is an important issue, as the high energy intensity of EAF processes affects the overall energy intensity of the steel production in Poland. In the future, the use of new innovative technological solutions, including solutions based on Industry 4.0 principles, should help the Polish steel industry to further reduce the level of electricity and heat consumption. The driving force behind the investment is the boom in the steel market. The authors made a short-term forecasts of steel production (2022–2025). The annual forecasts determined and analyses made were used to determine the heat and energy consumption of the Polish steel industry up to 2025.

The study is relevant due to increased interest to the underground coal gasification technologies (UCG). The interest is determined by the depletion of world oil and gas reserves, the significant amount of coal deposits in various countries of the world, the growing energy demand, as well as the threat of global climate change. The possibility to use technologies of underground gasification of low-grade coal with complex geological environment is huge. Recently, interest to UCG has grown dramatically. In contrast to all major programs of the 20th century, this unprecedented interest is mainly stimulated by private capital in response to high oil and energy prices. Thus, the studies of UCG are carried out. And more than 30 tests are planned in Australia, China, India, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. The development of competitive gas-based technologies of production of electricity and synthetic liquid fuels is a high-priority task. The studies have been carried out using a mathematical model of the unit for the production of electricity and methanol. To design a mathematical model, a software, or the system of machine programs development (SMPP) has been used. It has been developed at Melentiev Energy Systems Institute of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ESI SB RAS). The article presents the results of the study of the use of UCG for the coproduction of synthetic liquid fuel (methanol) and electricity. A detailed mathematical model of electricity and methanol production unit has been developed. Based on the model, technical and economic optimization of the schemes and parameters has been carried out. It made possible to estimate the competitiveness conditions of the proposed method of coal processing. In addition, the sensitivity of the economic indicators of the unit to changes in external conditions has been studied. Based on the results of the analysis of the cost of diesel fuel in the eastern regions of Russia, the authors have made the conclusion that at present methanol produced by the energy technological unit is as competitive as delivered expensive diesel fuel. The introduction of such systems is economically reasonable in the near future.

A general rise in environmental and anthropogenically induced greenhouse gas emissions has resulted from worldwide population growth and a growing appetite for clean energy, industrial outputs, and consumer utilization. Furthermore, well-established, advanced, and emerging countries are seeking fossil fuel and petroleum resources to support their aviation, electric utilities, industrial sectors, and consumer processing essentials. There is an increasing tendency to overcome these challenging concerns and achieve the Paris Agreement’s priorities as emerging technological advances in clean energy technologies progress. Hydrogen is expected to be implemented in various production applications as a fundamental fuel in future energy carrier materials development and manufacturing processes. This paper summarizes recent developments and hydrogen technologies in fuel refining, hydrocarbon processing, materials manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, aircraft construction, electronics, and other hydrogen applications. It also highlights the existing industrialization scenario and describes prospective innovations, including theoretical scientific advancements, green raw materials production, potential exploration, and renewable resource integration. Moreover, this article further discusses some socioeconomic implications of hydrogen as a green resource.

The work is devoted to the direction of digitalization in the innovative economy, the financial aspect. The sixth technological order, the trend "Resources, energy and ecology", commercialization and digitalization of innovations, the finiteness of resources are considered. The issues of the "green" economy, the prerequisites for its creation, the practice of state regulation, the concept of "4R" use of resources, renewable energy sources, distributed energy are consecrated. The article considers electric power storage devices that synchronize the processes of energy production and consumption. The analysis of the increase in carbon-free energy is made. The prospects of the Russian Federation in the "green" sector of the economy, the forecast for the "Strategy for the long-term development of the Russian Federation with low greenhouse gas emissions until 2050", shows the importance of implementing the principles of environmental, social and corporate governance, responsible investment. The tendency of the unification of states on the basis of the "green" economy is shown. The conclusion is made about the action program with practical application.

The presented article analyzes innovative activity in the development of solar energy and its impact on the energy security of Ukraine. In particular, the innovative processes taking place in the global alternative energy sector and their impact on the management of the Ukrainian energy complex are researched. It is emphasized that innovations in the technological process of manufacturing polycrystalline silicon and increasing the volume of its production made it possible to exponentially reduce the cost of production of photocells from polycrystalline silicon (C-si). An evaluation of the current state of innovation activity and its management in the global alternative energy sector as a tool for ensuring Ukraine’s energy security, competitiveness and economic independence of the country is provided. The world total installed capacity of photovoltaic power plants is outlined with a forecast until 2025. The current legislation of Ukraine on alternative energy, energy conservation, efficient use of energy resources, development of renewable and alternative energy sources is analyzed. It is underlined that today the high self-cost of electricity production is a serious problem of the Ukrainian electric energy sector, so the current trend of reducing the cost of solar electricity production against the background of a constant increase in nominal prices is a positive signal for investors. The outlined statistics of increasing energy production from renewable sources indicate that the government sees its independence in the development of renewable energy sources, and companies developing solar energy are becoming competitive owing to the rapid reduction in the cost of electricity production compared to traditional types of energy, which is a promising direction of work in today’s conditions. The investment attractiveness of electricity production using silicon solar panels is emphasized.

The article deals with the relevance of more effective structural transformation through the introduction of new innovations using advanced world experience in the infrastructure complex of the energy sector of the Republic of Azerbaijan. In this regard, the study also reflects the analysis and research on the directions of formation of optimal infrastructure complex in the energy sector. For this purpose, new development targets have been identified in the first chain of the national energy sector infrastructure complex against the background of progressive world experience analysis. For this purpose, the experience of leading world countries in oil and gas industry, including the United States of America, people's Republic of China, Russian Federation, Great Britain, Japan, South African Republic, Norway and others has been studied. The learning spectrum also covered the experience of well-known transnational corporations, including “Statoil”, “Schlumberger”, “Rosneft”, “Gazprom”, “Lukoil” and others. The existing positive trends in this sphere were based on systematized for application in the first chain of infrastructure complex of the national energy sector. Based on this, based on the analysis, the following were identified as the directions of formation of optimal infrastructure complex in the first chain of the national energy sector: • creation of a broad spectrum of continuously renewing energy potential; • increasing efficiency of production and processing of oil, gas and other energy resources and strengthening innovative supply of their production; • technological renewal of the fuel and energy complex and transition to energy-efficient strategic development model in this sphere in order to meet the growing domestic demand of the economy and ensure exports; • formation of a new system of institutions for the broad liberalization of the fuel and energy market and improvement of the relevant regulatory and legal framework. In addition, the achievements of Turkey, the Russian Federation, the Federal Republic of Germany and Great Britain were analyzed and evaluated to determine the principles of transition to the liberal market model in the second chain of the national energy sector infrastructure complex. The main components of this advanced practice have also been unified for application. Also, based on the analysis and research carried out in accordance with the requirements of the law of the “Republic of Azerbaijan on efficient use of energy resources and energy efficiency”, the author has prepared a scheme reflecting the transition of the National Electric Power system to a liberal market model. Based on the analysis and assessments covering both links of the energy sector, the author has developed an oligopolistic market model of the national energy infrastructure complex. The classification composition of the transformation of the optimal infrastructure complex in the national energy sector includes the following: • deposits and gas supply organizations located in dry areas are excluded from the structure of SOCAR and he continues to work as a transnational company that exploits offshore oil fields. In its structure, it retains its assets outside the country, as well as oil refining, deep foundations production and other directly necessary service areas. At the same time, it is considered appropriate to include in its functions the production of renewable energy sources; • a separate oil and gas producer concern is being set up in public-private cooperation, which manages the oil and gas industry in onshore areas from exploration to filling stations. The concern also implements a strategy for renewable energy production by converting some of the mining areas into energy farms (solar, wind, hydrogen, fast-growing plants and ethanol production by planting trees). • a separate vertically integrated state gas company is established, which carries out the reception, treatment, processing, storage, transportation and supply of gas. It also includes carbamide and methanol plants operating directly on gas raw materials. The gas distribution area is fully or partially allocated for privatization or transferred to private companies in pilot form for management; • the independence of the oil and gas chemistry complex is also assessed separately. At the same time, it is expedient to join “SOCAR Polymer” Plant, which produces polymers, into this complex; • In line with the reforms carried out in the country, the electric power sector is moving to a liberal market Model. Power plants remain in the state's view at the initial stage. Taking into account the strategic goals of the state, starting with relatively small power plants, their transfer or full privatization to independent and mixed management on the basis of rigid investment agreements is considered. In this sphere “Transmission System Operator for electric power” is being created, which includes high voltage transmission lines under full control of the state. In addition, the organization “Market Operator for electric energy” is established, which carries out the processes of wholesale electricity in the energy system, and is also under the full control of the state. In the distribution network system of electricity, full or partial privatization is carried out. The final results of our analysis on the formation of an optimal infrastructure complex in the national energy sector show that a fundamental transition to a liberal market model should be made in the country, and an optimal infrastructure complex should be formed here. The new infrastructure complex should be formed in an oligopolic model, reflecting the achievements of the most progressive world experience. Natural, environmental, political and economic factors that optimally influence the Bur sphere should be taken into account, the tariff and tax system should be improved, and the next stage of development in the energy sector should find continuous stimulation within the framework of Public-Private Partnership. Keywords: energy infrastructure, oil and gas industry, electricity, innovations, oligopoly, digital twins.

Radical transformations of the Ukrainian energy system also caused changes in energy policy. However, the interpreted provisions did not provide for extraordinary differences regarding the modification of energy measures in terms of individual regions. These actions subsequently caused the institutional transformation of fuel, gas, and electric power measures on the way to economic liberalization. Energy policy combines legal, organizational, financial and economic regulation in the country's national policy context. Implementation of innovative technological improvements in the FEC allows for: modernization of the energy system; improvement of infrastructure; integrating advanced foreign practices into one's own system; application of innovations following the EU legislation; introduction of hydrogen technologies and the transition to clean energy. Creation of reserves to avoid the shortage of energy resources: formation of the legislation of Ukraine regarding the reservation of oil and gas storages; creation of an Eastern European gas and oil center (hub) in Ukraine; formation of a system of increasing price competition on European markets through reservation. Assimilation of experience and formation of established norms of behavior on energy saving includes: improvement of normative and legal aspects of the regulation of economic activity by business entities; technical improvement of production processes; application of systematic monitoring and energy audit; achieving the effect of scale during the production and consumption of energy resources. The energy efficiency of the use of resources in view of their diversity and the use of FEC allows for: reliability and continuity of energy supply; pricing; normative and legal instruments of regulation; projects related to the implementation of efficient energy use; measures to preserve the environment. Diversification in the application of RES in energy segments provides for: diversifying the ties with the countries of the energy society; resuming the cooperation with Poland through the ?winouj?cie LNG terminal in the context of gas and energy; activating the transit of energy resources through Slovakia, Moldova, and Romania. The function of the energy system following EU legislation and modern global challenges consists in: implementation of the priorities of the Green Deal; transition to clean energy; application of hydrogen energy; establishing the infrastructure for the use of RES.

Our present dependence on fossil fuels means that, as our demand for energy inevitably increases, so do emissions of greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). To avoid the obvious consequences on climate change, the concentration of such greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must be stabilized. But, as populations grow and economies develop, future demands now ensure that energy will be one of the defining issues of this century. This unique set of (coupled) challenges also means that science and engineering have a unique opportunity—and a burgeoning challenge—to apply their understanding to provide sustainable energy solutions. Integrated carbon capture and subsequent sequestration is generally advanced as the most promising option to tackle greenhouse gases in the short to medium term. Here, we provide a brief overview of an alternative mid- to long-term option, namely, the capture and conversion of CO 2 , to produce sustainable, synthetic hydrocarbon or carbonaceous fuels, most notably for transportation purposes. Basically, the approach centres on the concept of the large-scale re-use of CO 2 released by human activity to produce synthetic fuels, and how this challenging approach could assume an important role in tackling the issue of global CO 2 emissions. We highlight three possible strategies involving CO 2 conversion by physico-chemical approaches: sustainable (or renewable) synthetic methanol, syngas production derived from flue gases from coal-, gas- or oil-fired electric power stations, and photochemical production of synthetic fuels. The use of CO 2 to synthesize commodity chemicals is covered elsewhere ( Arakawa et al. 2001 Chem. Rev. 101 , 953–996); this review is focused on the possibilities for the conversion of CO 2 to fuels. Although these three prototypical areas differ in their ultimate applications, the underpinning thermodynamic considerations centre on the conversion—and hence the utilization—of CO 2 . Here, we hope to illustrate that advances in the science and engineering of materials are critical for these new energy technologies, and specific examples are given for all three examples. With sufficient advances, and institutional and political support, such scientific and technological innovations could help to regulate/stabilize the CO 2 levels in the atmosphere and thereby extend the use of fossil-fuel-derived feedstocks.

D B Solovev 1,2 1 Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia 2 Vladivostok Branch of Russian Customs Academy, Vladivostok, Russia E-mail: solovev.db@dvfu.ru The special issue Journal of Physics: Conference Series is entitled ‘International Conference on Automatics and Energy (ICAE 2021)’. Smart technologies and modern innovations in design for control and automation systems of technological processes and objects: prospects and international experience. International Conference on Automatics and Energy (ICAE 2021) is devoted to the discussion of modern achievements and promising research in the sphere of intelligent technologies in solving real, applied problems in various fields of industry and energy policies of different countries. The special issue Journal of Physics: Conference Series (International Conference on Automatics and Energy (ICAE 2021)) is published to support interdisciplinary discussion and publication of research results that generalise research in technical branches of knowledge in higher education institutions, research institutes, large industrial enterprises, research and production associations of the Russian Federation, as well as authors from other countries, and the results of research carried out on the personal initiative of the authors. The main thematic sections of the International Conference on Automatics and Energy (ICAE 2021) include: control systems and technologies for various energy facilities, industrial mechatronic systems and robotics, electric power systems and renewable energy sources, power electronics, electrical machines and electric drives, microprocessor control systems and signal processing, modelling and computer technologies, theory and practice of dynamic measurements, organisational and management solutions for energy and resource conservation. International Conference on Automatics and Energy (ICAE 2021) may be of interest to a wide range of specialists in the field of designing innovative solutions and organisational measures that increase the efficiency of the use of energy technologies in their various manifestations. The issue is also of interest to scientific and engineering personnel engaged in the development, design and calibration of automation devices and control systems for technical electrified systems and facilities, as well as information and measuring instruments for obtaining, measuring and researching information about currents in electrical complexes and systems; and for students and undergraduates studying ‘electrical power engineering and electrical engineering’, ‘automated systems’, ‘control systems in energy technologies’ and postgraduate students in the corresponding branches of study. The Organizing committee conference (ICAE 2021) would like to thank all authors for sharing their research results, insights and conclusions on prospects and challenges modern innovations in design for control and automation systems. List of Organizing Committee are available in this pdf.

The following theses are claimed, several contrasting current climate policies and taxonomies. Analysis, based on solely carbon dioxide emission and energy budget, concludes a set of concrete solutions for mitigating climate change effects. Some of the theses violate more orthodox policy which is thus protested against in order to move forward. • Our long-term goal must be to stop using all carbon-containing fuels, including natural gas and other fossil products as well as biofuels. • We must electrify society and industry, with electricity from only non-carbon-based power including nuclear power, hydro-electric, wind and solar power. • We must prepare ourselves for changes. Even if the present emission volumes of carbon dioxide were possible to stop immediately, various lag effects are inevitable and negative development will therefore continue for considerable time. • We must count with continued melting of land ice, the complete liquifying of the Antarctica ice expected to lead to a global sea level rise by some 60 m, flooding most capitals. Among various solutions to mitigate the effects of ice melting, including lowered global temperatures, the following is proposed. • To mitigate sea level rise, stationary water reservoirs should be built around the world. With estimated melting rates it would require ca 1 million reservoirs be deployed or expanded during the next 20-40 years. • Such reservoirs could also solve the emergent problem of lack of fresh water in many places. They could also be used for local storage of hydroelectric energy by using pump storage hydroelectric (PSH) technology. • All energy production sources should be analyzed according to a Total Balanced Energy Budget (TBEB) with the main objective of minimizing the emissions of greenhouse gases. • For each region/country, a table of available or conceivable complementary electric energy sources should be made and ranked according to TBEB—the sources given priority weights depending on feasibility, significance, and environmental friendliness. Tables are presented for Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Ukraine, California, Massachusetts, Maine, Peru, Australia, China and Japan. Generally, we find the following rank of priority applicable. • Solar energy from desert arid areas is given highest priority in replacing carbon-based forms of energy. Submarine electric cables may be deployed along the Australia-Singapore model, if the available power grids are insufficient for the energy transport. • Electrolysis of water producing clean hydrogen gas is given very high priorityboth for using hydrogen as fuel as well as for energy storage. Improved efficiency should be achieved by the development of electrolysis catalysts. • Hydroelectric power in combination with PSH is given high priority to mitigate both grid power fluctuations as well as source (solar and wind) intermittence. • False hope should not be seeded among society and politicians by inflating projects that are less realistic or suboptimal for technological, economic or other reasons. Here, probably most forms of “biofuels” (which although being “carbon neutral” do produce carbon dioxide) and “carbon capture” (catching carbon dioxide gas at the combustion site, compressing it to liquid and depositing it in salt mines or empty oil fields) are considered less significant compared to other more direct solutions. Both biofuels and carbon capture may be associated with social and environmental issues. • Political legislation and instruments (“taxonomy”) invented with the original objective of mitigating negative climate change effects should be reanalyzed and changed if not functional. The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS)—a market for outlet rights, for example, is a local initiative which despite its valuable ambition might be suboptimal with respect to goal of efficient decrease of carbon dioxide emission globally. Similarly, “climate taxonomy” can create loopholes bypassing a sound TBEB. • Science-based targets (SBT) to decarbonize the private sector as part of global efforts to achieve the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement should be further encouraged. • Solve economic and political challenges allowing and promoting establishment of required international energy collaborations (e.g., for solar energy cross-continental transport programs).

