Journal articles on the topic 'Electronic mail marketing – Technological innovations'

The paper analyses the contribution of technological innovations to improve the relations and interactions among all members of marketing channels and those with the end consumer. The analysis focuses on marketing channel as a whole, aiming at providing a conceptual framework for future investigations and insights that can be conducted to capture the extent and effects of the changes in technology. The technological perspective of innovation is analyzed by taking into account all types of channels, not just those at the retail distribution level. This perspective can be divided into an area of innovation in vertical relationships between channel members and an area of innovation in relationships with final demand. The main fronts of innovation in vertical relations between firms are: logistics, the joint management of supplying activities, and those joint activities with a high level of integration among partners, such as Vendor Managed Category Management. As regard to relationships with final demand main innovation fields are: checkout technologies, electronic and mobile payments, distance and on-line selling, and self-service technologies.

The article examines the role of the tourism industry in the world economy, reveals the specifics of the innovation process in tourism. The classification of innovations in tourism according to the object of their application is given. The main directions of using innovative marketing technologies in the field of tourism services are considered: release of new types of tourism product, change in the organization of production and consumption, identification and use of new markets, as well as the use of new equipment and technology. Factors that accelerate the introduction of marketing innovations are studied. Based on the analysis of world experience, several models of regulation of innovative tour operating activities in the EU have been identified. The first direction of formation of the model of the innovations development in tourism is the activity of stimulating innovations in the public and private sectors of tourism with the aim of their transition to a qualitatively new model of touring (similar model is used in Greece, Italy and Portugal). The second direction is defined as the internationalization and opening of new markets (a similar model of stimulating innovative development is typical of Spain, Romania and partly Norway). The third one includes support for entrepreneurship in the field of tourism, stimulation of entrepreneurial initiatives, opening a new tourism business (A similar model of stimulating innovation in tourism is typical of many countries in Europe, Australia, New Zealand). The fourth direction is the promotion of the country, its tourism product, including educational and cultural ones (A similar model is typical of Bulgaria, Croatia, Spain, Turkey, Thailand). The role of introduction and active development of e-business and marketing technologies is defined, especially in modern conditions. The necessity of development of the newest directions of the Internet marketing in the field of tourism, including mobile, Internet branding and geomarketing, is proved. The role of innovative marketing technologies as one of the central elements of modern development of activity of tourist firms, the necessity of application of computer technologies and non-standard ways of giving of the information during carrying out modern technical maintenance, are justified. The first group of such technological solutions consists of management technologies, including property management system (PMS), aimed at optimization of basic technological operations. The modern hotels and chains are trying to present themselves not only in global distribution system (GDS), which has become a powerful advertising tool, but also in alternative distribution system (ADS), which is primarily needed by hotels focused on the business segment. Global distribution system (GDS) is also closely integrated into well-known booking systems such as Booking.com, HRS, Agoda, Travelocity, Expedia etc. The next group is for food and beverages inventory management technology (F&B). The group of marketing technologies includes search engine optimization measures (SEO and PPC), which allow to raise the hotel site in search engine rankings, E-mail Marketing as a means of maintaining constant communication with the client, marketing activities in social media (Social Media Optimization), creation of virtual hotels or illusions of visiting a hotel (Second Life and Virtual Hotels Conclusion), branding, etc. The last group of technologies are service ones, i.e. technologies for improving hotel products and services. Innovative technologies are developing in the direction of ensuring sustainable development (greening of hotel services and activities), inclusion in traditional technological operations of innovative components: electronic concierge terminals, access to hotel services via mobile devices, maximizing Internet access, etc. Based on the analysis of the activities of large tour operators, regional differences have been identified in Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Spain, Austria, Norway and France. It is proved that marketing innovations in tourism have a qualitative novelty, which affects the promising areas of tourism development, improvement of existing tourism products, improving the image and competitiveness of the tourism industry. Based on the study, it is generalized that the role of marketing innovations in international tourism has been growing every year, and it has become especially relevant in the conditions of the COVID-19 crisis. For travel companies, the effect of marketing innovation can be expressed in the qualitatively new changes in the tourism industry, improving the efficiency of tourism infrastructure, management of sustainable operation and development of tourism in the country and the formation, positioning and consumption of tourism services, improving the image and competitiveness of travel companies.

In article theoretical and empirical methods of research have been used: essence of the concepts «innovation», «innovative activity», «innovative process», etc. are considered by the author. Classifications of innovations by various signs are investigated. Introductions of an innovative component to technology of food and the offer of special services, application of the interactive (electronic) menu of the screen tablet on tables, the touch display, application of a QR code in marketing of the enterprise, the LED technology of the notification, food 3-D printers, touch producers of food, use of three-dimensional projections for demonstration of preparation of dishes, automation and informatization of processes at the enterprises, use of web and telecommunication technologies is analyzed in the article. The main directions of development of modern technologies in institutions of restaurant economy are: creation of restaurants as Free Floor; opening of food-courts; creation of the conceptual enterprises of restaurant economy; expansion of a network of the virtual restaurants providing the order on the Internet and delivery to the consumer; preparations of dishes in the presence of visitors; organization of service for system catering and others. New ideas, advanced restaurant products and services, technological processes, forms of the organization and management will be result of innovative development of institutions of restaurant economy. Introduction of innovations isn`t cheap, however having offered exclusive menus and services for clients, restaurant institutions are capable to ensure a survival and profit. Processes of high-quality transformation of the sphere in general and ensuring competitiveness of her separate objects are result of introduction of innovative technologies of rendering of services and formation of service according to modern requirements. Innovative development of restaurant technologies increases competitiveness of an institution in modern severe conditions. It is necessary to pay attention to the main current trends of development of science and equipment, a novelty and the invention in food sphere and in the market of services.

Purpose Despite the importance of innovation in business performance, investigation into innovation in services is scanty and lacking consensus. In retailing, it is a topic that has been awakening considerable academic and business interest in recent years. In this study context, this work aims to analyse innovation in retail experiences from two aspects – marketing innovation and technological innovation – to understand the role it exercises in satisfaction and subsequent recommendation. Design/methodology/approach The authors’ objective is to investigate the direct and indirect influence of marketing and technological innovation on satisfaction and word-of-mouth (WOM) through three core constructs: store image, consumer value and store brand equity. SEM methodology is applied on a sample of 820 retail customers of grocery, clothing, furniture an electronics store. Findings The results show that technological innovation is more important than marketing innovation in shaping image, value and satisfaction. At the same time, store image is the variable that most influences customer satisfaction and that satisfaction is a very significant antecedent of WOM behaviour. Practical implications for retail managers and further research are presented. Originality/value The main value of this work has been to go deeper into the study of retail innovation, both in marketing and technologies, and its direct and indirect effects on satisfaction and subsequent recommendation through store image, consumer value and store brand equity. It is a new line of study, which is still fragmented and with little empirical evidence.

This research explored the state of electronic customer service in Switzerland by e-mailing a typical room query to a random and stratified sample of 200 hotels. Based on the hotel responses, this study found that guests had less than a one in ten chance of receiving a prompt, polite and personal reply. Diffusion of innovations helps explain the poor e-mail replies by Swiss hoteliers. The quality of reply differed across hotel size, category, online relationship marketing tools and linguistic region while responsiveness differed across online relationship marketing tools, geographic location and linguistic region. This study suggests that hotels can gain an immediate competitive advantage by implementing basic e-mail procedures.

This paper considers how innovations in information technology have changed the process by which accounting historians collect primary and secondary sources of information. It examines how web-based systems have made it possible for historians to collect data from what is effectively a twenty-four-hour “on-line library”. The paper explores some of the limitations of technological innovations and considers the steps necessary to ensure future access to information stored in digital electronic form. It also considers the challenges involved in authenticating primary source documents such as e-mail and facsimiles and the impact of encryption on the availability of data in the future. Advances in information technology suggest that future generations of accounting historians will require new skills.

Email marketing tools now enable companies to dramatically improve customer engagement and balance their marketing budgets. To identify trends and tendencies, it is advisable to investigate the evolutionary features of electronic marketing tools, assess their classification specificity, study the functional features and analyze the transformational vectors of electronic marketing. Marketing in effectively functioning and constantly developing companies is designed in such a way that, penetrating into the management complex of implementing strategies and innovations, it instantly reacts to the emergence of the latest electronic tools and technological solutions, forms its own ways of preventing an unstable external environment.

Learning Islamic religious education should not turn a blind eye to technological developments that are realized or not have a very large impact on life. Al-Ulum Private Elementary School Medan implements Islamic Religious Education learning innovations using and utilizing technological developments. For example, Teleconference, Google Classroom, Zoom Meeting by utilizing facilities such as e-mail (electronic mail), mobile phones, MP3 players, websites, blogging, search engines, and others. Learning models develop in the form of electronic learning (e-learning), electronic books (e-books), online classes, online discussions, computer-based learning. The use of whiteboards and markers, replaced with the use of Notebook media, LCD Projectors, and so on. Printed sourcebook materials, modules, and student worksheets are replaced with e-books, digital libraries, YouTube, and internet pages. This research is focused on qualitative research using descriptive method. This research intends to examine the natural role of Islamic Religious Education Learning Innovation in the Industrial Revolution Era 4.0 Studies at Al-Ulum Private Elementary School Medan. This research is suitable to use a qualitative research approach with a descriptive method, in revealing the facts as empirical truth in this research.

As technological innovations have progressed, the ability of social enterprises to find creative solutions to social problems in the global economy has increased. Social electronic enterprises (e-enterprises) contribute to the well-being of society by utilizing information and communications technology that has a financial component in addition to social and environmental objectives. Social e-entrepreneurship is an effective dynamic way that organizations can achieve social objectives that facilitate change in the international environment. More recently, innovation in information and communications technology has increased the ability of individuals to establish social e-enterprises. This paper discusses the role of technological innovations in providing opportunities for social e-enterprises to develop based on mobile online services. The influence of mobile online communities in developing social e-enterprises is investigated along with how mobile communication has encouraged individuals and organisations to be involved in social e-enterprises. The changing mobile social software communications devices that have allowed individuals to build social e-enterprises using technological innovations from the internet are stated. Recommendations for the continued development of social e-enterprises that utilize emerging technological innovations are included in the paper with suggestions for future research.

Hostilities in eastern Ukraine have highlighted the need for accelerated transformation of Ukrainian armed forces and strengthening country’s defense capabilities. Ukraine is an active consumer and exporter of weapons, so it needs to improve constantly its position in the international arms market, which, by the way, unlike most markets suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic, is constantly growing. The study aims to assess the prospects of Ukraine’s integration into the world arms market to secure its armed forces and achieve the highest possible level of arms exports. Methods of comparative analysis and integrated approach were used in the study. The obtained results demonstrated that Ukrainian arms export has fallen dramatically in recent years (from 1501 million USD in 2012 to 115 million USD in 2020); the largest importers were China (36% of Ukraine’s total arms exports), Russia (20%), and Thailand (17%). The main explanation for this is the necessity of transition to more technological weapons. Concerning weapon imports, Turkey, the USA, Great Britain, Poland, and Bulgaria became the main suppliers. It is about ammunition, electronics, including electronic warfare stations, means of communication, sniper rifles, grenade launchers, etc. The study substantiated that Ukraine should implement joint projects with other countries to fully develop its high-tech weapons in accordance with the latest military technologies.

Research background. During these days the innovations are a more and more used definition in the business, especially in the market research, human resource management, new products and service development, etc. Frequently innovations are related with the application of new technology and new ideas as well as creation of new methods. Even more, innovations are related with the development of existing processes and products (Bigliardi, Dormio, 2009). Innovations are important in the sector of tourism industry, which is expanding every time combining more and more different areas of business. According to Melnikas (2011), discontent and necessity of changes are some persuasive factors to begin an activity of innovation. Thus, it could be the reason for the application of innovations in the sector of accommodation service to become essential. Importance of innovations is discussed pretty widely in the scientific literature (Bigliardi, Dormio, 2009; Hall, Williams, 2008; Inauen, Schenker-Wicki, 2011; Notaro et al., 2012), but innovations in tourism sector have been discussed only recently (Nagy, 2012; Ravar, Iorgulescu, 2013). This article is relevant because application of innovations in the sector of accommodation service is not enough discussed in Lithuania as it is done by some foreign scientists (Sundbo et al., 2007; Hall et al., 2008; Ravar, Iorgulescu, 2013). The object of the research is innovations in the sector of accommodation service, and the aim is to determine the activeness of innovations’ application in the sector of an accommodation service. Research methods. This article deals with the application of innovations in the sector of accommodation service using the method of scientific literature analyses and quantitative empirical research – the method questionnaire survey. The research respondents were the employees of Kaunas city organizations of accommodation service. The author of this article is grateful to her student Martynas Bruzas who collected 270 filled in questionnaires. Results and discussion. Innovations are the most frequently described as an application of technologies creating new products, new services, and new processes of activity in the market. Innovations are combined with technological changes in the products, services and their creation processes. The research results revealed that services of accommodation business were restricted by just using electronic mail, the electronic page of business and electronic page of socialization. The research results revealed that services of accommodation business performed just slight changes of innovations according to some novelties in the market. On the other hand, employees of these organizations were enough sure that their organizations were applying innovations, but at the same time they thought that innovations could be more combined with the qualifications of organizations’ employees. Conclusions. According to research results, we suggest that most Kaunas city accommodation services presume that they are active in the application of innovations, but there were only some technological changes of innovations. The research results revealed that usually innovations were related to IT programs of accommodation service, wireless internet, telephone, television, touch tabs, room infrastructure and the systems of reservations. Keywords: innovations, innovations of accommodation sector, development.

Purpose – This study aims to fill the void of previous research in organizational innovation. The understanding of the factors that affect intra-firm diffusion of innovations, which include the proactive management support and participation comprehensiveness from the adopting firm, as well as the provider’s support of innovation utilization has been advanced. In addition, the extent to which the consequent intra-firm diffusion affects both the adopter’s and provider’s benefits has been explored based on their relationship. Design/methodology/approach – A mail questionnaire on the organizational purchase and utilization of customer relationship management (CRM)-type database systems was developed for collecting data. A random sample of 480 firms from the Hong Kong Chambers of Commerce Directory was obtained. From the initial phone calls, 343 firms currently using a CRM-type database system were identified, and the questionnaires were mailed to the managers of these firms. In total, 163 responses were finally returned with usable data, for a response rate of 47.5 per cent. Findings – The current study focuses on the causes and the effects associated with successful diffusion and utilization of innovation within a firm. Using data from business-to-business markets, the results find that the two parties involved benefit when both proactively participate in the intra-firm diffusion process; that is, benefits are created for the adopter via improvement in efficiency; and for the provider via establishment of a long-term relationship and switching costs. Research limitations/implications – First, any moderating impact of the adopting firm’s technological capabilities was not analyzed. Second, the research results were obtained from a sample of software product innovations (especially database management system). Even though it could be assumed that these results can also be applicable to other types of innovations (e.g. process innovations), empirical tests of our framework based on different innovation typologies are still warranted. Practical implications – First, for an innovation-adopting firm, we have shown that a wide use of purchased innovations among the organizational members is at least as important as the adoption of new innovations. Second, we have included the participation comprehensiveness of adoption decision, arguing that the organizational decision-making process is also crucial to stimulating intra-firm diffusion. Finally, and more importantly, our study calls attention to the provider’s role in expediting intra-firm diffusion. Originality/value – First, we have suggested an analytic framework for intra-firm diffusion of an innovation and also provided its empirical support. Particularly, the current study has focused on the subsequent effects of intra-firm diffusion on both the adopter’s and the provider’s benefits. Second, we have examined further impact of the comprehensive participation of adoption decision on spreading innovation information, which subsequently stimulates the innovation’s intra-firm diffusion.

Today, innovations in information technology are having wide-ranging effects across numerous domains of society and policy makers are acting on issues involving economic productivity, intellectual property rights, privacy protection and affordability of access to information. The most significant outcomes of the progress of information technology is electronic commerce over the internet, a new way of conducting business. Already, it affects such large sectors as communications, finance and retail trade and has expanded to areas such as education and health services. Firms can outsource their manufacturing to other nations and rely on telecommunications to keep marketing, R&D and his distribution teams close contact with the manufacturing groups. The technology enables various types of work and employment to be decoupled from one another. The paper will focus on the impacts of information technology and electronic commerce on business models, commerce, market structure, workplace, labour market, education. Changes associated with rapid technological advances in industry have made continual upgrading of professional skills and economic necessity.

Lentera Bangsa School is an educational institution that runs community homeschooling & single homeschooling programs. This community service (PkM) activity run focuses on appropriate technology by creating technological innovations to increase sales. Building digital marketing was chosen as the final result with the aim that Lentera Bangsa School can improve branding or brand recognition and increase competition with other schools through online marketing. Digital marketing is a marketing activity carried out using electronic media and internet networks. Digital marketing is done using a website. The website was built to display the products offered, school profiles, teaching and learning activities and other activities in an attractive and professional manner. The website can be used as a medium to increase intake or the number of students who join online, because this website was built with an interactive concept between prospective students and the school. Besides being interactive, interaction through the website must be more effective and efficient. After the website is built, the next step in introducing the website can be done through social media such as youtube, facebook and instagram. After the website is built, periodic evaluation, improvement and development will be carried out, so that there will be continuous sustainability.

Purpose – Expanding access to financial services for the 70 percent of Ghanaians who are unbanked is critical. Bank branches have been the primary channel for financial service delivery, but this may be changing because of technological innovations. Analysts believe branch-based banking still has a role in promoting financial inclusion. The purpose of this paper is to examine the pattern of bank branch presence across rural and urban Ghana; the disparities in the spatial distribution of domestic, foreign, and rural and community bank branches; and the district level characteristics associated with the pattern of spatial distribution of bank branches. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses spatial analyst tools, geographically weighted Poisson regression, and data from Ghana’s banking sector to show the inequality in availability of branch-based services and to highlight the district and regional level differences in the determinants of branch allocation. Findings – The study finds evidence of inequality in access to financial services. Physical bank branches are disproportionately more accessible in the urban south compared to the rural north. The study also finds that population size, percentage of urban residents, workforce size, and literacy level are associated with bank allocation but the results vary by district. Practical implications – Branch banking needs modernization to continue to bring financial services in closer proximity. Development of physical and electronic infrastructure could attract financial institutions to serve deprived areas with significant concentration of unbanked populations. Originality/value – Findings of the study point to the need for banks to re-envision branch banking technology to make branch banking more interactive. Banks need to find ways to fuse transferable elements of mobile phone banking into branch-based banking, not just to attract younger technology-savvy customers but also to help make operations more attractive, efficient, and cost effective.

The crisis currently affecting the firms, joined to the technological development and more intense global competition have transformed the current competitive environment for most firms. Firms competitive advantage is now more dependent on continuous knowledge development and enhancement, so knowledge becomes a central theme in strategic management. Furthermore, the competitiveness of a company and the health of the communities around it are closely intertwined. The business needs a successful community, both to create demand for its products and to provide critical assets and a supportive environment and, also, community needs successful businesses to provide wealth creation opportunities. This scenario calls for a broader definition of business success which includes customer engagement methods and shifts the central goal of companies into creating shared value. This aim becomes more influential especially for those companies who operate in a new market space through electronic means that enable electronic marketing relationships from the perspective of non-conventional marketing and social-media marketing. Social Media (SM) and ICT enable the interactionwith the market that allows spreading development burden amongst companies and individuals. Firms increasingly have needs of gathering ideas for innovations and providing solutions to existing problems and/or for maintaining the competitive advantage. More and more companies apply the wisdom of crowds to certain tasks and challenges, making the crowdsourcing a recognized mechanism for problem-solving. While both phenomena are not new, their overlapping requires considerable attention in practice, related to the crowdsourcing opportunities and benefits that have been enabled by new web 2.0 technologies. Crowdsourcing presents a number of potential applications, open to future developments and seem to provide new channels and ways to enable this in practice and to create new shared value and firm value. Based on theoretical conceptualization, combined with empirical evidence, we develop an analysis framework for approaching crowdsourcing in a SME context. In particular, we aim to highlight the influence of customer-social engagement through new technologies on shared value creation and stress the role of crowdsourcing process in knowledge-building process. Finally, authors analyze if those instances are able to contribute to build and develop the firms performance.

There is no doubt that the digital world we are entering is not only a new logical stage in the development of the technological sphere of humanity, but also of all existing legal and socio-political realities. While common and harmonized definitions and legal definitions do not yet exist, digital technologies are already rapidly gaining ground for offensives. Digitalization is becoming a major factor in the economic growth of any country's economy. Digitization is a modern trend for the development and consistent improvement of all business processes in the economy and related social spheres, based on increasing the speed of mutual exchange, accessibility and security of information. The experts highlight eight key points of the digital economy: the state and society, marketing and advertising, finance and commerce, infrastructure and communications, media and entertainment, cybersecurity, education and human resources, startups and investments. Therefore, in determining the main goals of the digital economy can be identified: smart cities, autonomous transport, protection against cyberattacks, responsible attitude to personal data, elimination of digital inequality, telemedicine, smart agriculture, mechanisms of trust in the Internet. The implementation of any new technologies, the process, of course, is long and carries many unknown yet challenges and dangers to humanity, they are usually combined into three different groups: socio-economic, techno-organizational, natural. All this is quite fully understood in the twentieth century, introducing scientific and technological achievements in the real economy through the development of regulatory and legal factors (labor laws, environmental legislation, rules, norms, standards, practice of state and public control over their observance). The development of mass (conveyor) production of its time in general stimulated a deep study of social and legal issues of the real economy - adequate pay, a system of benefits and compensation, moral and material incentives for harmful working conditions and more. Borrowing the experience of G. Ford, we began to study the socio-psychic factors that characterize a person's attitude to work, psychological climate in the team, family, motives for work; socio-political factors for creating favorable working conditions, for invention and innovation. We have remembered that in the absence of legal rules and laws, there is always a likelihood of danger, which has become an axiom of danger, that in nature there are no phenomena absolutely safe for human life, factors - everything is dangerous and requires the formation of certain working conditions. We have also remembered that there are many examples where a lack of knowledge and a lack of methodologically based science and education justification for the practical implementation of knowledge and technology into the real economy leads to serious engineering, humanitarian and educational problems and even catastrophes. And at the same time, entering the electronic era, we are extremely light-hearted in the legal issues of defining the fundamental concepts of "information", "information resource", "information security" and more. Key words: information, informatization, information and communication technologies, information and communication security, information and communication activity, information space, information war, humanities, scientific and educational policy, information legislation.

