Journal articles on the topic 'Imitation – Psychological aspects'

In this paper, we move toward offering psychological benchmarks to measure success in building increasingly humanlike robots. By psychological benchmarks we mean categories of interaction that capture conceptually fundamental aspects of human life, specified abstractly enough to resist their identity as a mere psychological instrument, but capable of being translated into testable empirical propositions. Nine possible benchmarks are considered: autonomy, imitation, intrinsic moral value, moral accountability, privacy, reciprocity, conventionality, creativity, and authenticity of relation. Finally, we discuss how getting the right group of benchmarks in human–robot interaction will, in future years, help inform on the foundational question of what constitutes essential features of being human.

The purpose of the article is a brief description of the experience of analyzing the conceptual foun-dations of governance in education and other spheres in post-Soviet Russia in comparison with developed democracies; a description of typical approaches to the implementation (imitation) of strategic planning in management, as well as the consequences and specific traits of contextual, a-strategic management. Conceptual management in education and in the context of others is oppose to contextual management. Modern management concepts are externally presented in Russian education and in other areas of management discourse and practice. The system of professional standards developed in the country is designed to solve a number of managerial tasks. However, the non-conceptual use of professional standards leads to an imbalance in subject-object interaction and in organization in whole. This article lists two categories of workers. Non-compliance with the professional requirements is typical to the first category of workers. Failure to comply with professional standards also take part to the professional, partners and personal deformations. These deformations are illustrated by the text of management strategies. Having strategies is an incentive for development. However, the lack of an algorithm for the compilation and evaluation of such documents, the analysis of the importance of this aspect in the process of evaluating the activities of authorities leads to the fact that this strategic management remains unclaimed in the territorial and organizational management system. The authors consider two leading aspects of the problem of territorial strategization: (1) substantiation of the reasons for poor-quality strategic developments; (2) the search for errors in the conceptual management methodology. The roots of the first problem should be found in the imbalances in the formation and development of the subject of management, starting with the problem of improper selection and de-professionalization of managerial personnel. To solve the second problem, the authors propose SEO analysis tools as a methodology for evaluating strategy texts. This tool solves the problem of audit of regional strategies in the context of administrative, socio-psychological and linguistic aspects of public servants in the field of education. The data obtained can also be disseminated to non-governmental educational institutions: in particular, in additional or global education it is extremely important to know its subject, object, purpose and objectives, etc. Otherwise, as in the case of state educational institutions, imitations will arise that are more likely to harm education and society than support it.

Studying human infants will increase our understanding of the nature, origins and function of neural mirroring mechanisms. Human infants are prolific imitators. Infant imitation indicates observation–execution linkages in the brain prior to language and protracted learning. Investigations of neural aspects of these linkages in human infants have focused on the sensorimotor mu rhythm in the electroencephalogram, which occurs in the alpha frequency range over central electrode sites. Recent results show that the infant mu rhythm is desynchronized during action execution as well as action observation. Current work is elucidating properties of the infant mu rhythm and how it may relate to prelinguistic action processing and social understanding. Here, we consider this neuroscience research in relation to developmental psychological theory, particularly the ‘Like-Me’ framework, which holds that one of the chief cognitive tasks of the human infant is to map the similarity between self and other. We elucidate the value of integrating neuroscience findings with behavioural studies of infant imitation, and the reciprocal benefit of examining mirroring mechanisms from an ontogenetic perspective.

This study aims to reveal and identify therapeutic aspects in the tradition of shalawatan in Banyumas area. With ethnographic approach, this study describe the various aspects of therapeutic in the tradition of shalawatan. It can consider the elements that exist in the shalawatan, namely the shalawat reading or dzikir, the relationship between the leader (habib) and its members, the atmosphere of relations among its members, and the speech content (taushiyah) of habib or kiyai. The substance that be presented is the psychological implications caused by individual rituals and experiences in performing solawatan tradition. The therapeutic aspect is essentially part of this study. There are many therapeutic aspects of shalawatan tradition that have been revealed in this research, namely auto-suggestion, togetherness, psycho-spiritual and group therapy. The next study can find other ones, for example the aspect of musical of shalawatan that sharpens the sense or the religious emotions of the doers, so as not to dry in practice religious teachings. In addition there is also a scientific aspect that is contained in the moment of giving tausiyah (mau’idzah hasanah) by habib and kiyai in a shalawatan forum, which helps the jama’ah to develop positive thoughts in life. Similarly,, aspects of self-actualization development, the process of self imitation (identification), and aspects of religious transformation that exist in the subjective experience of the perpetrators of shalawatan

In the article it was shown that autonomy, generally, was not seen as a method or a behavior to be taught a learner. On the contrary, it is understood as innate part of human nature which is usually exercised over different areas of life not only in the aspect of language learning. By nature, we are all autonomous from birth since we fully, however, not always consciously, control what we learn during developmental learning stages. Frequently, even young children display their autonomy clearly when they choose to learn particular undesirable behavior, for example, saying inappropriate words. As can be seen, the notion of autonomy is not a recent “fashion”, but it has always been present in a human life. We presented facilitative aspects of learner’s autonomy: autonomy is a construct of capacity; autonomy involves a willingness on the part of the learner to take responsibility for their own learning; the capacity and willingness of learners take such a responsibility is not necessarily innate; complete autonomy is an idealistic goal; there are some main degrees of autonomy; the degrees of autonomy are unstable and variable; autonomy is not simply a matter of placing learners in situations where they have to be independent; developing autonomy requires conscious awareness of the learning process – i.e. conscious reflection and decision-making; promoting autonomy is not simply a matter of teaching strategies; autonomy can take place both inside and outside the classroom; autonomy has a social as well as an individual dimension; the promotion of autonomy has a political as well as psychological dimension; autonomy is interpreted differently by different cultures. Facilitative aspects of learner’s autonomy amaze us with their results: learners recognize and accept the need to organize the activity in an environment of interpersonal communication, facilitating personal development and providing constructive personal changes; they develop skills of empathic comprehension; they are interested by participants in creating the conditions for the formation of meaningful learning and personal development as a whole as a result of restructuring of personal attitudes in the process of interpersonal interaction; they are aware of their self-sufficiency. All these numerous situations of interaction of people are carried out through four main methods of interaction: persuasion, imitation, suggestion and infection, which are facilitative in their context. Persuasion is the process of rationale judgment or inference. Imitation is the reproduction by a person of certain external traits of behavior, manners and actions. Suggestion is the psychological impact of one person on another one, calculated on the uncritical perception of words, thoughts and will expressed by them. Infection is the process of transferring of the emotional state from one individual to another, in addition to semantic effect itself. When all these methods of interaction are brought into action, the educational product, as a rule, is distinguished by a creative, non-standard approach and, what is the most important, they are always in demand by students.

AbstractThis article considers why septuple metres are so rare in Western music, despite being common in many other cultures. The scene is set by tracing the history of the septuple-time ‘meme’ (an idea that replicates by imitation) from ancient Greece through to Western art and popular music. The following sections consider the psychological, musical and environmental factors in more detail. The scarcity of septuple time in Western music is largely attributable to the development of the time signature, as a vertical conception of music evolved during the Renaissance. Subsequent evolution of the ‘Western music memeplex’ maintained septuple time on its periphery. Analysis of this interaction permits the construction of a meme-centred narrative of aspects of the development of Western music.

The authors devoted their article to the theoretical study of the formation of children's personal and collective culture in the training of future teachers. In particular, we studied the combination of neuropsychological and cultural-educational aspects in the formation of personal and collective culture as an acquired psychological structure based on the nature-defined deep functions. The aim of the article was a theoretical analysis of related neuroscientific and educational approaches, formulation of components of professional culture of future educators on the basis of this analysis and development of the author's comprehensive program "The wheel of professionalism of a future teacher". To achieve this goal, the authors used theoretical methods of systematic analysis of the literature, comparison, extrapolation of pedagogical provisions to the neuroscientific plane; structuring and systematization of methodological provisions (components of professional culture of future educators). Among the empirical methods - explication and creative development of didactic material (integrated program) and elements of sociological research (survey) to find out the students' satisfaction with the implemented program. The relevance of the article lies in the significant discrepancy between the content of higher pedagogical education of future educators (particularly in Ukraine) and the reality of pedagogical activity, which does not take into account the general cognitive imitation and imitative mechanisms of learning culture. As a result, the neurocognitive and pedagogical reasoning for the development of the program was carried out. We also identified the main criteria for the formation of professional culture (spiritual-creative, cognitive, motivational-value, reflexive-perceptive, instrumental) and modeled a comprehensive program of formation of the basics of professional culture of future educators of educational institutions, which consists of training work on each of the components. The main result is the materialization of the program itself and the determination of a high degree of satisfaction with the students among whom it was implemented. Significance of the article. The formulated patterns of formation of professional culture and development of the culture of students on the principle of imitation are universal, and each of the above components is illustrated by specific practical and activity material, which may serve as recommendations for improving both the formation of future educators, and educational work in a preschool institution.

The paper presents analysis of cases of indirect literature influences of Ovid and Shakespeare upon Taras Shevchenko's poetry. The author questions the view which is common in modern Ukrainian literature studies that Shevchenko's interest in Ovid's works was caused by similarity of certain facts of their biographies, and in Shakespeare's one — because of their oeuvres' humanistic dimension. Based on analysis of some relevant aspects of Ovid's and Shakespeare's works, and poems, letters and diaries by Shevchenko, the author argues that Shevchenko's keen interest in both poets' works was specified by his concern with modes of autocommunication and its display. In Shevchenko's poems, autocommunication manifest is addressed to his own poems in many cases; in Ovid's works, it manifested itself in the same way, while for Shakespeare's dramas, it appeared in numerous soliloquys delivered by characters of his. Shevchenko's fierce need for autocommunication was rooted in his psychological portrait, therefore, he was interested in Ovid and Shakespeare not because of searching for some objects for reception or imitation but because of deep feeling of emotional affinity with Ovid's and Shakespeare's characters.

Правопорядок и безопасность наказания в виде лишения свободы во многом зависит от социально-психологических условий его исполнения. В связи с этим имеется ряд проблемных аспектов, которые требуют научного осмысления и практического анализа. Это относится к рассмотрению динамических, динамико-статических и статических социально-психологических факторов, способствующих совершению преступлений. На сегодняшний день в пенитенциарных учреждениях существует достаточно объективных и субъективных причин и условий, препятствующих эффективному исполнению наказания в виде лишения свободы. При этом формальные особенности отрядного размещения и трудности дифференцированного содержания в совокупности с прошлым криминальным опытном осужденных способствуют деформации социально-психологических процессов взаимодействия среди тюремного населения. Негативный механизм распространения психологического заражения, внушения и подражания, популяризации групповых мнений и настроений, формирования традиций и обычаев тюремной субкультуры в местах лишения свободы всегда противопоставлен позитивным интересам личности, общества и государства. The rule of law and security of a custodial sentence largely depends on the socio-psychological conditions of its execution. In this regard, there are a number of problematic aspects that require scientific understanding and practical analysis. This applies to the consideration of dynamic, dynamic-static and static socio-psychological factors that contribute to the Commission of crimes. To date, there are enough objective and subjective reasons and conditions in penitentiary institutions that prevent the effective execution of a custodial sentence. At the same time, the formal features of detachment placement and the difficulties of differentiated detention, combined with the past criminal experience of convicts, contribute to the deformation of socio-psychological processes of interaction among the prison population. The negative mechanism of spreading psychological infection, suggestion and imitation, popularization of group opinions and moods, formation of traditions and customs of the prison subculture in places of detention is always opposed to the positive interests of the individual, society and the state.