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944). It is worth revisiting the old boy’s grumpiness, because the rhetoric he so niftily skewers continues in our own time. Facebook features “Peace on Facebook” and even claims that it can “decrease world conflict” through inter-cultural communication. Twitter has announced itself as “a triumph of humanity” (“A Cyber-House” 61). Queue George. In between Orwell and latter-day hoody cybertarians, a whole host of excitable public intellectuals announced the impending end of materiality through emergent media forms. Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Daniel Bell, Ithiel de Sola Pool, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler—the list of 1960s futurists goes on and on. And this wasn’t just a matter of punditry: the OECD decreed the coming of the “information society” in 1975 and the European Union (EU) followed suit in 1979, while IBM merrily declared an “information age” in 1977. Bell theorized this technological utopia as post-ideological, because class would cease to matter (Mattelart). Polluting industries seemingly no longer represented the dynamic core of industrial capitalism; instead, market dynamism radiated from a networked, intellectual core of creative and informational activities. The new information and knowledge-based economies would rescue First World hegemony from an “insurgent world” that lurked within as well as beyond itself (Schiller). Orwell’s others and the Cold-War futurists propagated one of the most destructive myths shaping both public debate and scholarly studies of the media, culture, and communication. They convinced generations of analysts, activists, and arrivistes that the promises and problems of the media could be understood via metaphors of the environment, and that the media were weightless and virtual. The famous medium they wished us to see as the message —a substance as vital to our wellbeing as air, water, and soil—turned out to be no such thing. Today’s cybertarians inherit their anti-Marxist, anti-materialist positions, as a casual glance at any new media journal, culture-industry magazine, or bourgeois press outlet discloses. The media are undoubtedly important instruments of social cohesion and fragmentation, political power and dissent, democracy and demagoguery, and other fraught extensions of human consciousness. But talk of media systems as equivalent to physical ecosystems—fashionable among marketers and media scholars alike—is predicated on the notion that they are environmentally benign technologies. This has never been true, from the beginnings of print to today’s cloud-covered computing. Our new book Greening the Media focuses on the environmental impact of the media—the myriad ways that media technology consumes, despoils, and wastes natural resources. We introduce ideas, stories, and facts that have been marginal or absent from popular, academic, and professional histories of media technology. Throughout, ecological issues have been at the core of our work and we immodestly think the same should apply to media communications, and cultural studies more generally. We recognize that those fields have contributed valuable research and teaching that address environmental questions. For instance, there is an abundant literature on representations of the environment in cinema, how to communicate environmental messages successfully, and press coverage of climate change. That’s not enough. You may already know that media technologies contain toxic substances. You may have signed an on-line petition protesting the hazardous and oppressive conditions under which workers assemble cell phones and computers. But you may be startled, as we were, by the scale and pervasiveness of these environmental risks. They are present in and around every site where electronic and electric devices are manufactured, used, and thrown away, poisoning humans, animals, vegetation, soil, air and water. We are using the term “media” as a portmanteau word to cover a multitude of cultural and communications machines and processes—print, film, radio, television, information and communications technologies (ICT), and consumer electronics (CE). This is not only for analytical convenience, but because there is increasing overlap between the sectors. CE connect to ICT and vice versa; televisions resemble computers; books are read on telephones; newspapers are written through clouds; and so on. Cultural forms and gadgets that were once separate are now linked. The currently fashionable notion of convergence doesn’t quite capture the vastness of this integration, which includes any object with a circuit board, scores of accessories that plug into it, and a global nexus of labor and environmental inputs and effects that produce and flow from it. In 2007, a combination of ICT/CE and media production accounted for between 2 and 3 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted around the world (“Gartner Estimates,”; International Telecommunication Union; Malmodin et al.). Between twenty and fifty million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) are generated annually, much of it via discarded cell phones and computers, which affluent populations throw out regularly in order to buy replacements. (Presumably this fits the narcissism of small differences that distinguishes them from their own past.) E-waste is historically produced in the Global North—Australasia, Western Europe, Japan, and the US—and dumped in the Global South—Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southern and Southeast Asia, and China. It takes the form of a thousand different, often deadly, materials for each electrical and electronic gadget. This trend is changing as India and China generate their own media detritus (Robinson; Herat). Enclosed hard drives, backlit screens, cathode ray tubes, wiring, capacitors, and heavy metals pose few risks while these materials remain encased. But once discarded and dismantled, ICT/CE have the potential to expose workers and ecosystems to a morass of toxic components. Theoretically, “outmoded” parts could be reused or swapped for newer parts to refurbish devices. But items that are defined as waste undergo further destruction in order to collect remaining parts and valuable metals, such as gold, silver, copper, and rare-earth elements. This process causes serious health risks to bones, brains, stomachs, lungs, and other vital organs, in addition to birth defects and disrupted biological development in children. Medical catastrophes can result from lead, cadmium, mercury, other heavy metals, poisonous fumes emitted in search of precious metals, and such carcinogenic compounds as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, polyvinyl chloride, and flame retardants (Maxwell and Miller 13). The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency estimates that by 2007 US residents owned approximately three billion electronic devices, with an annual turnover rate of 400 million units, and well over half such purchases made by women. Overall CE ownership varied with age—adults under 45 typically boasted four gadgets; those over 65 made do with one. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) says US$145 billion was expended in the sector in 2006 in the US alone, up 13% on the previous year. The CEA refers joyously to a “consumer love affair with technology continuing at a healthy clip.” In the midst of a recession, 2009 saw $165 billion in sales, and households owned between fifteen and twenty-four gadgets on average. By 2010, US$233 billion was spent on electronic products, three-quarters of the population owned a computer, nearly half of all US adults owned an MP3 player, and 85% had a cell phone. By all measures, the amount of ICT/CE on the planet is staggering. As investigative science journalist, Elizabeth Grossman put it: “no industry pushes products into the global market on the scale that high-tech electronics does” (Maxwell and Miller 2). In 2007, “of the 2.25 million tons of TVs, cell phones and computer products ready for end-of-life management, 18% (414,000 tons) was collected for recycling and 82% (1.84 million tons) was disposed of, primarily in landfill” (Environmental Protection Agency 1). Twenty million computers fell obsolete across the US in 1998, and the rate was 130,000 a day by 2005. It has been estimated that the five hundred million personal computers discarded in the US between 1997 and 2007 contained 6.32 billion pounds of plastics, 1.58 billion pounds of lead, three million pounds of cadmium, 1.9 million pounds of chromium, and 632000 pounds of mercury (Environmental Protection Agency; Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 6). The European Union is expected to generate upwards of twelve million tons annually by 2020 (Commission of the European Communities 17). While refrigerators and dangerous refrigerants account for the bulk of EU e-waste, about 44% of the most toxic e-waste measured in 2005 came from medium-to-small ICT/CE: computer monitors, TVs, printers, ink cartridges, telecommunications equipment, toys, tools, and anything with a circuit board (Commission of the European Communities 31-34). Understanding the enormity of the environmental problems caused by making, using, and disposing of media technologies should arrest our enthusiasm for them. But intellectual correctives to the “love affair” with technology, or technophilia, have come and gone without establishing much of a foothold against the breathtaking flood of gadgets and the propaganda that proclaims their awe-inspiring capabilities.[i] There is a peculiar enchantment with the seeming magic of wireless communication, touch-screen phones and tablets, flat-screen high-definition televisions, 3-D IMAX cinema, mobile computing, and so on—a totemic, quasi-sacred power that the historian of technology David Nye has named the technological sublime (Nye Technological Sublime 297).[ii] We demonstrate in our book why there is no place for the technological sublime in projects to green the media. But first we should explain why such symbolic power does not accrue to more mundane technologies; after all, for the time-strapped cook, a pressure cooker does truly magical things. Three important qualities endow ICT/CE with unique symbolic potency—virtuality, volume, and novelty. The technological sublime of media technology is reinforced by the “virtual nature of much of the industry’s content,” which “tends to obscure their responsibility for a vast proliferation of hardware, all with high levels of built-in obsolescence and decreasing levels of efficiency” (Boyce and Lewis 5). Planned obsolescence entered the lexicon as a new “ethics” for electrical engineering in the 1920s and ’30s, when marketers, eager to “habituate people to buying new products,” called for designs to become quickly obsolete “in efficiency, economy, style, or taste” (Grossman 7-8).[iii] This defines the short lifespan deliberately constructed for computer systems (drives, interfaces, operating systems, batteries, etc.) by making tiny improvements incompatible with existing hardware (Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 33-50; Boyce and Lewis). With planned obsolescence leading to “dizzying new heights” of product replacement (Rogers 202), there is an overstated sense of the novelty and preeminence of “new” media—a “cult of the present” is particularly dazzled by the spread of electronic gadgets through globalization (Mattelart and Constantinou 22). References to the symbolic power of media technology can be found in hymnals across the internet and the halls of academe: technologies change us, the media will solve social problems or create new ones, ICTs transform work, monopoly ownership no longer matters, journalism is dead, social networking enables social revolution, and the media deliver a cleaner, post-industrial, capitalism. Here is a typical example from the twilight zone of the technological sublime (actually, the OECD): A major feature of the knowledge-based economy is the impact that ICTs have had on industrial structure, with a rapid growth of services and a relative decline of manufacturing. Services are typically less energy intensive and less polluting, so among those countries with a high and increasing share of services, we often see a declining energy intensity of production … with the emergence of the Knowledge Economy ending the old linear relationship between output and energy use (i.e. partially de-coupling growth and energy use) (Houghton 1) This statement mixes half-truths and nonsense. In reality, old-time, toxic manufacturing has moved to the Global South, where it is ascendant; pollution levels are rising worldwide; and energy consumption is accelerating in residential and institutional sectors, due almost entirely to ICT/CE usage, despite advances in energy conservation technology (a neat instance of the age-old Jevons Paradox). In our book we show how these are all outcomes of growth in ICT/CE, the foundation of the so-called knowledge-based economy. ICT/CE are misleadingly presented as having little or no material ecological impact. In the realm of everyday life, the sublime experience of electronic machinery conceals the physical work and material resources that go into them, while the technological sublime makes the idea that more-is-better palatable, axiomatic; even sexy. In this sense, the technological sublime relates to what Marx called “the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they are in the hands of the consumer, who lusts after them as if they were “independent beings” (77). There is a direct but unseen relationship between technology’s symbolic power and the scale of its environmental impact, which the economist Juliet Schor refers to as a “materiality paradox” —the greater the frenzy to buy goods for their transcendent or nonmaterial cultural meaning, the greater the use of material resources (40-41). We wrote Greening the Media knowing that a study of the media’s effect on the environment must work especially hard to break the enchantment that inflames popular and elite passions for media technologies. We understand that the mere mention of the political-economic arrangements that make shiny gadgets possible, or the environmental consequences of their appearance and disappearance, is bad medicine. It’s an unwelcome buzz kill—not a cool way to converse about cool stuff. But we didn’t write the book expecting to win many allies among high-tech enthusiasts and ICT/CE industry leaders. We do not dispute the importance of information and communication media in our lives and modern social systems. We are media people by profession and personal choice, and deeply immersed in the study and use of emerging media technologies. But we think it’s time for a balanced assessment with less hype and more practical understanding of the relationship of media technologies to the biosphere they inhabit. Media consumers, designers, producers, activists, researchers, and policy makers must find new and effective ways to move ICT/CE production and consumption toward ecologically sound practices. In the course of this project, we found in casual conversation, lecture halls, classroom discussions, and correspondence, consistent and increasing concern with the environmental impact of media technology, especially the deleterious effects of e-waste toxins on workers, air, water, and soil. We have learned that the grip of the technological sublime is not ironclad. Its instability provides a point of departure for investigating and criticizing the relationship between the media and the environment. The media are, and have been for a long time, intimate environmental participants. Media technologies are yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s news, but rarely in the way they should be. The prevailing myth is that the printing press, telegraph, phonograph, photograph, cinema, telephone, wireless radio, television, and internet changed the world without changing the Earth. In reality, each technology has emerged by despoiling ecosystems and exposing workers to harmful environments, a truth obscured by symbolic power and the power of moguls to set the terms by which such technologies are designed and deployed. Those who benefit from ideas of growth, progress, and convergence, who profit from high-tech innovation, monopoly, and state collusion—the military-industrial-entertainment-academic complex and multinational commandants of labor—have for too long ripped off the Earth and workers. As the current celebration of media technology inevitably winds down, perhaps it will become easier to comprehend that digital wonders come at the expense of employees and ecosystems. This will return us to Max Weber’s insistence that we understand technology in a mundane way as a “mode of processing material goods” (27). Further to understanding that ordinariness, we can turn to the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, who noted three decades ago “the failures of technocratic dreams [:] that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Such fantasies derived from the very banality of these introductions—that every time they took place, one more “technical apparatus” was simply “being made at home with the rest of our world’ (548). Media studies can join in this repetitive banality. Or it can withdraw the welcome mat for media technologies that despoil the Earth and wreck the lives of those who make them. In our view, it’s time to green the media by greening media studies. References “A Cyber-House Divided.” Economist 4 Sep. 2010: 61-62. “Gartner Estimates ICT Industry Accounts for 2 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions.” Gartner press release. 6 April 2007. ‹http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867›. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia. Seattle: Basel Action Network, 25 Feb. 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “Central Park.” Trans. Lloyd Spencer with Mark Harrington. New German Critique 34 (1985): 32-58. Biagioli, Mario. “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 816-33. Boyce, Tammy and Justin Lewis, eds. Climate Change and the Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Commission of the European Communities. “Impact Assessment.” Commission Staff Working Paper accompanying the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) (recast). COM (2008) 810 Final. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 3 Dec. 2008. Environmental Protection Agency. Management of Electronic Waste in the United States. Washington, DC: EPA, 2007 Environmental Protection Agency. Statistics on the Management of Used and End-of-Life Electronics. Washington, DC: EPA, 2008 Grossman, Elizabeth. Tackling High-Tech Trash: The E-Waste Explosion & What We Can Do about It. New York: Demos, 2008. ‹http://www.demos.org/pubs/e-waste_FINAL.pdf› Herat, Sunil. “Review: Sustainable Management of Electronic Waste (e-Waste).” Clean 35.4 (2007): 305-10. Houghton, J. “ICT and the Environment in Developing Countries: Opportunities and Developments.” Paper prepared for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2009. International Telecommunication Union. ICTs for Environment: Guidelines for Developing Countries, with a Focus on Climate Change. Geneva: ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division Policies and Strategies Department ITU Telecommunication Development Sector, 2008. Malmodin, Jens, Åsa Moberg, Dag Lundén, Göran Finnveden, and Nina Lövehagen. “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Operational Electricity Use in the ICT and Entertainment & Media Sectors.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 14.5 (2010): 770-90. Marx, Karl. Capital: Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 3rd ed. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1987. Mattelart, Armand and Costas M. Constantinou. “Communications/Excommunications: An Interview with Armand Mattelart.” Trans. Amandine Bled, Jacques Guot, and Costas Constantinou. Review of International Studies 34.1 (2008): 21-42. Mattelart, Armand. “Cómo nació el mito de Internet.” Trans. Yanina Guthman. El mito internet. Ed. Victor Hugo de la Fuente. Santiago: Editorial aún creemos en los sueños, 2002. 25-32. Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Nye, David E. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2007. Orwell, George. “As I Please.” Tribune. 12 May 1944. Richtel, Matt. “Consumers Hold on to Products Longer.” New York Times: B1, 26 Feb. 2011. Robinson, Brett H. “E-Waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts.” Science of the Total Environment 408.2 (2009): 183-91. Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: New Press, 2005. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Vols. I and II. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Malden: Blackwell, 1995. Schiller, Herbert I. Information and the Crisis Economy. Norwood: Ablex Publishing, 1984. Schor, Juliet B. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin, 2010. Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials. Los Angeles: Academy Imprints, 2007. Weber, Max. “Remarks on Technology and Culture.” Trans. Beatrix Zumsteg and Thomas M. Kemple. Ed. Thomas M. Kemple. Theory, Culture [i] The global recession that began in 2007 has been the main reason for some declines in Global North energy consumption, slower turnover in gadget upgrades, and longer periods of consumer maintenance of electronic goods (Richtel). [ii] The emergence of the technological sublime has been attributed to the Western triumphs in the post-Second World War period, when technological power supposedly supplanted the power of nature to inspire fear and astonishment (Nye Technology Matters 28). Historian Mario Biagioli explains how the sublime permeates everyday life through technoscience: "If around 1950 the popular imaginary placed science close to the military and away from the home, today’s technoscience frames our everyday life at all levels, down to our notion of the self" (818). [iii] This compulsory repetition is seemingly undertaken each time as a novelty, governed by what German cultural critic Walter Benjamin called, in his awkward but occasionally illuminating prose, "the ever-always-the-same" of "mass-production" cloaked in "a hitherto unheard-of significance" (48).