MSMEs are the most important pillars in the Indonesian economy. The most famous copper craft center in Indonesia is Tumang Village, Cepogo, Boyolali, Central Java. It is called a craft center because of the local residents, some of whom are copper craftsmen. The problems that occur are the limited information technology and the ability to access technology and information from outside, as well as management that has not been implemented properly that can support the craftsman development program, both from the point of view of the professionalism of its human resources as well as in terms of product development, craft design equipment and management. In addition, sales systems and data processing are still carried out conventionally, resulting in limited marketing opportunities and transaction processing. The lack of literacy of SMEs towards information technology is the cause. Only about 25% of all business actors in Tumang have utilized technology for marketing and financial management. The implementation of this Community Service is intended to provide socialization and training as well as assistance to improve skills and knowledge for craftsmen to market their products on a global scale and provide electronic sales applications for craftsmen so that customers can get information quickly, and can make online shopping transactions. As well as a digital accounting information system that will increasingly provide convenience in creating accountable, transparent, and secure financial reports. This PKM activity was carried out by the Community Service Team (PKM) from the Management Economics Study Program at the Islamic University of Batik Surakarta through the 2021 Matching Fund grant. The PKM activity was aimed at brass and copper metal craftsmen in Tumang, Cepogo Boyolali. The methods used are socialization, training, and mentoring. The results of PKM activities are technological innovations in the form of a Marketplace Application called "Javacraft", which is a web application developed by the Islamic University of Surakarta Batik as an online sales medium or as a sales medium for MSMEs of local Indonesian handicrafts, especially copper or brass crafts in Tumang Boyolali, handicraft products and sales processing facilities. In addition, PKM activities also include socialization about digital marketing (e-commerce) and Accounting Information Systems (SIA), training and assistance in using the "Javacraft" Marketplace Application to support sales of brass and copper metal crafts in Tumang.

Actual importance of study. At the beginning of the 2020s developed world countries and countries which are the leaders of world economic development faced up the challenges of radical structural reformation of social production (from industry to service system) which is based on digitalization. Digital technologies in world science and business practice are considered essential part of a complex technological phenomenon like ‘Industry 4.0’. Digitalization should cover development of all business processes and management processes at micro-, meso- and microlevels, processes of social production management at national and world economy levels. In general, in the 21st century world is shifting rapidly to the strategies of digital technologies application. The countries which introduce these strategies will gain guaranteed competitive advantages: from reducing production costs and improved quality of goods and services to developing new sales market and making guaranteed super-profits. The countries which stand aside from digitalization processes are at risk of being among the outsiders of socio-economic development. Such problem statement highlights the actual importance of determining the directions, trends and strategic priorities of social production digitalization. This issue is really crucial for all world countries, including Ukraine which is in midst of profound structural reformation of all national production system. Problem statement. Digital economy shapes the ground for ‘Industry 4.0’, information, It technologies and large databases become the key technologies. The main asset of ‘Industry 4.0’ is information, the major tool of production is cyberphysical systems that lead to formation the single unified highly productive environmental system of collecting, analyzing and applying data to production and other processes. Cyberphysical systems provides ‘smart machines’ (productive machines, tools and equipment which are programmed) integration via their connection to the Internet, or creation special network, ‘Industrial Internet’ (IIoT) which is regarded as a productive analogue of ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) that is focused on the consumers. ‘Internet of Things’ can be connected with ‘smart factories’ which use ‘Industrial Internet’ to adjust production processes quickly turning into account the changes in costs and availability of resources as well as demand for production made. One of the most essential tasks for current economics and researchers of systems and processes of organization future maintenance of world production is to determine the main strategic priorities of social production digitalization. Analysis of latest studies and publications. Valuable contribution to the study of the core and directions of strategic priorities concerning social production digitalization was made by such foreign scientists as the Canadian researcher Tapscott D [1], foreigners Sun, L., Zhao, L [2], Mcdowell, M. [3] and others. Yet, the study of issues concerning social production digitalization are mainly done by the team of authors as such issues are complicated and multihierarchical. Furthermore, the problem of social production digitalization is closely linked to the transition to sustainable development, which is reflected in the works by Ukrainian scholars like Khrapkin V., Ustimenko V., Kudrin O., Sagirov A. and others in the monograph “Determinants of sustainable economy development” [4]. The edition of the first in Ukraine inter-disciplinary textbook on Internet economy by a group of scientists like Tatomyr I., Kvasniy L., Poyda S. and others [5] should also be mentioned. But the challenges of social production digitalization are constantly focused on by theoretical scientists, analytics and practitioners of these processes. Determining unexplored parts of general problem. Defining strategic priorities of social production digitalization requires clear understanding of prospective spheres of their application, economic advantages and risks which mass transition of social production from traditional (industrial and post-industrial)to digital technologies bear. A new system of technological equipment (production digitalization, Internet-economy, technology ‘Industry 4.0’, NBIC- technologies and circular economy) has a number of economic advantages for commodity producers and countries, as well as leads to dramatical changes in the whole social security system, changes at labour market and reformation the integral system of social relations in the society. Tasks and objectives of the study. The objective of the study is to highlight the core and define the main strategic priorities of social production digitalization, as they cause the process of radical structural reformation of industrial production, services and social spheres of national economy of world countries and world economy in general. To achieve the objective set in the article the following tasks are determined and solved: - to define the main priorities of digital technologies development, which is radically modify all social production business processes; - to study the essence and the role of circular economy for transition to sustainable development taken EU countries as an example; - to identify the strategic priorities of robotization of production processes and priority spheres of industrial and service robots application; - to define the role of NBIC-technologies in the process of social production structural reformation and its transition to new digital technologies in the 21st century. Method and methodology of the study. While studying strategic priorities of social production digitalization theoretical and empirical methods of study are used, such as historical and logical, analysis and synthesis, abstract and specific, casual (cause-and-effect) ones. All of them helped to keep the track of digital technologies evolution and its impact on structural reformation of social production. Synergetic approach, method of expert estimates and casual methods are applied to ground system influence of digital technologies, ‘Industry 4.0’ and their materialization as ‘circular economy’ on the whole complicated and multihierarchical system of social production in general. Basic material (the results of the study). Digital economy, i.e. economy where it is virtual but not material or physical assets and transactions are of the greatest value, institutional environment in which business processes as well as all managerial processes are developed on the basis of digital computer technologies and information and communication technologies (ICT), lies as the ground for social production digitalization. ICT sphere involves production of electronic equipment, computing, hardware,.software and services. It also provides various information sevices. Information Technology serves as a material basis for digital economy and digital technologies development. Among the basic digital technologies the following ones play the profound role: technology ‘Blockchain’, 3D priniting, unmanned aerial vehicles and flying drones, virtual reality (VR). Augmented reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Internet of Value (IoV) which is founded on IT and blockchain technology, Internet of Everything (IoE), Artificial Intelligence (AI), neuron networks and robots. These basic digital technologies in business processes and management practices are applied in synergy, complexity and system but not in a single way. System combination of digital technologies gives maximal economic effect from their practical application in all spheres of social production-from industry to all kinds of services. For instance, in education digital technologies promote illustrating and virtual supplement of study materials; in tourism trade they promote engagement of virtual guides, transport and logistics security of tourist routes, virtual adverts and trips arrangements, virtual guidebooks, virtual demonstration of services and IT brochures and leaflets. Digital technologies radically change gambling and show businesses, in particular, they provide virtual games with ‘being there’ effect. Digital technologies drastically modify the retail trade sphere, advertisement and publishing, management and marketing, as well as provide a lot of opportunities for collecting unbiased data concerning changes in market conditions in real time. Digital technologies lie as the basis for ‘circular economy’, whose essence rests with non-linear, secondary, circular use of all existing natural and material resources to provide the production and consumption without loss of quality and availability of goods and services developed on the grounds of innovations, IT-technology application and ‘Industry 4.0’. Among priorities of circular economy potential applications the following ones should be mentioned: municipal services, solid household wastes management and their recycling, mass transition to smart houses and smart towns, circular agriculture development, circular and renewable energy, The potential of circular economy fully and equally corresponds to the demands for energy efficiency and rational consumption of limited natural resources, so it is widely applied in EU countries while transiting to sustainable development. In the 21st century processes of social production robotization draw the maximal attention of the society. There is a division between industrial and service robots which combine artificial intelligence and other various digital technologies in synergy. Industrial robots are widely used in production, including automotive industry, processing industry, energetic, construction sectors and agriculture Services are applied in all other spheres and sectors of national and world economies –from military-industrial complex (for instance, for mining and demining the areas, military drones) to robots-cleaners (robots-vacuum cleaners), robots-taxis, robots engaged in health care service and served as nurses (provide the ill person with water, tidy up, bring meals). Social production robotization is proceeding apace. According to “World Robotic Report 2020”, within 2014 – 2019 the total quantity of industrial robots increased by 85 %. By 2020 in the world the share of robots in the sphere of automated industrial production had comprised 34 %, in electronics – 25%, in metallurgy – 10 %. These indicators are constantly growing which results in structural reformation of the whole system of economic and industrial processes, radical changes in world labour market and the social sphere of world economy in general. Alongside with generally recognized types of digital technologies and robotization processes, an innovation segment of digital economy – NBIC – technologies (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology, Cognitive Science) are rapidly spread. Among the priorities of NBIC-technologies development the special place belongs to interaction between information and cognitive technologies. As a material basis for its synergy in NBIC-technologies creation of neuron networks, artificial intelligence, artificial cyber brain for robots are applied. It is estimated as one of the most prospective and important achievements of digital economy which determines basic, innovational vector of social production structural reformations in the 21st century. The sphere of results application. International economic relations and world economy, development of competitive strategies of national and social production digitalization of world economy in general. Conclusions. Digital technologies radically change all spheres of social production and social life, including business and managerial processes at all levels. Digital technologies are constantly developing and modifying, that promotes emergence of new spheres and new business activities and management. 21st century witnessed establishing digital economy, smart economy, circular economy, green economy and other various arrangements of social production which are based on digital technologies. Social production digitalization and innovative digital technologies promotes business with flexible systems of arrangement and management, production and sales grounded on processing large Big Data permanently, on the basis of online monitoring in real time. Grounded on digital technologies business in real time mode processes a massive Big Data and on their results makes smart decisions in all business spheres and business processes management. Radical shifts in social production digitalization provides businesses of the states which in practice introduce digital technologies with significant competitive advantages - from decrease in goods and services production cost to targeted meeting of specific needs of consumers. Whereas, rapid introduction of digital technologies in the countries-leaders of world economic development results in a set of system socio-economic and socio-political challenges, including the following: crucial reformatting the world labour market and rise in mass unemployment, shift from traditional export developing countries’ specialization, breakups of traditional production networks being in force since the end of the 20th century, so called ‘chains of additional value shaping’, breakups of traditional cooperation links among world countries and shaping the new ones based on ‘Industry 4.0’ and ‘Industrial Internet’. Socio-economic and political consequences of radical structural reformation of all spheres in national and world economy in the 21st century, undoubtedly, will be stipulated with the processes of social production digitalization. It will require further systemic and fundamental scientific studies on this complicated and multi hierarchical process.

The relevance of the research topic is due to the need to solve the problem of developing conceptual issues of digital transformation management in the context of innovation trends, taking into account the overarching impact and large-scale prospects of digitalization processes. The paper deals with the analysis of the digital aspects of innovation policy, in particular, based on the use of international rankings, the definition of features of building the digital component of innovation networks and the deepening of scientific and methodological approaches to digital support of innovation processes. An overview of modern scientific and methodological approaches to defining the impact of digital transformation on innovation process is presented. Digital transformation can be seen as a factor in access to information and new opportunities that can improve technological capabilities. To assess the impact of digitalization on the development of innovation processes, the data of the Global Innovation Index and the ICT Development Index were used. Based on results of calculations, significant values of the positive correlation with the key components of the innovation system and the level of cluster development were obtained. The study identifies marketing, communication, infrastructural, international dimensions of digitalization of innovation processes. It is shown that the increasing availability of ICTs necessitates a timely rethinking of many processes in the innovation sphere. On the basis of world experience, the role of universities has been substantiated, which should take on a significant part of the responsibility for the formation of a new technological order through improving the quality of researches and their results’ introduction into the real economy within the framework of S2B-B2S networks (Scіence-to-Busіness – Busіness-to-Scіence). As a result of the study, the conclusion is substantiated that an integrated approach to the creation of digital innovation ecosystems requires the study of both institutions and participants, their interaction networks, the specifics of the environment, resources, technologies, etc. It is proposed to consider the role of ICTs in the development of innovation networks on the basis of combining such modern approaches to the development of innovations, in particular – multidisciplinary engineering analysis, system design methodology and parallel engineering methodology. The analysis and deepening of scientific and methodological approaches to the digital support of innovation processes made it possible to identify other promising areas of digitalization of innovation processes, for example, within the framework of the activities of public authorities that ensure the introduction of electronic government technologies.

The e-mail allegedly attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto (supposedly a pseudonym) was transmitted 14 years ago, describing the development of an electronic currency (Nakamoto, 2008). The design of this electronic currency represented the solution of the general Byzantine problem, a well-known problem in computing, which, in general terms, defines that one of the parts of a system can intentionally fail, and with that, make the entire network unavailable. Therefore, the premise is that part of the system is corrupt (Dolev et al., 1982). In the few lines of the email, Satoshi Nakamoto described such a solution and published an article with the details made available on the same date. The article describes how to transmit information within a chain of blocks that are: synchronized with date and time (time stamp); combined with code that depends on a previous block (hash code); can be validated with public and private key cryptography framework anonymously and decentrally; but highly resilient to any tampering attempt and with public record. The concept of digital currency, in this case Bitcoin, consisted at that time of a code or token resulting from encryption and that could be included in these blocks. Blocks registered definitively in the ledgers distributed along the blockchain network that could be traced. The digital framework developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, although it emerged to make Bitcoin viable as a digital currency, has been separated over the last 14 years. Blockchain can be understood as a decentralized communication technology that gave rise to a family of other technological structures of encrypted communication such as ecosystems, public blockchain, private blockchain and blockchain networks, mainly (Mazumdar Ruj, 2022). Digital currencies, on the other hand, have also developed in variety and quantity, so much so that as we write this editorial there are over 10,000 digital currencies in operation. The total capitalization value of digital currencies rose from USD 18 billion at the beginning of 2017, surpassing USD 1.4 trillion by mid-2021 (Su et al., 2022). Currently, there is no technological impediment for companies to create their own digital currencies using a Bitcoin network or an Etherium network, for example, as well as many other networks available.Obviously, even today, there are technical challenges related, mainly, to the scalability of these networks and currencies. Bitcoin, when created, had a capacity of 7 transactions per second, currently, as we write this editorial, the transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network (BTS) is 14 transactions per second. The Etherium (ETH) network was born with a capacity of 20 transactions per second and currently has a capacity of 35 transactions per second. For comparison purposes, the VISA network has a capacity of 1700 transactions per second, which shows that there is still some way to make blockchain networks the new communication backbone, scalable for more mass uses (Chauhan Patel, 2022). There are implementations of the Solana network, for example, which promises to reach 50,000 transactions per second, still in the confirmation phase from a practical point of view, which could allow running Internet of Things (IoT) applications on this blockchain network (Duffy et al., 2021).At the same time, since 2013, the reorganization of the TCP IP structure from IPv4 (4.2 billion IP addresses) to IPv6 (79 octillion IP addresses or 7.9 x ) more than the total number of IPv4 addresses) has been implemented. Such implementation made it possible to expand connectivity to a level sufficient for the world demand, which is 56 octillion (56 x ) addresses per human being on earth. In terms of addressing, the possibilities of connecting new and future elements on the internet/blockchain communication network are guaranteed, making the IoT (Internet of Things) a real possibility.In addition to the traditional applications dedicated to making digital currency viable, especially in the last 5 years, certain works resulting from the combination of information technology and human creativity (also known as creative economy) brought NFT (Non-Fungible Token) to the management field. NFT are tokens (produced through encrypted code, subscribed in some blockchain network) that express the ownership of their author. Whoever acquires an NFT, has his/her record recorded in a ledger and, therefore, can exercise the rights or benefits related to the possession of that NFT. There are two main origins of an NFT, digital games and works of art or graphic expressions (Vasan et al., 2022). In the case of digital games, NFT can be used to record permanently and nominally the “achievements achieved” within a given game. Its owner now takes possession of a certain item that, previously, would only exist within the game itself, a virtual (digital) environment. In the case of graphic, artistic expressions, and other works of art, it is possible to make your possession digital. Works from the natural environment (physical), the result of expressions of human creativity, are now registered in an NFT-type token, coming to exist in the virtual world (digital). In this way, the works, and the data of their authorship and ownership, are permanently registered in the ledger of a blockchain network specialized in transacting NFT. As in the game, the possession of an NFT of a work of art allows the author to trade or use the benefits related to the possession of this NFT.From the convergence of connectivity technologies such as cloud computing, the advent of IPV6 and technologies based on tokens (blockchain, crypto assets and NFT not exhaustively) the concept of Web 3.0 becomes viable. Web 3.0 can be understood as a network of people and physical objects, making the integration between the natural world and the virtual world more intense (augmented, virtual and mixed reality). The idea of a Metaverse (Web 3.0 Application) depends on the technological availability that we describe here very succinctly and on the realization of new social behaviors that are underway (Korkmaz et al., 2022).The context described is not new to most practitioners and academics involved with innovation. However, by describing it in general terms, we can identify different research objects that may be of interest to the community working in the field of innovation management. Evidently, within the research perspectives, especially in innovation management, parallel logics can be established with the more established theories or concepts, which allow an approximation with the new technological objects available to people and companies. Such technologies have permeated traditional companies and startups that have a specific focus on these connectivity technologies described as core business or as business support.The idea of this editorial comment is to recognize the possibility of receiving more technological articles or scientific articles, perspectives and book reviews that consider connectivity and tokenization technologies as research objects. Such technologies can be positioned in research both as objects of analysis and as contextual and organizational objects. Whether contextual and organizational can bring research involving routines, capabilities, competencies and business models, whose core business process is innovation at different scales, natures, degrees of novelty, stages of diffusion or adoption. To cite just one possibility, as an example, the model by Tidd and Bessant from 2009, which describes the construct of orientation to innovation strategy, used in several research in the field of innovation since then, can be revised in the new contexts or in the face of new technologies (Ferreira et al., 2015). If such technologies are positioned as objects of analysis, research can involve every part of the innovation management process such as searching for innovations, selecting innovations, implementing innovations, generating value with innovations, and capturing value with innovations in analysis of single level or multilevel. In addition to the direct positioning of token and blockchain-based technologies, as an object or as a contextual aspect, adjacent effects are expected, for instance, involving intellectual property, environmental and social sustainability, technological governance, people management and other consequences that may be the focus of research, considering the emerging technologies mentioned above. There is also the field of research that is dedicated to the development of new products, both defining new models of digital product development and methods derived from these models, without forgetting all the implications related to the issues of information security management involved in these contexts of token transactions (Baudier et al., 2022). Although the possibilities for theoretical and managerial development for the area of innovation research, involving technologies based on tokens and blockchain, are broad, there is research that can be very relevant, but that would be better received in journals in mathematics, computer science or even software engineering and not in journals dedicated to innovation. Research that develops a new way of doing encryption, or even a more efficient algorithm that allows increasing the capacity of transactions per second, the design of a new network or a new ecosystem based on blockchain or even research that develops improvements in consensus protocols of blockchain undoubtedly has great value but would be expected in engineering or math journals. On the other hand, there are studies that bring reports of implementations of a business application on a blockchain basis, either as a business support application, or in the form of designing a blockchain-based product that will be taken to the market (Wan et al., 2022). In these cases, applied research, from the point of view of innovation research, what is expected to be found in the article is the development of knowledge that demonstrates how, why or to what extent the innovation processes were sensitized, or in what way the process of innovation contributed or presented limitations to support the reported implementation. In this way, such research can be received as technological articles, since the theoretical elements that relate the innovation process, or the management of the innovation process with the implementation based on token or blockchain, will be present, which are the bases of analysis used to support the expansion of innovation theories, innovation management or management practices in innovation contexts.Finally, we invite the entire community to submit papers with theoretical discussions related to paradigm shifts, involving the dematerialized nature of new products and their tendency towards a service-oriented view (Jain et al., 2022).As it should be clear, this editorial comment did not explore all the possibilities of research in innovation management involving technologies based on tokens and blockchain, but only a few examples that can help to obtain insights. We intend, in some way, to encourage the innovation community to develop studies considering new technologies, developing, or expanding theories and knowledge of innovation.

The importance of researching the information component of innovative capital support is due to the formation of the knowledge economy and the need to increase the competitiveness of domestic agrarian enterprises. Innovative renewal of the capital of agrarian enterprises is a key to improving the efficiency of their work: increasing production and sales, reducing production costs, and increasing productivity. At the same time, the problem of the influence of the information component of innovation on capital remains open, which is a reserve for increasing the efficiency of its use and allows us to develop approaches to ensure the profitability growth of agrarian enterprises. Separate aspects of the use of innovations in the agrarian sector of the economy were considered by J. Sayer, K. G. Cassman, H. van Es, J. Woodard, G. Ye. Pavlova, and others. The aim of this article is to research interconnections that arise between the information component of innovation and types of the capital of an enterprise, taking into account agrarian specificity. Methodology. During the research and writing of the article, methods were used: monographic, abstract-logical, mathematical statistics, observation. Results. Any innovation is dual in nature, including the material foundation and the information component. Innovation on the impact on economic processes of enterprises appropriately divided into production (technical, technological, chemical, biological, and managerial) and sales (product and marketing). According to the results of the research, the scheme of the influence of types of innovation on the types of the capital of agrarian enterprises was developed. Empirical studies have shown that the information component of production innovation is methodical and instructional documentation, warranty contract obligations, production licenses, patents, plant and animal breed rights, databases and electronic services of an innovator with their offers, automated information management systems of the enterprise, staff training programs. The information component of sales innovation are the certificates of products quality, brands and trademarks, the standards of the quality of products of the importing countries, characteristics of target market segments, automated customer databases, licensing agreements for the sale of product, data on monitoring of the sectoral markets, pre-contracted deliveries of products, tools e-commerce, etc. Conclusions. The information component of various types of innovation that are inherent in agrarian production is considered. Relationships between types of capital and innovation are explored. The specificity of the use of the information component of innovation in the sectoral section is analysed on the example of grain production and pig farming. The scheme of complex innovative support of enterprise capital is offered. The information component of innovation is detailed. It is recommended to use the information component in full, taking into account the sector specificity of agrarian enterprises.