Aristotle'sRhetoricdefines fear as a kind of pain (lypē) or disturbance (tarachē) and pity as a kind of pain (2.5.1382 a 21 and 2.8.1385 b 13). In hisPoetics, however, pity and fear are associated with pleasure: ‘ The poet must provide the pleasure that comes from pity and fear by means of imitation’ (τ⋯ν ⋯π⋯ ⋯λέου κα⋯ ɸόβου δι⋯ μιμήσεως δεῖ ⋯δον⋯ν παρασκευάζειν14.1453 b 12–13). The question of the relationship between pleasure and pain in Aristotle's aesthetics has been studied primarily in connection withcatharsis.Catharsis, however, raises more problems than it solves. Aristotle says nothing at all about the tragiccatharsisin thePoeticsexcept to state that tragedy accomplishes it. Though he gives a more complete account ofcatharsisin thePolitics, the context of this passage is so different from that of thePoeticsthat its relevance is questionable. A more promising, but largely neglected, approach to Aristotle's theory of tragic pleasure and pain is through a study of his psychological works. Here, Aristotle describes a number of emotional and cognitive responses to kinds of objects that include works of art. These descriptions support an interpretation of thePoeticsaccording to which (1) a tragedy is pleasurable in one respect and painful in another, and (2) pity and fear, though painful and not in themselves productive of pleasure, are nevertheless essential to the production of theoikeia hēdonē, ‘proper pleasure’, of tragedy. This interpretation has the advantage of not depending on a particular view ofcatharsis. It also makes much better sense than alternative views, once its seemingly paradoxical aspects are explained with the help of the psychological works.

Joint attention abilities play a crucial role in the development of autism. Impairments in joint attention are among the earliest signs of the disorder and joint attention skills relate to outcome, both in the ‘natural course’ of autism and through being targeted in early intervention programmes. In the current study, concurrent and longitudinal associations between joint attention and other social communication abilities measured in a sample of infants with autism and related pervasive developmental disorders at age 20 months, and language and symptom severity at age 42 months, were examined. Extending the findings from previous studies, joint attention ability was positively associated with language gains and (lower) social and communication symptoms, and imitation ability was also positively associated with later language. Some specificity in the association between different aspects of joint attention behaviours and outcome was found: declarative, triadic gaze switching predicted language and symptom severity but imperative, dyadic eye contact behaviours did not. Further, although joint attention was associated with later social and language symptoms it was unrelated to repetitive and stereotyped symptoms, suggesting the latter may have a separate developmental trajectory. Possible deficits in psychological and neurological processes that might underlie the impaired development of joint attention in autism are discussed.

The article is devoted to a specific socio-cultural phenomenon, called by the author “Napoleonic” Petersburg, and its reflection in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment (1866). In the late 1830s — 1860s the Napoleonic myth manifested itself in several aspects of the cultural life of the capital of the Russian Empire: the names of public institutions, restaurant menus, apartment decorations, museum rarities, monuments, street shows, theatrical productions, literary works, psychological imitation of Napoleon, etc. The article presents an attempt to reconstruct how the “Napoleonic” Petersburg was formed and looked like during the time when Fyodor Dostoevsky, who dedicated several works to the life of people in Petersburg, fascinated by Napoleon (“Mr. Prokharchin,” White Nights, Notes from the Underground, etc.), lived and worked in it, before the creation of Crime and Punishment. The author’s research focuses on the novel Crime and Punishment and Rodion Raskolnikov, trying to become a new Napoleon and talking about the transformation of St. Petersburg and the greatness of historical figures as “living monuments” on which there is “not a body, but bronze.” It is shown how the realities of St. Petersburg (the Egyptian Bridge, the Alexander Column, the Kazan Cathedral, etc.) relate to the Napoleonic myth and are indirectly reflected in the text of Dostoevsky’s novel.

Research on radicalization became relevant to the study of terrorism and violent extremism just two decades ago. The accumulated empirical data on terrorism have led researchers and experts to understand that radicalization is a predictor of violent actions by terrorists, violent extremists, and lone actors. Violent incidents committed by school shooters are not terrorist crimes, but there is good reasons for inclusion as terrorist crimes since they have similar mechanisms. The article aims to create a conceptual model of school-shooter radicalization and determine the distinguishing features of the process. The paper presents a theoretical and methodological base of content analysis concepts, political models, and terrorist radicalization on the different levels of study. Based on the content analysis results, we identify the significant gaps in the research field, consider the radicalization phenomenon in detail, substantiated the qualitative aspects of the school shooters radicalization, and propose a conceptual scheme. Psychological, behavioral, cognitive aspects of the school shooters radicalization reflect a holistic picture of the relationship between the process phases and changes in the parameters of the object’s state. The aspects of radicalization and this phenomenon’s qualitative properties are interpreted as the determinants of the conceptual model. The model includes five stages, each of which is considered to be one of the components for the formation and acceptance of the idea of a violent way to solve a problem, but certainly do not act individually as the only component that leads to the actual implementation of the incident of a school shooting. An in-depth study of online social connections and warning signs, mobilization factors, behavioral trajectories, and imitation mechanisms can help scientists understand why school shooters are increasingly motivated to use violent means to achieve personal goals. We have outlined the possibilities and prospects of the model’s application and directions for future research.

This article presents the research results of the dynamic of the formation of a person subjective attitude to supporting specialists' competencies in the educational environment of a university. The relevance of the study is due, on the one hand, to insufficient knowledge of the concept of "educational environment", its structure, correlation with other concepts, such as a multicultural environment, professional competencies. On the other hand, the study of the psychology of competencies and their structure, specificity (on the example of a specific group of professions), diagnostics, psychological and pedagogical conditions of formation. The practical significance of the study lies in examining professional competencies through the personal components of students, which are the subjective attitude of the individual. Empirical research was based on the use of quantitative data collection methods that reveal the concept of a person's subjective attitude. The sample consisted of 140 students of the faculties of "General Medicine" and "Social Work and Clinical Psychology" of The Volgograd State Medical University, who were trained in the second (2016) and fourth year (2018). The assessment of the attitude of students to the content of professional competencies of supporting specialists was measured using the author's methodology based on a list of general cultural and professional competencies declared in educational standards and selected by the subjects in accordance with the basic principles and rules of conducting a diagnostic study. The data obtained is processed through descriptive statistics. As a result, the structure and content of the subjective attitude of the individual was described, which includes the motivational ("important"), operational ("own") and pragmatic ("use") aspects of competencies. The course of study, the emerging "motivational stress", the organized conditions of the educational environment, involvement in practical professional activity determine the structure of the subjective attitude of students to the competencies being mastered: the structure of the second course of study is presented as "the motivational aspect – the operational aspect – the pragmatic aspect" of competencies, the structure of the fourth course of study – "pragmatic aspect – operational aspect – motivational aspect" of competencies. The choice of various psychological and pedagogical technologies in the training of specialists in helping professions as one of the effective conditions of the educational environment is aimed at manifesting, on the one hand, the cognitive activity of students, on the other, the formation of a positive attitude towards mastering a set of competencies. Information technologies and technologies for the development of critical thinking are aimed at developing research competencies. Interactive technologies of imitation and discussion types contribute to the development of a communicative group of competencies of supporting specialists, as well as conducting joint classes of Russian and foreign students, implementing patronage cooperation, etc. The results obtained can be taken into account in the practice of psychological, professional and socio-cultural support and adaptation of foreign and Russian students to supporting professions.

Like any productive activity, the phenomenon of consumption itself is an individual and social action like other productive activities in consumer societies. People express this action with different conceptual definitions for different reasons. In hedonic consumption, people attribute meanings to the act of purchasing and the product they buy, and they see consumption as an important purpose of life. The person may feel unhappy if the meaning and importance attributed to a particular brand in these societies is not completed by owning it. The pleasure of meeting him is, unfortunately, momentary; with hedonic adaptation, the person has to chase other pleasures. The effort to convey a message to the social environment through the symbolic meanings of the goods and services consumed by the person is seen as worthless by Ghazali, who prioritizes meeting the commodity needs. Ghazali’s view of human psychology is transpersonal, and Ghazali does not consider the physical aspect of man apart from his psychological and biological aspects, spiritual or spiritual aspects. Ghazali sees man as a being with the potential for continued development, especially regarding his spiritual aspect. It sees humanization not as a biological growth but as a psychological and spiritual deepening. Ghazali’s goal of maturing man is to lead him to his spiritual depth and religious orientation. Ghazali argues that not meeting the spiritual needs of man will create a deep feeling of “emptiness,” “nothingness,” and “spiritual hunger” in him. Ghazali, who argues that those who see the products they consume as status symbols do not have individual values, even that they are idiots of fame, aims to turn people towards their spiritual or meta-needs. Ghazali, who prioritizes commodity needs, sees hedonic consumption as a consumption frenzy stemming from ordinary life or the folly of fame. For Ghazali, who prioritizes meta-needs, hedonic consumption is not a simple shopping or an act of meeting needs but a pathological condition that should be questioned. Based on the assumption that a happy life is possible to the extent of consumption, hedonic consumption is a simple pleasure appealing only to the biological side of a person for someone who prioritizes meta-needs. This research focuses on two themes. The first is hedonic consumption; an act people do for desire, pleasure and imitation, not because of their needs. The other is the meta needs, which, like Ghazali, do not see the needs as endless and unlimited and consider it necessary to meet the physical needs of the person at a minimum level and turn to psychological needs. In this research, both the hedonic consumption act was questioned at the conceptual level and aimed to examine the concept of “meta-need,” which does not give more meaning to human needs than it deserves. In this way, what should be the main purpose and priority of the historical march of man through Ghazali will be questioned.

The article presents the research theoretical analysis of personality’s competence, it reveals its components and characteristics; the competence is considered from the point of view of cultural-historical theory of higher psychic functions made by L. Vyhotskyi, according to which the intellectual development of personality is implemented through acquisition by meanings of words and visual symbols, as well as it demonstrates the procedural-active approach (S. Rubinshtein, A. Brushlynskyi, L. Venher), in which the key concept is «thinking and ability», and it is determined that the essence of intellectual education should consist in formation of personality’s ability to understand and generate the new thoughts. Competence is defined by scientists as the ability to make decisions and bear responsibility for their implementation in various fields of human activity. The concept of competence implies combination of physical and intellectual qualities of a person and the properties necessary for independent and effective way out from different life situations. Competence implies the appropriate level of personal mechanisms development, such as repetition, identification, imitation, empathy, reflection, image of «I», conscience, corresponding to age opportunities and individual life stories of a child. In psychological and pedagogical literature, different aspects of competence are considered: competence in communication, cognitive competence, social and psychological competence, life competence, etc. Communicative competence is considered as a system of internal resources necessary for building the effective communication in a certain range of situations during the interpersonal interaction. Cognitive competence makes it possible to determine what is true and what is false. Competence in the emotional-volitional sphere implies the preschooler’s morality formation. As the indicators of vital competence the scientists determine the activity of a child in gaming, subject-practical activities, communication and basic qualities formation in personality.

Human handwriting changes throughout life, undergoing natural changes. Handwriting undergoes significant changes in the process of transition from mature to advanced and senile age. Aging is a natural, regular process of organism change at physiological, psychological, social levels. Over the past 50 years, the process of aging of the nation on a global scale is developing at a high speed. This article discusses the urgent issue of the study of signatures made by elderly and senile people: first of all, an attempt is made to determine the age boundaries of such concepts as «advanced» and «senile», as well as signs characteristic of signatures made by elderly or senile people are given age, and signs that the artist is trying to reproduce the signature with imitation. The problematic aspects that have arisen by experts during posthumous handwriting examinations of signatures are revealed, the main of which is the quality and quantity of lifetime free samples of signatures and the handwriting of the deceased. This is due to the fact that it is no longer possible to take experimental samples of signatures and handwriting from a deceased person, and free face samples, due to the peculiarity of the deceased’s life, may be in very limited numbers and may not correspond to the time of writing the document under study. Finally, the authors come to the conclusion that the methodology developed in 1983 for the forensic investigation of signatures made on behalf of elderly and senile people still remains effective and relevant, allows us to successfully detect the fact that signatures were performed by this category of people, but needs to be improved, experimental research, continuous monitoring of current trends in the physiological and psychological development of man.