Introduction This article is a study in anxiety with regard to social online spaces (SOS) conceived of as dark. There are two possible ways to define ‘dark’ in this context. The first is that communication is dark because it either has limited distribution, is not open to all users (closed groups are a case example) or hidden. The second definition, linked as a result of the first, is the way that communication via these means is interpreted and understood. Dark social spaces disrupt the accepted top-down flow by the ‘gazing elite’ (data aggregators including social media), but anxious users might need to strain to notice what is out there, and this in turn destabilises one’s reception of the scene. In an environment where surveillance technologies are proliferating, this article examines contemporary, dark, interconnected, and interactive communications for the entangled affordances that might be brought to bear. A provocation is that resistance through counterveillance or “sousveillance” is one possibility. An alternative (or addition) is retreating to or building ‘dark’ spaces that are less surveilled and (perhaps counterintuitively) less fearful. This article considers critically the notion of dark social online spaces via four broad socio-technical concerns connected to the big social media services that have helped increase a tendency for fearful anxiety produced by surveillance and the perceived implications for personal privacy. It also shines light on the aspect of darkness where some users are spurred to actively seek alternative, dark social online spaces. Since the 1970s, public-key cryptosystems typically preserved security for websites, emails, and sensitive health, government, and military data, but this is now reduced (Williams). We have seen such systems exploited via cyberattacks and misappropriated data acquired by affiliations such as Facebook-Cambridge Analytica for targeted political advertising during the 2016 US elections. Via the notion of “parasitic strategies”, such events can be described as news/information hacks “whose attack vectors target a system’s weak points with the help of specific strategies” (von Nordheim and Kleinen-von Königslöw, 88). In accord with Wilson and Serisier’s arguments (178), emerging technologies facilitate rapid data sharing, collection, storage, and processing wherein subsequent “outcomes are unpredictable”. This would also include the effect of acquiescence. In regard to our digital devices, for some, being watched overtly—through cameras encased in toys, computers, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) to digital street ads that determine the resonance of human emotions in public places including bus stops, malls, and train stations—is becoming normalised (McStay, Emotional AI). It might appear that consumers immersed within this Internet of Things (IoT) are themselves comfortable interacting with devices that record sound and capture images for easy analysis and distribution across the communications networks. A counter-claim is that mainstream social media corporations have cultivated a sense of digital resignation “produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them but feel unable to do so” (Draper and Turow, 1824). Careful consumers’ trust in mainstream media is waning, with readers observing a strong presence of big media players in the industry and are carefully picking their publications and public intellectuals to follow (Mahmood, 6). A number now also avoid the mainstream internet in favour of alternate dark sites. This is done by users with “varying backgrounds, motivations and participation behaviours that may be idiosyncratic (as they are rooted in the respective person’s biography and circumstance)” (Quandt, 42). By way of connection with dark internet studies via Biddle et al. (1; see also Lasica), the “darknet” is a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content … not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. As we note from the quote above, the “dark web” uses existing public and private networks that facilitate communication via the Internet. Gehl (1220; see also Gehl and McKelvey) has detailed that this includes “hidden sites that end in ‘.onion’ or ‘.i2p’ or other Top-Level Domain names only available through modified browsers or special software. Accessing I2P sites requires a special routing program ... . Accessing .onion sites requires Tor [The Onion Router]”. For some, this gives rise to social anxiety, read here as stemming from that which is not known, and an exaggerated sense of danger, which makes fight or flight seem the only options. This is often justified or exacerbated by the changing media and communication landscape and depicted in popular documentaries such as The Social Dilemma or The Great Hack, which affect public opinion on the unknown aspects of internet spaces and the uses of personal data. The question for this article remains whether the fear of the dark is justified. Consider that most often one will choose to make one’s intimate bedroom space dark in order to have a good night’s rest. We might pleasurably escape into a cinema’s darkness for the stories told therein, or walk along a beach at night enjoying unseen breezes. Most do not avoid these experiences, choosing to actively seek them out. Drawing this thread, then, is the case made here that agency can also be found in the dark by resisting socio-political structural harms. 1. Digital Futures and Anxiety of the Dark Fear of the darkI have a constant fear that something's always nearFear of the darkFear of the darkI have a phobia that someone's always there In the lyrics to the song “Fear of the Dark” (1992) by British heavy metal group Iron Maiden is a sense that that which is unknown and unseen causes fear and anxiety. Holding a fear of the dark is not unusual and varies in degree for adults as it does for children (Fellous and Arbib). Such anxiety connected to the dark does not always concern darkness itself. It can also be a concern for the possible or imagined dangers that are concealed by the darkness itself as a result of cognitive-emotional interactions (McDonald, 16). Extending this claim is this article’s non-binary assertion that while for some technology and what it can do is frequently misunderstood and shunned as a result, for others who embrace the possibilities and actively take it on it is learning by attentively partaking. Mistakes, solecism, and frustrations are part of the process. Such conceptual theorising falls along a continuum of thinking. Global interconnectivity of communications networks has certainly led to consequent concerns (Turkle Alone Together). Much focus for anxiety has been on the impact upon social and individual inner lives, levels of media concentration, and power over and commercialisation of the internet. Of specific note is that increasing commercial media influence—such as Facebook and its acquisition of WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Instagram, CRTL-labs (translating movements and neural impulses into digital signals), LiveRail (video advertising technology), Chainspace (Blockchain)—regularly changes the overall dynamics of the online environment (Turow and Kavanaugh). This provocation was born out recently when Facebook disrupted the delivery of news to Australian audiences via its service. Mainstream social online spaces (SOS) are platforms which provide more than the delivery of media alone and have been conceptualised predominantly in a binary light. On the one hand, they can be depicted as tools for the common good of society through notional widespread access and as places for civic participation and discussion, identity expression, education, and community formation (Turkle; Bruns; Cinque and Brown; Jenkins). This end of the continuum of thinking about SOS seems set hard against the view that SOS are operating as businesses with strategies that manipulate consumers to generate revenue through advertising, data, venture capital for advanced research and development, and company profit, on the other hand. In between the two polar ends of this continuum are the range of other possibilities, the shades of grey, that add contemporary nuance to understanding SOS in regard to what they facilitate, what the various implications might be, and for whom. By way of a brief summary, anxiety of the dark is steeped in the practices of privacy-invasive social media giants such as Facebook and its ancillary companies. Second are the advertising technology companies, surveillance contractors, and intelligence agencies that collect and monitor our actions and related data; as well as the increased ease of use and interoperability brought about by Web 2.0 that has seen a disconnection between technological infrastructure and social connection that acts to limit user permissions and online affordances. Third are concerns for the negative effects associated with depressed mental health and wellbeing caused by “psychologically damaging social networks”, through sleep loss, anxiety, poor body image, real world relationships, and the fear of missing out (FOMO; Royal Society for Public Health (UK) and the Young Health Movement). Here the harms are both individual and societal. Fourth is the intended acceleration toward post-quantum IoT (Fernández-Caramés), as quantum computing’s digital components are continually being miniaturised. This is coupled with advances in electrical battery capacity and interconnected telecommunications infrastructures. The result of such is that the ontogenetic capacity of the powerfully advanced network/s affords supralevel surveillance. What this means is that through devices and the services that they provide, individuals’ data is commodified (Neff and Nafus; Nissenbaum and Patterson). Personal data is enmeshed in ‘things’ requiring that the decisions that are both overt, subtle, and/or hidden (dark) are scrutinised for the various ways they shape social norms and create consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society (Gillespie). Data and personal information are retrievable from devices, sharable in SOS, and potentially exposed across networks. For these reasons, some have chosen to go dark by being “off the grid”, judiciously selecting their means of communications and their ‘friends’ carefully. 2. Is There Room for Privacy Any More When Everyone in SOS Is Watching? An interesting turn comes through counterarguments against overarching institutional surveillance that underscore the uses of technologies to watch the watchers. This involves a practice of counter-surveillance whereby technologies are tools of resistance to go ‘dark’ and are used by political activists in protest situations for both communication and avoiding surveillance. This is not new and has long existed in an increasingly dispersed media landscape (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes). For example, counter-surveillance video footage has been accessed and made available via live-streaming channels, with commentary in SOS augmenting networking possibilities for niche interest groups or micropublics (Wilson and Serisier, 178). A further example is the Wordpress site Fitwatch, appealing for an end to what the site claims are issues associated with police surveillance (fitwatch.org.uk and endpolicesurveillance.wordpress.com). Users of these sites are called to post police officers’ identity numbers and photographs in an attempt to identify “cops” that might act to “misuse” UK Anti-terrorism legislation against activists during legitimate protests. Others that might be interested in doing their own “monitoring” are invited to reach out to identified personal email addresses or other private (dark) messaging software and application services such as Telegram (freeware and cross-platform). In their work on surveillance, Mann and Ferenbok (18) propose that there is an increase in “complex constructs between power and the practices of seeing, looking, and watching/sensing in a networked culture mediated by mobile/portable/wearable computing devices and technologies”. By way of critical definition, Mann and Ferenbok (25) clarify that “where the viewer is in a position of power over the subject, this is considered surveillance, but where the viewer is in a lower position of power, this is considered sousveillance”. It is the aspect of sousveillance that is empowering to those using dark SOS. One might consider that not all surveillance is “bad” nor institutionalised. It is neither overtly nor formally regulated—as yet. Like most technologies, many of the surveillant technologies are value-neutral until applied towards specific uses, according to Mann and Ferenbok (18). But this is part of the ‘grey area’ for understanding the impact of dark SOS in regard to which actors or what nations are developing tools for surveillance, where access and control lies, and with what effects into the future. 3. Big Brother Watches, So What Are the Alternatives: Whither the Gazing Elite in Dark SOS? By way of conceptual genealogy, consideration of contemporary perceptions of surveillance in a visually networked society (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes) might be usefully explored through a revisitation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, applied here as a metaphor for contemporary surveillance. Arguably, this is a foundational theoretical model for integrated methods of social control (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 192-211), realised in the “panopticon” (prison) in 1787 by Jeremy Bentham (Bentham and Božovič, 29-95) during a period of social reformation aimed at the improvement of the individual. Like the power for social control over the incarcerated in a panopticon, police power, in order that it be effectively exercised, “had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible … like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception” (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 213–4). In grappling with the impact of SOS for the individual and the collective in post-digital times, we can trace out these early ruminations on the complex documentary organisation through state-controlled apparatuses (such as inspectors and paid observers including “secret agents”) via Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 214; Subject and Power, 326-7) for comparison to commercial operators like Facebook. Today, artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition technology (FRT), and closed-circuit television (CCTV) for video surveillance are used for social control of appropriate behaviours. Exemplified by governments and the private sector is the use of combined technologies to maintain social order, from ensuring citizens cross the street only on green lights, to putting rubbish in the correct recycling bin or be publicly shamed, to making cashless payments in stores. The actions see advantages for individual and collective safety, sustainability, and convenience, but also register forms of behaviour and attitudes with predictive capacities. This gives rise to suspicions about a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour over time. Returning to Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 135), the impact of this finds a dissociation of power from the individual, whereby they become unwittingly impelled into pre-existing social structures, leading to a ‘normalisation’ and acceptance of such systems. If we are talking about the dark, anxiety is key for a Ministry of SOS. Following Foucault again (Subject and Power, 326-7), there is the potential for a crawling, creeping governance that was once distinct but is itself increasingly hidden and growing. A blanket call for some form of ongoing scrutiny of such proliferating powers might be warranted, but with it comes regulation that, while offering certain rights and protections, is not without consequences. For their part, a number of SOS platforms had little to no moderation for explicit content prior to December 2018, and in terms of power, notwithstanding important anxiety connected to arguments that children and the vulnerable need protections from those that would seek to take advantage, this was a crucial aspect of community building and self-expression that resulted in this freedom of expression. In unearthing the extent that individuals are empowered arising from the capacity to post sexual self-images, Tiidenberg ("Bringing Sexy Back") considered that through dark SOS (read here as unregulated) some users could work in opposition to the mainstream consumer culture that provides select and limited representations of bodies and their sexualities. This links directly to Mondin’s exploration of the abundance of queer and feminist pornography on dark SOS as a “counterpolitics of visibility” (288). This work resulted in a reasoned claim that the technological structure of dark SOS created a highly political and affective social space that users valued. What also needs to be underscored is that many users also believed that such a space could not be replicated on other mainstream SOS because of the differences in architecture and social norms. Cho (47) worked with this theory to claim that dark SOS are modern-day examples in a history of queer individuals having to rely on “underground economies of expression and relation”. Discussions such as these complicate what dark SOS might now become in the face of ‘adult’ content moderation and emerging tracking technologies to close sites or locate individuals that transgress social norms. Further, broader questions are raised about how content moderation fits in with the public space conceptualisations of SOS more generally. Increasingly, “there is an app for that” where being able to identify the poster of an image or an author of an unknown text is seen as crucial. While there is presently no standard approach, models for combining instance-based and profile-based features such as SVM for determining authorship attribution are in development, with the result that potentially far less content will remain hidden in the future (Bacciu et al.). 4. There’s Nothing New under the Sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9) For some, “[the] high hopes regarding the positive impact of the Internet and digital participation in civic society have faded” (Schwarzenegger, 99). My participant observation over some years in various SOS, however, finds that critical concern has always existed. Views move along the spectrum of thinking from deep scepticisms (Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil) to wondrous techo-utopian promises (Negroponte, Being Digital). Indeed, concerns about the (then) new technologies of wireless broadcasting can be compared with today’s anxiety over the possible effects of the internet and SOS. Inglis (7) recalls, here, too, were fears that humanity was tampering with some dangerous force; might wireless wave be causing thunderstorms, droughts, floods? Sterility or strokes? Such anxieties soon evaporated; but a sense of mystery might stay longer with evangelists for broadcasting than with a laity who soon took wireless for granted and settled down to enjoy the products of a process they need not understand. As the analogy above makes clear, just as audiences came to use ‘the wireless’ and later the internet regularly, it is reasonable to argue that dark SOS will also gain widespread understanding and find greater acceptance. Dark social spaces are simply the recent development of internet connectivity and communication more broadly. The dark SOS afford choice to be connected beyond mainstream offerings, which some users avoid for their perceived manipulation of content and user both. As part of the wider array of dark web services, the resilience of dark social spaces is reinforced by the proliferation of users as opposed to decentralised replication. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used for anonymity in parallel to TOR access, but they guarantee only anonymity to the client. A VPN cannot guarantee anonymity to the server or the internet service provider (ISP). While users may use pseudonyms rather than actual names as seen on Facebook and other SOS, users continue to take to the virtual spaces they inhabit their off-line, ‘real’ foibles, problems, and idiosyncrasies (Chenault). To varying degrees, however, people also take their best intentions to their interactions in the dark. The hyper-efficient tools now deployed can intensify this, which is the great advantage attracting some users. In balance, however, in regard to online information access and dissemination, critical examination of what is in the public’s interest, and whether content should be regulated or controlled versus allowing a free flow of information where users self-regulate their online behaviour, is fraught. O’Loughlin (604) was one of the first to claim that there will be voluntary loss through negative liberty or freedom from (freedom from unwanted information or influence) and an increase in positive liberty or freedom to (freedom to read or say anything); hence, freedom from surveillance and interference is a kind of negative liberty, consistent with both libertarianism and liberalism. Conclusion The early adopters of initial iterations of SOS were hopeful and liberal (utopian) in their beliefs about universality and ‘free’ spaces of open communication between like-minded others. 