Purpose The creation of partnerships among companies, governments and universities can improve innovation and the technological development of institutions. As innovation is a multidimensional concept, more nuanced research is needed to identify, which dimensions of innovation firms should focus on them. This paper aims to investigate the influence of attitude to knowledge sharing (KS) factors, learning organization and creativity on the innovation in marketing biotechnology firms. So, the purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of learning organization, attitude to KS, creativity, information technology (IT) acceptance, KS culture and trust on the innovation by presenting a new framework and a model. Design/methodology/approach The structural equation modeling technique is used to examine the reliability and validity of the measurement of the provided model. Data were collected by questionnaires. A case study was carried out in 100 marketing biotechnology firms in the Tehran of Iran. In this paper, smart partial least squares 2.0 was used to evaluate the measurement. Findings The result showed that all hypotheses of this research are proved. Also, the results have shown that the attitude to KS, learning organization and creativity affect the innovation in marketing biotechnology firms. As an overall result, the managers should create an enhanced knowledge bank to increase and encourage the KS among employees, thus creating and enhancing innovation in organizations. Also, the results have shown that marketing shortages were mostly connected to access to human resources with related management and marketing experiences and were mainly felt by firms introducing discontinuous novelties. Research limitations/implications The main limitation of this paper is that the sample was retrieved from 384 employees in 100 marketing biotechnology institutions. The larger number of samples can yield better results. Next, even though the respondents’ profiles indicated a high probability of them being cognizant of their organization’s efforts in inter-firm KS, learning, creativity and innovation with three or four respondent from each organization answering all questions for such complicated issues always poses the risk of measurement bias and inaccuracy. An ideal situation for future studies would be to pool and compare multiple respondents from the same organization to obtain a more comprehensive firm-level measurement. In addition, this study only surveyed and sampled biotech marketing companies in Iran. Therefore, the model should be examined using samples from other countries because the varieties of culture could have an impact on employee apprehensions. So, future researchers can test the measurement instrument in different countries and/or conduct large multi-national comparisons. Practical implications Successful marketing strategies depend very much on an organization’s ability to implement them. This paper provides an excellent study about the future of pharmaceutical KS and shows that innovation paths are linked with local and temporary occasions. Also, the results of this study provide valuable information in formulating marketing biotechnology programs. It is essential to study both economics and innovation for students and academics. The results also suggested that policies to increase economic research will also increase innovation. They could contain the consolidation of the legal framework and institutional resources for public organizations to protect intellectual properties. In general, for successful implementation of strategies an organization has to integrate KS, processes and IT. Social implications The paper identifies the most critical factors in the innovation process of enterprizes in marketing biotechnology institutions. The implications derived from this study can shed new light upon policy-making both at the level of governance and in the management practice in Iran’s marketing biotechnology industry. Also, the paper increases understanding of the innovation process in Iran marketing biotechnology companies. This study contributes to innovating management research by offering a set of legal and dependable operational measures. These measures can help academics in theory analysis. Originality/value This is the first attempt examining the role of the learning organization, creativity and attitude to KS as a key contingency factor in innovation in Iran marketing biotechnology firms, an issue whose understanding is still developing in the literature. The paper adds to the body of knowledge by allowing better understanding the attitude toward KS and the influence of KS, learning and creativity on innovation. Previous studies did not investigate the KS in marketing biotechnology firms deeply, but, the present paper permits a more complete view on this topic. The guidelines are provided for the top directors to promote KS and innovation according to the research results. From a managerial point of view some critical elements, which are important for the success of KS and application of these elements for progressing institutional guidelines to develop KS, are considered. Theoretical foundations can be extracted from this study, and these foundations can be implemented to investigate connection in KS elements such as feasibilities processes and institution initiative abilities. So, the results could be suitable to managers when arranging an organization and shaping its culture to improve knowledge management.

Abstract Businesses nowadays have been adapting to technological advancements since the start of the 21st century to promote their products. The majority of the global population has been exposed to the digital world, and businesses have engaged themselves in the online environment. Social media tools have become a vital component in advertising products and have contributed significantly to creating countless innovations. Using social media has given online businesses options for managing their performance towards their brand and interacting with consumers through social media platforms. These digital improvements have benefited the consumer electronics industry. The goal of the study was to gain a thorough understanding of how social media platforms and tools impact the performance of online retail businesses in the consumer electronics industry. The study used the quantitative approach, and online survey questionnaires were distributed to 185 respondents. Results revealed that perceived ease of use, social media advertising, and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) all have a positive effect on the performance of online retail businesses in the consumer electronics industry. The implications of this research aim to benefit aspiring online business owners, consumers, and future researchers, and help them maximize social media to make them stand out from prospective competitors. Keywords: customer engagement, digital advertising, online marketing, retail businesses, social media

Businesses nowadays have been adapting to technological advancements since the start of the 21st century to promote their products. The majority of the global population has been exposed to the digital world, and businesses have engaged themselves in the online environment. Social media tools have become a vital component in advertising products and have contributed significantly to creating countless innovations. Using social media has given online businesses options for managing their performance towards their brand and interacting with consumers through social media platforms. These digital improvements have benefited the consumer electronics industry. The goal of the study was to gain a thorough understanding of how social media platforms and tools impact the performance of online retail businesses in the consumer electronics industry. The study used the quantitative approach, and online survey questionnaires were distributed to 185 respondents. Results revealed that perceived ease of use, social media advertising, and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) all have a positive effect on the performance of online retail businesses in the consumer electronics industry. The implications of this research aim to benefit aspiring online business owners, consumers, and future researchers, and help them maximize social media to make them stand out from prospective competitors. Keywords: customer engagement, digital advertising, online marketing, retail businesses, social media

Introduction The recent AOL/Time-Warner merger invites us to re-think the relationships amongst content producers, distributors, and audiences. Worth an estimated $300 billion (US), the largest Internet transaction of all time, the deal is 45 times larger than the AOL/Netscape merger of November 1998 (Ledbetter). Additionally, the Time Warner/EMI merger, which followed hard on the heels of the AOL/Time-Warner deal and is itself worth $28 billion (US), created the largest content rights organisation in the music industry. The joining of the Internet giant (AOL) with what was already the world's largest media corporation (Time-Warner-EMI) has inspired some exuberant reactions. An Infoworld column proclaimed: The AOL/Time-Warner merger signals the demise of traditional media companies and the ascendancy of 'new economy' media companies that will force any industry hesitant to adopt a complete electronic-commerce strategy to rethink and put itself on Internet time. (Saap & Schwarrtz) This comment identifies the distribution channel as the dominant component of the "new economy" media. But this might not really be much of an innovation. Indeed, the assumption of all industry observers is that Time-Warner will provide broadband distribution (through its extensive cable holdings) as well as proprietary content for AOL. It is also expected that Time-Warner will adopt AOL's strategy of seeking sponsorship for development projects as well as for content. However, both of these phenomena -- merger and sponsorship -- are at least as old as radio. It seems that the Internet is merely repeating an old industrial strategy. Nonetheless, one important difference distinguishes the Internet from earlier media: its characterisation of the audience. Internet companies such as AOL and Microsoft tend towards a simple and simplistic media- centred view of the audience as market. I will show, however, that as the Internet assumes more of the traditional mass media functions, it will be forced to adopt a more sophisticated notion of the mass audience. Indeed, the Internet is currently the site in which audience definitions borrowed from broadcasting are encountering and merging with definitions borrowed from marketing. The Internet apparently lends itself to both models. As a result, definitions of what the Internet does or is, and of how we should understand the audience, are suitably confused and opaque. And the behaviour of big Internet players, such as AOL and MSN, perfectly reflects this confusion as they seem to careen between a view of the Internet as the new television and a contrasting view of the Internet as the new shopping mall. Meanwhile, Internet users move in ways that most observers fail to capture. For example, Baran and Davis characterise mass communication as a process involving (1) an organized sender, (2) engaged in the distribution of messages, (3) directed toward a large audience. They argue that broadcasting fits this model whereas a LISTSERV does not because, even though the LISTSERV may have very many subscribers, its content is filtered through a single person or Webmaster. But why is the Webmaster suddenly more determining than a network programmer or magazine editor? The distinction seems to grow out of the Internet's technological characteristics: it is an interactive pipeline, therefore its use necessarily excludes the possibility of "broadcasting" which in turn causes us to reject "traditional" notions of the audience. However, if a media organisation were to establish an AOL discussion group in order to promote Warner TV shows, for example, would not the resulting communication suddenly fall under the definition as set out by Baran and Davis? It was precisely the confusion around such definitions that caused the CRTC (Canada's broadcasting and telecommunications regulator) to hold hearings in 1999 to determine what kind of medium the Internet is. Unlike traditional broadcasting, Internet communication does indeed include the possibility of interactivity and niche communities. In this sense, it is closer to narrowcasting than to broadcasting even while maintaining the possibility of broadcasting. Hence, the nature of the audience using the Internet quickly becomes muddy. While such muddiness might have led us to sharpen our definitions of the audience, it seems instead to have led many to focus on the medium itself. For example, Morris & Ogan define the Internet as a mass medium because it addresses a mass audience mediated through technology (Morris & Ogan 39). They divide producers and audiences on the Internet into four groups: One-to-one asynchronous communication (e-mail); Many-to-many asynchronous communication (Usenet and News Groups); One-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many synchronous communication (topic groups, construction of an object, role-playing games, IRC chats, chat rooms); Asynchronous communication (searches, many-to-one, one-to-one, one to- many, source-receiver relations (Morris & Ogan 42-3) Thus, some Internet communication qualifies as mass communication while some does not. However, the focus remains firmly anchored on either the sender or the medium because the receiver --the audience -- is apparently too slippery to define. When definitions do address the content distributed over the Net, they make a distinction between passive reception and interactive participation. As the World Wide Web makes pre-packaged content the norm, the Internet increasingly resembles a traditional mass medium. Timothy Roscoe argues that the main focus of the World Wide Web is not the production of content (and, hence, the fulfilment of the Internet's democratic potential) but rather the presentation of already produced material: "the dominant activity in relation to the Web is not producing your own content but surfing for content" (Rosco 680). He concludes that if the emphasis is on viewing material, the Internet will become a medium similar to television. Within media studies, several models of the audience compete for dominance in the "new media" economy. Denis McQuail recalls how historically, the electronic media furthered the view of the audience as a "public". The audience was an aggregate of common interests. With broadcasting, the electronic audience was delocalised and socially decomposed (McQuail, Mass 212). According to McQuail, it was not a great step to move from understanding the audience as a dispersed "public" to thinking about the audience as itself a market, both for products and as a commodity to be sold to advertisers. McQuail defines this conception of the audience as an "aggregate of potential customers with a known social- economic profile at which a medium or message is directed" (McQuail, Mass 221). Oddly though, in light of the emancipatory claims made for the Internet, this is precisely the dominant view of the audience in the "new media economy". Media Audience as Market How does the marketing model characterise the relationship between audience and producer? According to McQuail, the marketing model links sender and receiver in a cash transaction between producer and consumer rather than in a communicative relationship between equal interlocutors. Such a model ignores the relationships amongst consumers. Indeed, neither the effectiveness of the communication nor the quality of the communicative experience matters. This model, explicitly calculating and implicitly manipulative, is characteristically a "view from the media" (McQuail, Audience 9). Some scholars, when discussing new media, no longer even refer to audiences. They speak of users or consumers (Pavick & Dennis). The logic of the marketing model lies in the changing revenue base for media industries. Advertising-supported media revenues have been dropping since the early 1990s while user-supported media such as cable, satellite, online services, and pay-per-view, have been steadily growing (Pavlik & Dennis 19). In the Internet-based media landscape, the audience is a revenue stream and a source of consumer information. As Bill Gates says, it is all about "eyeballs". In keeping with this view, AOL hopes to attract consumers with its "one-stop shopping and billing". And Internet providers such as MSN do not even consider their subscribers as "audiences". Instead, they work from a consumer model derived from the computer software industry: individuals make purchases without the seller providing content or thematising the likely use of the software. The analogy extends well beyond the transactional moment. The common practice of prototyping products and beta-testing software requires the participation of potential customers in the product development cycle not as a potential audience sharing meanings but as recalcitrant individuals able to uncover bugs. Hence, media companies like MTV now use the Internet as a source of sophisticated demographic research. Recently, MTV Asia established a Website as a marketing tool to collect preferences and audience profiles (Slater 50). The MTV audience is now part of the product development cycle. Another method for getting information involves the "cookie" file that automatically provides a Website with information about the user who logs on to a site (Pavick & Dennis). Simultaneously, though, both Microsoft and AOL have consciously shifted from user-subscription revenues to advertising in an effort to make online services more like television (Gomery; Darlin). For example, AOL has long tried to produce content through its own studios to generate sufficiently heavy traffic on its Internet service in order to garner profitable advertising fees (Young). However, AOL and Microsoft have had little success in providing content (Krantz; Manes). In fact, faced with the AOL/Time-Warner merger, Microsoft declared that it was in the software rather than the content business (Trott). In short, they are caught between a broadcasting model and a consumer model and their behaviour is characteristically erratic. Similarly, media companies such as Time-Warner have failed to establish their own portals. Indeed, Time-Warner even abandoned attempts to create large Websites to compete with other Internet services when it shut down its Pathfinder site (Egan). Instead it refocussed its Websites so as to blur the line between pitching products and covering them (Reid; Lyons). Since one strategy for gaining large audiences is the creation of portals - - large Websites that keep surfers within the confines of a single company's site by providing content -- this is the logic behind the AOL/Time-Warner merger though both companies have clearly been unsuccessful at precisely such attempts. AOL seems to hope that Time- Warner will act as its content specialist, providing the type of compelling material that will make users want to use AOL, whereas Time- Warner seems to hope that AOL will become its privileged pipeline to the hearts and minds of untold millions. Neither has a coherent view of the audience, how it behaves, or should behave. Consequently, their efforts have a distinctly "unmanaged" and slighly inexplicable air to them, as though everyone were simultaneously hopeful and clueless. While one might argue that the stage is set to capitalise on the audience as commodity, there are indications that the success of such an approach is far from guaranteed. First, the AOL/Time-Warner/EMI transaction, merely by existing, has sparked conflicts over proprietary rights. For example, the Recording Industry Association of America, representing Sony, Universal, BMG, Warner and EMI, recently launched a $6.8 billion lawsuit against MP3.com -- an AOL subsidiary -- for alleged copyright violations. Specifically, MP3.com is being sued for selling digitized music over the Internet without paying royalties to the record companies (Anderson). A similar lawsuit has recently been launched over the issue of re- broadcasting television programs over the Internet. The major US networks have joined together against Canadian Internet company iCravetv for the unlawful distribution of content. Both the iCravetv and the MP3.com cases show how dominant media players can marshal their forces to protect proprietary rights in both content and distribution. Since software and media industries have failed to recreate the Internet in the image of traditional broadcasting, the merger of the dominant players in each industry makes sense. However, their simultaneous failure to secure proprietary rights reflects both the competitive nature of the "new media economy" and the weakness of the marketing view of the audience. Media Audience as Public It is often said that communication produces social cohesion. From such cohesion communities emerge on which political or social orders can be constructed. The power of social cohesion and attachment to group symbols can even create a sense of belonging to a "people" or nation (Deutsch). Sociologist Daniel Bell described how the mass media helped create an American culture simply by addressing a large enough audience. He suggested that on the evening of 7 March 1955, when one out of every two Americans could see Mary Martin as Peter Pan on television, a kind of social revolution occurred and a new American public was born. "It was the first time in history that a single individual was seen and heard at the same time by such a broad public" (Bell, quoted in Mattelart 72). One could easily substitute the 1953 World Series or the birth of little Ricky on I Love Lucy. The desire to document such a process recurs with the Internet. Internet communities are based on the assumption that a common experience "creates" group cohesion (Rheingold; Jones). However, as a mass medium, the Internet has yet to find its originary moment, that event to which all could credibly point as the birth of something genuine and meaningful. A recent contender was the appearance of Paul McCartney at the refurbished Cavern Club in Liverpool. On Tuesday, 14 December 1999, McCartney played to a packed club of 300 fans, while another 150,000 watched on an outdoor screen nearby. MSN arranged to broadcast the concert live over the Internet. It advertised an anticipated global audience of 500 million. Unfortunately, there was such heavy Internet traffic that the system was unable to accommodate more than 3 million people. Servers in the United Kingdom were so congested that many could only watch the choppy video stream via an American link. The concert raises a number of questions about "virtual" events. We can draw several conclusions about measuring Internet audiences. While 3 million is a sizeable audience for a 20 minute transmission, by advertising a potential audience of 500 million, MSN showed remarkably poor judgment of its inherent appeal. The Internet is the first medium that allows access to unprocessed material or information about events to be delivered to an audience with neither the time constraints of broadcast media nor the space limitations of the traditional press. This is often cited as one of the characteristics that sets the Internet apart from other media. This feeds the idea of the Internet audience as a participatory, democratic public. For example, it is often claimed that the Internet can foster democratic participation by providing voters with uninterpreted information about candidates and issues (Selnow). However, as James Curran argues, the very process of distributing uninterrupted, unfiltered information, at least in the case of traditional mass media, represents an abdication of a central democratic function -- that of watchdog to power (Curran). In the end, publics are created and maintained through active and continuous participation on the part of communicators and audiences. The Internet holds together potentially conflicting communicative relationships within the same technological medium (Merrill & Ogan). Viewing the audience as co-participant in a communicative relationship makes more sense than simply focussing on the Internet audience as either an aggregate of consumers or a passively constructed symbolic public. Audience as Relationship Many scholars have shifted attention from the producer to the audience as an active participant in the communication process (Ang; McQuail, Audience). Virginia Nightingale goes further to describe the audience as part of a communicative relationship. Nightingale identifies four factors in the relationship between audiences and producers that emphasize their co-dependency. The audience and producer are engaged in a symbiotic relationship in which consumption and use are necessary but not sufficient explanations of audience relations. The notion of the audience invokes, at least potentially, a greater range of activities than simply use or consumption. Further, the audience actively, if not always consciously, enters relationships with content producers and the institutions that govern the creation, distribution and exhibition of content (Nightingale 149-50). Others have demonstrated how this relationship between audiences and producers is no longer the one-sided affair characterised by the marketing model or the model of the audience as public. A global culture is emerging based on critical viewing skills. Kavoori calls this a reflexive mode born of an increasing familiarity with the narrative conventions of news and an awareness of the institutional imperatives of media industries (Kavoori). Given the sophistication of the emergent global audience, a theory that reduces new media audiences to a set of consumer preferences or behaviours will inevitably prove inadequate, just as it has for understanding audience behavior in old media. Similarly, by ignoring those elements of audience behavior that will be easily transported to the Web, we run the risk of idealising the Internet as a medium that will create an illusory, pre-technological public. Conclusion There is an understandable confusion between the two models of the audience that appear in the examples above. The "new economy" will have to come to terms with sophisticated audiences. Contrary to IBM's claim that they want to "get to know all about you", Internet users do not seem particularly interested in becoming a perpetual source of market information. The fragmented, autonomous audience resists attempts to lock it into proprietary relationships. Internet hypesters talk about creating publics and argue that the Internet recreates the intimacy of community as a corrective to the atomisation and alienation characteristic of mass society. This faith in the power of a medium to create social cohesion recalls the view of the television audience as a public constructed by the common experience of watching an important event. However, MSN's McCartney concert indicates that creating a public from spectacle it is not a simple process. In fact, what the Internet media conglomerates seem to want more than anything is to create consumer bases. Audiences exist for pleasure and by the desire to be entertained. As Internet media institutions are established, the cynical view of the audience as a source of consumer behavior and preferences will inevitably give way, to some extent, to a view of the audience as participant in communication. Audiences will be seen, as they have been by other media, as groups whose attention must be courted and rewarded. Who knows, maybe the AOL/Time-Warner merger might, indeed, signal the new medium's coming of age. References Anderson, Lessley. "To Beam or Not to Beam. MP3.com Is Being Sued by the Major Record Labels. Does the Digital Download Site Stand a Chance?" Industry Standard 31 Jan. 2000. <http://www.thestandard.com>. Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Methuen, 1985. Baran, Stanley, and Dennis Davis. Mass Communication Theory: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth 2000. Curran, James. "Mass Media and Democracy Revisited." Mass Media and Society. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. New York: Hodder Headline Group, 1996. Darlin, Damon. "He Wants Your Eyeballs." Forbes 159 (16 June 1997): 114-6. Egan, Jack, "Pathfinder, Rest in Peace: Time-Warner Pulls the Plug on Site." US News and World Report 126.18 (10 May 1999): 50. Gomery, Douglas. "Making the Web Look like Television (American Online and Microsoft)." American Journalism Review 19 (March 1997): 46. Jones, Steve, ed. CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995. Kavoori, Amandam P. "Discursive Texts, Reflexive Audiences: Global Trends in Television News Texts and Audience Reception." Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 43.3 (Summer 1999): 386-98. Krantz, Michael. "Is MSN on the Block?" Time 150 (20 Oct. 1997): 82. Ledbetter, James. "AOL-Time-Warner Make It Big." Industry Standard 11 Jan. 2000. <http://www.thestandard.com>. Lyons, Daniel. "Desparate.com (Media Companies Losing Millions on the Web Turn to Electronic Commerce)." Forbes 163.6 (22 March 1999): 50-1. Manes, Stephen. "The New MSN as Prehistoric TV." New York Times 4 Feb. 1997: C6. McQuail, Denis. Audience Analysis. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. ---. Mass Communication Theory. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 1987. Mattelart, Armand. Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture. Trans. Susan Emanuel and James A. Cohen. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Morris, Merrill, and Christine Ogan. "The Internet as Mass Medium." Journal of Communications 46 (Winter 1996): 39-50. Nightingale, Virginia. Studying Audience: The Shock of the Real. London: Routledge, 1996. Pavlik, John V., and Everette E. Dennis. New Media Technology: Cultural and Commercial Perspectives. 2nd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998. Reid, Calvin. "Time-Warner Seeks Electronic Synergy, Profits on the Web (Pathfinder Site)." Publisher's Weekly 242 (4 Dec. 1995): 12. Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper, 1993. Roscoe, Timothy. "The Construction of the World Wide Web Audience." Media, Culture and Society 21.5 (1999): 673-84. Saap, Geneva, and Ephraim Schwarrtz. "AOL-Time-Warner Deal to Impact Commerce, Content, and Access Markets." Infoworld 11 January 2000. <http://infoworld.com/articles/ic/xml/00/01/11/000111icimpact.xml>. Slater, Joanna. "Cool Customers: Music Channels Hope New Web Sites Tap into Teen Spirit." Far Eastern Economic Review 162.9 (4 March 1999): 50. Trott, Bob. "Microsoft Views AOL-Time-Warner as Confirmation of Its Own Strategy." Infoworld 11 Jan. 2000. <http://infoworld.com/articles/pi/xml/00/01/11/000111pimsaoltw.xml>. Yan, Catherine. "A Major Studio Called AOL?" Business Week 1 Dec. 1997: 1773-4. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Daniel M. Downes. "The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php>. Chicago style: Daniel M. Downes, "The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Daniel M. Downes. (2000) The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php> ([your date of access]).