This research studies Egypt in a selected sample of poems of modern Sudanese poetry. The study used the textual method to analyze stylistic and technical aspects of the poems chosen for this study. Sudanese poets have different views of Egypt based on their culture and psychological makeup and literary approach. Some poets had a simple vision despite their elevated diction, artificial rhetoric, and lifeless pathos; others had a more complex vision especially those who saw in Egypt the central state, with its science, history and civilization, and the ability to move the Arabs to wider horizons. The conservative poets relied heavily on stylistics and symbolic language expressions and intensified their structural formulations to meet the public’s tastes for clamor. Some used modern techniques like the narration, storytelling, and the internal monologue to express their visions. It was found that most texts analyzed in this study used the Khalili prosodics with the exception of a few new direction poets who used free verse to express themselves with smooth musicality without barriers as long as their poetry was fueled with profound passion, proper conscience, and a sense of simplicity. The Sudanese poet did not get rid of his old presentation of the image considering it a means for explanation, clarification, and extreme exaggeration. The image, therefore, appeared to be sensual and largely an imitation of ancient types. This, however, does not prevent the emergence of new forms.

The article deals with the theoretical principles of the formation of the field of values in several aspects – psychological, axiological and pedagogical. The purpose of mastering children of preschool age of value orientations require of a purposeful pedagogical influence from the first days of life is determined. Important components of such work are emotionality, a positive example of parents, directing long-term work of pre-school’s establishments.Valuable attitude of the child to an adult or coeval does not occur, if the child has not developed or poorly developed empathic feelings, respect, interest, cognitive activity. Valuable attitude promotes the most relevant and the fullest expression of moral feelings, is a stimulus to constant moral reflection, provides of psychological comfort in communication and causes appropriate politeness and kindness. The most important qualities of an adult during communication with a child should be the kindness, understanding and empathy that the child must learn as an ideal of communication and attitude to people. It is shown that the accumulated by the people during historical progress of pedagogical traditions form the basis of formation of value attitude to the family.In the traditional Ukrainian family, imitation and continuity of moral and ethical patterns of behavior was carried of help means of consolidating in the consciousness of the child information about the norms of behavior on the basis of a specific example – the traditions preservation, modernization and transfer from generation to generation of choosing social experience of the optimal and appropriate models of culture and, first of all, the subjects on a long-standing practice of ways of activities and behavior. Children in the family from an early age have been integrated to the traditions and customs, its formed and functioned during centuries and centuries, the most sustainable and expedient traditions have survived to the present time, although many traditions have been lost. Children are brought up on the traditions of collectivism, hard work, respect for the father, mother and elderly in general, respect for the traditions of the ancestors, obedience, hospitality, respectful attitude to their family tree.

The article summarizes the experience of technology to create artificial motivations for the formation of client flows in the context of solving problems: 1) the development of areas with a weak tourism and recreational potential; 2) extending the life cycle of tourist products; 3) management of client flows. In this paper the concept of artificial motivation is examined in three aspects: from the point of view of psychology, economics and marketing. In particular, the marketing aspects of the concept of artificial motivation are considered in the context of the region´s attractiveness as a tourist destination. As the main purposes of marketing highlighted are formation, maintenance or alteration of customer behavior in relation to a particular locality, region or country as a whole. Territory in which distribution occurs is treated as a set of opportunities for implementation of the different needs of tourists. If the tourist-recreational opportunities (resources) of the territory are limited, great importance is placed on artificial creation of motives for travelling. The article focuses on the description of the main approaches to the creation of artificial motivation at different stages of the life cycle of tourist products; examined are the key factors for creating an artificial incentive to intensify visits to tourist areas; highlighted are the psychological mechanisms of motivation formation, as well as major stimulants, such as: fashion, prestige, imitation authoritative personalities, creating a legend. The study highlights two main ways of solving the problem of formation of artificial motivations: first, due to the existence of unconscious needs and / or the lack of motive on the part of potential consumers of travel services; the second is related to the perceived needs and motivation of the consumer directed at another tourist attraction. The study describes in detail different possibilities of creating artificial motivations at different stages of the life cycle of the tourist product. The article cites numerous examples of artificial motivation in tourism.

The purpose of our research is: using the main statements of the theory of attraction to formulate the principles of facilitative interaction; to propose a set of exercises for the development of facilitative interaction of pupils at the lessons; to propose four types of transformation utterances of facilitative interaction at the lessons. Methods of the research. The following theoretical methods of the research were used to solve the tasks formulated in the article: the categorical method, structural and functional methods, the methods of the analysis, systematization, modeling, generalization. The results of the research. We proved, that the socio-genetic mechanism of facilitation is the mechanism of cultural transmission: to facilitate means to stimulate, to activate, to create favorable conditions, to make changes and to influence, to support, to help, to care, etc.; a belief in the original, constructive and creative essence of a man as self-worth. The result of facilitation is the concept of necessary and sufficient conditions for effective interpersonal communication that promote the development of personality and to provide constructive personality changes. The procedural side of facilitation at the lessons of secondary school is implied on the principles of synergy – cooperation, interaction, a dialogue; truthfulness and openness; the acceptance of another person as personally significant one; empathic understanding; the formation of skills and abilities which are appropriate for facilitative interaction. Conclusions. It was noted that the facilitative aspects of students’ autonomy often impressed with their results: pupils realized and accepted the need to organize activities in the environment of interpersonal communication as personally significant ones, contributing to their own personal development and providing constructive personal change. Students seek to develop skills of empathic mastery of the context; students are interested in creating positive preconditions for the formation of meaningful learning and personal development in general as a result of the restructuring of personal views in the process of interpersonal interaction; students are aware of their self-sufficiency. Facilitative aspects of human autonomy are actualized through four main methods of interpersonal interaction: persuasion, imitation, suggestion and infection, which are facilitative by their context. It is proved, that persuasion is the process of substantiating judgments or inferences. The imitation is the reproduction of certain external features of the behavior, the actions and the activities by a person. Suggestion is considered to be the psychological influence of one person on another; this process is designed for uncritical perception of words, thoughts and desires expressed by different people. Infection is the process of transmitting an emotional state from one person to another, actualizing the semantic effect of perception in the process of interpersonal interaction. It was noted that when all these methods of interpersonal interaction were explained in the process of the activity, the product of this activity, as a rule, would differ in a creative, non-standard approach and, that is the most important, – all students always like these products.

A new article by Ukrainian experts in ethno-pedagogy for the first time in science maximally summarizes the neuro-pedagogical, psychological and social potential of human development through the reproduction of folk games. The aim of the article is not only to consider the thematic diversity, but also to demonstrate how Ukrainian folk children's games and ancient adult games have a natural influence on the formation of worldview, socialization and maturity with the involvement of physical, neurophysiological and psycho-pedagogical mechanisms. Using general scientific, historical and neuroscientific methods, we proved the imitative, compensatory, sublimational, imitative, ritual and entertaining nature of folk games. Within the limits and possibilities available to the authors, neuroscientific commentary is presented to substantiate the underlying functions and mechanisms of folk games. The main result of the article is the creation of the fullest possible classification of the developing educational potential of folk games at two levels of generalization (general pedagogical aspects and specific functions). The authors were also able to review related literature on the topic, identify valuable observations and gnostic lacunas in need of scientific explication and ekplanatornost.

The paper analyzes the problems of introducing the computer techno- logies into the educational process. The opportunities and weaknesses of the implementation of computer programs and ways of overcoming them are discussed. During the Covid pandemic, the usage of computer and on- line recourses in educational process has increased. Computer models have numerous opportunities and allow speeding up or slowing down the time, narrowing or expanding the distance, in the real world holding the imitations of dangerous or impossible actions, which make them indispen- sable tools for the educational process. The results of the survey of the computer usage, their forms and features in the educational process are provided. In this article we also tried to identify the actions which, in stu- dents’ opinion, could increase the role and importance of computer- mediated education.

Abstract Background The era of Internet entrepreneurship is an era of “technology orientation, knowledge iteration, highly skilled talents and mode fission”, which challenges the original entrepreneurial education modes of experience (family), imitation (enterprise) and knowledge (University). Under the background of “structural entrepreneurship”, we need to break the threshold of “value creation” within the main body of education. Therefore, the emotional regulation ability and mental health of educational groups in the network era are particularly important. Research Objects and Methods This paper takes the theme of entrepreneurship education as the research object. From the perspective of value network theory and mental health, through case study and theoretical analysis, this paper theoretically deduces the “reconstruction of logical starting point relationship and value co creation” under the background of entrepreneurship education, mainly focusing on three aspects: (1) logical starting point: the driven change of innovation and entrepreneurship market; (2) Relationship reconstruction: the structural connection of the main body of entrepreneurship education; (3) Value co creation: benign improvement of the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education. This paper also uses the method of questionnaire to investigate the emotional micro behavior of entrepreneurship themes in different regions of China. The adoption of entrepreneurial anxiety scale is produced in the process of compiling self-awareness scale, which contains 6 items. A score of 0 indicates a low degree of focal deficiency and 24 indicates a high degree of focal deficiency. Cheier and Carver (1985) noticed that subjects without college education often have difficulties in understanding some items in the original scale, so they revised the scale to make it more understandable. The contents of the items in the social anxiety scale in the new scale have not changed, but their words have some minor modifications. At the same time, the score is also changed to 4-level system (0: not like me at all, 3: very like me). The scale scores range from. (low anxiety) to 18 (high anxiety). The correlation coefficient between the revised scale and the original scale was 0.86. This chapter includes the original scale and the revised scale respectively. The average of 179 male college students assessed by the original scale (5-level scoring system) was 12.5 (SD = 4.1). When using the revised scale (4-level scoring system), the mean of 213 men was 8.8 (SD = 4.3), while the mean of 85 women was 8.6 (SD = 4.7). Another sample, 396 middle-aged women, scored slightly lower. The mean is 7.3 (SD = 3.9). Cronbach of the original scale α the coefficient is the sum of Cronbach of the revised scale of 0.700 α The coefficient is 0.79. The two-week test-retest reliability of the original scale was 0.730, and the four-week test-retest correlation coefficient of the revised version was 0.77. Results (1) Entrepreneurship education in China has roughly experienced the development process of “family blood Network Entrepreneurship Education - cluster enterprise interactive Entrepreneurship Education - popularization of innovation and entrepreneurship concept education in Colleges and universities”. In the era of entrepreneurship, the original experiential, imitative and knowledge-based entrepreneurship education model is facing the dilemma of low efficiency or even ineffective: first, the “technology driven” weakens the experience advantage of family entrepreneurship education; Second, “model driven” weakens the imitation advantage of social entrepreneurship education; Third, “utility driven” breaks the knowledge advantage of entrepreneurship education in Colleges and universities. (2) In order to meet the new needs of the entrepreneurship market, under the background of “decentralization”, the main body of entrepreneurship education should actively break through the boundary, find the structural connection point and interactive intersection with other disciplines, embed core resources and advantages into the entrepreneurship education network, reconstruct the deeply integrated network relationship, promote the process reengineering of entrepreneurship education, and change the organizational form and content output of entrepreneurship education, Establish a multi-dimensional network coupling of multi-disciplinary cooperation guided by market demand: the first is the induced Association of “agglomeration” of core enterprises, the second is the “diffusion” of spillover Association of top universities, and the third is the interactive association “integration” of sharing platforms. At the same time, the correlation analysis between emotion regulation ability and health behavior of online education subjects under the “three drivers” shows that this study further finds that online learning efficacy plays a complete mediating role and a partial mediating role in the impact of positive academic emotion and negative academic emotion on online academic investment, respectively. Specifically, after introducing the mediating variable of learning efficacy, the path coefficient of “positive academic emotion online academic investment” decreased from significant to insignificant, indicating that online learning efficacy plays a complete mediating role in the influence of positive academic emotion on online learning investment; The relationship between negative academic emotion and online learning investment is still significant even after the introduction of mediating variables, which shows that online learning efficacy plays a partial mediating role in the impact of negative academic emotion on online learning investment. This result does not support Fredrickson's view that “positive emotions are associated with specific action tendencies”. In addition to the particularity of online learning environment, the difference of emotional nature plays an important role in the direct impact of positive academic emotion and negative academic emotion on online learning investment. This study believes that emotion is generated by individuals adapting to the environment. It is worth mentioning that negative emotions evolve gradually in the environment of dealing with survival threats, and are more closely related to specific action trends; Positive emotions are only accompanied by general activation, not specific action trends, and do not produce specific actions. Therefore, in the online learning environment, the positive academic emotion mainly affects the online learning investment by activating the individual's sense of learning efficacy, while the negative academic emotion not only directly affects the individual's online learning investment, but also indirectly affects the online learning investment by weakening the sense of learning efficacy. Conclusion The change of entrepreneurial market driving force gradually weakens the central advantage of the original subject of entrepreneurial education, making the experience advantage, imitation advantage and knowledge advantage in various entrepreneurial education unable to support the entrepreneurial behavior in the network era. Driven by “technology, mode and utility”, it is necessary to reconstruct the three interrelated modes of entrepreneurship education, Namely “core enterprise introduction (agglomeration), first-class university spillover (diffusion), sharing platform interaction (integration) So as to create three benefits after reconstructing the subject relationship of entrepreneurship education: rapid response to the advantages of network structure, symbiotic and mutual ecological effect, and multiple superimposed value creation system. Finally, strengthen positive cognitive education, carry out targeted psychological counseling for online educators, correctly guide positive emotions, turn some blind and optimistic impulsive emotions into rational motives, and guide them to carry out relevant activities according to their own advantages and characteristics. Set an example, clarify the incentive objectives, regularly hold successful model sharing, experience introduction, project display and other activities, set a successful example for positive emotions, clarify the specific objectives of entrepreneurial activities, form strong psychological motivation, stimulate internal potential and help realize positive behavior. Strengthen professional guidance and make the motivation of winning the bid behavioral. Give full play to the talent advantages under the Internet mode, enhance the degree of group intelligence, professionalize the knowledge in the business field, and form obvious talent and intellectual advantages. Experts and scholars can also be organized to establish professional staff psychological counseling teams, give full play to the business projects of experts and scholars in their respective fields, and carry out scientific research on entrepreneurship projects. Acknowledgements Supported by the Planning Project of Philosophy and Social Science in Zhejiang Province ”Research on Enterprise Education Model of Deep Integration and Stratification Promotion between School and Enterprise Based on Mass Innovation Platform“ (Project No.: 17NDJC285YB).