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“People live here, they die here so they must leave traces.” (Read 140) “Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettling and unsettled.” (Gibson, Badland 2) Introduction What does it mean for [a] country to be haunted? In much theoretical work in film and Cultural Studies since the 1990s, the Australian continent, more often than not, bears traces of long suppressed traumas which inevitably resurface to haunt the present (Gelder and Jacobs; Gibson; Read; Collins and Davis). Felicity Collins and Therese Davis illuminate the ways Australian cinema acts as a public sphere, or “vernacular modernity,” for rethinking settler/indigenous relations. Their term “backtracking” serves as a mode of “collective mourning” in numerous films of the last decade which render unspoken colonial violence meaningful in contemporary Australia, and account for the “aftershocks” of the Mabo decision that overturned the founding fiction of terra nullius (7). Ray Lawrence’s 2006 film Jindabyne is another after-Mabo film in this sense; its focus on conflict within settler/indigenous relations in a small local town in the alpine region explores a traumatised ecology and drowned country. More than this, in our paper’s investigation of country and its attendant politics, Jindabyne country is the space of excessive haunting and resurfacing - engaging in the hard work of what Gibson (Transformations) has termed “historical backfill”, imaginative speculations “that make manifest an urge to account for the disconnected fragments” of country. Based on an adaptation by Beatrix Christian of the Raymond Carver story, So Much Water, So Close to Home, Jindabyne centres on the ethical dilemma produced when a group of fishermen find the floating, murdered body of a beautiful indigenous woman on a weekend trip, but decide to stay on and continue fishing. In Jindabyne, “'country' […] is made to do much discursive work” (Gorman-Murray). In this paper, we use the word as a metonym for the nation, where macro-political issues are played out and fought over. But we also use ‘country’ to signal the ‘wilderness’ alpine areas that appear in Jindabyne, where country is “a notion encompassing nature and human obligation that white Australia has learned slowly from indigenous Australia” (Gibson, Badland 178). This meaning enables a slippage between ‘land’ and ‘country’. Our discussion of country draws heavily on concepts from Ross Gibson’s theorisation of badlands. Gibson claims that originally, ‘badland’ was a term used by Europeans in North America when they came across “a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition” (Badland 14). Using Collins and Davis’s “vernacular modernity” as a starting point, a film such as Jindabyne invites us to work through the productive possibilities of postcolonial haunting; to move from backtracking (going over old ground) to imaginative backfill (where holes and gaps in the ground are refilled in unconventional and creative returns to the past). Jindabyne (as place and filmic space) signifies “the special place that the Australian Alps occupy for so many Australians”, and the film engages in the discursive work of promoting “shared understanding” and the possibility of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal being “in country” (Baird, Egloff and Lebehan 35). We argue specifically that Jindabyne is a product of “aftermath culture” (Gibson Transformations); a culture living within the ongoing effects of the past, where various levels of filmic haunting make manifest multiple levels of habitation, in turn the product of numerous historical and physical aftermaths. Colonial history, environmental change, expanding wire towers and overflowing dams all lend meaning in the film to personal dilemmas, communal conflict and horrific recent crimes. The discovery of a murdered indigenous woman in water high in the mountains lays bare the fragility of a relocated community founded in the drowning of the town of old Jindabyne which created Lake Jindabyne. Beatrix Christian (in Trbic 61), the film’s writer, explains “everybody in the story is haunted by something. […] There is this group of haunted people, and then you have the serial killer who emerges in his season to create havoc.” “What’s in this compulsion to know the negative space?” asks Gibson (Badland 14). It’s the desire to better know and more deeply understand where we live. And haunting gives us cause to investigate further. Drowned, Murderous Country Jindabyne rewrites “the iconic wilderness of Australia’s High Country” (McHugh online) and replaces it with “a vast, historical crime scene” (Gibson, Badland 2). Along with nearby Adaminaby, the township of Old Jindabyne was drowned and its inhabitants relocated to the new town in the 1960s as part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. When Jindabyne was made in 2006 the scheme no longer represented an uncontested example of Western technological progress ‘taming’ the vast mountainous country. Early on in the film a teacher shows a short documentary about the town’s history in which Old Jindabyne locals lament the houses that will soon be sacrificed to the Snowy River’s torrents. These sentiments sit in opposition to Manning Clark’s grand vision of the scheme as “an inspiration to all who dream dreams about Australia” (McHugh online). With a 100,000-strong workforce, mostly migrated from war-ravaged Europe, the post-war Snowy project took 25 years and was completed in 1974. Such was this engineering feat that 121 workmen “died for the dream, of turning the rivers back through the mountains, to irrigate the dry inland” (McHugh online). Jindabyne re-presents this romantic narrative of progress as nothing less than an environmental crime. The high-tension wires scar the ‘pristine’ high country and the lake haunts every aspect of the characters’ interactions, hinting at the high country’s intractability that will “not succumb to colonial ambition” (Gibson, Badland 14). Describing his critical excavation of places haunted, out-of-balance or simply badlands, Gibson explains: Rummaging in Australia's aftermath cultures, I try to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies […] recuperate scenes and collections […] torn by landgrabbing, let's say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration (Transformations). Tourism is now the predominant focus of Lake Jindabyne and the surrounding areas but in the film, as in history, the area does not “succumb to the temptations of pictorialism” (McFarlane 10), that is, it cannot be framed solely by the picture postcard qualities that resort towns often engender and promote. Jindabyne’s sense of menace signals the transformation of the landscape that has taken place – from ‘untouched’ to country town, and from drowned old town to the relocated, damned and electrified new one. Soon after the opening of the film, a moment of fishing offers a reminder that a town once existed beneath the waters of the eerily still Lake Jindabyne. Hooking a rusty old alarm clock out of the lake, Stuart explains to Tom, his suitably puzzled young son: underneath the water is the town where all the old men sit in rocking chairs and there’s houses and shops. […] There was a night […] I heard this noise — boing, boing, boing. And it was a bell coming from under the water. ‘Cause the old church is still down there and sometimes when the water’s really low, you can see the tip of the spire. Jindabyne’s lake thus functions as “a revelation of horrors past” (Gibson Badland 2). It’s not the first time this man-made lake is filmically positioned as a place where “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson, Badland 13). Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004) also uses Lake Jindabyne and its surrounds to create a bleak and menacing ambience that heightens young Heidi’s sense of alienation (Simpson, ‘Reconfiguring rusticity’). In Somersault, the male-dominated Jindabyne is far from welcoming for the emotionally vulnerable out-of-towner, who is threatened by her friend’s father beside the Lake, then menaced again by boys she meets at a local pub. These scenes undermine the alpine region’s touristic image, inundated in the summer with tourists coming to fish and water ski, and likewise, with snow skiers in the winter. Even away from the Lake, there is no fleeing its spectre. “The high-tension wires marching down the hillside from the hydro-station” hum to such an extent that in one scene, “reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)”, a member of the fishing party is spooked (Ryan 52). This violence wrought upon the landscape contextualises the murder of the young indigenous woman, Susan, by Greg, an electrician who after murdering Susan, seems to hover in the background of several scenes of the film. Close to the opening of Jindabyne, through binoculars from his rocky ridge, Greg spots Susan’s lone car coursing along the plain; he chases her in his vehicle, and forces her to stop. Before (we are lead to assume) he drags her from the vehicle and murders her, he rants madly through her window, “It all comes down from the power station, the electricity!” That the murder/murderer is connected with the hydro-electric project is emphasised by the location scout in the film’s pre-production: We had one location in the scene where Greg dumps the body in some water and Ray [Lawrence] had his heart set on filming that next to some huge pipelines on a dam near Talbingo but Snowy Hydro didn’t […] like that negative content […] in association with their facility and […] said ‘no’ they wouldn’t let us do it.” (Jindabyne DVD extras) “Tales of murder and itinerancy in wild country are as old as the story of Cain in the killing fields of Eden” (Badlands 14). In Jindabyne we never really get to meet Greg but he is a familiar figure in Australian film and culture. Like many before him, he is the lone Road Warrior, a ubiquitous white male presence roaming the de-populated country where the road constantly produces acts of (accidental and intentional) violence (Simpson, ‘Antipodean Automobility’). And after a litany of murders in recent films such as Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and Gone (Ringan Ledwidge, 2007) the “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson Transformations 13) in the isolating landscape. The murderer in Jindabyne, unlike those who have migrated here as adults (the Irish Stuart and his American wife, Claire), is autochthonous in a landscape familiar with a trauma that cannot remain hidden or submerged. Contested High Country The unsinkability of Susan’s body, now an ‘indigenous murdered body’, holds further metaphorical value for resurfacing as a necessary component of aftermath culture. Such movement is not always intelligible within non-indigenous relations to country, though the men’s initial response to the body frames its drifting in terms of ascension: they question whether they have “broken her journey by tying her up”. The film reconfigures terra nullius as the ultimate badland, one that can never truly suppress continuing forms of physical, spiritual, historical and cultural engagement with country, and the alpine areas of Jindabyne and the Snowy River in particular. Lennon (14) points to “the legacy of biased recording and analysis” that “constitutes a threat to the cultural significance of Aboriginal heritage in alpine areas” (15). This significance is central to the film, prompting Lawrence to state that “mountains in any country have a spiritual quality about them […] in Aboriginal culture the highest point in the landscape is the most significant and this is the highest point of our country” (in Cordaiy 40). So whilst the Jindabyne area is contested country, it is the surfacing, upward mobility and unsinkable quality of Aboriginal memory that Brewster argues “is unsettling the past in post-invasion Australia” (in Lambert, Balayi 7). As the agent of backfill, the indigenous body (Susan) unsettles Jindabyne country by offering both evidence of immediate violence and reigniting the memory of it, before the film can find even the smallest possibility of its characters being ‘in country’. Claire illustrates her understanding of this in a conversation with her young son, as she attempts to contact the dead girls’ family. “When a bad thing happens,” she says, “we all have to do a good thing, no matter how small, alright? Otherwise the bad things, they just pile up and up and up.” Her persistent yet clumsy enactment of the cross-cultural go-between illuminates the ways “the small town community move through the terms of recent debate: shame and denial, repressed grief and paternalism” (Ryan 53). It is the movement of backfill within the aftermath: The movement of a foreign non-Aboriginal woman into Aboriginal space intertextually re-animates the processes of ‘settlement’, resolution and environmental assimilation for its still ‘unsettled’ white protagonists. […] Claire attempts an apology to the woman’s family and the Aboriginal community – in an Australia before Kevin Rudd where official apologies for the travesties of Australian/colonial history had not been forthcoming […] her movement towards reconciliation here is reflective of the ‘moral failure’ of a disconnection from Aboriginal history. (Lambert, Diasporas) The shift from dead white girl in Carver’s story to young Aboriginal woman speaks of a political focus on the ‘significance’ of the alpine region at a given moment in time. The corpse functions “as the trigger for crisis and panic in an Australia after native title, the stolen generation and the war-on-terror” (Lambert, Diasporas). The process of reconnecting with country and history must confront its ghosts if the community is to move forward. Gibson (Transformations) argues that “if we continue to close our imaginations to the aberrations and insufficiencies in our historical records. […] It’s likely we won’t dwell in the joy till we get real about the darkness.” In the post-colonial, multicultural but still divided geographies and cultures of Jindabyne, “genocidal displacement” comes face to face with the “irreconciled relation” to land “that refuses to remain half-seen […] a measure of non-indigenous failure to move from being on the land to being in country” (Ryan 52), evidenced by water harvesting in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and the more recent crises in water and land management. Aftermath Country Haunted by historical, cultural and environmental change, Jindabyne constitutes a post-traumatic screen space. In aftermath culture, bodies and landscapes offer the “traces” (Gibson, Transformations) of “the social consequences” of a “heritage of catastrophe” that people “suffer, witness, or even perpetrate” so that “the legacy of trauma is bequeathed” (Walker i). The youth of Jindabyne are charged with traumatic heritage. The young Susan’s body predictably bears the semiotic weight of colonial atrocity and non-indigenous environmental development. Evidence of witnesses, perpetrators and sufferers is still being revealed after the corpse is taken to the town morgue, where Claire (in a culturally improper viewing) is horrified by Susan’s marks from being secured in the water by Stuart and the other men. Other young characters are likewise haunted by a past that is environmental and tragically personal. Claire and Stuart’s young son, Tom (left by his mother for a period in early infancy and the witness of his parents strained marital relations), has an intense fear of drowning. This personal/historical fear is played with by his seven year old friend, Caylin-Calandria, who expresses her own grief from the death of her young mother environmentally - by escaping into the surrounding nature at night, by dabbling in the dark arts and sacrificing small animals. The two characters “have a lot to believe in and a lot of things to express – belief in zombies and ghosts, ritual death, drowning” (Cordaiy 42). As Boris Trbic (64) observes of the film’s characters, “communal and familial harmony is closely related to their intense perceptions of the natural world and their often distorted understanding of the ways their partners, friends and children cope with the grieving process.” Hence the legacy of trauma in Jindabyne is not limited to the young but pervades a community that must deal with unresolved ecologies no longer concealed by watery artifice. Backfilling works through unsettled aspects of country by moving, however unsteadily, toward healing and reconciliation. Within the aftermath of colonialism, 9/11 and the final years of the Howard era, Jindabyne uses race and place to foreground the “fallout” of an indigenous “condemnation to invisibility” and the “long years of neglect by the state” (Ryan 52). Claire’s unrelenting need to apologise to the indigenous family and Stuart’s final admission of impropriety are key gestures in the film’s “microcosm of reconciliation” (53), when “the notion of reconciliation, if it had occupied any substantial space in the public imagination, was largely gone” (Rundell 44). Likewise, the invisibility of Aboriginal significance has specificity in the Jindabyne area – indigeneity is absent from narratives recounting the Snowy Mountains Scheme which “recruited some 60,000 Europeans,” providing “a basis for Australia’s postwar multicultural society” (Lennon 15); both ‘schemes’ evidencing some of the “unrecognised implications” of colonialism for indigenous people (Curthoys 36). The fading of Aboriginal issues from public view and political discourse in the Howard era was serviced by the then governmental focus on “practical reconciliation” (Rundell 44), and post 9/11 by “the broad brushstrokes of western coalition and domestic political compliance” (Lambert, CMC 252), with its renewed focus on border control, and increased suspicion of non-Western, non-Anglo-European difference. Aftermath culture grapples with the country’s complicated multicultural and globalised self-understanding in and beyond Howard’s Australia and Jindabyne is one of a series of texts, along with “refugee plays” and Australian 9/11 novels, “that mobilised themselves against the Howard government” (Rundell 43-44). Although the film may well be seen as a “profoundly embarrassing” display of left-liberal “emotional politics” (44-45), it is precisely these politics that foreground aftermath: local neglect and invisibility, terror without and within, suspect American leadership and shaky Australian-American relations, the return of history through marked bodies and landscapes. Aftermath country is simultaneously local and global – both the disappearance and the ‘problem’ of Aboriginality post-Mabo and post-9/11 are backfilled by the traces and fragments of a hidden country that rises to the surface. Conclusion What can be made of this place now? What can we know about its piecemeal ecology, its choppy geomorphics and scarified townscapes? […] What can we make of the documents that have been generated in response to this country? (Gibson, Transformations). Amidst the apologies and potentialities of settler-indigenous recognition, the murdering electrician Gregory is left to roam the haunted alpine wilderness in Jindabyne. His allegorical presence in the landscape means there is work to be done before this badland can truly become something more. Gibson (Badland 178) suggests country gets “called bad […] partly because the law needs the outlaw for reassuring citizens that the unruly and the unknown can be named and contained even if they cannot be annihilated.” In Jindabyne the movement from backtracking to backfilling (as a speculative and fragmental approach to the bodies and landscapes of aftermath culture) undermines the institutional framing of country that still seeks to conceal shared historical, environmental and global trauma. The haunting of Jindabyne country undoes the ‘official’ production of outlaw/negative space and its discursively good double by realising the complexity of resurfacing – electricity is everywhere and the land is “uncanny” not in the least because “the town of Jindabyne itself is the living double of the drowned original” (Ryan 53). The imaginative backfill of Jindabyne reorients a confused, purgatorial Australia toward the “small light of home” (53) – the hope of one day being “in country,” and as Gibson (Badland 3) suggests, the “remembering,” that is “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands.” References Baird, Warwick, Brian Egloff and Rachel Lenehan. “Sharing the mountains: joint management of Australia’s alpine region with Aboriginal people.” historic environment 17.2 (2003): 32-36. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Cordaiy, Hunter. “Man, Woman and Death: Ray Lawrence on Jindabyne.” Metro 149 (2006): 38-42. Curthoys, Anne. “An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous.” Race Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Sydney, UNSW P, 2000. 21-36. Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness an Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1998. Gibson, Ross. Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. Gibson, Ross. “Places, Past, Disappearance.” Transformations 13 (2006). Aug. 11 2008 transformations.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Country.” M/C Journal 11.5 (this issue). Kitson, Michael. “Carver Country: Adapting Raymond Carver in Australia.” Metro150 (2006): 54-60. Lambert, Anthony. “Movement within a Filmic terra nullius: Woman, Land and Identity in Australian Cinema.” Balayi, Culture, Law and Colonialism 1.2 (2001): 7-17. Lambert, Anthony. “White Aborigines: Women, Mimicry, Mobility and Space.” Diasporas of Australian Cinema. Eds. Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, and Anthony Lambert. UK: Intellectbooks, 2009. Forthcoming. Lambert, Anthony. “Mediating Crime, Mediating Culture.” Crime, Media, Culture 4.2 (2008): 237-255. Lennon, Jane. “The cultural significance of Australian alpine areas.” Historic environment 17.2 (2003): 14-17. McFarlane, Brian. “Locations and Relocations: Jindabyne & MacBeth.” Metro Magazine 150 (Spring 2006): 10-15. McHugh, Siobhan. The Snowy: The People Behind the Power. William Heinemann Australia, 1999. http://www.mchugh.org/books/snowy.html. Read, Peter. Haunted Earth. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Rundle, Guy. “Goodbye to all that: The end of Australian left-liberalism and the revival of a radical politics.” Arena Magazine 88 (2007): 40-46. Ryan, Matthew. “On the treatment of non-indigenous belonging.” Arena Magazine 84 (2006): 52-53. Simpson, Catherine. “Reconfiguring Rusticity: feminizing Australian Cinema’s country towns’. Studies in Australasian Cinemas 2.1 (2008): forthcoming. Simpson, Catherine. “Antipodean Automobility & Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road.” Australian Humanities Review 39-40 (2006). http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2006/simpson.html. Trbic, Boris. “Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne: So Much Pain, So Close to Home.” Screen Education 44 (2006): 58–64. Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2005.