The contemporary supermarket is a work of classification and cataloguing as marvellous as any museum. Barcodes are hallmarks by which its computer systems could know, in their own electronic language, every possible product of a certain kind afoot in the nation. It is a rather special institution in this respect -- a huge fund of contemporary synchronic cultural memory, a database and storehouse of collected human tastes to which individuals turn to seek out their own. However, this means that just as Wittgenstein demonstrated the impossibility of a purely private language, there can be no such thing as a purely private taste. Taste is demonstrated by choosing from a range of public items, that is, products. Therefore let's bracket the liberal concept of sovereign personal taste for now and beat a different track: the supermarket is the site of aggregation of multiple discourses by which the individual is sewn into and sews the fabric of collective life. Techniques used to sell food today, such as freebies (like plastic toys), free offers, forms of gambling, and images of healthiness, convenience, celebrity and enhanced relationships, appeal to -- must appeal to for commercial reasons -- shared values. It is inviting to view the supermarket as an emblem of a postmodern condition. The gaggle of images and words that line its aisles defy unity, play fast and loose with reality, create a simulacral space of copied quotes and sight bites that is coterminous with radically decentred selves. It conforms to the Jamesonian topography of a culture that has lost it -- that sense of real placed history that identity used to be tied up with. But my aim in this essay is to critique such a rhetoric of loss. Discourse remains the province of the self-imaginings of social groups in spite of the diversity of images in circulation. And although the media through which group solidarity is transmitted change with technological developments, the fact of such transmission does not. Hence, by looking at the imagery used on food packets, I will analyse the way that one rhetorical strategy used to sell the food we find on supermarket shelves -- nationalism -- is part of a longstanding cultural trajectory by which citizens of a nation imagine their relationship with their land. This, however, involves the equation of 'the nation' with the ethnic imagery of the group that dominates its political apparatus and territory, a process of circumscription that I shall ultimately suggest has political ramifications, especially in the context of nations like Australia which were formed by largely European settler colonisation of the land. Nationalism, then, is a strand of marketing rhetoric used most often, but not exclusively, for the promotion of products in the country of their origin. As such it grafts a tradition of art commemorating place and ethnic identity into the seemingly unlikely genre of the product label. Indeed, for Benedict Anderson the sociopolitical sentiment of nationalism requires forums and images through which to articulate itself, or more accurately, to imaginatively create its auratic object of adoration -- as nationalism is itself innovative (Anderson 15). It also depends upon technologies that can produce a sense of simultaneity between dispersed people who will never meet each other. The distribution of the packaged 'gifts' of a land to 'its people' provides one such opportunity for the transmission of sacralised images of land and the solidarity of its inhabitants. So the genre of the label that comes with a specific distribution and selling system provides the technical medium, and the land, its produce, its people and their relationships in ecosocial community, form the imagery. A limit case example of pride in the gifts of the land can be found on the label of New Zealand's Steinlager: "New Zealand's Finest ... World's Best Lager ... Brewed with the finest New Zealand Hops, Yeast, Barley and Pure Water ... Since 1854". It embodies a series of associations found in other examples: the products of the land are associated with firstly, high quality, and secondly, natural purity. New Zealand seems to be repeated with two slightly different senses. In its juxtaposition with "the world", the two places centre on the finished product of lager, which is presented as a literally world-beating national product. The last line of the label reads "Brewed and Bottled by New Zealand Breweries Limited", the company name both emphasising the agency of New Zealand people in processing ingredients taken from their land's soil, and the legally New Zealandian status of their enterprise. The second sense implies the physical basis for all this: the giftedness of the land which subtends an economy and a culture. "Since 1854" brings these components together on the axis of continuity, making the origination of national production temporal as well as spatial. In other words this benign relationship of production becomes part of national heritage. A certain double sense is in play. Land is both a nation comprising citizens and physical resource; the word that perfectly fuses the sense of the former's political proprietary relationship with the latter into a working unity. Accordingly many packets transfigure the legal requirement to mention the place of production into an attention-grabbing declaration of country of origin whilst also referring to the physical land. The latter may be parsed into two general categories: imagery of animals, plants, landscapes, the elements, etc, and rustic images of human management of the land. So Bulla ice cream advertises its Australianness to a pastoral backdrop; Saxa salt, which has been "Australia's own ... Since 1911", is being hauled by a hat-wearing Aussie man and loyal horse; Bundaberg caster sugar is both "pure Australian" and "Australian made" thanks to the blessing of the (Australian) sun. And other products, such as Australian Natural Foods Non Dairy Soy Mango Smoothie and Pureland Organic Tofu make links between nation and nature through 'land-based' company names similarly buttressed by images of Australian agricultural landscape and the Australian made hallmark respectively. The three conceptual categories often found in correlation with the concrete particulars of 'the land' -- healthiness, purity and naturalness -- are well represented in the packets analysed here. A series of metonymic implications is set up between the terms. They are all potential qualities of the land that are realised in the products it yields. Pureland and Australian Natural Foods juxtapose nation and healthiness closely and the pastoral visions of Bürgen and Dairy Vale have the approval of the National Heart Foundation. Bundaberg and Pureland make the most direct appeals to purity, but concepts such as Bulla's "Australian made real dairy" and Devondale's "choice grade" and "premium Australian" also convey a certain sense of uncorrupted pedigree in their products' provenance. Most products seem to evoke naturalness pictorially, with green rolling landscapes and cows feeding on the verdure featuring particularly highly. Thus at this point a critique of capitalist industrial culture is possible. The missing links are the contemporary factory and office: the places of the processing and assembly of the product physically and discursively; the places where the fruits of the land meet their packaging and are primed for the marketplace. The gifts of nature become commodities but are inscribed as the gifts of nature still, such that the point of sale obfuscates the point of production: profit. The whole enterprise seems to be based on a principle of distantiation. Because of urbanisation, the vast majority of people live away from farm land, and because most food is not consumed by the local communities that produce it, but is produced for larger markets, it is packed and written upon for transport to strangers who will buy it and perhaps also an idealisation of the land. Yet they aren't strangers. This mediation of group solidarity by food-as-commodity does not tear social bonds apart, it forms them. It forms ecosocial community just as it provides a projection of one. And the very invocation of group loyalty as the reason for buying means we should question, as John Frow has done, whether the commodity is always simply a token of abstraction in conceptual opposition to 'the gift' (Frow, "Gift and Commodity"). It is not simply the case that capitalists dupe consumers into thinking of commodities in gift-like terms. Indeed, the discourses of the land we find on supermarket shelves go back a long way in Western culture. As Raymond Williams says: "in English, 'country' is both a nation and a part of a 'land'; 'the country' can be the whole society or its rural area. In the long history of human settlements, this connection between the land from which directly or indirectly we all get our living and the achievements of human society has been deeply known" (1). The majority of the packets analysed extend the pastoral tradition of European art, a tradition which determines the "innate bounty" (33) of the land as the province of benign, 'total' social relations as reflected in the "timeless rhythm" of the authentic agrarian life (10). But the pastoral tradition is itself a media technical one. Williams points out that "a working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation" (120). The same is true of pastoral in its nationalistic guise. It is transmitted by books, paintings and packets, is predicated on such a 'separation and observation'. The idealisation of the common land that subtends 'us' may be an attempt to bridge that distance, yet it is, ironically, transmitted through inscribed objects that create bonds between spatially and temporally dispersed people. It achieves what Anderson calls "unisonance", "a special kind of contemporaneous community which language alone suggests -- above all in the form of poetry and songs" (132). So, if the supermarket turns inner desire outward to the realm of public items that provides its possibilities, nationalistic desire moves in the same way, both inside and outside the supermarket context. There is no purely internal or purely external nation, just as there is no private language. Rather cultural memory, whether transmitted by a food packet or a poem is a thread transmitted through selves, language, technological milieux, and groups of people. Thus as Thongchai Winichakul succinctly states, "a nation is not a given reality. Rather it is the effect of imagining about it" (14). "We can know about it as long as we employ certain technologies to inscribe the possible sphere. In turn, such technologies create the knowledge of it, create a fact of it, and the entity comes into existence." (15). The contemporary food packet is one such media technology as certainly as a book or a song, and all media inscriptions of the possible sphere of 'the land' are lived ecosocial experience of the land. They make the land a unity by fusing its first physical sense with its second sociopolitical one. Invocation of the land as a prior given that subtends and provides the continuity of a sociopolitical group that has power over its resources, nests the historical contingency of that power relationship into a secure vision of the provenance of nation with the self-origination of 'its' land. That natural element, free, pure and healthy, is the one in which the group's ownership rights are rooted and legitimated. However, in fact, any nation is itself an historical innovation, an inherently unstable ideological product of strategy, technique, rhetorical and material. Nation-states are not naturally correlative with the land, nor are the ethnic groups that politically dominate the nation. They arise where other socio-economic political organisations existed before; they emerge. In The City and the Country Williams's main concern was to point out an alternative class-based history of the real and largely exploitative management of the land, a history that is actively occluded by idealised renderings of the countryside. Here in a parallel way but without room for explication, I want to suggest an alternative history of the management of the land that is indissociable from the emergence of the modern Australian nation -- a race-based history. Thus, here's the rub: the totems of pastoral that are equated with Australianness in the packets I have referred to, are European. The 'food packet' pastoral idealises group totems such as to transform historically contingent relationships of certain ethnic groups with the land into naturalised ones. The cows of Bulla and Devondale, the pastures of Dairy Vale, Bürgen's wheat, the agricultural infrastructure, the men imaged and their modes of management of the land, are European in lineage, and so is most of the food they sacralise as 'Australian'. These things are not natural to the land but were introduced, as was a related political and economic infrastructure that created 'Australia'. And there is a whole history to this appropriation of the land that is not active in the rhetorical force field of the European Australian pastoral, just as the living cultural memories of Aboriginal peoples disposed by the creation of the Australian nation-state are not. ... In "Australia Day at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy", Felicia Fletcher and John Leonard mention how representatives of Aboriginal countries in Australia assembled at Parliament House eat food to sustain themselves in their bid to right this dispossession: "vegetables are cooked in the coals, bread is toasted over the fire, endless cups of tea are poured, pots of three dozen eggs are boiled again and again to keep up the strengths and spirits of the people" (16). However, they add, quoting the group rather than a specific individual: "'It's nice, but at home we'd have a nice bit of kangaroo tail in the fire -- you've got to know how to do it properly -- and damper'": a different memory of and relationship with 'the land' (in both its senses). To conclude, the memories of the land create it at the time of commemoration. How we commemorate it is a present-day matter of great communal and political significance. Plates 1 Ducks Nuts 7 Bürgen High-Bake Heritage White bread 2 Steinlager Beer 8 Devondale Extra Soft margarine 3 Bulla Real Dairy Ice Cream 9 Bundaberg Caster Sugar 4 Saxa Table Salt 10 Dairy Vale Skim Milk 5 Pureland Organic Tofu 11 Devondale Cheese 6 So Natural Mango Smoothie 12 Edgell References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Fletcher, Felicia, and John Leonard. "Australia Day at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy." Meanjin 58.1 (1999): 10-17. Frow, John. "Gift and Commodity." Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. ---. "Toute la Mémoire du Monde: Repetition and Forgetting." Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973. Winichakul, Thongchai. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Guy Redden. "Packaging the Gifts of Nation." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php>. Chicago style: Guy Redden, "Packaging the Gifts of Nation," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Guy Redden. (1999) Packaging the gifts of nation. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php> ([your date of access]).

On the morning of Thursday, 4 May 2006, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing entitled “Terrorist Use of the Internet.” The Intelligence committee meeting was scheduled to take place in Room 1302 of the Longworth Office Building, a Depression-era structure with a neoclassical façade. Because of a dysfunctional elevator, some of the congressional representatives were late to the meeting. During the testimony about the newest political applications for cutting-edge digital technology, the microphones periodically malfunctioned, and witnesses complained of “technical problems” several times. By the end of the day it seemed that what was to be remembered about the hearing was the shocking revelation that terrorists were using videogames to recruit young jihadists. The Associated Press wrote a short, restrained article about the hearing that only mentioned “computer games and recruitment videos” in passing. Eager to have their version of the news item picked up, Reuters made videogames the focus of their coverage with a headline that announced, “Islamists Using US Videogames in Youth Appeal.” Like a game of telephone, as the Reuters videogame story was quickly re-run by several Internet news services, each iteration of the title seemed less true to the exact language of the original. One Internet news service changed the headline to “Islamic militants recruit using U.S. video games.” Fox News re-titled the story again to emphasise that this alert about technological manipulation was coming from recognised specialists in the anti-terrorism surveillance field: “Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games.” As the story circulated, the body of the article remained largely unchanged, in which the Reuters reporter described the digital materials from Islamic extremists that were shown at the congressional hearing. During the segment that apparently most captured the attention of the wire service reporters, eerie music played as an English-speaking narrator condemned the “infidel” and declared that he had “put a jihad” on them, as aerial shots moved over 3D computer-generated images of flaming oil facilities and mosques covered with geometric designs. Suddenly, this menacing voice-over was interrupted by an explosion, as a virtual rocket was launched into a simulated military helicopter. The Reuters reporter shared this dystopian vision from cyberspace with Western audiences by quoting directly from the chilling commentary and describing a dissonant montage of images and remixed sound. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults. Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001, statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity. According to the news reports, the key piece of evidence before Congress seemed to be a film by “SonicJihad” of recorded videogame play, which – according to the experts – was widely distributed online. Much of the clip takes place from the point of view of a first-person shooter, seen as if through the eyes of an armed insurgent, but the viewer also periodically sees third-person action in which the player appears as a running figure wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh, who dashes toward the screen with a rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder. Significantly, another of the player’s hand-held weapons is a detonator that triggers remote blasts. As jaunty music plays, helicopters, tanks, and armoured vehicles burst into smoke and flame. Finally, at the triumphant ending of the video, a green and white flag bearing a crescent is hoisted aloft into the sky to signify victory by Islamic forces. To explain the existence of this digital alternative history in which jihadists could be conquerors, the Reuters story described the deviousness of the country’s terrorist opponents, who were now apparently modifying popular videogames through their wizardry and inserting anti-American, pro-insurgency content into U.S.-made consumer technology. One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular “Battlefield 2” from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as “mods,” to video games. “Millions of people create mods on games around the world,” he said. “We have absolutely no control over them. It’s like drawing a mustache on a picture.” Although the Electronic Arts executive dismissed the activities of modders as a “mustache on a picture” that could only be considered little more than childish vandalism of their off-the-shelf corporate product, others saw a more serious form of criminality at work. Testifying experts and the legislators listening on the committee used the video to call for greater Internet surveillance efforts and electronic counter-measures. Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source. Ironically, the moment in the movie from which the sound clip is excerpted is one about intelligence gathering. As an agent of Team America, a fictional elite U.S. commando squad, the hero of the film’s all-puppet cast, Gary Johnston, is impersonating a jihadist radical inside a hostile Egyptian tavern that is modelled on the cantina scene from Star Wars. Additional laughs come from the fact that agent Johnston is accepted by the menacing terrorist cell as “Hakmed,” despite the fact that he utters a series of improbable clichés made up of incoherent stereotypes about life in the Middle East while dressed up in a disguise made up of shoe polish and a turban from a bathroom towel. The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists. It wasn’t intended for the purpose what it was portrayed to be by the media. So no I don’t regret making a funny video . . . why should I? The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters was objective and always right. The least they could do is some online research before publishing this. If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video, that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is everything al-Qaeda? Although Sonic Jihad dismissed his own work as “silly” or “funny,” he expected considerably more from a credible news agency like Reuters: “objective” reporting, “online research,” and fact-checking before “publishing.” Within the week, almost all of the salient details in the Reuters story were revealed to be incorrect. SonicJihad’s film was not made by terrorists or for terrorists: it was not created by “Islamic militants” for “Muslim youths.” The videogame it depicted had not been modified by a “tech-savvy militant” with advanced programming skills. Of course, what is most extraordinary about this story isn’t just that Reuters merely got its facts wrong; it is that a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play. Based on their exchanges in the public record, elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal. This environment of cultural reaction can be used to explain why policy makers’ reaction to terrorists’ use of networked communication and digital media actually tells us more about our own American ideologies about technology and rhetoric in a contemporary information environment. When the experts come forward at the Sonic Jihad hearing to “walk us through the media and some of the products,” they present digital artefacts of an information economy that mirrors many of the features of our own consumption of objects of electronic discourse, which seem dangerously easy to copy and distribute and thus also create confusion about their intended meanings, audiences, and purposes. From this one hearing we can see how the reception of many new digital genres plays out in the public sphere of legislative discourse. Web pages, videogames, and Weblogs are mentioned specifically in the transcript. The main architecture of the witnesses’ presentation to the committee is organised according to the rhetorical conventions of a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, the arguments made by expert witnesses about the relationship of orality to literacy or of public to private communications in new media are highly relevant to how we might understand other important digital genres, such as electronic mail or text messaging. The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property. To explain embarrassing leaks of infinitely replicable digital files, witness Ron Roughead says, “We’re not even sure that they don’t even hack into the kinds of spaces that hold photographs in order to get pictures that our forces have taken.” Another witness, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and International Affairs, Peter Rodman claims that “any video game that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and change the game for their needs.” Thus, the implication of these witnesses’ testimony is that the release of code into the public domain can contribute to political subversion, much as covert intrusion into computer networks by stealthy hackers can. However, the witnesses from the Pentagon and from the government contractor SAIC often present a contradictory image of the supposed terrorists in the hearing transcripts. Sometimes the enemy is depicted as an organisation of technological masterminds, capable of manipulating the computer code of unwitting Americans and snatching their rightful intellectual property away; sometimes those from the opposing forces are depicted as pre-modern and even sub-literate political innocents. In contrast, the congressional representatives seem to focus on similarities when comparing the work of “terrorists” to the everyday digital practices of their constituents and even of themselves. According to the transcripts of this open hearing, legislators on both sides of the aisle express anxiety about domestic patterns of Internet reception. Even the legislators’ own Web pages are potentially disruptive electronic artefacts, particularly when the demands of digital labour interfere with their duties as lawmakers. Although the subject of the hearing is ostensibly terrorist Websites, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) bemoans the difficulty of maintaining her own official congressional site. As she observes, “So we are – as members, I think we’re very sensitive about what’s on our Website, and if I retained what I had on my Website three years ago, I’d be out of business. So we know that they have to be renewed. They go up, they go down, they’re rebuilt, they’re – you know, the message is targeted to the future.” In their questions, lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions. Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) compares the polluting power of insurgent bloggers to that of influential online muckrakers from the American political Right. Hastings complains of “garbage on our regular mainstream news that comes from blog sites.” Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) attempts to project a media-savvy persona by bringing up the “phenomenon of blogging” in conjunction with her questions about jihadist Websites in which she notes how Internet traffic can be magnified by cooperative ventures among groups of ideologically like-minded content-providers: “These Websites, and particularly the most active ones, are they cross-linked? And do they have kind of hot links to your other favorite sites on them?” At one point Representative Wilson asks witness Rodman if he knows “of your 100 hottest sites where the Webmasters are educated? What nationality they are? Where they’re getting their money from?” In her questions, Wilson implicitly acknowledges that Web work reflects influences from pedagogical communities, economic networks of the exchange of capital, and even potentially the specific ideologies of nation-states. It is perhaps indicative of the government contractors’ anachronistic worldview that the witness is unable to answer Wilson’s question. He explains that his agency focuses on the physical location of the server or ISP rather than the social backgrounds of the individuals who might be manufacturing objectionable digital texts. The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries. The residual subtexts in the witnesses’ conjectures about competing cultures of orality and literacy may tell us something about a reactionary rhetoric around videogames and digital culture more generally. According to the experts before Congress, the Middle Eastern audience for these videogames and Websites is limited by its membership in a pre-literate society that is only capable of abortive cultural production without access to knowledge that is archived in printed codices. Sometimes the witnesses before Congress seem to be unintentionally channelling the ideas of the late literacy theorist Walter Ong about the “secondary orality” associated with talky electronic media such as television, radio, audio recording, or telephone communication. Later followers of Ong extend this concept of secondary orality to hypertext, hypermedia, e-mail, and blogs, because they similarly share features of both speech and written discourse. Although Ong’s disciples celebrate this vibrant reconnection to a mythic, communal past of what Kathleen Welch calls “electric rhetoric,” the defence industry consultants express their profound state of alarm at the potentially dangerous and subversive character of this hybrid form of communication. The concept of an “oral tradition” is first introduced by the expert witnesses in the context of modern marketing and product distribution: “The Internet is used for a variety of things – command and control,” one witness states. “One of the things that’s missed frequently is how and – how effective the adversary is at using the Internet to distribute product. They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of oral tradition, if you will.” Thus, although the Internet can be deployed for hierarchical “command and control” activities, it also functions as a highly efficient peer-to-peer distributed network for disseminating the commodity of information. Throughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order. Witness Eric Michael describes the “oral tradition” and the conventions of communal life in the Middle East to emphasise the primacy of speech in the collective discursive practices of this alien population: “I’d like to point your attention to the media types and the fact that the oral tradition is listed as most important. The other media listed support that. And the significance of the oral tradition is more than just – it’s the medium by which, once it comes off the Internet, it is transferred.” The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era. The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A[n] event takes place. There is an explosion in a city. Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is doing indiscriminate killing. This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution. It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the story and broadcasts it, at which point it’s now a fact. In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go back to this false initial report on network television and continue to reiterate that it’s a fact, even though the United States government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the network has since recanted the broadcast. In this example, many-to-many discussion on the “street” is formalised into a one-to many “sermon” and then further stylised using technology in a one-to-many broadcast on “network television” in which “propaganda” that is “false” can no longer be disputed. This “oral tradition” is like digital media, because elements of discourse can be infinitely copied or “recycled,” and it is designed to “reiterate” content. In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.” The film by SonicJihad is chosen as the final clip by the witnesses before Congress, because it allegedly combines many different types of emotional appeal, and thus it conveniently ties together all of the themes that the witnesses present to the legislators about unreliable oral or rhetorical sources in the Middle East: And there you see how all these products are linked together. And you can see where the games are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces. You can see how they use humor. You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct that response in the direction that they want. Jihadist digital products, especially videogames, are effective means of manipulation, the witnesses argue, because they employ multiple channels of persuasion and carefully sequenced and integrated subliminal messages. To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses. This sharp criticism of the artful use of a presentation style that is “crafted” is ironic, given that the witnesses’ “compilation” of jihadist digital material is staged in the form of a carefully structured PowerPoint presentation, one that is paced to a well-rehearsed rhythm of “slide, please” or “next slide” in the transcript. The transcript also reveals that the members of the House Intelligence Committee were not the original audience for the witnesses’ PowerPoint presentation. Rather, when it was first created by SAIC, this “expert” presentation was designed for training purposes for the troops on the ground, who would be facing the challenges of deployment in hostile terrain. According to the witnesses, having the slide show showcased before Congress was something of an afterthought. Nonetheless, Congressman Tiahrt (R-KN) is so impressed with the rhetorical mastery of the consultants that he tries to appropriate it. As Tiarht puts it, “I’d like to get a copy of that slide sometime.” From the hearing we also learn that the terrorists’ Websites are threatening precisely because they manifest a polymorphously perverse geometry of expansion. For example, one SAIC witness before the House Committee compares the replication and elaboration of digital material online to a “spiderweb.” Like Representative Eshoo’s site, he also notes that the terrorists’ sites go “up” and “down,” but the consultant is left to speculate about whether or not there is any “central coordination” to serve as an organising principle and to explain the persistence and consistency of messages despite the apparent lack of a single authorial ethos to offer a stable, humanised, point of reference. In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.” Of course, to maintain their share of the government market, the Science Applications International Corporation also employs practices of publicity and promotion through the Internet and digital media. They use HTML Web pages for these purposes, as well as PowerPoint presentations and online video. The rhetoric of the Website of SAIC emphasises their motto “From Science to Solutions.” After a short Flash film about how SAIC scientists and engineers solve “complex technical problems,” the visitor is taken to the home page of the firm that re-emphasises their central message about expertise. The maps, uniforms, and specialised tools and equipment that are depicted in these opening Web pages reinforce an ethos of professional specialisation that is able to respond to multiple threats posed by the “global war on terror.” By 26 June 2006, the incident finally was being described as a “Pentagon Snafu” by ABC News. From the opening of reporter Jake Tapper’s investigative Webcast, established government institutions were put on the spot: “So, how much does the Pentagon know about videogames? Well, when it came to a recent appearance before Congress, apparently not enough.” Indeed, the very language about “experts” that was highlighted in the earlier coverage is repeated by Tapper in mockery, with the significant exception of “independent expert” Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If the Pentagon and SAIC deride the legitimacy of rhetoric as a cultural practice, Bogost occupies himself with its defence. In his recent book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost draws upon the authority of the “2,500 year history of rhetoric” to argue that videogames represent a significant development in that cultural narrative. Given that Bogost and his Watercooler Games Weblog co-editor Gonzalo Frasca were actively involved in the detective work that exposed the depth of professional incompetence involved in the government’s line-up of witnesses, it is appropriate that Bogost is given the final words in the ABC exposé. As Bogost says, “We should be deeply bothered by this. We should really be questioning the kind of advice that Congress is getting.” Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see. References ABC News. “Terrorist Videogame?” Nightline Online. 21 June 2006. 22 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2105341>. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Game Politics. “Was Congress Misled by ‘Terrorist’ Game Video? We Talk to Gamer Who Created the Footage.” 11 May 2006. http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/285129.html#cutid1>. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. julieb. “David Morgan Is a Horrible Writer and Should Be Fired.” Online posting. 5 May 2006. Dvorak Uncensored Cage Match Forums. http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,130.0.html>. Mahmood. “Terrorists Don’t Recruit with Battlefield 2.” GGL Global Gaming. 16 May 2006 http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3090>. Morgan, David. “Islamists Using U.S. Video Games in Youth Appeal.” Reuters online news service. 4 May 2006 http://today.reuters.com/news/ArticleNews.aspx?type=topNews &storyID=2006-05-04T215543Z_01_N04305973_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY- VIDEOGAMES.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc= NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2>. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Methuen, 1982. Parker, Trey. Online posting. 7 May 2006. 9 May 2006 http://www.treyparker.com>. Plato. “Gorgias.” Plato: Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Shrader, Katherine. “Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites.” Associated Press 4 May 2006. SonicJihad. “SonicJihad: A Day in the Life of a Resistance Fighter.” Online posting. 26 Dec. 2005. Planet Battlefield Forums. 9 May 2006 http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefield/topic.asp?fid=13670&tid=1806909&p=1>. Tapper, Jake, and Audery Taylor. “Terrorist Video Game or Pentagon Snafu?” ABC News Nightline 21 June 2006. 30 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Technology/story?id=2105128&page=1>. U.S. Congressional Record. Panel I of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Subject: “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Communications.” Federal News Service. 4 May 2006. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and the New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Losh, Elizabeth. "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>. APA Style Losh, E. (Oct. 2007) "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>.