The article is about the socio-psychological aspect of folk games, which stood at the origins of the formation of the centuries-old culture of the Kazakh people, although, they are still poorly studied. The main object of the study is the intellectual game «Uyshik-uyshik», that is an integral part of the national culture and contributes to the formation of personality in the first years of the person’s life. Anattempt has been made to study the nature of national games. Collected materials, works of shcolars showed a gap in the study of this topic. The article examines the abilities of the participant of the game: imagination, creativity, imitation, rivalry, worldview, orientation in time and space, also explains the conditions and rules of the game. It is noted that one of the conditions for the formation of children’s speaking skills is listening; the formation of intellectual abilities is due to the ability to verbally express what they see, hear and think. This is facilitated by the children’s game «Uyshik-uyshik». The relations between the players are based on the principles of solidarity, understanding, respect, friendship, and this serves as a socio-psychological basis for instilling universal values in children. The role of the game as the foundation of the formation of a mature person is proved. The result of the research and evidence revealed the socio-psychological significance of the game.

The issue of morality in modern psychological discourse and life activity of a human, group, society in general is analyzed. The importance of its theoretical rethinking is stated, starting from the ideas of man of ancient thinkers, including Plato, where the ontological marker of a perfect society and a separate person considered authenticity, creation of good, usefulness, expediency, harmony of existence and essence. The essence of man is denied in the idea of simulacra (sophists) as a false copy in imitation, when his ability to live in accordance with the idea of human (good, welfare, reason) is questioned, and society is seen as a set of faceless units (singularity) without personal origin, so are neglected the questions about the ideal of man, the meaning and content of his life. It is concluded that the methodology of modern postmodernism is based on the idea of simulacra, which argues the course of a person’s life process in unconscious and undetermined existential motives, which do not pose the problem of morality. It is believed that a person has the right to always be different, even abnormal, not to obey any norms, rules and standards, not to question the essence and meaning of life, instead it is popularized a man-simulacrum as an indefinite unit, from the array of which arises a faceless broad community, not a human community with life-affirming, sincere and open relationships. It is argued that the substantiation of the fundamental principles of personality’s authentic morality primarily concerns its relationship with God, the Other, with himself, the community, the world, which is manifested in relation to various aspects of social life. At the same time, it was argued the existence of vertical and horizontal dimensions of morality social nature and spiritual content. It is proved that the basis of spiritual morality is the law of effective (unconditional, absolute, equal to all) love for the Other, the liberation of the person from selfishness, the creation of freedom and universal personal responsibility. Instead, a person with social morality constantly has difficulties in realization of his moral attitude to the Other (dependence of attitude on the level of family ties, status closeness, individual characteristics) and problems with motivation for such behavior (non-consideration for the dignity of the Other, his needs for good, freedom, to be individuality). It is noted that in Ukrainian society today prevails morality of social nature and manifestations of personal immorality are common, so cleansing requires a sphere of moral attitude to others, based on the idea of man, the phenomenology of effective love, good and evil, life and death, conscience, justice, as well as respect for the right of the Other and the community to freedom and individuality. The scale of moral and immoral attitude to the Other is characterized, in which three levels are singled out - moral, morally neutral, immoral and its eleven sublevels. The personal mechanisms and problem zones in realization of the person’s moral behavior are analyzed. The channels of its moral improvement in the covital contexts of culture, work, politics, everyday life are highlighted.

This research is motivated by the development of literature as a communication science that can express all ideas or opinions that want to be conveyed to the audience or readers from an author. The Mahasiswa Baru Film was chosen because it has an aspect that is being discussed today, namely about a social interaction. The problem of this research is how is the description of social interaction in the Mahasiswa Baru film directed by Monty Tiwa? This study aims to describe the social interaction in the film Mahasiswa Baru directed by Monty Tiwa. Data collection techniques using documentation in the form of films.The results of this study stated that in the film Mahasiswa Baru directed by Monty Tiwa, there are imitation factors, sympathy factors, identification factors, and suggestion factors that affect a social interaction. The imitation factor is the urge to imitate others experienced by Lastri. The suggestion factor is a psychological influence that is influenced by others and oneself. The identification factor is a factor that when interacting follows a style consciously. The last factor is the sympathy factor, this factor is a factor that feels as a reason for social interaction.

Золотой век немецкого кино для кинорежиссера Вернера Херцога в 1970-х – 1980-х годах являлся «энциклопедией» жанров. Воплощая стилистику фильмов ушедшей эпохи, Херцог, тем не менее, шел по пути возрождения, а не копирования, психологизируя типизированный нарратив и наполняя его новыми смыслами. Главным инструментом «психологизации» у Херцога становится классическая музыка. Так, благодаря музыке, в фильмах «Строшек» и «Войцек» черты, характерные для жанра каммершпиле, утрачивают резкость, и вместо камерных буржуазных драм перед зрителем возникают экзистенциальные трагедии. In 1970s – 1980s, the Golden age of German cinema was for the film director Werner Herzog an encyclopaedia of genres. Implementing the stylistics of the movies of the past era, Herzog, nonetheless, pursued the path of revival, and not of imitating, adding psychological aspect to typified narrative and filling it with new meanings. The main means for adding psychological aspect for Herzog was classical music. Thus, due to music, the features of Kammerspiele in the films “Stroszek” and “Woyzeck” become less distinct and instead of chamber bourgeois dramas there are existential tragedies.

This study aims to examine the ornament parts of the traditional ceilings, one of the essential elements of the space with physical and psychological aspects, in terms of design methods and approaches. In this study, the ceilings of the houses have been discussed in the Safranbolu region, which was chosen as the study area. Star-formed ceiling rose ornament, which is one of the indispensable components of these elements and is widely used in these houses, has been evaluated by shape grammar implementations that are commonly both generative and analytic tools for assessing design languages. By determining generation rules, a design process has been defined. With these rules, by using samples of present ceiling ornaments, variations have been generated in the frame of different scenarios. The richness and innovative sustainability of Star-formed ceiling rose ornament are demonstrated by the proposal of an analytic and generative approach based on inferences from traditional implementations. This study makes contributions to the literature by offering an alternative process to imitations and iterations of traditional architectural components and by enriching the design language of the craft implementations

The article deals with psychogenetic and neuropsychological principles of envy. Its originality lies in the fact that envy is seen as an unpleasant emotion and feeling, and a negative attitude, projected onto another person who, compared to the object of envy, has certain advantages, opportunities, or is in a more favourable position (social, psychological, physical, financial). Besides, the article analyzes theoretical-empirical and experimental studies on envy, its neuropsychological aspects and influence on the functioning of the brain. It shows prerequisites (genetic and social) for envy as an emotional experience and analyzes the role of social comparison in generating and consolidating envy. The article discusses describes the neuropsychological localization of envy in brain structures and the role of mirror neurons in the formation of envious impulses. It also theoretically proves that envy as a mental reaction is a situational and short-term feeling of dissatisfaction aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities or luck, which is manifested in a strong desire to have them for oneself right away. Social comparison (not in one’s favour) causes a profound drop in self-esteem, which the brain perceives as physical pain. This triggers specific mechanisms of imaginary psychological compensation when someone else’s defeat is perceived as one’s victory. Short-term envious reactions are based on the natural action mechanism of mirror neurons in the brain that come from “imitative desire”, important for survival. Neuropsychologists have traced the overactivation of mirror neurons responsible for assessment and motivation in those people whose experience of envy is frequent and long-term. The article suggests possible ways of envy psychocorrection based on the neuropsychological mechanisms of its formation.

It is fundamentally essential for children to learn English from a young age in this rapidly globalizing world. English knowledge will help to open many opportunities for them in the future and it will be invaluable in their future careers. However, teaching English to children is not an easy job. But it is also not difficult, if we already know how to do it. Many teaching positions involve teaching children - a unique experience that is both challenging and fun. Compared to adults, children are more energetic, have shorter attention spans, and learn language according to specific stages of development; these present planning challenges for the teacher. The key to teaching English to children is to understand the principles of language acquisition and apply it in ways that keep children motivated to learn. Children's world is playing and imitating. The present paper deals with the following subjects: what are the principles of teaching English to children, what are the characteristics of a language teacher, why do we teach children a foreign language, teachers social and psychological preparation , the emotional and physical aspects of young learners , the teachers main roles in class , a review of TPR , and finally some practical tips and teaching techniques for beginner teachers of English language.