Critique of Ability In July 2008, we could be on the eve of an enormously important shift in disability in Australia. One sign of change is the entry into force on 3 May 2008 of the United Nations convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which will now be adopted by the Rudd Labor government. Through this, and other proposed measures, the Rudd government has indicated its desire for a seachange in the area of disability. Bill Shorten MP, the new Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services has been at pains to underline his commitment to a rights-based approach to disability. In this inaugural speech to Parliament, Senator Shorten declared: I believe the challenge for government is not to fit people with disabilities around programs but for programs to fit the lives, needs and ambitions of people with disabilities. The challenge for all of us is to abolish once and for all the second-class status that too often accompanies Australians living with disabilities. (Shorten, “Address in reply”; see also Shorten, ”Speaking up”) Yet if we listen to the voices of people with disability, we face fundamental issues of justice, democracy, equality and how we understand the deepest aspects of ourselves and our community. This is a situation that remains dire and palpably unjust, as many people with disabilities have attested. Elsewhere I have argued (Goggin and Newell) that disability constitutes a systemic form of exclusion and othering tantamount to a “social apartheid” . While there have been improvements and small gains since then, the system that reigns in Australia is still fundamentally oppressive. Nonetheless, I would suggest that through the rise of the many stranded movements of disability, the demographic, economic and social changes concerning impairment, we are seeing significant changes in how we understand impairment and ability (Barnes, Oliver and Barton; Goggin and Newell, Disability in Australia; Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson; Shakespeare; Stiker). There is now considerable, if still incomplete, recognition of disability as a category that is constituted through social, cultural, and political logics, as well as through complex facets of impairment, bodies (Corker and Shakespeare), experiences, discourses (Fulcher), and modes of materiality and subjectivity (Butler), identity and government (Tremain). Also there is growing awareness of the imbrication of disability and other categories such as sex and gender (Fine and Asch; Thomas), race, age, culture, class and distribution of wealth (Carrier; Cole; Davis, Bending over Backwards, and Enforcing Normalcy; Oliver; Rosenblum and Travis), ecology and war (Bourke; Gerber; Muir). There are rich and wide-ranging debates that offer fundamental challenges to the suffocating grip of the dominant biomedical model of disability (that conceives disability as individual deficit — for early critiques see: Borsay; Walker), as well as the still influential and important (if at times limiting) social model of disability (Oliver; Barnes and Mercer; Shakespeare). All in all,there have been many efforts to transform the social and political relations of disability. If disability has been subject to considerable examination, there has not yet been an extended, concomitant critique of ability. Nor have we witnessed a thoroughgoing recognition of unmarked, yet powerful operations of ability in our lives and thought, and the potential implications of challenging these. Certainly there have been important attempts to reframe the relationship between “ability” and “disability” (for example, see Jones and Mark). And we are all familiar with the mocking response to some neologisms that seek to capture this, such as the awkward yet pointed “differently-abled.” Despite such efforts we lack still a profound critique of ability, an exploration of “able”, the topic that this special issue invites us to consider. If we think of the impact and significance of “whiteness”, as a way to open up space for how to critically think about and change concepts of race; or of “masculinity” as a project for thinking about gender and sexuality — we can see that this interrogation of the unmarked category of “able” and “ability” is much needed (for one such attempt, see White). In this paper I would like to make a small contribution to such a critique of ability, by considering what the concept of innovation and its contemporary rhetorics have to offer for reframing disability. Innovation is an important discourse in contemporary life. It offers interesting possibilities for rethinking ability — and indeed disability. And it is this relatively unexplored prospect that this paper seeks to explore. Beyond Access, Equity & Diversity In this scene of disability, there is attention being given to making long over-due reforms. Yet the framing of many of these reforms, such as the strengthening of national and international legal frameworks, for instance, also carry with them considerable problems. Disability is too often still seen as something in need of remediation, or special treatment. Access, equity, and anti-discrimination frameworks offer important resources for challenging this “special” treatment, so too do the diversity approaches which have supplemented or supplanted them (Goggin and Newell, “Diversity as if Disability Mattered”). In what new ways can we approach disability and policies relevant to it? In a surprisingly wide range of areas, innovation has featured as a new, cross-sectoral approach. Innovation has been a long-standing topic in science, technology and economics. However, its emergence as master-theme comes from its ability to straddle and yoke together previously diverse fields. Current discussions of innovation bring together and extend work on the information society, the knowledge economy, and the relationships between science and technology. We are now familiar for instance with arguments about how digital networked information and communications technologies and their consumption are creating new forms of innovation (Benkler; McPherson; Passiante, Elia, and Massari). Innovation discourse has extended to many other unfamiliar realms too, notably the area of social and community development, where a new concept of social innovation is now proposed (Mulgan), often aligned with new ideas of social entrepreneurship that go beyond earlier accounts of corporate social responsibility. We can see the importance of innovation in the ‘creative industries’ discourses and initiatives which have emerged since the 1990s. Here previously distinct endeavours of arts and culture have become reframed in a way that puts their central achievement of creativity to the fore, and recognises its importance across all sorts of service and manufacturing industries, in particular. More recently, theorists of creative industries, such as Cunningham, have begun to talk about “social network markets,” as a way to understand the new hybrid of creativity, innovation, digital technology, and new economic logics now being constituted (Cunningham and Potts). Innovation is being regarded as a cardinal priority for societies and their governments. Accordingly, the Australian government has commissioned a Review of The National Innovation System, led by Dr Terry Cutler, due to report in the second half of 2008. The Cutler review is especially focussed upon gaps and weaknesses in the Australian innovation system. Disability has the potential to figure very strongly in this innovation talk, however there has been little discussion of disability in the innovation discourse to date. The significance of disability in relation to innovation was touched upon some years ago, in a report on Disablism from the UK Demos Foundation (Miller, Parker and Gillinson). In a chapter entitled “The engine of difference: disability, innovation and creativity,” the authors discuss the area of inclusive design, and make the argument for the “involvement of disabled people to create a stronger model of user design”:Disabled people represented a market of 8.6 million customers at the last count and their experiences aren’t yet feeding through into processes of innovation. But the role of disabled people as innovators can and should be more active; we should include disabled people in the design process because they are good at it. (57) There are two reasons given for this expertise of disabled people in design. Firstly, “disabled people are often outstanding problem solvers because they have to be … life for disabled people at the moment is a series of challenges to be overcome” (57). Secondly, “innovative ideas are more likely to come from those who have a new or different angle on old problems” (57). The paradox in this argument is that as life becomes more equitable for people with disabilities, then these ‘advantages’ should disappear” (58). Accordingly, Miller et al. make a qualified argument, namely that “greater participation of disabled people in innovation in the short term may just be the necessary trigger for creating an altogether different, and better, system of innovation for everyone in the future” (58). The Demos Disablism report was written at a time when rhetorics of innovation were just beginning to become more generalized and mainstream. This was also at a time in the UK, when there was hope that new critical approaches to disability would see it become embraced as a part of the diverse society that Blair’s New Labor Britain had been indicating. The argument Disablism offers about disability and innovation is in some ways a more formalized version of vernacular theory (McLaughlin, 1996). In the disability movement we often hear, with good reason, that people with disability, by dint of their experience and knowledge are well positioned to develop and offer particular kinds of expertise. However, Miller et al. also gesture towards a more generalized account of disability and innovation, one that would intersect with the emerging frameworks around innovation. It is this possibility that I wish to take up and briefly explore here. I want to consider the prospects for a fully-fledged encounter between disability and innovation. I would like to have a better sense of whether this is worth pursuing, and what it would add to our understanding of both disability and innovation? Would the disability perspective be integrated as a long-term part of our systems of innovation rather than, as Miller et al. imply, deployed temporarily to develop better innovation systems? What pitfalls might be bound up with, or indeed be the conditions of, such a union between disability and innovation? The All-Too-Able User A leading area where disability figures profoundly in innovation is in the field of technology — especially digital technology. There is now a considerable literature and body of practice on disability and digital technology (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability; National Council on Disability), however for my purposes here I would like to focus upon the user, the abilities ascribed to various kinds of users, and the user with disability in particular. Digital technologies are replete with challenges and opportunities; they are multi-layered, multi-media, and global in their manifestation and function. In Australia, Britain, Canada, the US, and Europe, there have been some significant digital technology initiatives which have resulted in improved accessibility for many users and populations (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; National Council on Disability) . There are a range of examples of ways in which users with disability are intervening and making a difference in design. There is also a substantial body of literature that clarifies why we need to include the perspective of the disabled if we are to be truly innovative in our design practices (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, “Disability, Identity and Interdependence”). I want to propose, however, that there is merit in going beyond recognition of the role of people with disability in technology design (vital and overlooked as it remains), to consider how disability can enrich contemporary discourses on innovation. There is a very desirable cross-over to be promoted between the emphasis on the user-as-expert in the sphere of disability and technology, and on the integral role of disability groups in the design process, on the one hand, and the rise of the user in digital culture generally, on the other. Surprisingly, such connections are nowhere near as widespread and systematic as they should be. It may be that contemporary debates about the user, and about the user as co-creator, or producer, of technology (Haddon et al.; von Hippel) actually reinstate particular notions of ability, and the able user, understood with reference to notions of disability. The current emphasis on the productive user, based as it is on changing understandings of ability and disability, provides rich material for critical revision of the field and those assumptions surrounding ability. It opens up possibilities for engaging more fully with disability and incorporating disability into the new forms and relations of digital technology that celebrate the user (Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability). While a more detailed consideration of these possibilities require more time than this essay allows, let us consider for a moment the idea of a genuine encounter between the activated user springing from the disability movement, and the much feted user in contemporary digital culture and theories of innovation. People with disability are using these technologies in innovative ways, so have much to contribute to wider discussions of digital technology (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra). The Innovation Turn Innovation policy, the argument goes, is important because it stands to increase productivity, which in turn leads to greater international competitiveness and economic benefit. Especially with the emergence of capitalism (Gleeson), productivity has strong links to particular notions of which types of production and produce are valued. Productivity is also strongly conditioned by how we understand ability and, last in a long chain of strong associations, how we as a society understand and value those kinds of people and bodies believed to contain and exercise the ordained and rewarded types of ability, produce, and productivity. Disability is often seen as antithetical to productivity (a revealing text on the contradictions of disability and productivity is the 2004 Productivity Commission Review of the Disability Discrimination Act). When we think about the history of disability, we quickly realize that productivity, and by extension, innovation, are strongly ideological. Ideological, that is, in the sense that these fields of human endeavour and our understanding of them are shaped by power relations, and are built upon implicit ‘ableist’ assumptions about productivity. In this case, the power relations of disability go right to the heart of the matter, highlighting who and what are perceived to be of value, contributing economically and in other ways to society, and who and what are considered as liabilities, as less valued and uneconomical. A stark recent example of this is the Howard government workplace and welfare reforms, which further disenfranchised, controlled, and impoverished people with disability. If we need to rethink our ideas of productivity and ability in the light of new notions of disability, then so too do we need to rethink our ideas about innovation and disability. Here the new discourses of innovation may actually be useful, but also contain limited formulations and assumptions about ability and disability that need to be challenged. The existing problems of a fresh approach to disability and innovation can be clearly observed in the touchstones of national science and technology “success.” Beyond One-Sided Innovation Disability does actually feature quite prominently in the annals of innovation. Take, for instance, the celebrated case of the so-called “bionic ear” (or cochlear implant) hailed as one of Australia’s great scientific inventions of the past few decades. This is something we can find on display in the Powerhouse Museum of Technology and Design, in Sydney. Yet the politics of the cochlear implant are highly controversial, not least as it is seen by many (for instance, large parts of the Deaf community) as not involving people with disabilities, nor being informed by their desires (Campbell, also see “Social and Ethical Aspects of Cochlear Implants”). A key problem with the cochlear implant and many other technologies is that they are premised on the abolition or overcoming of disability — rather than being shaped as technology that acknowledges and is informed by disabled users in their diverse guises. The failure to learn the lessons of the cochlear implant for disability and innovation can be seen in the fact that we are being urged now to band together to support the design of a “bionic eye” by the year 2020, as a mark of distinction of achieving a great nation (2020 Summit Initial Report). Again, there is no doubting the innovation and achievement in these artefacts and their technological systems. But their development has been marked by a distinct lack of consultation and engagement with people with disabilities; or rather the involvement has been limited to a framework that positions them as passive users of technology, rather than as “producer/users”. Further, what notions of disability and ability are inscribed in these technological systems, and what do they represent and symbolize in the wider political and social field? Unfortunately, such technologies have the effect of reproducing an ableist framework, “enforcing normalcy” (Davis), rather than building in, creating and contributing to new modes of living, which embrace difference and diversity. I would argue that this represents a one-sided logic of innovation. A two-sided logic of innovation, indeed what we might call a double helix (at least) of innovation would be the sustained, genuine interaction between different users, different notions of ability, disability and impairment, and the processes of design. If such a two-sided (or indeed many-sided logic) is to emerge there is good reason to think it could more easily do so in the field of digital cultures and technologies, than say, biotechnology. The reason for this is the emphasis in digital communication technologies on decentralized, participatory, user-determined governance and design, coming from many sources. Certainly this productive, democratic, participatory conception of the user is prevalent in Internet cultures. Innovation here is being reshaped to harness the contribution and knowledge of users, and could easily be extended to embrace pioneering efforts in disability. Innovating with Disability In this paper I have tried to indicate why it is productive for discourses of innovation to consider disability; the relationship between disability and innovation is rich and complex, deserving careful elaboration and interrogation. In suggesting this, I am aware that there are also fundamental problems that innovation raises in its new policy forms. There are the issues of what is at stake when the state is redefining its traditional obligations towards citizens through innovation frameworks and discourses. And there is the troubling question of whether particular forms of activity are normatively judged to be innovative — whereas other less valued forms are not seen as innovative. By way of conclusion, however, I would note that there are now quite basic, and increasingly accepted ways, to embed innovation in design frameworks, and while they certainly have been adopted in the disability and technology area, there is much greater scope for this. However, a few things do need to change before this potential for disability to enrich innovation is adequately realized. Firstly, we need further research and theorization to clarify the contribution of disability to innovation, work that should be undertaken and directed by people with disability themselves. Secondly, there is a lack of resources for supporting disability and technology organisations, and the development of training and expertise in this area (especially to provide viable career paths for experts with disability to enter the field and sustain their work). If this is addressed, the economic benefits stand to be considerable, not to mention the implications for innovation and productivity. Thirdly, we need to think about how we can intensify existing systems of participatory design, or, better still, introduce new user-driven approaches into strategically important places in the design processes of ICTs (and indeed in the national innovation system). Finally, there is an opportunity for new approaches to governance in ICTs at a general level, informed by disability. New modes of organising, networking, and governance associated with digital technology have attracted much attention, also featuring recently in the Australia 2020 Summit. Less well recognised are new ideas about governance that come from the disability community, such as the work of Queensland Advocacy Incorporated, Rhonda Galbally’s Our Community, disability theorists such as Christopher Newell (Newell), or the Canadian DIS-IT alliance (see, for instance, Stienstra). The combination of new ideas in governance from digital culture, new ideas from the disability movement and disability studies, and new approaches to innovation could be a very powerful cocktail indeed.Dedication This paper is dedicated to my beloved friend and collaborator, Professor Christopher Newell AM (1964-2008), whose extraordinary legacy will inspire us all to continue exploring and questioning the idea of able. 