The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers. I’m obviously not the first person to notice this (see, for instance, "Scholarly Communication"; "Transforming Scholarly Communication"; Houghton; Policy Perspectives; Teute), but I do have a personal stake in the process. For if the journal is obsolete then it follows that the editor is obsolete, and I am the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. I founded the IJCS and have been sole editor ever since. Next year will see the fiftieth issue. So far, I have been responsible for over 280 published articles – over 2.25 million words of other people’s scholarship … and counting. We won’t say anything about the words that did not get published, except that the IJCS rejection rate is currently 87 per cent. Perhaps the first point that needs to be made, then, is that obsolescence does not imply lack of success. By any standard the IJCS is a successful journal, and getting more so. It has recently been assessed as a top-rating A* journal in the Australian Research Council’s journal rankings for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), the newly activated research assessment exercise. (In case you’re wondering, M/C Journal is rated B.) The ARC says of the ranking exercise: ‘The lists are a result of consultations with the sector and rigorous review by leading researchers and the ARC.’ The ARC definition of an A* journal is given as: Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/ subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted.Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions. (Appendix I, p. 21; and see p. 4.)Talking of boasting, I love to prate about the excellent people we’ve published in the IJCS. We have introduced new talent to the field, and we have published new work by some of its pioneers – including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. We’ve also published – among many others – Sara Ahmed, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Tony Bennett, Goran Bolin, Charlotte Brunsdon, William Boddy, Nico Carpentier, Stephen Coleman, Nick Couldry, Sean Cubitt, Michael Curtin, Daniel Dayan, Ben Dibley, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John Frow, Elfriede Fursich, Christine Geraghty, Mark Gibson, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsberg, Jonathan Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Judith Halberstam, Hanno Hardt, Gay Hawkins, Joke Hermes, Su Holmes, Desmond Hui, Fred Inglis, Henry Jenkins, Deborah Jermyn, Ariel Heryanto, Elihu Katz, Senator Rod Kemp (Australian government minister), Youna Kim, Agnes Ku, Richard E. Lee, Jeff Lewis, David Lodge (the novelist), Knut Lundby, Eric Ma, Anna McCarthy, Divya McMillin, Antonio Menendez-Alarcon, Toby Miller, Joe Moran, Chris Norris, John Quiggin, Chris Rojek, Jane Roscoe, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, John Storey, Su Tong, the late Sako Takeshi, Sue Turnbull, Graeme Turner, William Uricchio, José van Dijck, Georgette Wang, Jing Wang, Elizabeth Wilson, Janice Winship, Handel Wright, Wu Jing, Wu Qidi (Chinese Vice-Minister of Education), Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Robert Young and Zhao Bin. As this partial list makes clear, as well as publishing the top ‘hegemons’ we also publish work pointing in new directions, including papers from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, economics, education, feminism, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. We have sought to represent neglected regions, especially Chinese cultural studies, which has grown strongly during the past decade. And for quite a few up-and-coming scholars we’ve been the proud host of their first international publication. The IJCS was first published in 1998, already well into the internet era, but it was print-only at that time. Since then, all content, from volume 1:1 onwards, has been digitised and is available online (although vol 1:2 is unaccountably missing). The publishers, Sage Publications Ltd, London, have steadily added online functionality, so that now libraries can get the journal in various packages, including offering this title among many others in online-only bundles, and individuals can purchase single articles online. Thus, in addition to institutional and individual subscriptions, which remain the core business of the journal, income is derived by the publisher from multi-site licensing, incremental consortial sales income, single- and back-issue sales (print), pay-per-view, and deep back file sales (electronic). So what’s obsolete about it? In that boasting paragraph of mine (above), about what wonderful authors we’ve published, lies one of the seeds of obsolescence. For now that it is available online, ‘users’ (no longer ‘readers’!) can search for what they want and ignore the journal as such altogether. This is presumably how most active researchers experience any journal – they are looking for articles (or less: quotations; data; references) relevant to a given topic, literature review, thesis etc. They encounter a journal online through its ‘content’ rather than its ‘form.’ The latter is irrelevant to them, and may as well not exist. The Cover Some losses are associated with this change. First is the loss of the front cover. Now you, dear reader, scrolling through this article online, might well complain, why all the fuss about covers? Internet-generation journals don’t have covers, so all of the work that goes into them to establish the brand, the identity and even the ‘affect’ of a journal is now, well, obsolete. So let me just remind you of what’s at stake. Editors, designers and publishers all take a good deal of trouble over covers, since they are the point of intersection of editorial, design and marketing priorities. Thus, the IJCS cover contains the only ‘content’ of the journal for which we pay a fee to designers and photographers (usually the publisher pays, but in one case I did). Like any other cover, ours has three main elements: title, colour and image. Thought goes into every detail. Title I won’t say anything about the journal’s title as such, except that it was the result of protracted discussions (I suggested Terra Nullius at one point, but Sage weren’t having any of that). The present concern is with how a title looks on a cover. Our title-typeface is Frutiger. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is suitably international, being used for the corporate identity of the UK National Health Service, Telefónica O2, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Conservative Party of Canada, Banco Bradesco of Brazil, the Finnish Defence Forces and on road signs in Switzerland (Wikipedia, "Frutiger"). Frutiger is legible, informal, and reads well in small copy. Sage’s designer and I corresponded on which of the words in our cumbersome name were most important, agreeing that ‘international’ combined with ‘cultural’ is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the journal, so they should be picked out (in bold small-caps) from the rest of the title, which the designer presented in a variety of Frutiger fonts (regular, italic, and reversed – white on black), presumably to signify the dynamism and diversity of our content. The word ‘studies’ appears on a lozenge-shaped cartouche that is also used as a design element throughout the journal, for bullet points, titles and keywords. Colour We used to change this every two years, but since volume 7 it has stabilised with the distinctive Pantone 247, ‘new fuchsia.’ This colour arose from my own environment at QUT, where it was chosen (by me) for the new Creative Industries Faculty’s academic gowns and hoods, and thence as a detailing colour for the otherwise monochrome Creative Industries Precinct buildings. There’s a lot of it around my office, including on the wall and the furniture. New Fuchsia is – we are frequently told – a somewhat ‘girly’ colour, especially when contrasted with the Business Faculty’s blue or Law’s silver; its similarity to the Girlfriend/Dolly palette does introduce a mild ‘politics of prestige’ element, since it is determinedly pop culture, feminised, and non-canonical. Image Right at the start, the IJCS set out to signal its difference from other journals. At that time, all Sage journals had calligraphic colours – but I was insistent that we needed a photograph (I have ‘form’ in this respect: in 1985 I changed the cover of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies from a line drawing (albeit by Sydney Nolan) to a photograph; and I co-designed the photo-cover of Cultural Studies in 1987). For IJCS I knew which photo I wanted, and Sage went along with the choice. I explained it in the launch issue’s editorial (Hartley, "Editorial"). That original picture, a goanna on a cattle grid in the outback, by Australian photographer Grant Hobson, lasted ten years. Since volume 11 – in time for our second decade – the goanna has been replaced with a picture by Italian-based photographer Patrick Nicholas, called ‘Reality’ (Hartley, "Cover Narrative"). We have also used two other photos as cover images, once each. They are: Daniel Meadows’s 1974 ‘Karen & Barbara’ (Hartley, "Who"); and a 1962 portrait of Richard Hoggart from the National Portrait Gallery in London (Owen & Hartley 2007). The choice of picture has involved intense – sometimes very tense – negotiations with Sage. Most recently, they were adamant the Daniel Meadows picture, which I wanted to use as the long-term replacement of the goanna, was too ‘English’ and they would not accept it. We exchanged rather sharp words before compromising. There’s no need to rehearse the dispute here; the point is that both sides, publisher and editor, felt that vital interests were at stake in the choice of a cover-image. Was it too obscure; too Australian; too English; too provocative (the current cover features, albeit in the deep background, a TV screen-shot of a topless Italian game-show contestant)? Running Order Beyond the cover, the next obsolete feature of a journal is the running order of articles. Obviously what goes in the journal is contingent upon what has been submitted and what is ready at a given time, so this is a creative role within a very limited context, which is what makes it pleasurable. Out of a limited number of available papers, a choice must be made about which one goes first, what order the other papers should follow, and which ones must be held over to the next issue. The first priority is to choose the lead article: like the ‘first face’ in a fashion show (if you don’t know what I mean by that, see FTV.com. It sets the look, the tone, and the standard for the issue. I always choose articles I like for this slot. It sends a message to the field – look at this! Next comes the running order. We have about six articles per issue. It is important to maintain the IJCS’s international mix, so I check for the country of origin, or failing that (since so many articles come from Anglosphere countries like the USA, UK and Australia), the location of the analysis. Attention also has to be paid to the gender balance among authors, and to the mix of senior and emergent scholars. Sometimes a weak article needs to be ‘hammocked’ between two good ones (these are relative terms – everything published in the IJCS is of a high scholarly standard). And we need to think about disciplinary mix, so as not to let the journal stray too far towards one particular methodological domain. Running order is thus a statement about the field – the disciplinary domain – rather than about an individual paper. It is a proposition about how different voices connect together in some sort of disciplinary syntax. One might even claim that the combination of cover and running order is a last vestige of collegiate collectivism in an era of competitive academic individualism. Now all that matters is the individual paper and author; the ‘currency’ is tenure, promotion and research metrics, not relations among peers. The running order is obsolete. Special Issues An extreme version of running order is the special issue. The IJCS has regularly published these; they are devoted to field-shaping initiatives, as follows: Title Editor(s) Issue Date Radiocracy: Radio, Development and Democracy Amanda Hopkinson, Jo Tacchi 3.2 2000 Television and Cultural Studies Graeme Turner 4.4 2001 Cultural Studies and Education Karl Maton, Handel Wright 5.4 2002 Re-Imagining Communities Sara Ahmed, Anne-Marie Fortier 6.3 2003 The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption John Hartley 7.1 2004 Creative Industries and Innovation in China Michael Keane, John Hartley 9.3 2006 The Uses of Richard Hoggart Sue Owen, John Hartley 10.1 2007 A Cultural History of Celebrity Liz Barry 11.3 2008 Caribbean Media Worlds Anna Pertierra, Heather Horst 12.2 2009 Co-Creative Labour Mark Deuze, John Banks 12.5 2009 It’s obvious that special issues have a place in disciplinary innovation – they can draw attention in a timely manner to new problems, neglected regions, or innovative approaches, and thus they advance the field. They are indispensible. But because of online publication, readers are not held to the ‘project’ of a special issue and can pick and choose whatever they want. And because of the peculiarities of research assessment exercises, editing special issues doesn’t count as research output. The incentive to do them is to that extent reduced, and some universities are quite heavy-handed about letting academics ‘waste’ time on activities that don’t produce ‘metrics.’ The special issue is therefore threatened with obsolescence too. Refereeing In many top-rating journals, the human side of refereeing is becoming obsolete. Increasingly this labour-intensive chore is automated and the labour is technologically outsourced from editors and publishers to authors and referees. You have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal. At the IJCS the process is still handled by humans – namely, journal administrator Tina Horton and me. We spend a lot of time checking how papers are faring, from trying to find the right referees through to getting the comments and then the author’s revisions completed in time for a paper to be scheduled into an issue. The volume of email correspondence is considerable. We get to know authors and referees. So we maintain a sense of an interactive and conversational community, albeit by correspondence rather than face to face. Doubtless, sooner or later, there will be a depersonalised Text Management System. But in the meantime we cling to the romantic notion that we are involved in refereeing for the sake of the field, for raising the standard of scholarship, for building a globally dispersed virtual college of cultural studies, and for giving everyone – from unfavoured countries and neglected regions to famous professors in old-money universities – the same chance to get their research published. In fact, these are largely delusional ideals, for as everyone knows, refereeing is part of the political economy of publicly-funded research. It’s about academic credentials, tenure and promotion for the individual, and about measurable research metrics for the academic organisation or funding agency (Hartley, "Death"). The IJCS has no choice but to participate: we do what is required to qualify as a ‘double-blind refereed journal’ because that is the only way to maintain repute, and thence the flow of submissions, not to mention subscriptions, without which there would be no journal. As with journals themselves, which proliferate even as the print form becomes obsolete, so refereeing is burgeoning as a practice. It’s almost an industry, even though the currency is not money but time: part gift-economy; part attention-economy; partly the payment of dues to the suzerain funding agencies. But refereeing is becoming obsolete in the sense of gathering an ‘imagined community’ of people one might expect to know personally around a particular enterprise. The process of dispersal and anonymisation of the field is exacerbated by blind refereeing, which we do because we must. This is suited to a scientific domain of objective knowledge, but everyone knows it’s not quite like that in the ‘new humanities’. The agency and identity of the researcher is often a salient fact in the research. The embedded positionality of the author, their reflexiveness about their own context and room-for-manoeuvre, and the radical contextuality of knowledge itself – these are all more or less axiomatic in cultural studies, but they’re not easily served by ‘double-blind’ refereeing. When refereeing is depersonalised to the extent that is now rife (especially in journals owned by international commercial publishers), it is hard to maintain a sense of contextualised productivity in the knowledge domain, much less a ‘common cause’ to which both author and referee wish to contribute. Even though refereeing can still be seen as altruistic, it is in the service of something much more general (‘scholarship’) and much more particular (‘my career’) than the kind of reviewing that wants to share and improve a particular intellectual enterprise. It is this mid-range altruism – something that might once have been identified as a politics of knowledge – that’s becoming obsolete, along with the printed journals that were the banner and rallying point for the cause. If I were to start a new journal (such as cultural-science.org), I would prefer ‘open refereeing’: uploading papers on an open site, subjecting them to peer-review and criticism, and archiving revised versions once they have received enough votes and comments. In other words I’d like to see refereeing shifted from the ‘supply’ or production side of a journal to the ‘demand’ or readership side. But of course, ‘demand’ for ‘blind’ refereeing doesn’t come from readers; it comes from the funding agencies. The Reading Experience Finally, the experience of reading a journal is obsolete. Two aspects of this seem worthy of note. First, reading is ‘out of time’ – it no longer needs to conform to the rhythms of scholarly publication, which are in any case speeding up. Scholarship is no longer seasonal, as it has been since the Middle Ages (with university terms organised around agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms). Once you have a paper’s DOI number, you can read it any time, 24/7. It is no longer necessary even to wait for publication. With some journals in our field (e.g. Journalism Studies), assuming your Library subscribes, you can access papers as soon as they’re uploaded on the journal’s website, before the published edition is printed. Soon this will be the norm, just as it is for the top science journals, where timely publication, and thereby the ability to claim first discovery, is the basis of intellectual property rights. The IJCS doesn’t (yet) offer this service, but its frequency is speeding up. It was launched in 1998 with three issues a year. It went quarterly in 2001 and remained a quarterly for eight years. It has recently increased to six issues a year. That too causes changes in the reading experience. The excited ripping open of the package is less of a thrill the more often it arrives. Indeed, how many subscribers will admit that sometimes they don’t even open the envelope? Second, reading is ‘out of place’ – you never have to see the journal in which a paper appears, so you can avoid contact with anything that you haven’t already decided to read. This is more significant than might first appear, because it is affecting journalism in general, not just academic journals. As we move from the broadcast to the broadband era, communicative usage is shifting too, from ‘mass’ communication to customisation. This is a mixed blessing. One of the pleasures of old-style newspapers and the TV news was that you’d come across stories you did not expect to find. Indeed, an important attribute of the industrial form of journalism is its success in getting whole populations to read or watch stories about things they aren’t interested in, or things like wars and crises that they’d rather not know about at all. That historic textual achievement is in jeopardy in the broadband era, because ‘the public’ no longer needs to gather around any particular masthead or bulletin to get their news. With Web 2.0 affordances, you can exercise much more choice over what you attend to. This is great from the point of view of maximising individual choice, but sub-optimal in relation to what I’ve called ‘population-gathering’, especially the gathering of communities of interest around ‘tales of the unexpected’ – novelty or anomalies. Obsolete: Collegiality, Trust and Innovation? The individuation of reading choices may stimulate prejudice, because prejudice (literally, ‘pre-judging’) is built in when you decide only to access news feeds about familiar topics, stories or people in which you’re already interested. That sort of thing may encourage narrow-mindedness. It is certainly an impediment to chance discovery, unplanned juxtaposition, unstructured curiosity and thence, perhaps, to innovation itself. This is a worry for citizenship in general, but it is also an issue for academic ‘knowledge professionals,’ in our ever-narrower disciplinary silos. An in-close specialist focus on one’s own area of expertise need no longer be troubled by the concerns of the person in the next office, never mind the next department. Now, we don’t even have to meet on the page. One of the advantages of whole journals, then, is that each issue encourages ‘macro’ as well as ‘micro’ perspectives, and opens reading up to surprises. This willingness to ‘take things on trust’ describes a ‘we’ community – a community of trust. Trust too is obsolete in these days of performance evaluation. We’re assessed by an anonymous system that’s managed by people we’ll never meet. If the ‘population-gathering’ aspects of print journals are indeed obsolete, this may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation. In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too. ReferencesHartley, John. "'Cover Narrative': From Nightmare to Reality." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2005): 131-137. ———. "Death of the Book?" Symposium of the National Scholarly Communication Forum & Australian Academy of the Humanities, Sydney Maritime Museum, 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.humanities.org.au/Resources/Downloads/NSCF/RoundTables1-17/PDF/Hartley.pdf›. ———. "Editorial: With Goanna." International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998): 5-10. ———. "'Who Are You Going to Believe – Me or Your Own Eyes?' New Decade; New Directions." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 5-14. Houghton, John. "Economics of Scholarly Communication: A Discussion Paper." Center for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, 2000. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.caul.edu.au/cisc/EconomicsScholarlyCommunication.pdf›. Owen, Sue, and John Hartley, eds. The Uses of Richard Hoggart. International Journal of Cultural Studies (special issue), 10.1 (2007). Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish. (Special issue cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable) 7.4 (1998). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html›. "Scholarly Communication: Crisis and Revolution." University of California Berkeley Library. N.d. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Collections/crisis.html›. Teute, F. J. "To Publish or Perish: Who Are the Dinosaurs in Scholarly Publishing?" Journal of Scholarly Publishing 32.2 (2001). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/322/perish5.html›."Transforming Scholarly Communication." University of Houston Library. 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://info.lib.uh.edu/scomm/transforming.htm›.