The review is devoted to the relationship between executive functions and metacognition in the context of a cultural-historical perspective. On the basis of the research carried out over the past 15 years, the commonality and differences of these constructs are shown. Special attention is paid to the development of executive functions and metacognition, their connection with the academic success of children, the role of the social aspect in their formation. The importance of an adult in the directed formation of metacognition and self-regulation is shown, which confirms the provisions of the cultural-historical theory. Within the framework of the cultural-historical paradigm, several mechanisms for the development of executive functions are considered: imitation based on understanding; sign mediation; as well as communication in a social developmental situation. L.S. Vygotsky noted that higher mental functions arise on the basis of real interactions of people, are interiorized, turning into psychological functions. The review showed that one of the most common models of the structure of executive functions is a model that includes such components as “working memory”, “inhibitory control” and “cognitive flexibility”. Based on the analysis, it is possible to assert the influence of J. Piaget’s concept on the development of executive functions. A certain difficulty is caused by the explanation of emotional regulation in the context of metacognitive problems. At the same time, L.S. Vygotsky spoke about the unity of affect and intellect, which suggests the existence behavioral control and, in particular, of emotional processes at the level of metacognitive processes.

Advertising is an example of persuasive communication, at the beginning of the XXI century it becomes the object of linguistic research in the field of speech suggestion. In the article the author analyzes the proper names as a group of the linguistic signs that ensure the functioning of the program of undocumented influence in the consciousness of the subject and aim to persuade him to buy the advertised object. The material of the study is commercial advertising texts from the magazine «Tatler». The choice of this source of the actual material is due to its prototypicity. This international highly artistic glossy magazine, focused on creating a model of the world of luxury and comfort, is an effective advertising medium. The author comes to the conclusion that in the aspect of suggestive linguistics problems the proper names of three groups are especially important for the advertising text: pragmatonyms, anthroponyms and toponyms. The orientation of the magazine «Tatler» for a specific target audience (people with a high level of the material wealth) affects the selection of the pragmatonyms, anthroponyms and toponyms. For example, pragmatonyms-globalisms, symbolic pragmatonyms, calling cosmetic, jewelry, watch brands, etc., allusive names of the persons with a common background of world fame, the names of the countries and cities that are leaders of the fashion and the beauty industry. These groups of names implement suggestive strategies of idealization of the advertised object and imitation of its exclusivity, high quality, participate in the creation of a psychological effect of the trust, form a positive motivation for the purchase.

The paper is dedicated to studying the oneiric text of S. Krzhizhanovsky’s novel “Sideline.” The topicality of the research is due to modern literary criticism interest in examining various aspects of artistic hypnology of Russian writers, as well as studying the works of “returned” authors, including S. Krzhizhanovsky. The realization specifics of the structural model of the literary dream in question can be presented as the following scheme: unconscious falling asleep – dream-journey – awakening by falling down. Different variants of artistic implementation of the main metaphors connected with dreaming are analyzed: “dream-life” in the image of briefcase-cushion and the image of “million-brained” dream of equality and brotherhood; “dream-death” in the image of the leader of a dream world, with the prevalence of thanatological vocabulary in the description of the city of dreams. The ways of imitating the space of real dreaming in the oneiric text of the novel are studied: awakening by falling, sudden muteness of characters, sudden change of location, etc. Also, the specifics of using the plot device of an unannounced dream is considered contributing to the illusion of “reality” of everything that happens to the character in the city of dreams. An attempt is made to consider the oneirotop of the novel in terms of classification by genre and function, plot and composition, images and esthetics and characters, as well as artistic functions of dreams in the literature (plot function, psychological function, idea, and symbolic function). The oneiric text of Krzhizhanosky’s novel “Sideline” is viewed as an artistic realization of the author’s original idea of the subconscious, dreamy origin of a communist utopia.

From the perspective of modern cognitive science the conceptual metaphor reflects the mental aspect of cognition and creation of a new conception of the world. Therefore, numerous researchers in the area of conceptual metaphor explored it as the understanding of one conceptual domain in terms of another, paying little attention to the role of fiction diegesis. Thus, the objective of the article is to gain a better understanding of conceptual metaphor perception in the diegesis of Steven Hall's fiction. In “The Raw Shark Texts” the conceptual worldview helps the protagonist to recreate the chronicle of his self-identification after the posttraumatic loss of memory. Human knowledge, experience and communication as well as his individual mind, ideas and thoughts are perceived by the protagonist’s split personality as an aquatic space inhabited by conceptual fish. His fear of the conceptual shark, feeding on his memory, generates distinctive psychedelic hydro-text in the form of specific narrative structures. The state of fear also extends to increased human dependence on technology, digital databases (on-line memory storage and loss). The discreteness of narrative diegesis emphasizes the protagonist’s frustrations and is used by the author as a literary imitation of dissociative amnesia. Besides peculiar metaphorical expressions, in the author’s visual metaphors, owing to the simultaneous implementation of the first and second planes of the metaphor content, a third plane (a new reality) arises. Comprehension of conceptual metaphors as intimately interconnected in the narrative diegesis reveals the way of creating layered, intertwined conceptual reality exemplified by the First / the Second Eric Sanderson’s narrative structures. Consequently, metaphorical expressions and visual metaphors in Steven Hall's novel are merely a manifestation of the conceptual metaphors underlying them. Reproducing the features of perception mechanisms in their interaction with psychological, the author was able to catch the common between tangible things and abstract concepts, matter and idea, to compare the incomparable. This approach allows us to consider the conceptual metaphor as a structural component of meta-fiction and to emphasize the cognition specificity of metaphor in creation of new realities in it.

The study of the speech-genre and formal-semantic properties of Russian anecdotes on bribery is based the corpus of anecdotes, which also include jokes of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, differing from Russian ones only in the names of the “protagonists” appearing in them. It is established that the main means of creating a pun in a joke are the lexical and grammatical polysemy and homonymy, playing off the phonetic similarities and spontaneous humor. The comic effect in jokes on bribery can also be created by playing off idioms – their literalization or replacement of components. According to the corpus of anecdotes, the authorities act as an almost “exclusive” subject of bribery – officials of all ranks, police authorities and lawmakers. In the corpus of jokes on corruption, the axiological and praxeological aspects of bribery are traced clearly: the general attitude of society towards a bribe and its assessment. The research claims the ubiquity of bribery in power structures, and with regard to the miraculous disappearance of corruption, one can feel extreme pessimism as it is ineradicable and inescapable. Humor as the ability to notice the ridiculous side of someone or something and present it in a maliciously mocking form in the corpus of jokes on bribery is practically absent due to the domination of sarcasm and irony. In jokes, all the denunciatory pathos is directed at bribe-takers, towards whom there is hatred, impotent rage and hyperbolic cruelty. The “fight against corruption” is purely imitative, but it has several non-fictitious functions: a tool for reprisal against competitors and those who do not fit into corruption schemes. Among socio-cultural functions of the jokes on corruption, in addition to the entertainment function, the article identifies the cathartic-therapeutic function, aimed at relieving a psychological stress caused by the prevalence of bribery, and the aggression function, specified in the outrage by corruption.

The study presents the identification and study of the characteristics of the formation and dynamics of various forms of deviant behavior in the clinic of neurosis-like states of residual-organic genesis, that is guided by the principles not previously used in the study of the studied pathology. Behavioral disorders were studied in a comparative aspect in two clinical variants, which are asthenohyperdynamic and astheno-adynamic manifestations of the cerebrastenic syndrome, which is a part of the structure of a neurosis-like state. The age dynamics of behavioral disorders was studied at different stages of ontogenesis, including childhood, prepubertal and puberty, by comparing the obtained data labeled by the subheadings "Period of the first age crisis", "Period of the second age crisis" and "Puberty period". The study found that age response forms reflect the low personal resources of adolescents and the massiveness of negative social influences. As the analysis of clinical material has shown, during puberty, violations in the sphere of cravings became more distinct. Disorders in the sphere of inclinations at this age are closely correlated with the features of the somato-endocrine metamorphosis and with the unfavorable influence of socio-psychological factors. Lack of sexual desire was in direct proportion with a pronounced delay in puberty. Violations in the sphere of sexual desire, reflecting the nondifferentiation of the sexual attitudes of adolescents with delayed puberty, were characteristic of those studied with pronounced volitional immaturity, in particular with such signs as suggestibility, a tendency to imitation. During puberty, the clinical picture of the studied adolescents revealed more clearly the qualitatively new pathological properties of the personality due to the development of excitable, unstable, less often labile and hysterical manifestations. In contrast to psychopathic behavior in sick children and adolescents, no correlation was found between the first signs of deviant behavior and cerebrastenic disorders. In all cases, behavioral disturbances are caused by unfavorable micro-social factors. Based on the follow-up data, the study has found that the studied group of sick children and adolescents is characterized by both favorable dynamics (22) and a negative outcome (20 patients). This suggests that the pubertal period is characterized by a polymorphism of behavioral disorders and is one of the decisive factors in the prognosis of the further development of the child.