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Introduction The public sphere includes a range of credible discourses asserting that a proportion of teenagers (“teens”) has an unhealthy dependence upon continuous connection with media devices, and especially smartphones. A review of media discourse (Jaunzems et al.) in Australia, and a critical review of public discourse in Australia and Belgium (Zaman et al.), reveal both positive and negative commentary around screentime. Despite the “emotionally laden, opposing views” expressed in the media, there appears to be a groundswell of concern around young people’s dependence upon digital devices (Zaman et al. 120). Concerns about ‘addiction’ to and dependency on digital media first emerged with the Internet and have been continually represented as technology evolves. One recent example is the 2020 multi-part Massey Lecture series which hooked audiences with the provocative title: “we need to reclaim our lives from our phones” (Deibert). In Sydney, a psychology-based “outpatient addiction treatment centre” offers specialised recovery programs for “Internet addiction”, noting that addicts include school-aged teens, as well as adults (Cabin). Such discourse reflects well-established social anxieties around the disruptive impacts of new technologies upon society (Marvin), while focussing such concern disproportionately upon the lives, priorities, and activities of young people (Tsaliki and Chronaki). While a growing peer-reviewed evidence base suggests some young people have problematic relationships with digital media (e.g. Odgers and Robb; Donald et al.; Gaspard; Tóth-Király et al.; Boer et al.), there are also opposing views (e.g. Vuorre et al.) Ben Light, for instance, highlights the notion of disconnection as a set of practices that include using some platforms and not others, unfriending, and selective anonymity (Light). We argue that this version of disconnection and what we refer to as ‘detox’ are two different practices. Detox, as we use it, is the regular removal of elements of lived experience (such as food consumption) that may be enjoyable but which potentially have negative consequences over time, before (potentially) reintroducing the element or pratice. The aims of a detox include ensuring greater control over the enjoyable experience while, at the same time, reducing exposure to possible harm. There is a lack of specific research that unequivocally asserts young people’s unhealthy dependence upon smartphones. Nonetheless, there appears to be a growing public belief in the efficacy of “the detox” (Beyond Blue) or “unplugging” (Shlain). We argue that a teen’s commitment to regular smartphone abstinence is non-fungible with ‘as and when’ smartphone use. In other words, there is a significant, ineluctable and non-trivial difference between the practice of regularly disconnecting from a smartphone at a certain point of the day, or for a specified period in the week, compared with the same amount of time ‘off’ the device which is a haphazard, as and when, doing something else, type of practice. We posit that recurrent periods of smartphone abstinence, equating to a regular detox, might support more balanced, healthy and empowered smartphone use. Repeated abstinence in this case differs from the notion of the disconnected holiday, where a person might engage in irregular smartphone withdrawal during an annual holiday, for example (Traveltalk; Hoving; Stäheli and Stoltenberg). Such abstinence does have widespread historical and cultural resonance, however, as in the fasting practices of Islam (the month of Ramadan), the Christian season of Lent, and the holy Hindu month of Śravaṇa. Where prolonged periods of fasting are supplemented by weekly or holy-day fasts, they may be reprised with a regularity that brings the practice closer to the scheduled pattern of abstinence that we see as non-fungible with an unstructured as-and-when approach. An extreme example of the long fast and intermittent fast days is offered by the traditional practices of the Greek Orthodox church, whose teachings recommend fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays as well as on religious holy days. With the inclusion of Lent, Greek Orthodox fasting practices can comprise 180 fast days per year: that’s about half of available days. As yet, there is no coherent evidence base supporting the benefits of regular intermittent disconnection. The Australian mental health Website Beyond Blue, which asserts the value of digital detox, cannot find a stronger authority to underpin a practice of withdrawal than “Research from Deloitte’s annual Mobile Consumer Survey report” which indicates that “44 per cent of people in Australia think their phone use is a problem and are trying to reduce how much time they spend on it” (Beyond Blue). Academic literature that addresses these areas by drawing on more than personal experience and anecdote is scarce to non-existent. Insofar as such studies exist over the past decade, from Maushart to Leonowicz-Bukała et al., they are irregular experiments which do not commit to repeated periods of disconnection. This article is a call to investigate the possibly non-fungible benefits of teens’ regularly practicing smartphone disconnection. It argues that there is actual evidence which is yet to be collected. New knowledge in this area may provide a compelling dataset that suggests verifiable benefits for the non-fungible practice of regular smartphone disconnection. We believe that there are teenagers, parents and communities willing to trial appropriate interventions over a significant period of time to establish ‘before’ and ‘after’ case studies. The evidence for these opinions is laid out in the sections that follow. Teens’ Experiences of Media, Smartphone, and Other Cultural Dis/connection In 2018, the Pew Research Center in the US surveyed teens about their experiences of social media, updating elements of an earlier study from 2014-15. They found that almost all (95%) the 743 teens in the study, aged between 13 and 17 when they were surveyed in March-April 2018, had or had access to a smartphone (Anderson and Jiang). A more recent report from 2021 notes that 88% of US teenagers, aged 13-18, have their own smartphone (Common Sense Media 22). What is more, this media use survey indicates that American teens have increased their screen entertainment time from 7 hours, 22 minutes per day in 2019 to 8 hours, 39 minutes per day in 2021 (Common Sense Media 3). Lee argues that, on average, mobile phone users in Australia touch their phones 2,617 times a day. In Sweden, a 2019 study of youth aged 15-24 noted a pervasive concern regarding the logical assumption “that offline time is influenced and adapted when people spend an increasing amount of time online” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 41). These authors critique the overarching theory of young people comprising a homogenous group of ‘digital natives’ by identifying different categories of light, medium, and heavy users of ICT. They say that the “variation in use is large, indicating that responses to ubiquitous ICT access are highly diverse rather than homogenously determined” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 48). The practice or otherwise of regular periods of smartphone disconnection is a further potential differentiator of teens’ digital experiences. Any investigation into these areas of difference should help indicate ways in which teens may or may not achieve comparatively more or less control over their smartphone use. Lee argues that in Australia “teens who spend five or more hours per day on their devices have a 71% higher risk factor for suicide”. Twenge and Campbell (311) used “three large surveys of adolescents in two countries (n = 221,096)” to explore differences between ‘light users’ of digital media (<1 hour per day) and ‘heavy users’ (5+ hours per day). They use their data to argue that “heavy users (vs. light) of digital media were 48% to 171% more likely to be unhappy, to be low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or past suicide attempts” (Twenge and Campbell 311). Notably, Livingstone among others argues that emotive assertions such as these tend to ignore the nuance of significant bodies of research (Livingstone, about Twenge). Even so, it is plausible that teens’ online activities interpolate both positively and negatively upon their offline activities. The capacity to disconnect, however, to disengage from smartphone use at will, potentially allows a teen more opportunity for individual choice impacting both positive and negative experiences. As boyd argued in 2014: “it’s complicated”. The Pew findings from 2018 indicate that teens’ positive comments about social media use include: 81% “feel more connected to their friends”; 69% “think it helps [them] interact with a more diverse group of people”; and 68% “feel as if they have people who will support them through tough times.” (Anderson and Jiang) The most numerous negative comments address how of all teens: 45% “feel overwhelmed by all the drama there”; 43% “feel pressure to only post content that makes them look good to others”; and 37% “feel pressure to post content that will get a lot of likes and comments.” (Anderson and Jiang) It is notable that these three latter points relate to teens’ vulnerabilities around others’ opinions of themselves and the associated rollercoaster of emotions these opinions may cause. They resonate with Ciarrochi et al.’s argument that different kinds of Internet activity impact different issues of control, with more social forms of digital media associated with young females’ higher “compulsive internet use […] and worse mental health than males” (276). What is not known, because it has never been investigated, is whether any benefits flowing from regular smartphone disconnection might have a gendered dimension. If there is specific value in a capacity to disconnect regularly, separating that experience from haphazard episodes of connection and disconnection, regular disconnection may also enhance the quality of smartphone engagement. Potentially, the power to turn off their smartphone when the going got tough might allow young people to feel greater control over their media use while being less susceptible to the drama and compulsion of digital engagement. As one 17-year-old told the Pew researchers, possibly ruefully, “[teens] would rather go scrolling on their phones instead of doing their homework, and it’s so easy to do so. It’s just a huge distraction” (Anderson and Jiang). Few cultural contexts support teens’ regular and repeated disengagement from smartphones, but Icelandic society, Orthodox Judaism and the comparatively common practice of overnight disconnection from smartphone use may offer helpful indications of possible benefits. Cross-Cultural and Religious Interventions in Smartphone Use Concern around teens’ smartphone use, as described above, is typically applied to young people whose smartphone use constitutes an integral part of everyday life. The untangling of such interconnection would benefit from being both comparative and experimental. Our suggestions follow. Iceland has, in the past, adopted what Karlsson and Broddason term “a paternalistic cultural conservatism” (1). Legislators concerned about the social impacts of television deferred the introduction of Icelandic broadcasting for many years, beyond the time that most other European nations offered television services. Program offerings were expanded in a gradual way after the 1966 beginnings of Iceland’s public television broadcasting. As Karlsson and Broddason note, “initially the transmission hours were limited to only a few hours in the evening, three days a week and a television-free month in July. The number of transmission days was increased to six within a few years, still with a television-free month in July until 1983 and television-free Thursdays until 1987” (6). Interestingly, the nation is still open to social experimentation on a grand scale. In the 1990s, for example, in response to significant substance abuse by Icelandic teens, the country implemented an interventionist whole-of-Iceland public health program: the Icelandic Prevention Model (Kristjansson et al.). Social experimentation on a smaller scale remains part of the Icelandic cultural fabric. More recently, between 2015 and 2019, Iceland ran a successful social experiment whereby 1% of the working population worked a shorter work week for full time pay. The test was deemed successful because “workers were able to work less, get paid the same, while maintaining productivity and improving personal well-being” (Lau and Sigurdardottir). A number of self-governing Icelandic villages operate a particularly inclusive form of consultative local democracy enabling widespread buy-in for social experiments. Two or more such communities are likely to be interested in trialling an intervention study if there is a plausible reason to believe that the intervention may make a positive difference to teens’ (and others’) experiences of smartphone use. Those plausible reasons might be indicated by observational data from other people’s everyday practices. One comparatively common everyday practice which has yet to be systematically investigated from the perspective of evaluating the possible impacts of regular disconnection is that practiced by families who leave connected media outside the bedroom at night-time. These families are in the habit of putting their phones on to charge, usually in a shared space such as a kitchen or lounge room, and not referring to them again until a key point in the morning: when they are dressed, for example, or ready to leave the house. It is plausible to believe that such families might feel they have greater control over smartphone use than a family who didn’t adopt a regular practice of smartphone disconnection. According to social researchers in the Nordic nations, including co-authors Kjartan Ólafsson and Elisabeth Staksrud, it is likely that an Icelandic community will be keen to trial this experience of regular smartphone disconnection for a period of six months or more, if that trial went hand in hand with a rigorous evaluation of impact. Some religious communities offer a less common exemplar for teens’ regular disconnection from their smartphone. Young people in these communities may suspend their smartphone (and other media use) for just over a full day per week to focus on deepening their engagement with family and friends, and to support their spiritual development. Notable among such examples are teenagers who identify as members of the Orthodox Jewish faith. Their religious practices include withdrawing from technological engagement as part of the observance of Shabbat (the Sabbath): at least, that’s the theory. For the past ten years or so in Australia there has been a growing concern over some otherwise-Orthodox Jewish teens’ practice of the “half-Shabbat,” in which an estimated 17-50% of this cohort secretly use digital media for some time during their 25 hours of mandated abstinence. As one teacher from an Orthodox high school argues, “to not have access to the phone, it’s like choking off their air” (Telushikin). Interestingly, many Jewish teens who privately admit practicing half-Shabbat envision themselves as moving towards full observance in adulthood: they can see benefits in a wholehearted commitment to disengagement, even if it’s hard to disengage fully at this point in their lives. Hadlington et al.’s article “I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]” similarly evokes a broader community crisis around children’s dependence on digital media, noting that many children aged 8-12 have a tablet of their own before moving onto smartphone ownership in their teens (Common Sense Media 22). We appreciate that not every society has children and young people who are highly networked and integrated within digital dataflows. Nonetheless, while constant smartphone connectivity might appear to be a ‘first world problem’, preparing teens to be adults with optimal choice over their smartphone use includes identifying and promoting support for conscious disengagement from media as and when a young person wishes. Such a perspective aligns with promoting young people’s rights in digital contexts by interrogating the possible benefits of regularly disconnecting from digital media. Those putative benefits may be indicated by investigating perspectives around smartphone use held by Orthodox Jewish teenagers and comparing them with those held by teens who follow a liberal Jewish faith: liberal Jewish teens use smartphones in ways that resonate with broader community teens. A comparison of these two groups, suggests co-author Lynne Cohen, may indicate differences that can (in part) be attributed to Orthodox Jewish practices of digital disconnection, compared with liberal Jewish practices that don’t include disconnection. If smartphone disconnection has the potential to offer non-fungible benefits, it is incumbent upon researchers to investigate the possible advantages and drawbacks of such practices. That can be done through the comparative investigation of current practice as outlined above, and via an experimental intervention for approximately six months with a second Icelandic/Nordic community. The Potential Value of Investigating the (Non-)Fungibility of Digital Engagement and Digital Inactivity The overarching hypothesis addressed in this article is that a lived experience of regular smartphone disconnection may offer teenagers the opportunity to feel more in control of their personal technologies. Such a perspective aligns with many established media theories. These theories include the domestication of technology and its integration into daily life, helping to explain the struggle teens experience in detaching from digital media once they have become a fundamental element of their routine. Domestication theory asserts that technology moves from novelty to an integral aspect of everyday experience (Berker et al.). Displacement theory asserts that young people whose lives are replete with digital media may have substituted that media use for other activities enjoyed by the generations that grew up before them, while boyd offers an alternative suggestion that digital media add to, rather than displace, teens’ activities in daily contexts. Borrowing inputs from other disciplinary traditions, theories around mindfulness are increasingly robust and evidence-based, asserting that “attentiveness to what is present appears to yield corrective and curative benefits in its own right” (Brown et al. 1). Constant attention to digital media may be a distraction from mindful engagement with the lived environment. A detailed study of the non-fungible character of smartphone disconnection practices might offer an evidence base to support suggestions, such as those proffered by Beyond Blue, that a digital detox benefits mental health, resilience, and sociality. Such information might support initiatives by schools and other organisations central to the lives of teenagers to institute regular digital disconnection regimes, akin to Iceland’s experiments with television-free Thursdays. These innovations could build upon aligned social initiatives such as “no email Fridays” (Horng), which have been trialled in business contexts. Further, studies such as those outlined above could add authority to recommendations for parents, educators, and caregivers such as those recommendations contained in papers on the Common Sense Media site, for example, including Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health (Odgers and Robb) and Device-Free Dinners (Robb). Relevantly, the results from such observational and intervention studies would address the post-COVID era when parents and others will be considering how best to support a generation of children who went online earlier, and more often, than any generation before them. These results might also align with work towards early-stage adoption of the United Nations’ General Comment No. 25 on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment (UNCRC). If so, an investigation into the fungibility or otherwise of digital abstention could contribute to the national and international debate about the rights of young people to make informed decisions around when to connect, and when to disconnect, from engagement via a smartphone. References Anderson, Monica, and Jingjing Jiang. "Teens’ Social Media Habits and Experiences." Pew Research Center 28 Nov. 2018. <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/11/28/teens-social-media-habits-and-experiences/>. Berker, Thomas, Maren Hartmann, and Yves Punie. Domestication of Media and Technology. McGraw-Hill Education, 2005. Beyond Blue. “The Benefits of a Digital Detox: Unplugging from Digital Technology Can Have Tremendous Benefits on Body and Mind.” Beyond Blue, n.d. <https://www.beyondblue.org.au/personal-best/pillar/wellbeing/the-benefits-of-a-digital-detox>. Boer, Maartje, Gonneke W.J.M. Stevens, Catrin Finkenauer, Margaretha E. de Looze, and Regina J.J.M. van den Eijnden. “Social Media Use Intensity, Social Media Use Problems, and Mental Health among Adolescents: Investigating Directionality and Mediating Processes.” Computers in Human Behavior 116 (Mar. 2021): 106645. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106645>. boyd, danah. It’s Complicated : The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Yale University Press, 2014. <http://www.danah.org/books/ItsComplicated.pdf>. Brown, Kirk Warren, J. David Creswell, and Richard M. Ryan. “The Evolution of Mindfulness Science.” Handbook of Mindfulness : Theory, Research, and Practice, eds. Kirk Warren Brown et al. Guilford Press, 2016. Cabin, The. “Internet Addiction Treatment Center.” The Cabin, 2020. <https://www.thecabinsydney.com.au/internet-addiction-treatment/>. Ciarrochi, Joseph, Philip Parker, Baljinder Sahdra, Sarah Marshall, Chris Jackson, Andrew T. Gloster, and Patrick Heaven. “The Development of Compulsive Internet Use and Mental Health: A Four-Year Study of Adolescence.” Developmental Psychology 52.2 (2016): 272. Common Sense Media. "The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021". <https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/8-18-census-integrated-report-final-web_0.pdf>. Deibert, Ron. “Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society.” 2020 Massey Lectures. CBC Radio. 7 Feb. 2022 <https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/reset-reclaiming-the-internet-for-civil-society-1.5795345>. Donald, James N., Joseph Ciarrochi, and Baljinder K. Sahdra. "The Consequences of Compulsion: A 4-Year Longitudinal Study of Compulsive Internet Use and Emotion Regulation Difficulties." Emotion (2020). Gaspard, Luke. “Australian High School Students and Their Internet Use: Perceptions of Opportunities versus ‘Problematic Situations.’” Children Australia 45.1 (Mar. 2020): 54–63. <https://doi.org/10.1017/cha.2020.2>. Hadlington, Lee, Hannah White, and Sarah Curtis. "‘I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]’: Children's Experiences of Using Tablet Technology within the Home." Computers in Human Behavior 94 (2019): 19-24. Horng, Eric. “No-E-Mail Fridays Transform Office.” ABC News [US], 4 Aug. 2007. <https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2939232&page=1>. Hoving, Kristel. “Digital Detox Tourism: Why Disconnect? : What Are the Motives of Dutch Tourists to Undertake a Digital Detox Holiday?” Undefined, 2017. <https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Digital-Detox-Tourism%3A-Why-disconnect-%3A-What-are-of-Hoving/17503393a5f184ae0a5f9a2ed73cd44a624a9de8>. Jaunzems, Kelly, Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, and Kylie Stevenson. “Very Young Children Online: Media Discourse and Parental Practice.” Digitising Early Childhood. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, <https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013/7550>. Karlsson, Ragnar, and Thorbjörn Broddason. Between the Market and the Public: Content Provision and Scheduling of Public and Private TV in Iceland. Kristjansson, Alfgeir L., Michael J. Mann, Jon Sigfusson, Ingibjorg E. Thorisdottir, John P. Allegrante, and Inga Dora Sigfusdottir. “Development and Guiding Principles of the Icelandic Model for Preventing Adolescent Substance Use.” Health Promotion Practice 21.1 (Jan. 2020): 62–69. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1524839919849032>. Lau, Virginia, and Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir. “The Shorter Work Week Really Worked in Iceland: Here’s How.” Time, 2021. <https://time.com/6106962/shorter-work-week-iceland/>. Lee, James. “16 Smartphone Statistics Australia Should Take Note Of (2021).” Smartphone Statistics Australia, 2022. <https://whatasleep.com.au/blog/smartphone-statistics-australia/>. Leonowicz-Bukała, Iwona, Anna Martens, and Barbara Przywara. "Digital Natives Disconnected. The Qualitative Research on Mediatized Life of Polish and International Students in Rzeszow and Warsaw, Poland." Przegląd Badań Edukacyjnych (Educational Studies Review) 35.2 (2021): 69-96. Light, Ben. Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Livingstone, Sonia. "iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood." Journal of Children and Media, 12.1 (2018): 118–123. <https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2017.1417091>. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New : Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford UP, 1990. Maushart, Susan. The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale. Penguin, 2011. Odgers, Candice L., and Michael Robb. “Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health: Coming of Age in an Increasingly Digital, Uncertain, and Unequal World.” Common Sense Media, 2020. <https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/tweens-teens-tech-and-mental-health>. Robb, Michael. “Why Device-Free Dinners Are a Healthy Choice.” Common Sense Media, 4 Aug. 2016. <https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/why-device-free-dinners-are-a-healthy-choice>. Shlain, Tiffany. “Tech’s Best Feature: The Off Switch.” Harvard Business Review, 1 Mar. 2013. <https://hbr.org/2013/03/techs-best-feature-the-off-swi>. Stäheli, Urs, and Luise Stoltenberg. “Digital Detox Tourism: Practices of Analogization.” New Media & Society (Jan. 2022). <https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211072808>. Telushikin, Shira. “Modern Orthodox Teens Can’t Put Down Their Phones on Shabbat.” Tablet Magazine, 12 Sep. 2014. <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/shabbat-phones>. Thulin, Eva, and Bertil Vilhelmson. “More at Home, More Alone? Youth, Digital Media and the Everyday Use of Time and Space.” Geoforum 100 (Mar. 2019): 41–50. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.02.010>. Tóth-Király, István, Alexandre J.S. Morin, Lauri Hietajärvi, and Katariina Salmela‐Aro. “Longitudinal Trajectories, Social and Individual Antecedents, and Outcomes of Problematic Internet Use among Late Adolescents.” Child Development 92.4 (2021): e653–73. <https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13525>. Traveltalk. “The Rise of Digital Detox Holidays and Tech-Free Tourism.” Traveltalk, 2018. <https://www.traveltalkmag.com.au/blog/articles/the-rise-of-digital-detox-holidays-and-tech-free-tourism>. Tsaliki, Liza, and Despina Chronaki. Discourses of Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across Cultures. 1st ed. Springer International Publishing, 2020. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46436-3>. Twenge, Jean M. iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood – and What That Means for the Rest of Us. Simon and Schuster, 2017. Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith Campbell. “Media Use Is Linked to Lower Psychological Well-Being: Evidence from Three Datasets.” The Psychiatric Quarterly 90.2 (2019): 311-331. <https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-019-09630-7>. UNCRC. "General Comment No. 25 (2021) on Children's Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment." United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2 Mar. 2021. <https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-25-2021-childrens-rights-relation>. Vuorre, Matti, Amy Orben, and Andrew K. Przybylski. “There Is No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents’ Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased.” Clinical Psychological Science 9.5 (Sep. 2021): 823–35. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702621994549>. Zaman, Bieke, Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, Kelly Jaunzems, and Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe. “Opposing Narratives about Children’s Digital Media Use: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Online Public Advice Given to Parents in Australia and Belgium:” Media International Australia (May 2020). <https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X20916950>.