"If people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society." -- Orville Schell Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley "Most people aren't very discerning. Maybe they need good financial information, but I don't think people know what good information is when you get into culture, society, and politics." -- Steven Brill,Chairman and Editor-in-chief, Brill's Content Once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise. They had simple personalities with goals not much more complicated than selling you a bar of soap or a box of cereal. And they possessed the reassuring familiarity of old friends or relatives you've known all your life. They were Pilgrims who smiled at you from Quaker Oats boxes or little tablets named "Speedy" who joyfully danced into a glass of water with the sole purpose of giving up their short life to help lessen your indigestion from overindulgence. Yes, sometimes they could be a little obnoxious but, hey, it was a predictable annoyance. And once, not very long ago, advertisements also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture, their boundaries were the ad space of magazines or the commercial time of television programs. When the ads got too annoying, you could toss the magazine aside or change the TV channel. The ease and quickness of their dispatch had the abruptness of slamming your front door in the face of an old door-to-door salesman. This all began to change around the 1950s when advertisements acquired a more complex and subtle personality and began straying outside of their familiar media neighborhoods. The social observer Vance Packard wrote a best-selling book in the late 50s called The Hidden Persuaders which identified this change in advertising's personality as coming from hanging around Professor Freud's psychoanalysis and learning his hidden, subliminal methods of trickery. Ice cubes in a glass for a liquor ad were no longer seen as simple props to help sell a brand of whiskey but were now subliminal suggestions of female anatomy. The curved fronts of automobiles were more than aesthetic streamlined design features but rather suggestive of a particular feature of the male anatomy. Forgotten by the new subliminal types of ads was the simple salesmanship preached by founders of the ad industry like David Ogilvy and John Caples. The word "sales" became a dirty word and was replaced with modern psychological buzzwords like subliminal persuasion. The Evolution of Subliminal Techniques The book Hidden Persuaders made quite a stir at the time, bringing about congressional hearings and even the introduction of legislation. Prominent motivation researchers Louis Cheskin and Ernest Dichter utilised the new ad methods and were publicly admonished as traitors to their profession. The life of the new subliminal advertising seemed short indeed. Even Vance Packard predicted its coming demise. "Eventually, say by A.D. 2000," he wrote in the preface to the paperback edition of his book, "all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old- fashioned". Yet, 40 years later, any half-awake observer of popular culture knows that things haven't exactly worked out the way Packard predicted. In fact what seems old-fashioned today is the belief that ads are those simpletons they once were before the 50s and that products are sold for features and benefits rather than for images. Even Vance Packard expresses an amazement at the evolution of advertising since the 50s, noting that today ads for watches have nothing to do with watches or that ads for shoes scarcely mention shoes. Packard remarks "it used to be the brand identified the product. In today's advertising the brand is the product". Modern advertising, he notes, has an almost total obsession with images and feelings and an almost total lack of any concrete claims about the product and why anyone should buy it. Packard admits puzzlement. "Commercials seem totally unrelated to selling any product at all". Jeff DeJoseph of the J. Walter Thompson firm underlines Packard's comments. "We are just trying to convey a sensory impression of the brand, and we're out of there". Subliminal advertising techniques have today infiltrated the heart of corporate America. As Ruth Shalit notes in her article "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders" from the 27 September 1999 issue of Salon magazine, "far from being consigned to the maverick fringe, the new psycho- persuaders of corporate America have colonized the marketing departments of mainstream conglomerates. At companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble and Daimler-Chrysler, the most sought-after consultants hail not from McKinsey & Company, but from brand consultancies with names like Archetype Discoveries, PsychoLogics and Semiotic Solutions". Shalit notes a growing number of CEOs have become convinced they cannot sell their brands until they first explore the "Jungian substrata of four- wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; or deconstruct the sexual politics of bologna". The result, as Shalit observes, is a "charmingly retro school of brand psychoanalysis, which holds that all advertising is simply a variation on the themes of the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, or toilet training, and that the goal of effective communications should be to compensate the consumer for the fact that he was insufficiently nursed as an infant, has taken corporate America by storm". The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising Yet pervasive as the subliminal techniques of advertising have become, the emerging power of modern advertising ultimately centres around "where" it is rather than "what" it is or "how" it works. The power of modern advertising is within this growing ubiquity or "everywhereness" of advertising rather than the technology and methodology of advertising. The ultimate power of advertising will be arrived at when ads cannot be distinguished from their background environment. When this happens, the environment will become a great continuous ad. In the process, ads have wandered away from their well-known hangouts in magazines and TV shows. Like alien-infected pod-people of early science fiction movies, they have stumbled out of these familiar media playgrounds and suddenly sprouted up everywhere. The ubiquity of advertising is not being driven by corporations searching for new ways to sell products but by media searching for new ways to make money. Traditionally, media made money by selling subscriptions and advertising space. But these two key income sources are quickly drying up in the new world of online media. Journalist Mike France wisely takes notice of this change in an important article "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap" from the 11 October 1999 issue of Business Week. France notes that subscription fees have not worked because "Web surfers are used to getting content for free, and they have been reluctant to shell out any money for it". Advertising sales and their Internet incarnation in banner ads have also been a failure so far, France observes, because companies don't like paying a flat fee for online advertising since it's difficult to track the effectiveness of their marketing dollars. Instead, they only want to pay for actual sales leads, which can be easily monitored on the Web as readers' click from site to site. Faced with the above situation, media companies have gone on the prowl for new ways to make money. This search underpins the emerging ubiquity of advertising: the fact that it is increasingly appearing everywhere. In the process, traditional boundaries between advertising and other societal institutions are being overrun by these media forces on the prowl for new "territory" to exploit. That time when advertisements knew their place in the landscape of popular culture and confined themselves to just magazines or TV commercials is a fading memory. And today, as each of us is bombarded by thousands of ads each day, it is impossible to "slam" the door and keep them out of our house as we could once slam the door in the face of the old door-to-door salesmen. Of course you can find them on the matchbook cover of your favorite bar, on t-shirts sold at some roadside tourist trap or on those logo baseball caps you always pick up at trade shows. But now they have got a little more personal and stare at you over urinals in the men's room. They have even wedged themselves onto the narrow little bars at the check-out counter conveyer belts of supermarkets or onto the handles of gasoline pumps at filling stations. The list goes on and on. (No, this article is not an ad.) Advertising and Entertainment In advertising's march to ubiquity, two major boundaries have been crossed. They are crucial boundaries which greatly enhance advertising's search for the invisibility of ubiquity. Yet they are also largely invisible themselves. These are the boundaries separating advertising from entertainment and those separating advertising from journalism. The incursion of advertising into entertainment is a result of the increasing merger of business and entertainment, a phenomenon pointed out in best-selling business books like Michael Wolf's Entertainment Economy and Joseph Pine's The Experience Economy. Wolf, a consultant for Viacom, Newscorp, and other media heavy-weights, argues business is becoming synonymous with entertainment: "we have come to expect that we will be entertained all the time. Products and brands that deliver on this expectation are succeeding. Products that do not will disappear". And, in The Experience Economy, Pine notes the increasing need for businesses to provide entertaining experiences. "Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience". Yet entertainment, whether provided by businesses or the traditional entertainment industry, is increasingly weighted down with the "baggage" of advertising. In a large sense, entertainment is a form of new media that carries ads. Increasingly, this seems to be the overriding purpose of entertainment. Once, not long ago, when ads were simple and confined, entertainment was also simple and its purpose was to entertain rather than to sell. There was money enough in packed movie houses or full theme parks to make a healthy profit. But all this has changed with advertising's ubiquity. Like media corporations searching for new revenue streams, the entertainment industry has responded to flat growth by finding new ways to squeeze money out of entertainment content. Films now feature products in paid for scenes and most forms of entertainment use product tie-ins to other areas such as retail stores or fast-food restaurants. Also popular with the entertainment industry is what might be termed the "versioning" of entertainment products into various sub-species where entertainment content is transformed into other media so it can be sold more than once. A film may not make a profit on just the theatrical release but there is a good chance it doesn't matter because it stands to make a profit in video rentals. Advertising and Journalism The merger of advertising and entertainment goes a long way towards a world of ubiquitous advertising. Yet the merger of advertising and journalism is the real "promised land" in the evolution of ubiquitous advertising. This fundamental shift in the way news media make money provides the final frontier to be conquered by advertising, a final "promised land" for advertising. As Mike France observes in Business Week, this merger "could potentially change the way they cover the news. The more the press gets in the business of hawking products, the harder it will be to criticize those goods -- and the companies making them". Of course, there is that persistent myth, perpetuated by news organisations that they attempt to preserve editorial independence by keeping the institutions they cover and their advertisers at arm's length. But this is proving more and more difficult, particularly for online media. Observers like France have pointed out a number of reasons for this. One is the growth of ads in news media that look more like editorial content than ads. While long-standing ethical rules bar magazines and newspapers from printing advertisements that look like editorial copy, these rules become fuzzy for many online publications. Another reason making it difficult to separate advertising from journalism is the growing merger and consolidation of media corporations. Fewer and fewer corporations control more and more entertainment, news and ultimately advertising. It becomes difficult for a journalist to criticise a product when it has a connection to the large media conglomerate the journalist works for. Traditionally, it has been rare for media corporations to make direct investments in the corporations they cover. However, as Mike France notes, CNBC crossed this line when it acquired a stake in Archipelago in September 1999. CNBC, which runs a business-news Website, acquired a 12.4% stake in Archipelago Holdings, an electronic communications network for trading stock. Long-term plans are likely to include allowing visitors to cnbc.com to link directly to Archipelago. That means CNBC could be in the awkward position of both providing coverage of online trading and profiting from it. France adds that other business news outlets, such as Dow Jones (DJ), Reuters, and Bloomberg, already have indirect ties to their own electronic stock-trading networks. And, in news organisations, a popular method of cutting down on the expense of paying journalists for content is the growing practice of accepting advertiser written content or "sponsored edit" stories. The confusion to readers violates the spirit of a long-standing American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) rule prohibiting advertisements with "an editorial appearance". But as France notes, this practice is thriving online. This change happens in ever so subtle ways. "A bit of puffery inserted here," notes France, "a negative adjective deleted there -- it doesn't take a lot to turn a review or story about, say, smart phones, into something approaching highbrow ad copy". He offers an example in forbes.com whose Microsoft ads could easily be mistaken for staff-written articles. Media critic James Fallows points out that consumers have been swift to discipline sites that are caught acting unethically and using "sponsored edits". He notes that when it was revealed that amazon.com was taking fees of up to $10,000 for books that it labelled as "destined for greatness", its customers were outraged, and the company quickly agreed to disclose future promotional payments. Unfortunately, though, the lesson episodes like these teach online companies like Amazon centres around more effective ways to be less "revealing" rather than abstention from the practice of "sponsored edits". France reminds us that journalism is built on trust. In the age of the Internet, though, trust is quickly becoming an elusive quality. He writes "as magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television networks rush to colonize the Internet, the Great Wall between content and commerce is beginning to erode". In the end, he ponders whether there is an irrevocable conflict between e-commerce and ethical journalism. When you can't trust journalists to be ethical, just who can you trust? Transaction Fees & Affiliate Programs - Advertising's Final Promised Land? The engine driving the growing ubiquity of advertising, though, is not the increasing merger of advertising with other industries (like entertainment and journalism) but rather a new business model of online commerce and Internet technology called transaction fees. This emerging and potentially dominant Internet e-commerce technology provides for the ability to track transactions electronically on Websites and to garner transaction fees. Through these fees, many media Websites take a percentage of payment through online product sales. In effect, a media site becomes one pervasive direct mail ad for every product mentioned on its site. This of course puts them in a much closer economic partnership with advertisers than is the case with traditional fixed-rate ads where there is little connection between product sales and the advertising media carrying them. Transaction fees are the new online version of direct marketing, the emerging Internet technology for their application is one of the great economic driving forces of the entire Internet commerce apparatus. The promise of transaction fees is that a number of people, besides product manufacturers and advertisers, might gain a percentage of profit from selling products via hypertext links. Once upon a time, the manufacturer of a product was the one that gained (or lost) from marketing it. Now, however, there is the possibility that journalists, news organisations and entertainment companies might also gain from marketing via transaction fees. The spread of transaction fees outside media into the general population provides an even greater boost to the growing ubiquity of advertising. This is done through the handmaiden of media transaction fees: "affiliate programs" for the general populace. Through the growing magic of Internet technology, it becomes possible for all of us to earn money through affiliate program links to products and transaction fee percentages in the sale of these products. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that advertisers are most likely to increasingly pressure media Websites to support themselves with e-commerce transaction fees. Charles Li, Senior Analyst for New Media at Forrester Research, estimates that by the year 2003, media sites will receive $25 billion in revenue from transaction fees, compared with $17 billion from ads and $5 billion from subscriptions. The possibility is great that all media will become like great direct response advertisements taking a transaction fee percentage for anything sold on their sites. And there is the more dangerous possibility that all of us will become the new "promised land" for a ubiquitous advertising. All of us will have some cut in selling somebody else's product. When this happens and there is a direct economic incentive for all of us to say nice things about products, what is the need and importance of subliminal techniques and methods creating advertising based on images which try to trick us into buying things? A Society Without Critics? It is for these reasons that criticism and straight news are becoming an increasingly endangered species. Everyone has to eat but what happens when one can no longer make meal money by criticising current culture? Cultural critics become a dying breed. There is no money in criticism because it is based around disconnection rather than connection to products. No links to products or Websites are involved here. Critics are becoming lonely icebergs floating in the middle of a cyber-sea of transaction fees, watching everyone else (except themselves) make money on transaction fees. The subliminal focus of the current consultancies is little more than a repackaging of an old theme discovered long ago by Vance Packard. But the growing "everywhereness" and "everyoneness" of modern advertising through transaction fees may mark the beginning of a revolutionary new era. Everyone might become their own "brand", a point well made in Tim Peters's article "A Brand Called You". Media critic James Fallows is somewhat optimistic that there still may remain "niche" markets for truthful information and honest cultural criticism. He suggests that surely people looking for mortgages, voting for a politician, or trying to decide what movie to see will continue to need unbiased information to help them make decisions. But one must ask what happens when a number of people have some "affiliate" relationship with suggesting particular movies, politicians or mortgages? Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, has summarised this growing ubiquity of advertising in a rather simple and elegant manner saying "at a certain point, people won't be able to differentiate between what's trustworthy and what isn't". Over the long run, this loss of credibility could have a corrosive effect on society in general -- especially given the media's importance as a political, cultural, and economic watchdog. Schell warns, "if people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society". Yet, will we be able to realise this simple fact when we all become types of Marxists and Leninists? Still, there is the great challenge to America to learn how to utilise transaction fees in a democratic manner. In effect, a combination of the technological promise of the new economy with that old promise, and perhaps even myth, of a democratic America. America stands on the verge of a great threshold and challenge in the growing ubiquity of advertising. In a way, as with most great opportunities or threats, this challenge centres on a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, there is the promise of the emerging Internet business model and its centre around the technology of transaction fees. At the same time, there is the threat posed by transaction fees to America's democratic society in the early years of the new millennium. Yes, once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise and also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture. Their greatest, yet silent, evolution (especially in the age of the Internet) has really been in their spread into all areas of culture rather than in methods of trickery and deceit. Now, it is more difficult to slam that front door in the face of that old door-to-door salesman. Or toss that magazine and its ad aside, or switch off commercials on television. We have become that door-to-door salesman, that magazine ad, that television commercial. The current cultural landscape takes on some of the characteristics of the theme of that old science fiction movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A current advertising campaign from RJ Reynolds has a humorous take on the current zeitgeist fad of alien abduction with copy reading "if aliens are smart enough to travel through space then why do they keep abducting the dumbest people on earth?" One might add that when Americans allow advertising to travel through all our space, perhaps we all become the dumbest people on earth, abducted by a new alien culture so far away from a simplistic nostalgia of yesterday. (Please press below for your links to a world of fantastic products which can make a new you.) References Brill, Steven. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. France, Mike. "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. <http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_41/b3650163.htm>. Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. Out of Print, 1957. Pine, Joseph, and James Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Harvard Business School P, 1999. Shalit, Ruth. "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders." Salon Magazine 27 Sep. 1999. <http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/09/27/persuaders/index.php>. Schell, Orville. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. Wolf, Michael. Entertainment Economy. Times Books, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Fraim. "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php>. Chicago style: John Fraim, "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Fraim. (2000) Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]).