Education has long been the target of utopian interventions, and with technological interventions, offering to change drastically or even eliminates classroom-based learning, traditional education research needs to focus on introducing technology tools at an early age through media literacy. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of media literacy and cognitive abilities on the introduction of laptop-based media. This study used a quasi-experimental design involving 46 children. Data collection techniques through tests and data collection tools using statement sheets, which were processed using t-test. The results showed that the experimental class using the original laptop media had a high average value of 86.66 compared to the control class using the imitation laptop media which had a value of 81.66. There is a significant effect of media literacy and cognitive ability on the introduction of laptop-based media in children. On the introduction of laptop-based media in children, media literacy and cognitive capacities can have a big impact. The comparison of the average value of the control and experimental classes demonstrates this. When children are introduced to media via a genuine laptop, they become more excited and engaged in the experimental lesson. Keywords: media literacy, cognitive ability, laptop-based learning media References: Adams, D., & Hamm, M. (2001). Literacy in a multimedia age. MA: Christopher- Gordon Publishers. Ames, M. G. (2016). Learning consumption: Media, literacy, and the legacy of One Laptop per Child. The Information Society, 32(2), 85–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2016.1130497 Arsyad. (2013). Media Pembelajaran [Learning Media]. Raja Grafindo Persada. Bedford, D. (2021). Evaluating confidence in information literacy: A red/amber/green approach. 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Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 16(1), 3–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100615569721 Hobbs, R. (2011). The state of media literacy: A response to potter. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 55(3), 419–430. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2011.597594 Hwang, G.-J., Lai, C.-L., & Wang, S.-Y. (2015). Seamless flipped learning: A mobile technology-enhanced flipped classroom with effective learning strategies. Journal of Computers in Education, 2(4), 449–473. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40692-015-0043-0 Juditha, C. (2013). Literasi Media pada Anak di Daerah Perbatasan Indonesia dan Timor Leste [Media Literacy for Children in the Border Areas of Indonesia and Timor Leste]. JURNAL IPTEKKOM: Jurnal Ilmu Pengetahuan & Teknologi Informasi, 15(1), 47. https://doi.org/10.33164/iptekkom.15.1.2013.47-62 Kaushal S and Singh CK. (2021). Home Stimulation and Cognitive Abilities of Disadvantaged Children. Journal of Scientific Research, 65(1). https://doi.org/DOI: 10.37398/JSR.2021.650413 Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2007). Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education. Peter Lang Publishing. www.centerxgseis.ucla.edu Leena Rantala. (2011). Finnish Media Literacy Education Policies and Best Practices in Early Childhood Education and Care Since 2004. The National Association for Media Literacy Education’s Journal of Media Literacy Education, 3, 123–133. Liu, W., Tan, L., Huang, D., Chen, N., & Liu, F. (2021). When Preschoolers Use Tablets: The Effect of Educational Serious Games on Children’s Attention Development. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 37(3), 234–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2020.1818999 Livingstone, S., Marsh, J., Plowman, L., & Fletcher-Watson, B. (2015). Young Children (0-8) and Digital Technology(p. 55). Joint Research Centre. http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC93239 Macias, C., & Choi, K. (2021). Preschoolers’ beliefs about media technologies: The role of family income. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 3(4), 572–584. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.278 Papadakis, S., Kalogianakis, M., Sifaki, E., & Monnier, A. (2021). Editorial: The Impact of Smart Screen Technologies and Accompanied Apps on Young Children Learning and Developmental Outcomes. Frontiers in Education, 6, 790534. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.790534 Papadakis, S., & Kalogiannakis, M. (2017). Mobile educational applications for children: What educators and parents need to know. Int. J. Mobile Learning and Organisation, 11(3), 22. Papadakis, S., Kalogiannakis, M., & Zaranis, N. (2016a). Developing fundamental programming concepts and computational thinking with ScratchJr in preschool education: A case study. International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation, 10(3), 187. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJMLO.2016.077867 Papadakis, S., Kalogiannakis, M., & Zaranis, N. (2016b). Comparing Tablets and PCs in teaching Mathematics: An attempt to improve Mathematics Competence in Early Childhood Education. Preschool and Primary Education, 4(2), 241. https://doi.org/10.12681/ppej.8779 Potter, W. J. (2010). The state of media literacy. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 54(4), 675–696. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2011.521462 Ren, X., Tong, Y., Peng, P., & Wang, T. (2020). Critical thinking predicts academic performance beyond general cognitive ability: Evidence from adults and children. Intelligence, 82, 101487. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101487 Rusydiyah, E. F., Ummah, F. S., & Mudlofir, A. (2020). The Implementation of Laptop Mobile in the Teaching-Learning Process in Islamic Boarding School. TARBIYA: Journal of Education in Muslim Society, 7(1), 67–77. https://doi.org/10.15408/tjems.v7i1.13650 Salomon, G. (1990). Cognitive Effects with and Of Computer Technology. Communication Research, 17(1), 26–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/009365090017001002 Schaeffer, J. (2021). The influence of cognitive abilities on article choice and scrambling performance in Dutch-speaking children with autism. Language Acquisition, 28(2), 166–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2020.1724293 Seftiani, I. (2019). Alat Evaluasi Pembelajaran Interaktif Kahoot pada Mata Pelajaran Bahasa Indonesia di Era Revolusi Industri [Kahoot Interactive Learning Evaluation Tool for Indonesian Language Subjects in the Industrial Revolution Era] 4. 0. Prosiding Seminar Nasional Bulan Bahasa (Semiba) 2019, 284–291. Syarah, E. S., Mayuni, I., & Dhieni, N. (2020). Understanding Teacher’s Perspectives in Media Literacy Education as an Empowerment Instrument of Blended Learning in Early Childhood Classroom. JPUD - Jurnal Pendidikan Usia Dini, 14(2), 201–214. https://doi.org/10.21009/JPUD.142.01 Trimmel, M., & Bachmann, J. (2004). 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The paper presents research findings with 56 Roma children from Macedonia and Serbia between the ages of 3-6 years. The children’s knowledge of Romani as their mother tongue was assessed with a specially designed test. The test measures the children’s comprehension and production of different types of grammatical knowledge such as wh–questions, wh-complements, passive verbs, possessives, tense, aspect, the ability of the children to learn new nouns and new adjectives, and repetition of sentences. In addition, two pictured narratives about Theory of Mind were given to the children. The hypothesis of the authors was that knowledge of the complex grammatical categories by children will help them to understand better the Theory of Mind stories. The results show that Roma children by the age of 5 know most of the grammatical categories in their mother tongue and most of them understand Theory of Mind. References Bakalar, P. (2004). The IQ of Gypsies in Central Europe. 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The subject of this article is the process of influence of social engineers on people by manipulating consciousness, emotions, feelings without and with the use of modern information technology processing and simulation of biological characteristics of mankind in peacetime and wartime. The purpose and objectives are: consideration of existing methods of social engineering such as phishing, trojan, pretexting, watering hole, betting, quid pro quo, persecution, reverse social engineering through the prism of human feelings: naivety, inattention, greed, gullibility, curiosity, belonging fear; Consideration of modern technologies: handwriting forgery - My Text in your Handwriting algorithm, voice substitution - Descript's Ovrlab service, artificial dialogue - Replika application and face replacement - Deep Fake technology, which can help fraudsters to achieve their own goals of obtaining confidential data and carrying out further attacks based on them, as well as manipulating the consciousness of the real perception of events in wartime. The methods used are: psychological and sociological research methods, such as observation, social engineering methods, forecasting methods based on analysis and conclusions about future trends. The following results were obtained. Associations of methods of social engineering with feelings to which this or that psychological influence of the social engineer is directed are created. The potential of using emerging technologies with social engineering techniques to carry out more effective and sophisticated attacks, taking into account the favorite effects of criminals: haste, surprise, confusion, feelings of pity, anxiety, excitement and so on. The possibility of threats related to the procedures of authentication and authorization of users of biometric data on the basis of the considered modern technologies of imitation of biometric data of mankind: handwriting, voice, face. The scientific novelty of the research results is as follows: the importance and necessity of careful treatment of confidential information that people disseminate about themselves in all aspects of their social life; identified the main feelings on which social engineers play to achieve their own goals and benefit; the potential of development of modern technologies of imitation of biometric data of people in efficiency of carrying out attacks by methods of social engineering is specified, efficiency of use of means and methods of social engineering during information wars for influence on unstable psychological state is proved.

The research of Ian McEwan’s novel “Solar” (2010) will help to delineate the transformational dynamics of the postmodern to post-postmodern novel and to characterize the configurations of such changes in the contemporary British novel.The purpose of the study is to outline the thematic units and problem areas that reveal the genre specifics of the contemporary British novel, determining the narrative feature of the novel “Solar” by I. McEwan.Results of research. It has been determined in what way the ironic mode is represented in the novel “Solar”. The philosophical parameters of the narrator, the worldview characteristics of the protagonist, the way of interaction of irony and seriousness (philosophical, confessional) in the novel, which British literary critics describe as an example of a comic work, have been discussed. At the same time, the spectrum of socio-psychological problems that reveal the critical attitude of the narrator to a number of problems of the contemporary academic science has been analyzed. The innovative aspects explained in the novel, in particular at the thematic level (new complexes of existential problems related to the devastation of the protagonist, his alienation and loss of values in life), as well as the general guidelines of the narrator (author) on innovation, which is realized even in the linguistic aspect due to the excess of occasionalisms (author's neologisms) have been outlined. The way in which external conditions determine Michael’s alienation is studied, and it has been determined how the motif of the path (way) explicated in the novel helps the character to be “born again” in the “new life”. It is analyzed what internal transformations take place inside the character in order to break the vicious circle of academic and existential problems and reach the level of perception of life in the categories of purpose and happiness. The scope of problems related to the critique of the contemporary science (imitation, plagiarism, bureaucracy, routine and numerous bureaucratic obstacles to innovative researches, lack of interest, banal fatigue experienced by the protagonist, and unwillingness to help younger colleagues in the implementation of their heuristic projects, etc.) have been spotlighted in the research .

This review illustrates the relevance of shamanism and its evolution under effects of psilocybin as a framework for identifying evolved aspects of psychedelic set and setting. Effects of 5HT2 psychedelics on serotonin, stress adaptation, visual systems and personality illustrate adaptive mechanisms through which psychedelics could have enhanced hominin evolution as an environmental factor influencing selection for features of our evolved psychology. Evolutionary psychology perspectives on ritual, shamanism and psychedelics provides bases for inferences regarding psychedelics’ likely roles in hominin evolution as exogenous neurotransmitter sources through their effects in selection for innate dispositions for psychedelic set and setting. Psychedelics stimulate ancient brain structures and innate modular thought modules, especially self-awareness, other awareness, “mind reading,” spatial and visual intelligences. The integration of these innate modules are also core features of shamanism. Cross-cultural research illustrates shamanism is an empirical phenomenon of foraging societies, with its ancient basis in collective hominid displays, ritual alterations of consciousness, and endogenous healing responses. Shamanic practices employed psychedelics and manipulated extrapharmacological effects through stimulation of serotonin and dopamine systems and augmenting processes of the reptilian and paleomammalian brains. Differences between chimpanzee maximal displays and shamanic rituals reveal a zone of proximal development in hominin evolution. The evolution of the mimetic capacity for enactment, dance, music, and imitation provided central capacities underlying shamanic performances. Other chimp-human differences in ritualized behaviors are directly related to psychedelic effects and their integration of innate modular thought processes. Psychedelics and other ritual alterations of consciousness stimulate these and other innate responses such as soul flight and death-and-rebirth experiences. These findings provided bases for making inferences regarding foundations of our evolved set, setting and psychology. Shamanic setting is eminently communal with singing, drumming, dancing and dramatic displays. Innate modular thought structures are prominent features of the set of shamanism, exemplified in animism, animal identities, perceptions of spirits, and psychological incorporation of spirit others. A shamanic-informed psychedelic therapy includes: a preparatory set with practices such as sexual abstinence, fasting and dream incubation; a set derived from innate modular cognitive capacities and their integration expressed in a relational animistic worldview; a focus on internal imagery manifesting a presentational intelligence; and spirit relations involving incorporation of animals as personal powers. Psychedelic research and treatment can adopt this shamanic biogenetic paradigm to optimize set, setting and ritual frameworks to enhance psychedelic effects.

Rehabilitation after free gracilis muscle transfer (smile surgery, SS) is crucial for a functional recovery of the smiling skill, mitigating social and psychological problems resulting from facial paralysis. We compared two post-SS rehabilitation treatments: the traditional based on teeth clenching exercises and the FIT-SAT (facial imitation and synergistic activity treatment). FIT-SAT, based on observation/imitation therapy and on hand-mouth motor synergies would facilitate neuronal activity in the facial motor cortex avoiding unwanted contractions of the jaw, implementing muscle control. We measured the smile symmetry on 30 patients, half of whom after SS underwent traditional treatment (control group, CG meanage = 20 ± 9) while the other half FIT-SAT (experimental group, EG meanage= 21 ± 14). We compared pictures of participants while holding two postures: maximum and gentle smile. The former corresponds to the maximal muscle contraction, whereas the latter is strongly linked to the control of muscle strength during voluntary movements. No differences were observed between the two groups in the maximum smile, whereas in the gentle smile the EG obtained a better symmetry than the CG. These results support the efficacy of FIT-SAT in modulating the smile allowing patients to adapt their smile to the various social contexts, aspect which is crucial during reciprocal interactions.