Introduction The public sphere includes a range of credible discourses asserting that a proportion of teenagers (“teens”) has an unhealthy dependence upon continuous connection with media devices, and especially smartphones. A review of media discourse (Jaunzems et al.) in Australia, and a critical review of public discourse in Australia and Belgium (Zaman et al.), reveal both positive and negative commentary around screentime. Despite the “emotionally laden, opposing views” expressed in the media, there appears to be a groundswell of concern around young people’s dependence upon digital devices (Zaman et al. 120). Concerns about ‘addiction’ to and dependency on digital media first emerged with the Internet and have been continually represented as technology evolves. One recent example is the 2020 multi-part Massey Lecture series which hooked audiences with the provocative title: “we need to reclaim our lives from our phones” (Deibert). In Sydney, a psychology-based “outpatient addiction treatment centre” offers specialised recovery programs for “Internet addiction”, noting that addicts include school-aged teens, as well as adults (Cabin). Such discourse reflects well-established social anxieties around the disruptive impacts of new technologies upon society (Marvin), while focussing such concern disproportionately upon the lives, priorities, and activities of young people (Tsaliki and Chronaki). While a growing peer-reviewed evidence base suggests some young people have problematic relationships with digital media (e.g. Odgers and Robb; Donald et al.; Gaspard; Tóth-Király et al.; Boer et al.), there are also opposing views (e.g. Vuorre et al.) Ben Light, for instance, highlights the notion of disconnection as a set of practices that include using some platforms and not others, unfriending, and selective anonymity (Light). We argue that this version of disconnection and what we refer to as ‘detox’ are two different practices. Detox, as we use it, is the regular removal of elements of lived experience (such as food consumption) that may be enjoyable but which potentially have negative consequences over time, before (potentially) reintroducing the element or pratice. The aims of a detox include ensuring greater control over the enjoyable experience while, at the same time, reducing exposure to possible harm. There is a lack of specific research that unequivocally asserts young people’s unhealthy dependence upon smartphones. Nonetheless, there appears to be a growing public belief in the efficacy of “the detox” (Beyond Blue) or “unplugging” (Shlain). We argue that a teen’s commitment to regular smartphone abstinence is non-fungible with ‘as and when’ smartphone use. In other words, there is a significant, ineluctable and non-trivial difference between the practice of regularly disconnecting from a smartphone at a certain point of the day, or for a specified period in the week, compared with the same amount of time ‘off’ the device which is a haphazard, as and when, doing something else, type of practice. We posit that recurrent periods of smartphone abstinence, equating to a regular detox, might support more balanced, healthy and empowered smartphone use. Repeated abstinence in this case differs from the notion of the disconnected holiday, where a person might engage in irregular smartphone withdrawal during an annual holiday, for example (Traveltalk; Hoving; Stäheli and Stoltenberg). Such abstinence does have widespread historical and cultural resonance, however, as in the fasting practices of Islam (the month of Ramadan), the Christian season of Lent, and the holy Hindu month of Śravaṇa. Where prolonged periods of fasting are supplemented by weekly or holy-day fasts, they may be reprised with a regularity that brings the practice closer to the scheduled pattern of abstinence that we see as non-fungible with an unstructured as-and-when approach. An extreme example of the long fast and intermittent fast days is offered by the traditional practices of the Greek Orthodox church, whose teachings recommend fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays as well as on religious holy days. With the inclusion of Lent, Greek Orthodox fasting practices can comprise 180 fast days per year: that’s about half of available days. As yet, there is no coherent evidence base supporting the benefits of regular intermittent disconnection. The Australian mental health Website Beyond Blue, which asserts the value of digital detox, cannot find a stronger authority to underpin a practice of withdrawal than “Research from Deloitte’s annual Mobile Consumer Survey report” which indicates that “44 per cent of people in Australia think their phone use is a problem and are trying to reduce how much time they spend on it” (Beyond Blue). Academic literature that addresses these areas by drawing on more than personal experience and anecdote is scarce to non-existent. Insofar as such studies exist over the past decade, from Maushart to Leonowicz-Bukała et al., they are irregular experiments which do not commit to repeated periods of disconnection. This article is a call to investigate the possibly non-fungible benefits of teens’ regularly practicing smartphone disconnection. It argues that there is actual evidence which is yet to be collected. New knowledge in this area may provide a compelling dataset that suggests verifiable benefits for the non-fungible practice of regular smartphone disconnection. We believe that there are teenagers, parents and communities willing to trial appropriate interventions over a significant period of time to establish ‘before’ and ‘after’ case studies. The evidence for these opinions is laid out in the sections that follow. Teens’ Experiences of Media, Smartphone, and Other Cultural Dis/connection In 2018, the Pew Research Center in the US surveyed teens about their experiences of social media, updating elements of an earlier study from 2014-15. They found that almost all (95%) the 743 teens in the study, aged between 13 and 17 when they were surveyed in March-April 2018, had or had access to a smartphone (Anderson and Jiang). A more recent report from 2021 notes that 88% of US teenagers, aged 13-18, have their own smartphone (Common Sense Media 22). What is more, this media use survey indicates that American teens have increased their screen entertainment time from 7 hours, 22 minutes per day in 2019 to 8 hours, 39 minutes per day in 2021 (Common Sense Media 3). Lee argues that, on average, mobile phone users in Australia touch their phones 2,617 times a day. In Sweden, a 2019 study of youth aged 15-24 noted a pervasive concern regarding the logical assumption “that offline time is influenced and adapted when people spend an increasing amount of time online” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 41). These authors critique the overarching theory of young people comprising a homogenous group of ‘digital natives’ by identifying different categories of light, medium, and heavy users of ICT. They say that the “variation in use is large, indicating that responses to ubiquitous ICT access are highly diverse rather than homogenously determined” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 48). The practice or otherwise of regular periods of smartphone disconnection is a further potential differentiator of teens’ digital experiences. Any investigation into these areas of difference should help indicate ways in which teens may or may not achieve comparatively more or less control over their smartphone use. Lee argues that in Australia “teens who spend five or more hours per day on their devices have a 71% higher risk factor for suicide”. Twenge and Campbell (311) used “three large surveys of adolescents in two countries (n = 221,096)” to explore differences between ‘light users’ of digital media (<1 hour per day) and ‘heavy users’ (5+ hours per day). They use their data to argue that “heavy users (vs. light) of digital media were 48% to 171% more likely to be unhappy, to be low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or past suicide attempts” (Twenge and Campbell 311). Notably, Livingstone among others argues that emotive assertions such as these tend to ignore the nuance of significant bodies of research (Livingstone, about Twenge). Even so, it is plausible that teens’ online activities interpolate both positively and negatively upon their offline activities. The capacity to disconnect, however, to disengage from smartphone use at will, potentially allows a teen more opportunity for individual choice impacting both positive and negative experiences. As boyd argued in 2014: “it’s complicated”. The Pew findings from 2018 indicate that teens’ positive comments about social media use include: 81% “feel more connected to their friends”; 69% “think it helps [them] interact with a more diverse group of people”; and 68% “feel as if they have people who will support them through tough times.” (Anderson and Jiang) The most numerous negative comments address how of all teens: 45% “feel overwhelmed by all the drama there”; 43% “feel pressure to only post content that makes them look good to others”; and 37% “feel pressure to post content that will get a lot of likes and comments.” (Anderson and Jiang) It is notable that these three latter points relate to teens’ vulnerabilities around others’ opinions of themselves and the associated rollercoaster of emotions these opinions may cause. They resonate with Ciarrochi et al.’s argument that different kinds of Internet activity impact different issues of control, with more social forms of digital media associated with young females’ higher “compulsive internet use […] and worse mental health than males” (276). What is not known, because it has never been investigated, is whether any benefits flowing from regular smartphone disconnection might have a gendered dimension. If there is specific value in a capacity to disconnect regularly, separating that experience from haphazard episodes of connection and disconnection, regular disconnection may also enhance the quality of smartphone engagement. Potentially, the power to turn off their smartphone when the going got tough might allow young people to feel greater control over their media use while being less susceptible to the drama and compulsion of digital engagement. As one 17-year-old told the Pew researchers, possibly ruefully, “[teens] would rather go scrolling on their phones instead of doing their homework, and it’s so easy to do so. It’s just a huge distraction” (Anderson and Jiang). Few cultural contexts support teens’ regular and repeated disengagement from smartphones, but Icelandic society, Orthodox Judaism and the comparatively common practice of overnight disconnection from smartphone use may offer helpful indications of possible benefits. Cross-Cultural and Religious Interventions in Smartphone Use Concern around teens’ smartphone use, as described above, is typically applied to young people whose smartphone use constitutes an integral part of everyday life. The untangling of such interconnection would benefit from being both comparative and experimental. Our suggestions follow. Iceland has, in the past, adopted what Karlsson and Broddason term “a paternalistic cultural conservatism” (1). Legislators concerned about the social impacts of television deferred the introduction of Icelandic broadcasting for many years, beyond the time that most other European nations offered television services. Program offerings were expanded in a gradual way after the 1966 beginnings of Iceland’s public television broadcasting. As Karlsson and Broddason note, “initially the transmission hours were limited to only a few hours in the evening, three days a week and a television-free month in July. The number of transmission days was increased to six within a few years, still with a television-free month in July until 1983 and television-free Thursdays until 1987” (6). Interestingly, the nation is still open to social experimentation on a grand scale. In the 1990s, for example, in response to significant substance abuse by Icelandic teens, the country implemented an interventionist whole-of-Iceland public health program: the Icelandic Prevention Model (Kristjansson et al.). Social experimentation on a smaller scale remains part of the Icelandic cultural fabric. More recently, between 2015 and 2019, Iceland ran a successful social experiment whereby 1% of the working population worked a shorter work week for full time pay. The test was deemed successful because “workers were able to work less, get paid the same, while maintaining productivity and improving personal well-being” (Lau and Sigurdardottir). A number of self-governing Icelandic villages operate a particularly inclusive form of consultative local democracy enabling widespread buy-in for social experiments. Two or more such communities are likely to be interested in trialling an intervention study if there is a plausible reason to believe that the intervention may make a positive difference to teens’ (and others’) experiences of smartphone use. Those plausible reasons might be indicated by observational data from other people’s everyday practices. One comparatively common everyday practice which has yet to be systematically investigated from the perspective of evaluating the possible impacts of regular disconnection is that practiced by families who leave connected media outside the bedroom at night-time. These families are in the habit of putting their phones on to charge, usually in a shared space such as a kitchen or lounge room, and not referring to them again until a key point in the morning: when they are dressed, for example, or ready to leave the house. It is plausible to believe that such families might feel they have greater control over smartphone use than a family who didn’t adopt a regular practice of smartphone disconnection. According to social researchers in the Nordic nations, including co-authors Kjartan Ólafsson and Elisabeth Staksrud, it is likely that an Icelandic community will be keen to trial this experience of regular smartphone disconnection for a period of six months or more, if that trial went hand in hand with a rigorous evaluation of impact. Some religious communities offer a less common exemplar for teens’ regular disconnection from their smartphone. Young people in these communities may suspend their smartphone (and other media use) for just over a full day per week to focus on deepening their engagement with family and friends, and to support their spiritual development. Notable among such examples are teenagers who identify as members of the Orthodox Jewish faith. Their religious practices include withdrawing from technological engagement as part of the observance of Shabbat (the Sabbath): at least, that’s the theory. For the past ten years or so in Australia there has been a growing concern over some otherwise-Orthodox Jewish teens’ practice of the “half-Shabbat,” in which an estimated 17-50% of this cohort secretly use digital media for some time during their 25 hours of mandated abstinence. As one teacher from an Orthodox high school argues, “to not have access to the phone, it’s like choking off their air” (Telushikin). Interestingly, many Jewish teens who privately admit practicing half-Shabbat envision themselves as moving towards full observance in adulthood: they can see benefits in a wholehearted commitment to disengagement, even if it’s hard to disengage fully at this point in their lives. Hadlington et al.’s article “I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]” similarly evokes a broader community crisis around children’s dependence on digital media, noting that many children aged 8-12 have a tablet of their own before moving onto smartphone ownership in their teens (Common Sense Media 22). We appreciate that not every society has children and young people who are highly networked and integrated within digital dataflows. Nonetheless, while constant smartphone connectivity might appear to be a ‘first world problem’, preparing teens to be adults with optimal choice over their smartphone use includes identifying and promoting support for conscious disengagement from media as and when a young person wishes. Such a perspective aligns with promoting young people’s rights in digital contexts by interrogating the possible benefits of regularly disconnecting from digital media. Those putative benefits may be indicated by investigating perspectives around smartphone use held by Orthodox Jewish teenagers and comparing them with those held by teens who follow a liberal Jewish faith: liberal Jewish teens use smartphones in ways that resonate with broader community teens. A comparison of these two groups, suggests co-author Lynne Cohen, may indicate differences that can (in part) be attributed to Orthodox Jewish practices of digital disconnection, compared with liberal Jewish practices that don’t include disconnection. If smartphone disconnection has the potential to offer non-fungible benefits, it is incumbent upon researchers to investigate the possible advantages and drawbacks of such practices. That can be done through the comparative investigation of current practice as outlined above, and via an experimental intervention for approximately six months with a second Icelandic/Nordic community. The Potential Value of Investigating the (Non-)Fungibility of Digital Engagement and Digital Inactivity The overarching hypothesis addressed in this article is that a lived experience of regular smartphone disconnection may offer teenagers the opportunity to feel more in control of their personal technologies. Such a perspective aligns with many established media theories. These theories include the domestication of technology and its integration into daily life, helping to explain the struggle teens experience in detaching from digital media once they have become a fundamental element of their routine. Domestication theory asserts that technology moves from novelty to an integral aspect of everyday experience (Berker et al.). Displacement theory asserts that young people whose lives are replete with digital media may have substituted that media use for other activities enjoyed by the generations that grew up before them, while boyd offers an alternative suggestion that digital media add to, rather than displace, teens’ activities in daily contexts. Borrowing inputs from other disciplinary traditions, theories around mindfulness are increasingly robust and evidence-based, asserting that “attentiveness to what is present appears to yield corrective and curative benefits in its own right” (Brown et al. 1). Constant attention to digital media may be a distraction from mindful engagement with the lived environment. A detailed study of the non-fungible character of smartphone disconnection practices might offer an evidence base to support suggestions, such as those proffered by Beyond Blue, that a digital detox benefits mental health, resilience, and sociality. Such information might support initiatives by schools and other organisations central to the lives of teenagers to institute regular digital disconnection regimes, akin to Iceland’s experiments with television-free Thursdays. These innovations could build upon aligned social initiatives such as “no email Fridays” (Horng), which have been trialled in business contexts. Further, studies such as those outlined above could add authority to recommendations for parents, educators, and caregivers such as those recommendations contained in papers on the Common Sense Media site, for example, including Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health (Odgers and Robb) and Device-Free Dinners (Robb). Relevantly, the results from such observational and intervention studies would address the post-COVID era when parents and others will be considering how best to support a generation of children who went online earlier, and more often, than any generation before them. These results might also align with work towards early-stage adoption of the United Nations’ General Comment No. 25 on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment (UNCRC). If so, an investigation into the fungibility or otherwise of digital abstention could contribute to the national and international debate about the rights of young people to make informed decisions around when to connect, and when to disconnect, from engagement via a smartphone. References Anderson, Monica, and Jingjing Jiang. "Teens’ Social Media Habits and Experiences." Pew Research Center 28 Nov. 2018. <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/11/28/teens-social-media-habits-and-experiences/>. Berker, Thomas, Maren Hartmann, and Yves Punie. Domestication of Media and Technology. McGraw-Hill Education, 2005. Beyond Blue. “The Benefits of a Digital Detox: Unplugging from Digital Technology Can Have Tremendous Benefits on Body and Mind.” Beyond Blue, n.d. <https://www.beyondblue.org.au/personal-best/pillar/wellbeing/the-benefits-of-a-digital-detox>. Boer, Maartje, Gonneke W.J.M. 