A common criticism of the rhythm video games genre — including series like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, is that playing musical simulation games is a waste of time when you could be playing an actual guitar and learning a real skill. A more serious criticism of games cultures draws attention to the degree of e-waste they produce. E-waste or electronic waste includes mobiles phones, computers, televisions and other electronic devices, containing toxic chemicals and metals whose landfill, recycling and salvaging all produce distinct environmental and social problems. The e-waste produced by games like Guitar Hero is obvious in the regular flow of merchandise transforming computer and video games stores into simulation music stores, filled with replica guitars, drum kits, microphones and other products whose half-lives are short and whose obsolescence is anticipated in the annual cycles of consumption and disposal. This paper explores the connection between e-waste and obsolescence in the games industry, and argues for the further consideration of consumers as part of the solution to the problem of e-waste. It uses a case study of the PC digital distribution software platform, Steam, to suggest that the digital distribution of games may offer an alternative model to market driven software and hardware obsolescence, and more generally, that such software platforms might be a place to support cultures of consumption that delay rather than promote hardware obsolescence and its inevitability as e-waste. The question is whether there exists a potential for digital distribution to be a means of not only eliminating the need to physically transport commodities (its current 'green' benefit), but also for supporting consumer practices that further reduce e-waste. The games industry relies on a rapid production and innovation cycle, one that actively enforces hardware obsolescence. Current video game consoles, including the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii, are the seventh generation of home gaming consoles to appear within forty years, and each generation is accompanied by an immense international transportation of games hardware, software (in various storage formats) and peripherals. Obsolescence also occurs at the software or content level and is significant because the games industry as a creative industry is dependent on the extensive management of multiple intellectual properties. The computing and video games software industry operates a close partnership with the hardware industry, and as such, software obsolescence directly contributes to hardware obsolescence. The obsolescence of content and the redundancy of the methods of policing its scarcity in the marketplace has been accelerated and altered by the processes of disintermediation with a range of outcomes (Flew). The music industry is perhaps the most advanced in terms of disintermediation with digital distribution at the center of the conflict between the legitimate and unauthorised access to intellectual property. This points to one issue with the hypothesis that digital distribution can lead to a reduction in hardware obsolescence, as the marketplace leader and key online distributor of music, Apple, is also the major producer of new media technologies and devices that are the paragon of stylistic obsolescence. Stylistic obsolescence, in which fashion changes products across seasons of consumption, has long been observed as the dominant form of scaled industrial innovation (Slade). Stylistic obsolescence is differentiated from mechanical or technological obsolescence as the deliberate supersedence of products by more advanced designs, better production techniques and other minor innovations. The line between the stylistic and technological obsolescence is not always clear, especially as reduced durability has become a powerful market strategy (Fitzpatrick). This occurs where the design of technologies is subsumed within the discourses of manufacturing, consumption and the logic of planned obsolescence in which the product or parts are intended to fail, degrade or under perform over time. It is especially the case with signature new media technologies such as laptop computers, mobile phones and portable games devices. Gamers are as guilty as other consumer groups in contributing to e-waste as participants in the industry's cycles of planned obsolescence, but some of them complicate discussions over the future of obsolescence and e-waste. Many gamers actively work to forestall the obsolescence of their games: they invest time in the play of older games (“retrogaming”) they donate labor and creative energy to the production of user-generated content as a means of sustaining involvement in gaming communities; and they produce entirely new game experiences for other users, based on existing software and hardware modifications known as 'mods'. With Guitar Hero and other 'rhythm' games it would be easy to argue that the hardware components of this genre have only one future: as waste. Alternatively, we could consider the actual lifespan of these objects (including their impact as e-waste) and the roles they play in the performances and practices of communities of gamers. For example, the Elmo Guitar Hero controller mod, the Tesla coil Guitar Hero controller interface, the Rock Band Speak n' Spellbinder mashup, the multiple and almost sacrilegious Fender guitar hero mods, the Guitar Hero Portable Turntable Mod and MAKE magazine's Trumpet Hero all indicate a significant diversity of user innovation, community formation and individual investment in the post-retail life of computer and video game hardware. Obsolescence is not just a problem for the games industry but for the computing and electronics industries more broadly as direct contributors to the social and environmental cost of electrical waste and obsolete electrical equipment. Planned obsolescence has long been the experience of gamers and computer users, as the basis of a utopian mythology of upgrades (Dovey and Kennedy). For PC users the upgrade pathway is traversed by the consumption of further hardware and software post initial purchase in a cycle of endless consumption, acquisition and waste (as older parts are replaced and eventually discarded). The accumulation and disposal of these cultural artefacts does not devalue or accrue in space or time at the same rate (Straw) and many users will persist for years, gradually upgrading and delaying obsolescence and even perpetuate the circulation of older cultural commodities. Flea markets and secondhand fairs are popular sites for the purchase of new, recent, old, and recycled computer hardware, and peripherals. Such practices and parallel markets support the strategies of 'making do' described by De Certeau, but they also continue the cycle of upgrade and obsolescence, and they are still consumed as part of the promise of the 'new', and the desire of a purchase that will finally 'fix' the users' computer in a state of completion (29). The planned obsolescence of new media technologies is common, but its success is mixed; for example, support for Microsoft's operating system Windows XP was officially withdrawn in April 2009 (Robinson), but due to the popularity in low cost PC 'netbooks' outfitted with an optimised XP operating system and a less than enthusiastic response to the 'next generation' Windows Vista, XP continues to be popular. Digital Distribution: A Solution? Gamers may be able to reduce the accumulation of e-waste by supporting the disintermediation of the games retail sector by means of online distribution. Disintermediation is the establishment of a direct relationship between the creators of content and their consumers through products and services offered by content producers (Flew 201). The move to digital distribution has already begun to reduce the need to physically handle commodities, but this currently signals only further support of planned, stylistic and technological obsolescence, increasing the rate at which the commodities for recording, storing, distributing and exhibiting digital content become e-waste. Digital distribution is sometimes overlooked as a potential means for promoting communities of user practice dedicated to e-waste reduction, at the same time it is actively employed to reduce the potential for the unregulated appropriation of content and restrict post-purchase sales through Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. Distributors like Amazon.com continue to pursue commercial opportunities in linking the user to digital distribution of content via exclusive hardware and software technologies. The Amazon e-book reader, the Kindle, operates via a proprietary mobile network using a commercially run version of the wireless 3G protocols. The e-book reader is heavily encrypted with Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and exclusive digital book formats designed to enforce current copyright restrictions and eliminate second-hand sales, lending, and further post-purchase distribution. The success of this mode of distribution is connected to Amazon's ability to tap both the mainstream market and the consumer demand for the less-than-popular; those books, movies, music and television series that may not have been 'hits' at the time of release. The desire to revisit forgotten niches, such as B-sides, comics, books, and older video games, suggests Chris Anderson, linked with so-called “long tail” economics. Recently Webb has queried the economic impact of the Long Tail as a business strategy, but does not deny the underlying dynamics, which suggest that content does not obsolesce in any straightforward way. Niche markets for older content are nourished by participatory cultures and Web 2.0 style online services. A good example of the Long Tail phenomenon is the recent case of the 1971 book A Lion Called Christian, by Anthony Burke and John Rendall, republished after the author's film of a visit to a resettled Christian in Africa was popularised on YouTube in 2008. Anderson's Long Tail theory suggests that over time a large number of items, each with unique rather than mass histories, will be subsumed as part of a larger community of consumers, including fans, collectors and everyday users with a long term interest in their use and preservation. If digital distribution platforms can reduce e-waste, they can perhaps be fostered by to ensuring digital consumers have access to morally and ethically aware consumer decisions, but also that they enjoy traditional consumer freedoms, such as the right to sell on and change or modify their property. For it is not only the fixation on the 'next generation' that contributes to obsolescence, but also technologies like DRM systems that discourage second hand sales and restrict modification. The legislative upgrades, patches and amendments to copyright law that have attempted to maintain the law's effectiveness in competing with peer-to-peer networks have supported DRM and other intellectual property enforcement technologies, despite the difficulties that owners of intellectual property have encountered with the effectiveness of DRM systems (Moore, Creative). The games industry continues to experiment with DRM, however, this industry also stands out as one of the few to have significantly incorporated the user within the official modes of production (Moore, Commonising). Is the games industry capable (or willing) of supporting a digital delivery system that attempts to minimise or even reverse software and hardware obsolescence? We can try to answer this question by looking in detail at the biggest digital distributor of PC games, Steam. Steam Figure 1: The Steam Application user interface retail section Steam is a digital distribution system designed for the Microsoft Windows operating system and operated by American video game development company and publisher, Valve Corporation. Steam combines online games retail, DRM technologies and internet-based distribution services with social networking and multiplayer features (in-game voice and text chat, user profiles, etc) and direct support for major games publishers, independent producers, and communities of user-contributors (modders). Steam, like the iTunes games store, Xbox Live and other digital distributors, provides consumers with direct digital downloads of new, recent and classic titles that can be accessed remotely by the user from any (internet equipped) location. Steam was first packaged with the physical distribution of Half Life 2 in 2004, and the platform's eventual popularity is tied to the success of that game franchise. Steam was not an optional component of the game's installation and many gamers protested in various online forums, while the platform was treated with suspicion by the global PC games press. It did not help that Steam was at launch everything that gamers take objection to: a persistent and initially 'buggy' piece of software that sits in the PC's operating system and occupies limited memory resources at the cost of hardware performance. Regular updates to the Steam software platform introduced social network features just as mainstream sites like MySpace and Facebook were emerging, and its popularity has undergone rapid subsequent growth. Steam now eclipses competitors with more than 20 million user accounts (Leahy) and Valve Corporation makes it publicly known that Steam collects large amounts of data about its users. This information is available via the public player profile in the community section of the Steam application. It includes the average number of hours the user plays per week, and can even indicate the difficulty the user has in navigating game obstacles. Valve reports on the number of users on Steam every two hours via its web site, with a population on average between one and two million simultaneous users (Valve, Steam). We know these users’ hardware profiles because Valve Corporation makes the results of its surveillance public knowledge via the Steam Hardware Survey. Valve’s hardware survey itself conceptualises obsolescence in two ways. First, it uses the results to define the 'cutting edge' of PC technologies and publishing the standards of its own high end production hardware on the companies blog. Second, the effect of the Survey is to subsequently define obsolescent hardware: for example, in the Survey results for April 2009, we can see that the slight majority of users maintain computers with two central processing units while a significant proportion (almost one third) of users still maintained much older PCs with a single CPU. Both effects of the Survey appear to be well understood by Valve: the Steam Hardware Survey automatically collects information about the community's computer hardware configurations and presents an aggregate picture of the stats on our web site. The survey helps us make better engineering and gameplay decisions, because it makes sure we're targeting machines our customers actually use, rather than measuring only against the hardware we've got in the office. We often get asked about the configuration of the machines we build around the office to do both game and Steam development. We also tend to turn over machines in the office pretty rapidly, at roughly every 18 months. (Valve, Team Fortress) Valve’s support of older hardware might counter perceptions that older PCs have no use and begins to reverse decades of opinion regarding planned and stylistic obsolescence in the PC hardware and software industries. Equally significant to the extension of the lives of older PCs is Steam's support for mods and its promotion of user generated content. By providing software for mod creation and distribution, Steam maximises what Postigo calls the development potential of fan-programmers. One of the 'payoffs' in the information/access exchange for the user with Steam is the degree to which Valve's End-User Licence Agreement (EULA) permits individuals and communities of 'modders' to appropriate its proprietary game content for use in the creation of new games and games materials for redistribution via Steam. These mods extend the play of the older games, by requiring their purchase via Steam in order for the individual user to participate in the modded experience. If Steam is able to encourage this kind of appropriation and community support for older content, then the potential exists for it to support cultures of consumption and practice of use that collaboratively maintain, extend, and prolong the life and use of games. Further, Steam incorporates the insights of “long tail” economics in a purely digital distribution model, in which the obsolescence of 'non-hit' game titles can be dramatically overturned. Published in November 2007, Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) by Epic Games, was unappreciated in a market saturated with games in the first-person shooter genre. Epic republished UT3 on Steam 18 months later, making the game available to play for free for one weekend, followed by discounted access to new content. The 2000 per cent increase in players over the game's 'free' trial weekend, has translated into enough sales of the game for Epic to no longer consider the release a commercial failure: It’s an incredible precedent to set: making a game a success almost 18 months after a poor launch. It’s something that could only have happened now, and with a system like Steam...Something that silently updates a purchase with patches and extra content automatically, so you don’t have to make the decision to seek out some exciting new feature: it’s just there anyway. Something that, if you don’t already own it, advertises that game to you at an agreeably reduced price whenever it loads. Something that enjoys a vast community who are in turn plugged into a sea of smaller relevant communities. It’s incredibly sinister. It’s also incredibly exciting... (Meer) Clearly concerns exist about Steam's user privacy policy, but this also invites us to the think about the economic relationship between gamers and games companies as it is reconfigured through the private contractual relationship established by the EULA which accompanies the digital distribution model. The games industry has established contractual and licensing arrangements with its consumer base in order to support and reincorporate emerging trends in user generated cultures and other cultural formations within its official modes of production (Moore, "Commonising"). When we consider that Valve gets to tax sales of its virtual goods and can further sell the information farmed from its users to hardware manufacturers, it is reasonable to consider the relationship between the corporation and its gamers as exploitative. Gabe Newell, the Valve co-founder and managing director, conversely believes that people are willing to give up personal information if they feel it is being used to get better services (Leahy). If that sentiment is correct then consumers may be willing to further trade for services that can reduce obsolescence and begin to address the problems of e-waste from the ground up. Conclusion Clearly, there is a potential for digital distribution to be a means of not only eliminating the need to physically transport commodities but also supporting consumer practices that further reduce e-waste. For an industry where only a small proportion of the games made break even, the successful relaunch of older games content indicates Steam's capacity to ameliorate software obsolescence. Digital distribution extends the use of commercially released games by providing disintermediated access to older and user-generated content. For Valve, this occurs within a network of exchange as access to user-generated content, social networking services, and support for the organisation and coordination of communities of gamers is traded for user-information and repeat business. Evidence for whether this will actively translate to an equivalent decrease in the obsolescence of game hardware might be observed with indicators like the Steam Hardware Survey in the future. The degree of potential offered by digital distribution is disrupted by a range of technical, commercial and legal hurdles, primary of which is the deployment of DRM, as part of a range of techniques designed to limit consumer behaviour post purchase. While intervention in the form of legislation and radical change to the insidious nature of electronics production is crucial in order to achieve long term reduction in e-waste, the user is currently considered only in terms of 'ethical' consumption and ultimately divested of responsibility through participation in corporate, state and civil recycling and e-waste management operations. The message is either 'careful what you purchase' or 'careful how you throw it away' and, like DRM, ignores the connections between product, producer and user and the consumer support for environmentally, ethically and socially positive production, distribrution, disposal and recycling. This article, has adopted a different strategy, one that sees digital distribution platforms like Steam, as capable, if not currently active, in supporting community practices that should be seriously considered in conjunction with a range of approaches to the challenge of obsolescence and e-waste. References Anderson, Chris. "The Long Tail." Wired Magazine 12. 10 (2004). 20 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html›. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Dovey, Jon, and Helen Kennedy. Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. London: Open University Press,2006. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2008. Flew, Terry. New Media: An Introduction. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2008. Leahy, Brian. "Live Blog: DICE 2009 Keynote - Gabe Newell, Valve Software." The Feed. G4TV 18 Feb. 2009. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/Live-Blog-DICE-2009-Keynote-–-Gabe-Newell-Valve-Software.html›. Meer, Alec. "Unreal Tournament 3 and the New Lazarus Effect." Rock, Paper, Shotgun 16 Mar. 2009. 24 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/03/16/unreal-tournament-3-and-the-new-lazarus-effect/›.Moore, Christopher. "Commonising the Enclosure: Online Games and Reforming Intellectual Property Regimes." Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 3. 2, (2005). 12 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.swin.edu.au/sbs/ajets/journal/issue5-V3N2/abstract_moore.htm›. Moore, Christopher. "Creative Choices: Changes to Australian Copyright Law and the Future of the Public Domain." Media International Australia 114 (Feb. 2005): 71–83. Postigo, Hector. "Of Mods and Modders: Chasing Down the Value of Fan-Based Digital Game Modification." Games and Culture 2 (2007): 300-13. Robinson, Daniel. "Windows XP Support Runs Out Next Week." PC Business Authority 8 Apr. 2009. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/142013,windows-xp-support-runs-out-next-week.aspx›. Straw, Will. "Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music." Canadian Journal of Communication 25.1 (2000): 175. Slade, Giles. Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. Valve. "Steam and Game Stats." 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://store.steampowered.com/stats/›. Valve. "Team Fortress 2: The Scout Update." Steam Marketing Message 20 Feb. 2009. 12 Apr. 2009 ‹http://storefront.steampowered.com/Steam/Marketing/message/2269/›. Webb, Richard. "Online Shopping and the Harry Potter Effect." New Scientist 2687 (2008): 52-55. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026873.300-online-shopping-and-the-harry-potter-effect.html?page=2›. With thanks to Dr Nicola Evans and Dr Frances Steel for their feedback and comments on drafts of this paper.

A politician’s political and personal selves have been in the spotlight of academic scholarship for hundreds of years, but only in recent years has a political ‘persona’ obtained new modes of mediation via networked media. New advancements in politics, technology, and media brought challenges to the traditional politics and personal self-representation of major leaders. Vladimir Putin’s divorce announcement in June 2013, posed a new challenge for his political self-mediation. A rather reserved leader (Loshak), he nonetheless broadcast his personal news to the large audience and made it in a very peculiar way, causing the media professionals and public to draw parallels with Soviet-era mediated politics and thereby evoke collective memories. This paper studies how Vladimir Putin’s divorce announcement was constructed and presented and also what response and opinion threads—satirical and humorous, ignorant and informed feedback—it achieved via media professionals and the general Twitter audience. Finally, this study aims to evaluate how Vladimir Putin’s political ‘persona’ was represented and perceived via these mixed channels of communication.According to classic studies of mediated political persona (Braudy; Meyrowitz; Corner), any public activity of a political persona is considered a part of their political performance. The history of political marketing can be traced back to ancient times, but it developed through the works of Renaissance and Medieval thinkers. Of particular prominence is Machiavelli’s The Prince with its famous “It is unnecessary for the prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them” (cited in Corner 68). All those centuries-built developments and patterns of political self-representation have now taken on new forms as a result of the development of media industry and technology. Russian mediated politics has seen various examples of new ways of self-representation exercised by major politicians in the 2010s. For instance, former president Dmitry Medvedev was known as the “president with an iPad” (Pronina), as he was advocating technology and using social networks in order to seem more approachable and appear to be responsive to collecting feedback from the nation. Traditional media constantly highlighted Medvedev’s keen interest in Facebook and Twitter, which resulted in a growing public assumption that this new modern approach to self-representation may signify a new approach to governance (see Asmolov).Goffman’s classic study of the distinction between public and private life helps in linking political persona to celebrity persona. In his view the political presentation of self differs from the one in popular culture because politicians as opposed to entertainers have to conform to a set of ideals, projections, social stereotypes and cultural/national archetypes for their audience of voters (Goffman; Corner). A politician’s public persona has to be constantly reaffirming and proving the values he or she is promoting through their campaigns. Mediations of a political personhood can be projected in three main modes: visual, vocal, and kinetic (Ong; Mayhew; Corner). Visual representation follows the iconic paintings and photography in displaying the position, attitude, and associative contexts related to that. Vocal representation covers both content and format of a political speech, it is not only the articulated message, but also more important the persona speaking. Ong describes this close relation of the political and personal along with the interrelation of the message and the medium as “secondary orality”—voice, tone and volume make the difference. The third mode is kinetic representation and means the political persona in action and interaction. Overlapping of different strategies and structures of political self-representation fortifies the notion of performativity (Corner and Pels) in politics that becomes a core feature of the multidimensional representation of a mediated political self.The advancement of electronic media and interactive platforms has influenced political communication and set the new standard for the convergence of the political and personal life of a politician. On its own, the President Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair raised the level of public awareness of the politician’s private life. It also allowed for widely distributed, contested, and mediated judgments of a politician’s personal actions. Lawrence and Bennett in their study of Lewinsky case’s academic and public response state that although the majority of American citizens did not expect the president to be the moral leader, they expressed ambivalence in their rendition of the importance of “moral leadership” by big politicians (438). The President Clinton/Lewinsky case adds a new dimension to Goffman and Corner’s respective discussions on the significance of values in the political persona self-representation. This case proves that values can not only be reinforced by one’s public persona, but those values can be (re)constructed by the press or public opinion. Values are becoming a contested trait in the contemporary mediated political persona. This view can be supported by Dmitry Medvedev’s case: although modern technology was known as his personal passion, it was publicised only with reference to his role as a public politician and specifically when Medvedev appeared with an iPad talking about modernisation at major meetings (Pronina). However, one can argue that one’s charisma can affect the impact of values in public self-representation of the politician. In addition, social networks add a new dimension to personified publicity. From Barack Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ networked campaign in 2008 and through many more recent examples, we are witnessing the continuing process of the personalisation of politics (Corner and Pels). From one point of view, audiences tend to have more interest and sympathy in political individuals and their lifestyles rather than political parties and their programmes (Lawrence and Bennett; Corner and Pels). It should be noted that the interest towards political individuals does not fall apart from the historical logics of politics; it is only mediated in a new way. Max Weber’s notion of “leadership democracy” proves that political strategy is best distributed through the charismatic leadership imposing his will on the audience. This view can be strengthened by Le Bon’s concept of emotive connection of the leader and his crowd, and Adorno’s writings on the authoritarian personality also highlight the significance of the leader’s own natural and mediated persona in politics. What is new is the channels of mediation—modern audiences’ access to a politician’s private life is facilitated by new forms of media interactivity (Corner and Pels). This recent development calls for the new understanding of “persona” in politics. On one hand, the borderline between private and public becomes blurred and we are more exposed to the private self of a leader, but on the other hand, those politicians aware of new media literacy can create new structures of proximity and distance and construct a separate “persona” online, using digital media for their benefit (Corner and Pels). Russian official politics has developed a cautious attitude towards social networks in the post-Medvedev era - currently, President Vladimir Putin is not known for using social networks personally and transmits his views via his spokesperson. However, his personal charisma makes him overly present in digital media - through the images and texts shared both by his supporters and rivals. As opposed to Medvedev’s widely publicised “modernisation president” representation, Putin’s persona breaks the boundaries of limited traditional publicity and makes him recognised not only for his political activity, but looks, controversial expression, attitude to employees, and even personal life. That brings us back to Goffman, Corner and Lawrence and Bennett’s discussions on the interrelation of political values and personal traits in one’s political self-representation, making it evident that one’s strong personality can dominate over his political image and programme. Moreover, an assumption can be made that a politician’s persona may be more powerful than the narrative suggested by the constructed self-representation and new connotations may arise on the crossroads of this interaction.Russian President Divorce Announcement and Collective MemoryVladimir Putin’s divorce announcement was broadcast via traditional media on 6 June 2013 as a simple news story. The state broadcasting company Vesti-24 sent a journalist Polina Yermolayeva from their news bulletin to cover Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putin’s visit to a ballet production, Esmeralda, at the state Kremlin theatre. The news anchor’s introduction to the interview was ordinarily written and had no hints of the upcoming sensation. After the first couple and the journalist had discussed their opinion of the ballet (“beautiful music,” “flawless and light moves”), the reporter Yermolayeva suddenly asked: “You and Lyudmila are rarely seen together in public. Rumour has it that you do not live together. It is true?” Vladimir Putin and his wife exchanged a number of rather pre-scripted speeches stating that the first couple was getting a divorce as the children had grown old enough, and they would still stay friends and wished each other the best of luck. The whole interview lasted 3:25 minutes and became a big surprise for the country (Loshak; Sobchak).When applying the classification of three modes of political personhood (Corner; Ong) to Vladimir Putin’s divorce announcement, it becomes evident that all three modes—visual, vocal, and kinetic—were used. Television audiences watched their president speak freely to the unknown reporter, explain details of his life in his own words so that body language also was visible and conveyed additional information. The visual self-representation harkens back to classic, Soviet-style announcements: Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina are dressed in classic monochrome suit and costume with a skirt respectively. They pose in front of the rather dull yet somewhat golden decorations of the Kremlin Theatre Hall, the walls themselves reflecting the glory and fanfare of the Soviet leadership and architecture. Vladimir Putin and his wife both talk calmly while Lyudmila appears even more relaxed than her husband (Sobchak). Although the speech looks prepared in advance (Loshak), it uses colloquial expressions and is delivered with emotional pauses and voice changes.However, close examination of not only the message but the medium of the divorce announcement reveals a vast number of intriguing symbols and parallels. First, although living in the era of digital media, Vladimir Putin chose to broadcast his personal news through a traditional television channel. Second, it was broadcast in a news programme making the breaking news of the president’s divorce, paradoxically, quite a mundane news event. Third, the semiotic construction of the divorce announcement bore a lot of connotations and synergies to the conservative, Soviet-style information distribution patterns. There are a few key symbols here that evoke collective memories: ballet, conservative political report on the government, and the stereotype of a patriarchal couple with a submissive wife (see Loshak; Rostovskiy). For example, since the perestroika of the 1990s, ballet has been widely perceived as a symbol of big political change and cause of public anxiety (Kachkaeva): this connotation was born in the 1990s when all channels were broadcasting Swan Lake round the clock while the White House was under attack. Holden reminds us that this practice was applied many times during major crises in Soviet history, thus creating a short link in the public subconscious of a ballet broadcast being symbolic of a political crisis or turmoil.Vladimir Putin Divorce: Traditional and Social Media ReceptionIn the first day after the divorce announcement Russian Twitter generated 180,000 tweets about Vladimir Putin’s divorce, and the hashtag #развод (“divorce”) became very popular. For the analysis that follows, Putin divorce tweets were collected by two methods: retrieved from traditional media coverage of Twitter talk on Putin’s divorce and from Twitter directly, using Topsy engine. Tweets were collected for one week, from the divorce announcement on 6 June to 13 June when the discussion declined and became repetitive. Data was collected using Snob.ru, Kommersant.ru, Forbes.ru, other media outlets and Topsy. The results were then combined and evaluated.Some of those tweets provided a satirical commentary to the divorce news and can be classified as “memes.” An “Internet meme” is a contagious message, a symbolic pattern of information spread online (Lankshear and Knobel; Shifman). Memes are viral texts that are shared online after being adjusted/altered or developed on the way. Starting from 1976 when Richard Dawkins coined the term, memes have been under media scholarship scrutiny and the term has been widely contested in various sciences. In Internet research studies, memes are defined as “condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to others” (Pickerel, Jorgensen, and Bennett). The open character of memes makes them valuable tools for political discourse in a modern highly mediated environment.Qualitative analysis of the most popular and widely shared tweets reveals several strong threads and themes round Putin’s divorce discussion. According to Burzhskaya, many users created memes with jokes about the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. For instance, “He should have tied up his relationship with Dmitry Anatolyevich long ago” or “So actually Medvedev is the case?” were among popular memes generated. Another collection of memework contained a comment that, according to the Russian legislation, Putin’s ex-wife should get half of their wealth, in this case—half of the country. This thread was followed by the discussion whether the separation/border of her share of Russia should use the Ural Mountains as the borderline. Another group of Twitter users applied the Russian president’s divorce announcement to other countries’ politics. Thus one user wrote “Take Yanukovich to the ballet” implying that Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich (who was still a legitimate president in June 2013) should also be taken to the ballet to trigger changes in the political life in Ukraine. Twitter celebrity and well-known Russian actress and comedian Tatiana Lazareva wrote “In my opinion, it is a scam”, punning on the slang meaning of the word “razvod” (“divorce”) in Russian that can also mean “fraud” or “con”. Famous Russian journalist Dmitry Olshansky used his Twitter account to draw a historical parallel between Putin and other Russian and Soviet political leaders’ marital life. He noted that such Russian leaders as Tsar Nikolay the Second and Mikhail Gorbachev who loved their wives and were known to be good husbands were not successful managers of the state. In contrast, lone rulers of Russia such as Joseph Stalin proved to be leaders who loved their country first and gained a lot of support from their electorate because of that lonely love. Popular print and online journalist Oleg Kashin picked up on that specific idea: he quoted Vladimir Putin’s press secretary who explained that the president had declared that he would now spend more time working for the prosperity of the country.Twitter users were exchanging not only 140 symbol texts but also satirical images and other visual memes based on the divorce announcement. Those who suggested that Vladimir Putin should have divorced the country instead portrayed Lyudmila Putina and Vladimir holding candles and wearing funereal black with various taglines discussing how the country would now be split. Other users contributed visual memes jamming the television show Bachelor imagery and font with Vladimir Putin’s face and an announcement that the most desirable bachelor in the country is now its president. A similar idea was put into jammed images of the Let’s Get Married television show using Vladimir Putin’s face or name linked with a humorous comment that he could try those shows to find a new wife. One more thread of Twitter memes on Putin’s divorce used the name of Alina Kabaeva, Olympic gymnast who is rumoured by the press to be in relationship with the leader (Daily Mail Reporter). She was mentioned in plenty of visual and textual memes. Probably, the most popular visual meme (Burzhskaya; Topsy) used the one-liner from a famous Soviet comedy Ivan Vasylievich Menyaet Professiyu: it uses a joyful exclamation of an actress who learns that her love interest, a movie director, is leaving his wife so that the lovers can now fly to a resort together. Alina Kabaeva, the purported love interest of Putin, was jammed to be that actress as she announced the “triumphal” resort vacation plan to a girlfriend over the phone.Vladimir Putin’s 2013 divorce announcement presented new challenges for his personal and political self-representation and revealed new traits of the Russian president’s interaction with the nation. As the news of Vladimir and Lyudmila Putin’s divorce was broadcast via traditional media in a non-interactive television format, commentary on the event advanced only through the following week’s media coverage and the massive activity on social networks. It has still to be examined whether Vladimir Putin’s political advisors intentionally included many symbols of collective memory in the original and staid broadcast announcement. However, the response from traditional and social media shows that both Russian journalists and regular Twitter users were inclined to use humour and satire when discussing the personal life of a major political leader. Despite this appearance of an active counter-political sphere via social networks, the majority of tweets retrieved also revealed a certain level of respect towards Vladimir Putin’s privacy as few popular jokes or memes were aggressive, offensive or humiliating. Most popular memes on Vladimir Putin’s divorce linked this announcement to the political life of Russia, the political situation in other countries, and television shows and popular culture. Some of the memes, though, advanced the idea that Vladimir Putin should have divorced the country instead. The analysis also shows how a charismatic leader can affect or reconstruct the “values” he represents. In Vladimir Putin’s divorce event, his personality is the main focus of discussion both by traditional and new media. However, he is not judged for his personal choices as the online social media users provide rather mild commentary and jokes about them. The event and the subsequent online discourse, images and texts not only identify how Putin’s politics have become personified, the research also uncovers how the audience/citizenry online often see the country as a “persona” as well. Some Internet users suggested Putin’s marriage to the country; this mystified, if not mythologised view reinforces Vladimir Putin’s personal and political charisma.Conclusively, Vladimir Putin’s divorce case study shows how political and private persona are being mediated and merged via mixed channels of communication. The ever-changing nature of the political leader portrayal in the mediated environment of the 2010s opens new challenges for further research on the modes and ways for political persona representation in modern Russia.References Adorno, Theodor W. The Authoritarian Personality. New York, 1969 (1950).Ankersmit, Franklin R. Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy beyond Fact and Value. Stanford University Press, 1996.Asmolov, Gregory. “The Kremlin’s Cameras and Virtual Potemkin Villages: ICT and the Construction of Statehood.” Bits and Atoms: Information and Communication Technology in Areas of Limited Statehood (2014): 30.Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, 1981.Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.Burzhskaya, Kseniya. “Galochka, Ti Seichas Umryosh!” [“Galochka, You Are Going to Die!”]. Snob.ru 7 June 2013. April 2014 ‹http://www.snob.ru/profile/9947/blog/61372›.Corner, John, and Dick Pels. “Introduction: The Re-Styling of Politics.” Media and the Restyling of Politics. Ed. John Corner and Dick Pels. London: Sage, 2003: 1-19.Corner, John. “Mediated Persona and Political Culture.” Media and the Restyling of Politics. Ed. John Corner and Dick Pels. London: Sage, 2003: 67-85.Daily Mail Reporter. “Has President Putin Married Former Olympic Gymnast? Alina Kabayeva Flashes ‘Wedding Ring’ at TV Cameras.” DailyMail.co.uk 15 Feb. 2014. April 2014 ‹http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2560278/Has-President-Putin-married-former-Olympic-gymnast-Alina-Kabayeva-flashes-wedding-ring-TV-cameras.html›.Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 2006.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.Holden, Stephen. “Through the Looking Glass of History.” New York Times 22 Mar. 2011. April 2014 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/movies/my-perestroika-about-growing-up-in-russia-review.html?_r=0›. Kavanagh, Dennis. Election Campaigning: The New Marketing of Politics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.Kotova, Yulia. “‘Otstoyala Vakhtu’: Vladimir I Lyudmila Putiny Ob’yavili o Razvode” [“‘Fulfilled the Duty’: Vladimir and Lyudmila Putin Announced a Divorce”]. Forbes.ru. April 2014 ‹http://www.forbes.ru/news/240295-vladimir-putin-razvelsya-s-zhenoi-lyudmiloi›.Lankshear, Colin, and Michele Knobel. “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies.” A New Literacies Sampler. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 1-24.Lawrence, Regina G., and W. Lance Bennett. “Rethinking Media Politics and Public Opinion: Reactions to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal.” Political Science Quarterly 116.3 (2001): 425-446.Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd. New York: Viking, 1960 (1895).Loshak, Viktor. “Vyvody Nuzhno Delat’ Iz Togo, Kak Zhivet Strana, a Ne Semya, Pust’ Dazhe Samaya Pervaya” [“You need to make conclusions on the life of the country, not of the family even though of the highest range”]. Kommersant.ru 7 June 2013. April 2014 ‹http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2206093›.Mayhew, Leon H. The New Public: Professional Communication and the Means of Social Influence. Cambridge University Press, 1997.Medvedev, Dmitry. “Interview to The Times [Russian transcript].” Government of the Russian Federation 30 July 2012. May 2014 ‹http://government.ru/docs/19842›.Meywrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen, 1982.Pickerel, Wendi, Helena Jorgensen, and Lance Bennett. "Culture Jams and Meme Warfare: Kalle Lasn, Adbusters, and Media Activism." Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, 2002.Pronina, Lyubov. “Dreams of an iPad Economy for Russia.” BloombergBusinessWeek 3 Feb. 2011. May 2014 ‹http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_07/b4215011283273.htm›.Rostovskiy, Mikhail. “Razvod Po-Prezidentski” [“Divorce President-Style”]. Mk.ru 7 June 2013. April 2014 ‹http://www.mk.ru/politics/russia/article/2013/06/07/865979-razvod-poprezidentski.html›.Shifman, Limor. “Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18.3 (2013): 362-77.Sobchak, Kseniya. “Razvod Pod Lupoj” [“Divorce under Magnifyin Glass”]. Snob.ru 7 June 2013. April 2013 http://www.snob.ru/profile/24691/blog/61395›.Sokolov, Mikhail. “Russkiy Facebook o Razvode Chety Putinykh” [“Russian Facebook on Putin Divorce”]. Radio Svoboda 7 June 2013. May 2014 ‹http://www.svoboda.org/content/article/25009616.html›.Swanson, David L., and Paolo Mancini, eds. Politics, Media, and Modern Democracy: An International Study of Innovations in Electoral Campaigning and Their Consequences. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996.Thompson, John B. Political Scandal. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.Vesti.ru. “Vladimir I Lyudmila Putiny: Razvod Byl Nashim Obschim Resheniem” [“Vladimir and Lyudmila Putin: Divorce Was Our Joint Decision”]. 6 June 2013. April 2014 ‹http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=1092091›. Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Routledge, 2009.