L’articolo intende offrire un quadro sistematico dell’insegnamento di Giovanni Paolo II sulla donna, prendendo in esame numerosi scritti (Lettere, Messaggi, Udienze), primo fra tutti la Lettera Apostolica “Mulieris Dignitatem”. L’autrice, ripercorrendo il pensiero del Pontefice, affronta il tema della dignità della donna secondo diversi piani o livelli: teologico, filosofico, sociale e culturale. La lettura teologica mette in luce la verità sulla donna, così come scaturisce dalla Sapienza Creatrice di Dio e così come perfettamente si rivela nella Storia della Salvezza con Maria, Sposa e Madre di Dio. La lettura filosofica sottolinea la specificità ontologica della donna: “femminilità e mascolinità sono tra loro complementari non solo dal punto di vista fisico e psichico, ma ontologico” (Lettera alle donne, 7). Il genio della donna, così frequentemente chiamato in causa da Giovanni Paolo II, rivela questa specificità e si esprime nella capacità di leggere gli eventi e guardare l’essere umano con gli occhi del cuore. Le letture teologica e filosofica dell’antropologia femminile sostanziano una specifica missione sociale e culturale della donna, che è la promozione di un’autentica civiltà, basata sulla radicale affermazione del valore della vita e del valore dell’amore. L’articolo si conclude con l’appello di Giovanni Paolo II rivolto alla responsabilità delle stesse donne: “tocca a loro di farsi promotrici di un nuovo femminismo che, senza cadere nella tentazione di rincorrere modelli maschilisti, sappia riconoscere ed esprimere il vero genio femminile in tutte le manifestazioni della convivenza civile, operando per il superamento di ogni forma di discriminazione, di violenza e di sfruttamento” (Evangelium vitae, n. 99). ---------- This artiche intends to offer a systematic outline of John Paul II’s teaching about women, taking into accont several writings (Letters, Messages, Audiences), first of all the Apostolic Letter “Mulieris Dignitatem”. The author reconsiders the Pope’s thought and analyses the subject of women’s dignity according different plans or levels: theological, philosophical, social and cultural. The theological approach enlightens the truth about women as it originates from God’s creative Wisdom and is perfectly revealed in the History of Salvation with Mary, Bride and Mother of God. The philosophical approach underlines women’s ontological specificity: “Womanhood and manhood are complementary not only from the physical and psychological points of view, but also from the ontological (Letters to Women, 7). The genius of women, so frequently recalled by John Paul II, reveals this specificity and is expressed in the capacity to interprete events and look at human being with the eyes of the heart. The theological and anthropological approaches of feminine anthropology substantiate women’s specific social and cultural mission, that is the promotion of an authentic civilization, based on the the radical assertion of the value of life and love. The article ends with John Paul II’s calling addressed to the responsibility of women themselves: “It depends on them to promote a “new feminism” which rejects the temptation of imitating models of ‘male domination’, in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society, and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation” (Evangelium vitae, n. 99).