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Introduction Many anthropologists and other academics have attempted to argue that the spread of technology is a global homogenising force, socialising the remaining indigenous groups across the planet into an indistinct Western "monoculture" focussed on consumption, where they are rapidly losing their cultural distinctiveness. In many cases, these intellectuals -– people such as Jerry Mander -- often blame the diffusion of television (particularly through new innovations that are allowing it to penetrate further into rural areas, such as satellite and cable) as a key force in the effort to "assimilate" indigenous groups and eradicate their unique identities. Such writers suggest that indigenous groups can do nothing to resist the onslaught of the technologically, economically, and aesthetically superior power of Western television. Ironically, while often protesting the plight of indigenous groups and heralding their need for cultural survival, these authors often fail to recognise these groups’ abilities to fend for themselves and preserve their cultural integrity. On the other side of the debate are visual anthropologists and others who are arguing that indigenous groups are quickly becoming savvy to Western technologies, and that they are now using them for cultural revitalisation, linguistic revival, and the creation of outlets for the indigenous voice. In this school of thought, technology is seen not so much as a threat to indigenous groups, but instead as a remarkable opportunity to reverse the misfortunes of these groups at the hands of colonisation and national programmes of attempted assimilation. From this perspective, the rush of indigenous groups to adopt new technologies comes hand-in-hand with recent efforts to assert their tribal sovereignty and their independence. Technology has become a "weapon" in their struggle for technological autonomy. As a result, many are starting their own television stations and networks, and thus transforming the way television operates in their societies -– away from global monocultures and toward local interests. I hypothesise that in fact there is no correlation between television viewing and acculturation, and that, in fact, the more familiar people are with the technology of television and the current way the technology is utilised, the more likely they are to be interested in using it to revive and promote their own culture. Whatever slight negative effect exists depends on the degree to which local people can understand and redirect how that technology is used within their own cultural context. However, it should be stated that for terms of this investigation, I consider the technologies of "video" and "television" to be identical. One is the recording aspect, and the other the distribution aspect, of the same technology. Once people become aware that they can control what is on the television screen through the instrumentality of video, they immediately begin attempting to assert cultural values through it. And this is precisely what is going on on the Cheyenne River Reservation. This project is significant because the phenomenon of globalisation is real and Western technologies such as video, radio, and PCs are spreading throughout the world, including the "Fourth World" of the planet’s indigenous peoples. However, in order to deal with the phenomenon of globalisation, anthropologists and others may need to deal more realistically with the phenomenon of technological diffusion, which operates far less simply than they might assume. Well-meaning anthropologists seeking to "protect" indigenous groups from the "invasion" of technologies which will change their way of life may be doing these groups a disservice. If they turned some of their effort away from fending off these technologies and toward teaching indigenous groups how to use them, perhaps they might have a better result in creating a better future for them. I hope this study will show a more productive model for dealing with technological diffusion and what effects it has on cultural change in indigenous societies. There have been very few authors that have dealt with this topic head-on. One of the first to do so was Pace (1993), who suggested that some Brazilian Indians were acculturating more quickly as a result of television finally coming to their remote villages in the 1960s. Molohon (1984) looked at two Cree communities, and found that the one which had more heavy television viewing was culturally closer to its neighboring white towns. Zimmerman (1996) fingered television as one of the key elements in causing Indian teenagers to lose their sense of identity, thus putting them at higher risk for suicide. Gillespie (1995) argued that television is actually a ‘weapon’ of national states everywhere in their efforts to assimilate and socialise indigenous and other ethnic minority groups. In contrast, authors like Weiner (1997), Straubhaar (1991), and Graburn (1982) have all critiqued these approaches, suggesting that they deny subjectivity and critical thinking to indigenous TV audiences. Each of these researchers suggest, based on their field work, that indigenous people are no more likely than anybody else to believe that the things they see on television are true, and no more likely to adopt the values or worldviews promoted by Western TV programmers and advertisers. In fact, Graburn has observed that the Inuit became so disgusted with what they saw on Canadian national television, that they went out and started their own TV network in an effort to provide their people with meaningful alternatives on their screens. Bell (1995) sounds a cautionary note against studies like Graburn’s, noting that the efforts of indigenous New Zealanders to create their own TV programming for local markets failed, largely because they were crowded out by the "media imperialism" of outside international television. Although the indigenous groups there tried to put their own faces on the screen, many local viewers preferred to see the faces of J.R. Ewing and company, and lowered the ratings share of these efforts. Salween (1991) thinks that global media "cultural imperialism" is real -– that it is an objective pursued by international television marketers -– and suggests a media effects approach might be the best way to see whether it works. Woll (1987) notes that historically many ethnic groups have formed their self-images based on the way they have been portrayed onscreen, and that so far these portrayals have been far from sympathetic. In fact, even once these groups started their own cinemas or TV programmes, they unconsciously perpetuated stereotypes first foisted on them by other people. This study tends to side with those who have observed that indigenous people do not tend to "roll over" in the wake of the onslaught of Western television. Although cautionary studies need to be examined carefully, this research will posit that although the dominant forces controlling TV are antithetical to indigenous groups and their goals, the efforts of indigenous people to take control of their TV screens and their own "media literacy" are also increasing. Thus, this study should contribute to the viewpoint that perhaps the best way to save indigenous groups from cultural eradication is to give them access to television and show them how to set up their own stations and distribute their own video programming. In fact, it appears to be the case that TV, the Internet, and electronic 'new media' are helping to foster a process of cultural renewal, not just among the Lakota, but also among the Inuit, the Australian aborigines, and other indigenous groups. These new technologies are helping them renew their native languages, cultural values, and ceremonial traditions, sometimes by giving them new vehicles and forms. Methods The research for this project was conducted on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation headquartered in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Participants chosen for this project were Lakota Sioux who were of the age of consent (18 or older) and who were tribal members living on the reservation. They were given a survey which consisted of five components: a demographic question section identifying their age, gender, and individual data; a technology question section identifying what technologies they had in their home; a TV question section measuring the amount of television they watched; an acculturation question section determining their comparative level of acculturation; and a cultural knowledge question section determining their knowledge of Lakota history. This questionnaire was often followed up by unstructured ethnographic interviews. Thirty-three people of mixed age and gender were given this questionnaire, and for the purposes of this research paper, I focussed primarily on their responses dealing with television and acculturation. These people were chosen through strictly random sampling based on picking addresses at random from the phone book and visiting their houses. The television section asked specifically how many hours of TV they watched per day and per week, what shows they watched, what kinds of shows they preferred, and what rooms in their home had TVs. The acculturation section asked them questions such as how much they used the Lakota language, how close their values were to Lakota values, and how much participation they had in traditional indigenous rituals and customs. To assure open and honest responses, each participant filled out a consent form, and was promised anonymity of their answers. To avoid data contamination, I remained with each person until they completed the questionnaire. For my data analysis, I attempted to determine if there was any correlation (Pearson’s coefficient r of correlation) between such things as hours of TV viewed per week or years of TV ownership with such things as the number of traditional ceremonies they attended in the past year, the number of non-traditional Lakota values they had, their fluency in the Lakota language, their level of cultural knowledge, or the number of traditional practices and customs they had engaged in in their lives. Through simple statistical tests, I determined whether television viewing had any impact on these variables which were reasonable proxies for level of acculturation. Findings Having chosen two independent variables, hours of TV watched per week, and years of TV ownership, I tested if there was any significant correlation between them and the dependent variables of Lakota peoples’ level of cultural knowledge, participation in traditional practices, conformity of values to non-Lakota or non-traditional values, fluency in Lakota, and participation in traditional ceremonies (Table 1). These variables all seemed like reasonable proxies for acculturation since acculturated Lakota would know less of their own culture, go to fewer ceremonies, and so on. The cultural knowledge score was based on how many complete answers the respondents knew to ‘fill in the blank’ questions regarding Lakota history, historical figures, and important events. Participation in traditional practices was based on how many items they marked in a survey of whether or not they had ever raised a tipi, used traditional medicine, etc. The score for conformity to non-Lakota values was based on how many items they marked with a contrary answer to the emic Lakota value system ("the seven Ws".) Lakota fluency was based on how well they could speak, write, or use the Lakota language. And ceremonial attendance was based on the number of traditional ceremonies they had attended in the past year. There were no significant correlations between either of these TV-related variables and these indexes of acculturation. Table 1. R-Scores (Pearson’s Coefficient of Correlation) between Variables Representing Television and Acculturation R-SCORES Cultural Knowledge Traditional Practices Modern Values Lakota Fluency Ceremonial Attendance Years Owning TV 0.1399 -0.0445 -0.4646 -0.0660 0.1465 Hours of TV/Week -0.3414 -0.2640 -0.2798 -0.3349 0.2048 The strongest correlation was between the number of years the Lakota person owned a television, and the number of non-Lakota (or ‘modern Western’) values they held in their value system. But even that correlation was pretty weak, and nowhere near the r-score of other linear correlations, such as between their age and the number of children they had. How much television Lakota people watched did not seem to have any influence on how much cultural knowledge they knew, how many traditional practices they had participated in, how many non-Lakota values they held, how well they spoke or used the Lakota language, or how many ceremonies they attended. Even though there does not appear to be anything unusual about their television preferences, and in general they are watching the same shows as other non-Lakota people on the reservation, they are not becoming more acculturated as a result of their exposure to television. Although the Lakota people may be losing aspects of their culture, language, and traditions, other causes seem to be at the forefront than television. I also found that people who were very interested in television production as well as consumption saw this as a tool for putting more Lakota-oriented programs on the air. The more they knew about how television worked, the more they were interested in using it as a tool in their own community. And where I was working at the Cultural Center, there was an effort to videotape many community and cultural events. The Center had a massive archive of videotaped material, but unfortunately while they had faithfully recorded all kinds of cultural events, many of them were not quite "broadcast ready". There was more focus on showing these video programmes, especially oral history interviews with elders, on VCRs in the school system, and in integrating them into various kinds of multimedia and hypermedia. While the Cultural Center had begun broadcasting (remotely through a radio modem) a weekly radio show, ‘Wakpa Waste’ (Good Morning CRST), on the radio station to the north, KLND-Standing Rock, there had never been any forays into TV broadcasting. The Cultural Center director had looked into the feasibility of putting up a television signal transmission tower, and had applied for a grant to erect one, but that grant was denied. The local cable system in Eagle Butte unfortunately lacked the technology to carry true "local access" programming; although the Channel 8 of the system carried CRST News and text announcements, there was no open channel available to carry locally produced public access programming. The way the cable system was set up, it was purely a "relay" or feed from news and channels from elsewhere. Also, people were investing heavily in satellite systems, especially the new DBS (direct broadcast satellite) receivers, and would not be able to pick up local access programmes anyway. The main problem hindering the Lakotas’ efforts to preserve their culture through TV and video was lack of access to broadcast distribution technology. They had the interest, the means, and the stock of programming to put on the air. They had the production and editing equipment, although not the studios to do a "live" show. Were they able to have more local access to and control over TV distribution technology, they would have a potent "arsenal" for resisting the drastic acculturation their community is undergoing. TV has the potential to be a tool for great cultural revitalisation, but because the technology and know-how for producing it was located elsewhere, the Lakotas could not benefit from it. Discussion I hypothesised that the effects if TV viewing on levels of indigenous acculturation would be negligible. The data support my hypothesis that TV does not seem to have a major correlation with other indices of acculturation. Previous studies by anthropologists such as Pace and Molohon suggested that TV was a key determinant in the acculturation of indigenous people in Brazil and the U.S. -– this being the theory of cultural imperialism. However, this research suggests that TV’s effect on the decline of indigenous culture is weak and inconclusive. In fact, the qualitative data suggest that the Lakota most familiar with TV are also the most interested in using it as a tool for cultural preservation. Although the CRST Lakota currently lack the means for mass broadcast of cultural programming, there is great interest in it, and new technologies such as the Internet and micro-broadcast may give them the means. There are other examples of this phenomenon worldwide, which suggest that the Lakota experience is not unique. In recent years, Australian Aborigines, Canadian Inuit, and Brazilian Kayapo have each begun ambitious efforts in creating satellite-based television networks that allow them to reach their far-flung populations with programming in their own indigenous language. In Australia, Aboriginal activists have created music television programming which has helped them assert their position in land claims disputes with the Australian government (Michaels 1994), and also to educate the Europeans of Australia about the aboriginal way of life. In Canada, the Inuit have also created satellite TV networks which are indigenous-owned and operated and carry traditional cultural programming (Valaskakis 1992). Like the Aborigines and the Inuit, the Lakota through their HVJ Lakota Cultural Center are beginning to create their own radio and video programming on a smaller scale, but are beginning to examine using the reservation's cable network to carry some of this material. Since my quantitative survey included only 33 respondents, the data are not as robust as would be determined from a larger sample. However, ethnographic interviews focussing on how people approach TV, as well as other qualitative data, support the inferences of the quantitative research. It is not clear that my work with the Lakota is necessarily generalisable to other populations. Practically, it does suggest that anthropologists interested in cultural and linguistic preservation should strive to increase indigenous access to, and control of, TV production technology. ‘Protecting’ indigenous groups from new technologies may cause more harm than good. Future applied anthropologists should work with the ‘natives’ and help teach them how to adopt and adapt this technology for their own purposes. Although this is a matter that I deal with more intensively in my dissertation, it also appears to me to be the case that, contrary to the warnings of Mander, many indigenous cultures are not being culturally assimilated by media technology, but instead are assimilating the technology into their own particular cultural contexts. The technology is part of a process of revitalisation or renewal -- although there is a definite process of change and adaptation underway, this actually represents an 'updating' of old cultural practices for new situations in an attempt to make them viable for the modern situation. Indeed, I think that the Internet, globally, is allowing indigenous people to reassert themselves as a Fourth World "power bloc" on the world stage, as linkages are being formed between Saami, Maya, Lakota, Kayapo, Inuit, and Aborigines. Further research should focus on: why TV seems to have a greater acculturative influence on certain indigenous groups rather than others; whether indigenous people can truly compete equally in the broadcast "marketplace" with Western cultural programming; and whether attempts to quantify the success of TV/video technology in cultural preservation and revival can truly demonstrate that this technology plays a positive role. In conclusion, social scientists may need to take a sidelong look at why precisely they have been such strong critics of introducing new technologies into indigenous societies. There is a better role that they can play –- that of technology ‘broker’. They can cooperate with indigenous groups, serving to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, expertise, and technology between them and the majority society. References Bell, Avril. "'An Endangered Species’: Local Programming in the New Zealand Television Market." Media, Culture & Society 17.1 (1995): 182-202. Gillespie, Marie. Television, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change. New York: Routledge, 1995. Graburn, Nelson. "Television and the Canadian Inuit". Inuit Etudes 6.2 (1982): 7-24. Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Molohon, K.T. "Responses to Television in Two Swampy Cree Communities on the West James Bay." Kroeber Anthropology Society Papers 63/64 (1982): 95-103. Pace, Richard. "First-Time Televiewing in Amazonia: Television Acculturation in Gurupa, Brazil." Ethnology 32.1 (1993): 187-206. Salween, Michael. "Cultural Imperialism: A Media Effects Approach." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8.2 (1991): 29-39. Straubhaar, J. "Beyond Media Imperialism: Asymmetrical Interdependence and Cultural Proximity". Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8.1 (1991): 39-70. Valaskakis, Gail. "Communication, Culture, and Technology: Satellites and Northern Native Broadcasting in Canada". Ethnic Minority Media: An International Perspective. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1992. Weiner, J. "Televisualist Anthropology: Representation, Aesthetics, Politics." Current Anthropology 38.3 (1997): 197-236. Woll, Allen. Ethnic and Racial Images in American Film and Television: Historical Essays and Bibliography. New York: Garland Press, 1987. Zimmerman, M. "The Development of a Measure of Enculturation for Native American Youth." American Journal of Community Psychology 24.1 (1996): 295-311. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Steven Mizrach. "Natives on the Electronic Frontier: Television and Cultural Change on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/natives.php>. Chicago style: Steven Mizrach, "Natives on the Electronic Frontier: Television and Cultural Change on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/natives.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Steven Mizrach. (2000) Natives on the electronic frontier: television and cultural change on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/natives.php> ([your date of access]).