On 17 January 2013, Wired chose the smart contact lens as one of “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World” describing a Google-led research project. Wired explains that the inventor, Dr. Babak Parviz, wants to build a microsystem on a contact lens: “Using radios no wider than a few human hairs, he thinks these lenses can augment reality and incidentally eliminate the need for displays on phones, PCs, and widescreen TVs”. Explained further in other sources, the technology entails an antenna, circuits embedded into a contact lens, GPS, and an LED to project images on the eye, creating a virtual display (Solve for X). Wi-Fi would stream content through a transparent screen over the eye. One patent describes a camera embedded in the lens (Etherington). Another mentions medical sensing, such as glucose monitoring of tears (Goldman). In other words, Google proposes an imagined future when we use contact lenses to search the Internet (and be searched by it), shop online, communicate with friends, work, navigate maps, swipe through Tinder, monitor our health, watch television, and, by that time, probably engage in a host of activities not yet invented. Often referred to as a bionic contact, the smart contact lens would signal a weighty shift in the way we work, socialize, and frame our online identities. However, speculative discussion over this radical shift in personal computing, rarely if ever, includes consideration of how the body, acting as a host to digital information, will manage to assimilate not only significant affordances, but also significant constraints and vulnerabilities. At this point, for most people, the smart contact lens is just an idea. Is a new medium of communication started when it is launched in an advertising campaign? When we Like it on Facebook? If we chat about it during a party amongst friends? Or, do a critical mass of people actually have to be using it to say it has started? One might say that Apple’s Macintosh computer started as a media platform when the world heard about the famous 1984 television advertisement aired during the American NFL Super Bowl of that year. Directed by Ridley Scott, the ad entails an athlete running down a passageway and hurling a hammer at a massive screen depicting cold war style rulers expounding state propaganda. The screen explodes freeing those imprisoned from their concentration camp existence. The direct reference to Orwell’s 1984 serves as a metaphor for IBM in 1984. PC users were made analogous to political prisoners and IBM served to represent the totalitarian government. The Mac became a something that, at the time, challenged IBM, and suggested an alternative use for the desktop computer that had previously been relegated for work rather than life. Not everyone bought a Mac, but the polemical ad fostered the idea that Mac was certainly the start of new expectations, civic identities, value-systems, and personal uses for computers. The smart contact lens is another startling start. News of it shocks us, initiates social media clicks and forwards, and instigates dialogue. But, it also indicates the start of a new media paradigm that is already undergoing popular adoption as it is announced in mainstream news and circulated algorithmically across media channels. Since 2008, news outlets like CNN, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Asian International News, United News of India, The Times of London and The Washington Post have carried it, feeding the buzz in circulation that Google intends. Attached to the wave of current popular interest generated around any technology claiming to be “wearable,” a smart contact lens also seems surreptitious. We would no longer hold smartphones, but hide all of that digital functionality beneath our eyelids. Its emergence reveals the way commercial models have dramatically changed. The smart contact lens is a futuristic invention imagined for us and about us, but also a sensationalized idea socializing us to a future that includes it. It is also a real device that Parviz (with Google) has been inventing, promoting, and patenting for commercial applications. All of these workings speak to a broader digital culture phenomenon. We argue that the smart contact lens discloses a process of nascent posthuman adaptation, launched in an era that celebrates wearable media as simultaneously astonishing and banal. More specifically, we adopt technology based on our adaptation to it within our personal, political, medial, social, and biological contexts, which also function in a state of flux. N. Katherine Hayles writes that “Contemporary technogenesis, like evolution in general, is not about progress ... rather, contemporary technogenesis is about adaptation, the fit between organisms and their environments, recognizing that both sides of the engagement (human and technologies) are undergoing coordinated transformations” (81). This article attends to the idea that in these early stages, symbolic acts of adaptation signal an emergent medium through rhetorical processes that society both draws from and contributes to. In terms of project scope, this article contributes a focused analysis to a much larger ongoing digital rhetoric project. For the larger project, we conducted a discourse analysis on a collection of international publications concerning Babak Parviz and the invention. We searched for and collected newspaper stories, news broadcasts, YouTube videos from various sources, academic journal publications, inventors’ conference presentations, and advertising, all published between January 2008 and May 2014, generating a corpus of more than 600 relevant artifacts. Shortly after this time, Dr. Parviz, a Professor at the University of Washington, left the secretive GoogleX lab and joined Amazon.com (Mac). For this article we focus specifically on the idea of beginnings or genesis and how digital spaces increasingly serve as the grounds for emergent digital cultural phenomena that are rarely recognized as starting points. We searched through the corpus to identify a few exemplary international mainstream news stories to foreground predominant tropes in support of the claim we make that smart contacts lenses are a startling idea. Content producers deliberately use astonishment as a persuasive device. We characterize the idea of a smart contact lens cast in rhetorical terms in order to reveal how its allure works as a process of adaptation. Rhetorician and philosopher, Kenneth Burke writes that “rhetorical language is inducement to action (or to attitude)” (42). A rhetorical approach is instrumental because it offers a model to explain how we deploy, often times, manipulative meaning as senders and receivers while negotiating highly complex constellations of resources and contexts. Burke’s rhetorical theory can show how messages influence and become influenced by powerful hierarchies in discourse that seem transparent or neutral, ones that seem to fade into the background of our consciousness. For this article, we also concentrate on rhetorical devices such as ethos and the inventor’s own appeals through different modes of communication. Ethos was originally proposed by Aristotle to identify speaker credibility as a persuasive tactic. Addressed by scholars of rhetoric for centuries, ethos has been reconfigured by many critical theorists (Burke; Baumlin Ethos; Hyde). Baumlin and Baumlin suggest that “ethos describes an audience’s projection of authority and trustworthiness onto the speaker ... ethos suggests that the ethical appeal to be a radically psychological event situated in the mental processes of the audience – as belonging as much to the audience as to the actual character of a speaker” (Psychology 99). Discussed in the next section, our impression of Parviz and his position as inventor plays a dramatic role in the surfacing of the smart contact lens. Digital Rhetoric is an “emerging scholarly discipline concerned with the interpretation of computer-generated media as objects of study” (Losh 48). In an era when machine-learning algorithms become the messengers for our messages, which have become commodity items operating across globalized, capitalist networks, digital rhetoric provides a stable model for our approach. It leads us to demonstrate how this emergent medium and invention, the smart contact lens, is born amid new digital genres of speculative communication circulated in the everyday forums we engage on a daily basis. Smart Contact Lenses, Sensationalism, and Identity One relevant site for exploration into how an invention gains ethos is through writing or video penned or produced by the inventor. An article authored by Parviz in 2009 discusses his invention and the technical advancements that need to be made before the smart contact lens could work. He opens the article using a fictional and sensationalized analogy to encourage the adoption of his invention: The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.But why stop there?In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field—virtual captions that enhance the cyborg’s scan of a scene. In stories by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes. Identity building is made to correlate with smart contact lenses in a manner that frames them as exciting. Coming to terms with them often involves casting us as superhumans, wielding abilities that we do not currently possess. One reason for embellishment is because we do not need digital displays on the eyes, so the motive to use them must always be geared to transcending our assumed present condition as humans and society members. Consequently, imagination is used to justify a shift in human identity along a future trajectory.This passage above also instantiates a transformation from humanist to posthumanist posturing (i.e. “the cyborg”) in order to incent the adoption of smart contact lenses. It begins with the bold declarative statement, “The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse,” which is a comforting claim about our seemingly human superiority. Indexing abstract humanist values, Parviz emphasizes skills we already possess, including seeing a plethora of colours, adjusting to light on the fly, and thinking fast, indeed faster than “a high-speed Internet connection”. However, the text goes on to summon the Terminator character and his optic feats from the franchise of films. Filmic cyborg characters fulfill the excitement that posthuman rhetoric often seems to demand, but there is more here than sensationalism. Parviz raises the issue of augmenting human vision using science fiction as his contextualizing vehicle because he lacks another way to imbricate the idea. Most interesting in this passage is the inventor’s query “But why stop there?” to yoke the two claims, one biological (i.e., “The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse”) and one fictional (i.e. Terminator, Vernor Vinge characters). The query suggests, Why stop with human superiority, we may as well progress to the next level and embrace a smart contact lens just as fictional cyborgs do. The non-threatening use of fiction makes the concept seem simultaneously exciting and banal, especially because the inventor follows with a clear description of the necessary scientific engineering in the rest of the article. This rhetorical act signifies the voice of a technoelite, a heavily-funded cohort responding to global capitalist imperatives armed with a team of technologists who can access technological advancements and imbue comments with an authority that may extend beyond their fields of expertise, such as communication studies, sociology, psychology, or medicine. The result is a powerful ethos. The idea behind the smart contact lens maintains a degree of respectability long before a public is invited to use it.Parviz exhumes much cultural baggage when he brings to life the Terminator character to pitch smart contact lenses. The Terminator series of films has established the “Arnold Schwarzenegger” character a cultural mainstay. Each new film reinvented him, but ultimately promoted him within a convincing dystopian future across the whole series: The Terminator (Cameron), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Mostow), Terminator Salvation (McG) and Terminator Genisys (Taylor) (which appeared in 2015 after Parviz’s article). Recently, several writers have addressed how cyborg characters figure significantly in our cultural psyche (Haraway, Bukatman; Leaver). Tama Leaver’s Artificial Culture explores the way popular, contemporary, cinematic, science fiction depictions of embodied Artificial Intelligence, such as the Terminator cyborgs, “can act as a matrix which, rather than separating or demarcating minds and bodies or humanity and the digital, reinforce the symbiotic connection between people, bodies, and technologies” (31). Pointing out the violent and ultimately technophobic motive of The Terminator films, Leaver reads across them to conclude nevertheless that science fiction “proves an extremely fertile context in which to address the significance of representations of Artificial Intelligence” (63).Posthumanism and TechnogenesisOne reason this invention enters the public’s consciousness is its announcement alongside a host of other technologies, which seem like parts of a whole. We argue that this constant grouping of technologies in the news is one process indicative of technogenesis. For example, City A.M., London’s largest free commuter daily newspaper, reports on the future of business technology as a hodgepodge of what ifs: As Facebook turns ten, and with Bill Gates stepping down as Microsoft chairman, it feels like something is drawing to an end. But if so, it is only the end of the technological revolution’s beginning ... Try to look ahead ten years from now and the future is dark. Not because it is bleak, but because the sheer profusion of potential is blinding. Smartphones are set to outnumber PCs within months. After just a few more years, there are likely to be 3bn in use across the planet. In ten years, who knows – wearables? smart contact lenses? implants? And that’s just the start. The Internet of Things is projected to be a $300bn (£183bn) industry by 2020. (Sidwell) This reporting is a common means to frame the commodification of technology in globalized business news that seeks circulation as much as it does readership. But as a text, it also posits how individuals frame the future and their participation with it (Pedersen). Smart contacts appear to move along this exciting, unstoppable trajectory where the “potential is blinding”. The motive is to excite and scare. However, simultaneously, the effect is predictable. We are quite accustomed to this march of innovations that appears everyday in the morning paper. We are asked to adapt rather than question, consequently, we never separate the parts from the whole (e.g., “wearables? smart contact lenses? Implants”) in order to look at them critically.In coming to terms with Cary Wolf’s definition of posthumanism, Greg Pollock writes that posthumanism is the questioning that goes on “when we can no longer rely on ‘the human’ as an autonomous, rational being who provides an Archimedean point for knowing about the world (in contrast to “humanism,” which uses such a figure to ground further claims)” (208). With similar intent, N. Katherine Hayles formulating the term technogenesis suggests that we are not really progressing to another level of autonomous human existence when we adopt media, we are in effect, adapting to media and media are also in a process of adapting to us. She writes: As digital media, including networked and programmable desktop stations, mobile devices, and other computational media embedded in the environment, become more pervasive, they push us in the direction of faster communication, more intense and varied information streams, more integration of humans and intelligent machines, and more interactions of language with code. These environmental changes have significant neurological consequences, many of which are now becoming evident in young people and to a lesser degree in almost everyone who interacts with digital media on a regular basis. (11) Following Hayles, three actions or traits characterize adaptation in a manner germane to the technogenesis of media like smart contact lenses. The first is “media embedded in the environment”. The trait of embedding technology in the form of sensors and chips into external spaces evokes the onset of The Internet of Things (IoT) foundations. Extensive data-gathering sensors, wireless technologies, mobile and wearable components integrated with the Internet, all contribute to the IoT. Emerging from cloud computing infrastructures and data models, The IoT, in its most extreme, involves a scenario whereby people, places, animals, and objects are given unique “embedded” identifiers so that they can embark on constant data transfer over a network. In a sense, the lenses are adapted artifacts responding to a world that expects ubiquitous networked access for both humans and machines. Smart contact lenses will essentially be attached to the user who must adapt to these dynamic and heavily mediated contexts.Following closely on the first, the second point Hayles makes is “integration of humans and intelligent machines”. The camera embedded in the smart contact lens, really an adapted smartphone camera, turns the eye itself into an image capture device. By incorporating them under the eyelids, smart contact lenses signify integration in complex ways. Human-machine amalgamation follows biological, cognitive, and social contexts. Third, Hayles points to “more interactions of language with code.” We assert that with smart contact lenses, code will eventually govern interaction between countless agents in accordance with other smart devices, such as: (1) exchanges of code between people and external nonhuman networks of actors through machine algorithms and massive amalgamations of big data distributed on the Internet;(2) exchanges of code amongst people, human social actors in direct communication with each other over social media; and (3) exchanges of coding and decoding between people and their own biological processes (e.g. monitoring breathing, consuming nutrients, translating brainwaves) and phenomenological (but no less material) practices (e.g., remembering, grieving, or celebrating). The allure of the smart contact lens is the quietly pressing proposition that communication models such as these will be radically transformed because they will have to be adapted to use with the human eye, as the method of input and output of information. Focusing on genetic engineering, Eugene Thacker fittingly defines biomedia as “entail[ing] the informatic recontextualization of biological components and processes, for ends that may be medical or nonmedical (economic, technical) and with effects that are as much cultural, social, and political as they are scientific” (123). He specifies, “biomedia are not computers that simply work on or manipulate biological compounds. Rather, the aim is to provide the right conditions, such that biological life is able to demonstrate or express itself in a particular way” (123). Smart contact lenses sit on the cusp of emergence as a biomedia device that will enable us to decode bodily processes in significant new ways. The bold, technical discourse that announces it however, has not yet begun to attend to the seemingly dramatic “cultural, social, and political” effects percolating under the surface. Through technogenesis, media acclimatizes rapidly to change without establishing a logic of the consequences, nor a design plan for emergence. Following from this, we should mention issues such as the intrusion of surveillance algorithms deployed by corporations, governments, and other hegemonic entities that this invention risks. If smart contact lenses are biomedia devices inspiring us to decode bodily processes and communicate that data for analysis, for ourselves, and others in our trust (e.g., doctors, family, friends), we also need to be wary of them. David Lyon warns: Surveillance has spilled out of its old nation-state containers to become a feature of everyday life, at work, at home, at play, on the move. So far from the single all-seeing eye of Big Brother, myriad agencies now trace and track mundane activities for a plethora of purposes. Abstract data, now including video, biometric, and genetic as well as computerized administrative files, are manipulated to produce profiles and risk categories in a liquid, networked system. The point is to plan, predict, and prevent by classifying and assessing those profiles and risks. (13) In simple terms, the smart contact lens might disclose the most intimate information we possess and leave us vulnerable to profiling, tracking, and theft. Irma van der Ploeg presupposed this predicament when she wrote: “The capacity of certain technologies to change the boundary, not just between what is public and private information but, on top of that, between what is inside and outside the human body, appears to leave our normative concepts wanting” (71). The smart contact lens, with its implied motive to encode and disclose internal bodily information, needs considerations on many levels. Conclusion The smart contact lens has made a digital beginning. We accept it through the mass consumption of the idea, which acts as a rhetorical motivator for media adoption, taking place long before the device materializes in the marketplace. This occurrence may also be a sign of our “posthuman predicament” (Braidotti). We have argued that the smart contact lens concept reveals our posthuman adaptation to media rather than our reasoned acceptance or agreement with it as a logical proposition. By the time we actually squabble over the price, express fears for our privacy, and buy them, smart contact lenses will long be part of our everyday culture. References Baumlin, James S., and Tita F. Baumlin. “On the Psychology of the Pisteis: Mapping the Terrains of Mind and Rhetoric.” Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Eds. James S. Baumlin and Tita F. Baumlin. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994. 91-112. Baumlin, James S., and Tita F. Baumlin, eds. Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994. Bilton, Nick. “A Rose-Colored View May Come Standard.” The New York Times, 4 Apr. 2012. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Cameron, James, dir. The Terminator. Orion Pictures, 1984. DVD. Cameron, James, dir. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Artisan Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Etherington, Darrell. “Google Patents Tiny Cameras Embedded in Contact Lenses.” TechCrunch, 14 Apr. 2014. Goldman, David. “Google to Make Smart Contact Lenses.” CNN Money 17 Jan. 2014. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012. Hyde, Michael. The Ethos of Rhetoric. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Leaver, Tama. Artificial Culture: Identity, Technology, and Bodies. New York: Routledge, 2012. Losh, Elizabeth. Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes. Boston: MIT Press. 2009. Lyon, David, ed. Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. New York: Routledge, 2003. Mac, Ryan. “Amazon Lures Google Glass Creator Following Phone Launch.” Forbes.com, 14 July 2014. McG, dir. Terminator Salvation. Warner Brothers, 2009. DVD. Mostow, Jonathan, dir. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Warner Brothers, 2003. DVD. Parviz, Babak A. “Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens.” IEEE Spectrum, 1 Sep. 2009. Pedersen, Isabel. Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media. Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor Press, 2013. Pollock, Greg. “What Is Posthumanism by Cary Wolfe (2009).” Rev. of What is Posthumanism?, by Cary Wolfe. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9.1/2 (2011): 235-241. Sidwell, Marc. “The Long View: Bill Gates Is Gone and the Dot-com Era Is Over: It's Only the End of the Beginning.” City A.M., 7 Feb. 2014. “Solve for X: Babak Parviz on Building Microsystems on the Eye.” YouTube, 7 Feb. 2012. Taylor, Alan, dir. Terminator: Genisys. Paramount Pictures, 2015. DVD. Thacker, Eugene “Biomedia.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T Mitchell and Mark Hansen, Chicago: Chicago Press, 2010. 117-130. Van der Ploeg, Irma. “Biometrics and the Body as Information.” Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. Ed. David Lyon. New York: Routledge, 2003. 57-73. Wired Staff. “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World.” Wired.com, 17 Jan. 2013.