The depiction of alcohol is the focus of a growing number of content analyses in the field of social media research. Typically, the occurrence and nature of alcohol representations are coded to measure the prevalence, normalization, or even glorification of alcohol and its consumption on different social media platforms (Moreno et al., 2016; Westgate & Holliday, 2016) and smartphone apps (Ghassemlou et al., 2020). But social media platforms and smartphone apps also play a role in the prevention of alcohol abuse when they disseminate messages about alcohol risks and foster harm reduction, abstinence, and sobriety (Davey, 2021; Döring & Holz, 2021; Tamersoy et al., 2015; Westgate & Holliday, 2016). Field of application/theoretical foundation: Social Cognitive Theory (SCT; Bandura 1986, 2009) as the dominant media effects theory in communication science, is applicable and widely applied to social media representations of alcohol: According to SCT, positive media portayals of alcohol and attractive role models consuming alcohol can influence the audience’s relation to alcohol. That’s why positive alcohol portayals in the media are considered a public health threat as they can foster increased and risky alcohol consumption among media users in general and young people in particular. The negative health impact predicted by SCT depends on different aspects of alcohol portrayals on social media that have been traditionally coded in manual content analyses (Beullens & Schepers, 2013; Mayrhofer & Naderer, 2019; Moreno et al., 2010) and most recently by studies relying on computational methods for content analysis (e.g. Ricard & Hassanpour, 2021). Core aspects of alcohol representations on social media are: a) the type of communicator / creator of alcohol-related social media content, b) the overall valence of the alcohol portrayal, c) the people consuming alcohol, d) the alcohol consumption behaviors, e) the social contexts of alcohol consumption, f) the types and brands of consumed alcohol, g) the consequences of alcohol consumption, and h) alcohol-related consumer protection messages in alcohol marketing (Moreno et al., 2016; Westgate & Holliday, 2016). For example, a normalizing portrayal shows alcohol consumption as a regular and normal behavior of diverse people in different contexts, while a glorifying portrayal shows alcohol consumption as a behavior that is strongly related to positive effects such as having fun, enjoying social community, feeling sexy, happy, and carefree (Griffiths & Casswell, 2011). While criticism of glorifying alcohol portrayals in entertainment media (e.g., music videos; Cranwell et al., 2015), television (e.g., Barker et al., 2021), and advertising (e.g., Curtis et al., 2018; Stautz et al., 2016) has a long tradition, the concern about alcohol representations on social media is relatively new and entails the phenomenon of alcohol brands and social media influencers marketing alcohol (Critchlow & Moodie, 2022; Turnwald et al., 2022) as well as ordinary social media users providing alcohol-related self-presentations (e.g., showing themselves partying and drinking; Boyle et al., 2016). Such alcohol-related self-presentations might elicit even stronger identification and imitation effects among social media audiences compared to regular advertising (Griffiths & Casswell, 2011). Because of its psychological and health impact, alcohol-related social media content – and alcohol marketing in particular – is also an issue of legal regulation. The World Health Organization states that “Europe is the heaviest-drinking region in the world” and strongly advocates for bans or at least stricter regulations of alcohol marketing both offline and online (WHO, 2020, p. 1). At the same time, the WHO points to the problem of clearly differentiating between alcohol marketing and other types of alcohol representations on social media. Apart from normalizing and glorifying alcohol portayals, there are also anti-alcohol posts and comments on social media. They usually point to the health risks of alcohol consumption and the dangers of alcohol addiction and, hence, try to foster harm reduction, abstincence and sobriety. While such negative alcohol portayals populate different social media platforms, an in-depth investigation of the spread, scope and content of anti-alcohol messages on social media is largely missing (Davey, 2021; Döring & Holz, 2021; Tamersoy et al., 2015). References/combination with other methods of data collection: Manual and computational content analyses of alcohol representations on social media platforms can be complemented by qualitative interview and quantitative survey data addressing alcohol-related beliefs and behaviors collected from social media users who a) create and publish alcohol-related social media content and/or b) are exposed to or actively search for and follow alcohol-related social media content (e.g., Ricard & Hassanpour, 2021; Strowger & Braitman, 2022). Furthermore, experimental studies are helpful to directly measure how different alcohol-related social media posts and comments are perceived and evaluated by recipients and if and how they can affect their alcohol-related thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (Noel, 2021). Such social media experiments can build on respective mass media experiments (e.g., Mayrhofer & Naderer, 2019). Insights from content analyses help to select or create appropriate stimuli for such experiments. Last but not least, to evaluate the effectiveness of alcohol marketing regulations, social media content analyses conducted within a longitudinal or trend study design (including measurements before and after new regulations came into effect) should be preferred over cross-sectional studies (e.g., Chapoton et al., 2020). Example Studies for Manual Content Analyses: Coding Material Measure Operationalization (excerpt) Reliability Source a) Creators of alcohol-related social media content Extensive explorations on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok Creators of alcohol-related social media content on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok Polytomous variable “Type of content creator” (1: alcohol industry; 2: media organization/media professional; 3: health organization/health professional; 4: social media influencer; 5: ordinary social media user; 6: other) Not available Döring & Tröger (2018) Döring & Holz (2021) b) Valence of alcohol-related social media content N = 3 015 Facebook comments N = 100 TikTok videos Valence of alcohol-related social media content (posts or comments) Binary variable “Valence of alcohol-related social media content” (1: positive/pro-alcohol sentiment; 2: negative/anti-alcohol sentiment) Cohen’s Kappa average of .72 for all alcohol-related variables in codebook* Döring & Holz (2021) *Russell et al. (2021) c) People consuming alcohol N = 160 Facebook profiles (profile pictures, personal photos, and text) Portrayal of people consuming alcohol on Facebook profiles Binary variable “Number of persons on picture” (1: alone; 2: with others) Cohen’s Kappa > .90 Beullens & Schepers (2013) d) Alcohol consumption behaviors N = 160 Facebook profiles (profile pictures, personal photos, and text) Type of depicted alcohol use/consumption Polytomous variable “Type of depicted alcohol use/consumption” (1: explicit use such as depiction of person drinking alcohol; 2: implicit use such as depiction of alcohol bottle on table; 3: alcohol logo only) Cohen’s Kappa = .89 Beullens & Schepers (2013) N = 100 TikTok videos Multiple alcoholic drinks consumed per person Binary variable “Multiple alcoholic drinks consumed per person” as opposed to having only one drink or no drink per person (1: present; 2: not present) Cohen’s Kappa average of .72 for all alcohol-related variables in codebook Russell et al. (2021) N = 100 TikTok videos Alcohol intoxication Binary variable “Alcohol intoxication” (1: present; 2: not present) Cohen’s Kappa average of .72 for all alcohol-related variables in codebook Russell et al. (2021) N = 4 800 alcohol-related Tweets Alcohol mentioned in combination with other substance use Binary variable “Alcohol mentioned in combination with tobacco, marijuana, or other drugs” (1: yes; 2: no) Cohen’s Kappa median of .73 for all pro-drinking variables in codebook Cavazos-Rehg et al. (2015) e) Social contexts of alcohol consumption N = 192 Facebook and Instagram profiles (profile pictures, personal photos, and text) Portrayal of social evaluative contexts of alcohol consumption on Facebook and Instagram profiles Polytomous variable “Social evaluative context” (1: negative context such as someone looking disapprovingly at a drunk person; 2: neutral context such as no explicit judgment or emotion is shown; 3: positive context such as people laughing and toasting with alcoholic drinks) Cohen’s Kappa ranging from .68 to .91 for all variables in codebook Hendriks et al. (2018), based on previous work by Beullens & Schepers (2013) N = 51 episodes with a total of N = 1 895 scenes of the American adolescent drama series “The OC” Portrayal of situational contexts of alcohol consumption in scenes of a TV series Polytomous variable “Setting of alcohol consumption” (1: at home; 2: at adult / youth party; 3: in a bar; 4: at work; 5: at other public place) Polytomous variable “Reason of alcohol consumption” (1: celebrating/partying; 2: habit; 3: stress relief; 4: social facilitation) Cohen’s Kappa for setting of alcohol consumption .90 Cohen’s Kappa for reason of alcohol consumption .71 Van den Bulck et al. (2008) f) Types and brands of consumed alcohol N = 17 800 posts of Instagram influencers and related comments Portrayal of different alcohol types and alcohol brands in Instagram posts Polytomous variable “Alcohol type” (1: wine; 2: beer; 3: cocktails; 4: spirits; 5: non-alcoholic drinks/0% alcohol) Binary variable “Alcohol brand visibility” (1: present if full brand name, recognizable logo, or brand name in header or tag are visible; 2: non-present) String variable “Alcohol brand name” (open text coding) Krippendorff’s Alpha ranging from .69 to 1.00 for all variables in codebook Hendriks et al. (2019) g) Consequences of alcohol consumption N = 400 randomly selected public MySpace profiles Portayal of consequences of alcohol consumption on MySpace profiles Five individually coded binary variables for different consequences associated with alcohol use (1: present; 2: not present): a) “Positive emotional consequence highlighting positive mood, feeling or emotion associated with alcohol use” b) “Negative emotional consequence highlighting negative mood, feeling or emotion associated with alcohol use” c) “Positive social consequences highlighting perceived social gain associated with alcohol use” d) “Negative social consequences highlighting perceived poor social outcomes associated with alcohol use” e) “Negative physical consequences describing adverse physical consequences or outcomes associated with alcohol use” Cohen’s Kappa ranging from 0.76 to 0.82 for alcohol references and alcohol use Moreno et al. (2010) h) Alcohol-related consumer protection messages in alcohol marketing N = 554 Tweets collected from 13 Twitter accounts of alcohol companies in Ireland Alcohol-related consumer protection messages in alcohol marketing (covers both mandatory and voluntary messages depending on national legislation) Four individually coded binary variables for different alcohol-related consumer protection messages in alcohol marketing (1: present; 2: not present): a) “Warning about the risks/danger of alcohol consumption” b) “Warning about the risks/danger of alcohol consumption when pregnant” c) “Warning about the link between alcohol consumption and fatal cancers” d) “Link/reference to website with public health information about alcohol” Not available Critchlow & Moodie (2022) The presented measures were developed for specific social media platforms, but are so generic that they can be used across different social media platforms and even across mass media channels such as TV, cinema, and advertisement. The presented measures cover different aspects of media portrayals of alcohol and can be used individually or in combination. Depending on the research aim, more detailed measures can be developed and added: for example, regarding the media portrayal of people consuming alcohol, additional measures can code people’s age, gender, ethnicity and further characteristics relevant to the respective research question. In the course of a growing body of content analyses addressing alcohol-related prevention messages on social media, respective measures can be added as well. References Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall. Bandura, A. (2009). Social cognitive theory of mass communication. In J. Bryant & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Communication series. Media effects: Advances in theory and research (3rd ed., pp. 94–124). Routledge. Barker, A. B., Britton, J., Thomson, E., & Murray, R. L. (2021). Tobacco and alcohol content in soap operas broadcast on UK television: A content analysis and population exposure. Journal of Public Health (Oxford, England), 43(3), 595–603. https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdaa091 Boyle, S. C., LaBrie, J. W., Froidevaux, N. M., & Witkovic, Y. D. (2016). Different digital paths to the keg? How exposure to peers' alcohol-related social media content influences drinking among male and female first-year college students. Addictive Behaviors, 57, 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2016.01.011 Beullens, K., & Schepers, A. (2013). Display of alcohol use on Facebook: A content analysis. Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, 16(7), 497–503. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2013.0044 Cavazos-Rehg, P. A., Krauss, M. J., Sowles, S. J., & Bierut, L. J. (2015). "Hey everyone, I'm drunk." An evaluation of drinking-related Twitter chatter. 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Pornography is neither a documentary media genre that documents what real sex in everyday life looks like, nor is it a pedagogical or moral media genre aimed at showing what ideal sex (in terms of health or morality) should look like. Instead, pornography is a fictional media genre that depicts sexual fantasies and explicitly presents naked bodies and sexual activities for the purpose of sexual arousal (Williams, 1989; McKee et al., 2020). Regarding media ethics and media effects, pornography has traditionally been viewed as highly problematic. Pornographic material has been accused of portraying sexuality in unhealthy, morally questionable and often sexist ways, thereby harming performers, audiences, and society at large. In the age of the Internet, pornography has become more diverse, accessible, and widespread than ever (Döring, 2009; Miller et al., 2020). Consequently, the depiction of sexuality in pornography is the focus of a growing number of content analyses of both mass media (e.g., erotic and pornographic novels and movies) and social media (e.g., erotic and pornographic stories, photos and videos shared via online platforms). Typically, pornography’s portrayals of sexuality are examined by measuring the prevalence and frequency of sexual practices and related gender roles via quantitative content analysis (for research reviews see Carrotte et al., 2020; Miller & McBain, 2022). It should be noted that the conceptual differentiation between erotica and pornography is complex and that “pornography” remains an ideologically charged, and often negatively connotated, concept. Hence, the research literature sometimes uses the broader and more neutral term “sexually explicit material” (SEM) in place of “pornographic material” (McKee et al., 2020). Furthermore, it must be emphasized that in the context of content analyses of SEM the focus is typically on legal pornography. Legal visual pornography is produced with adults who have given their informed consent for their image to be recorded, and then disseminated and marketed as SEM. Illegal pornography is usually beyond the scope of media content research, as the acquisition and use of illegal material would be unethical and illegal for researchers (e.g., the analysis of so-called “child pornography”, or what might be more accurately labeled “images of child sexual abuse”). Criminological and forensic research projects are exceptions to this rule. Field of application/theoretical foundation: The theories applied in pornographic media content research primarily come from four academic disciplines: communication science, psychology, sex research, and gender studies. These different theories are fairly similar in their core assumption that pornography users’ sexual cognitions and behaviors are molded by the ways in which sexuality is portrayed in pornographic material. Some of the theories also explain the typical content of pornography and point to the fact that audiences might not only be influenced by pornography but can also shape porn production through their preferences. All theories demand content analyses of pornographic material to back up their predictions. General Media Effects Theories Cultivation Theory and Social Cognitive Theory are the most commonly used media effects theories, irrespective of specific media content. They are often applied to pornographic material. Cultivation Theory (CT) was developed by communication researcher George Gerbner in the 1960s (Gerbner, 1998). CT claims that heavy media users’ perceptions of the prevalence of different societal phenomena (e.g., crimes) are shaped by the prevalence with which these phenomena occur in the media they consume (e.g., cop shows on TV). Applied to pornography, CT predicts that heavy users of pornography will severely overestimate the prevalence of sexual practices that are rare in reality, but widespread in pornography. Young people who lack real life sexual experience are regarded as particularly vulnerable for sexual cultivation effects in terms of biased perceptions of the popularity and normalcy of different performances of sexuality (e.g., name calling and slapping during sex). Another classic media effects theory that is widely adopted in pornography research is psychologist Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1971), later re-labeled as Social Cognitive Theory (SCT; Bandura, 2001). SCT claims that people imitate the behaviors of media role models. Applied to pornographic material, SCT predicts that media audiences will develop more favorable attitudes towards, and engage more frequently in, sexual behaviors portrayed positively in sexually explicit material. Such sexual imitation effects may influence not only attitudes toward, and engagement in, sex acts represented in pornography (e.g., anal sex), but also gender role behaviors (e.g., men acting dominantly, women acting submissively during sex), safer sex measures (e.g., lack of condom use), bodily appearance (e.g., breast augmentation), and consent communication (e.g., lack of explicitly asking for, or giving, consent to engage in different sex acts). Sexual Media Effects Theories While CT and SCT are broad media effects theories applicable to pornography as well as many other types of media content, Sexual Script Theory and the 3AM specifically address sexual media and their effects. Sexual Script Theory (SST) was developed by sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon in the 1970s (Gagnon & Simon, 1973; Simon & Gagnon, 2003; Wiederman, 2015). SST argues that human sexuality is not merely a biological instinct, but a highly complex set of cognitions and behaviors shaped by symbolic, social and cultural factors: People develop ideas about how to have sex in terms of organized cognitive schemas or “scripts” that reflect intra-psychic desires (e.g., their sexual fantasies), social norms (e.g., peers’ and partners’ sexual expectations), and cultural influences (e.g., representations of sexuality in the media they consume). SST stresses that the intra-psychic, social, and cultural determinants of individuals’ sexual scripts mutually influence each other and can change over time (Simon & Gagnon, 2003). However, in pornography research, usually only the third element of the theory (cultural influences through media representations of sexuality) is considered. Applied to pornography, SST predicts that sexual scripts presented in pornographic material (e.g., spontaneous anal sex with strangers without condoms or overt consent communication) can shape individuals’ sexual scripts. The Acquisition, Activation, and Application Model of Media Sexual Socialization (3AM) was developed more recently by communication researcher Paul Wright as a specification of SST regarding media influence (Wright, 2011). According to the 3AM, sexually explicit media content shapes cognitive schemas of sexuality in three ways: Pornography can foster the creation of new schemas (schema acquisition), it can prime extant schemas (schema activation), and it can facilitate the utilization of extant schemas to inform attitudes and behaviors (schema application). The 3AM differentiates between specific scripting effects of pornography (e.g., engaging in condom-free casual anal sex without sufficient consent communication after having observed this exact sexual script multiple times in pornography) versus abstract scripting effects (e.g., adopting a more permissive sexual worldview after having observed many people engaging in unrestricted sex in pornography). The aforementioned general and sexuality-specific media effects theories have been used predominantly to predict negative (unwanted, harmful) effects such as dangerously distorted views of sexuality and gender roles as well as engagement in risky or violent sexual behaviors, while potential positive effects have been mostly ignored. Only recently, has serious consideration been given to the beneficial effects of pornography use (e.g., sexual identity validation, sexual empowerment, improved couple communication, sexual skill acquisition, etc.) in the research literature (e.g., Döring, 2021; Döring & Mohseni, 2018; Döring et al., 2021; Kohut & Fisher, 2013; Kohut et al., 2017; Miller et al., 2018; Tillmann & Wells, 2022). Depending on specific negative and/or positive effect assumptions, different aspects of the representation of sexuality will be measured (e.g., expressions of aggression during sex or different types of sexual stimulation techniques). Gender Role, Feminist and Queer Theories Typically, analysis of the ways in which sexuality is represented in pornography involves considerations of gender relations, therefore gender role theories and feminist theories of gender (in-)equality are frequently drawn upon (e.g., Eagly, 1987). There are two main reasons for this additional theoretical focus on gender: 1) Most SEM depicts heterosexual encounters, hence the portrayal of sexuality in pornography implies a portrayal of sexual gender relations (Williams, 1989). 2) Gender relations in the media are often asymmetrical, depicting men and women in superior and subordinate positions, respectively. Such patriarchal gender relations are expected to be reflected, or even exaggerated, in pornographic material. Radical feminist approaches in particular characterize pornography as a portrayal of sexual degradation of women by men, that is so harmful to society that it should be prohibited (e.g., MacKinnon, 1991). Other feminist approaches are also critical of asymmetric gender relations in traditional mainstream pornography and call for more gender equality in SEM, such as in feminist pornography (Williams, 1989). Feminist criticism of gender roles and relations in pornography does not address the demographic variable of sex/gender alone, but also covers other diversity dimensions such as age, race/ethnicity, or disability. According to the analytical framework of intersectionality, the subordination and discrimination of women in society and media representations particularly affect those women who have multiple marginalized demographic characteristics (e.g., the representation of white women in pornography differs from that of black or Asian women; Fritz et al. 2021). Queer theory is also concerned with different racial/ethnic and sexual identities of women and their participation and representation in pornography (Ingraham 2013). Content analyses of pornography need to take into consideration that pornography is becoming increasingly diverse (Miller & McBain, 2022). Hence, content analyses need to differentiate between various pornographic sub-genres such as commercial heterosexual mainstream pornography (traditionally targeting men) versus, for example, women-friendly and couple-oriented pornography, feminist pornography, queer pornography, fetish and kink pornography, or authentic amateur and DIY (do it yourself) pornography in the form of visual or text pornography (Döring, 2021; McKee et al., 2008). Gender role, feminist, and queer theories predict that gender relations in mainstream pornography are more asymmetrical, stereotypical and patriarchal than in women- and couple-friendly, feminist and queer pornography. Sexual Fantasy and Desire Theories The above-mentioned effect theories do not address and explain the main intended effect of pornography, namely immediate sexual arousal, pleasure and satisfaction. The theories focus on linking the fictional pornographic content directly with real life opinions and behaviors, but mostly ignore the links between fictional pornographic content and sexual fantasies. Research shows that many sexual fantasies of people of all genders are unrealistic, extreme, clichéd, violent and norm-violating and that norm-violation is often what makes them arousing (e.g., Bivona et al., 2012; Critelli & Bivona, 2008; Joyal, 2015). The same might be true for pornographic content. Hence, measuring pornography, a fictional media genre, against standards of realism, health and morality might not always be in line with the main entertainment purpose of the genre. Erotizing the forbidden and dangerous (e.g, sex with family members, with mysterious strangers, with authority figures, with non-human creatures) is a common trope of sexual fantasies, hence meaningful variables to measure pornographic portrayals of sexuality could be derived from, and related to, theories of sexual fantasy and desire (e.g., Salmon et al., 2019; Stoller, 1985). Indulging in unrealistic and norm-violating fantasies and fictional media contents is part of media entertainment and may not necessarily lead to norm-violating behaviors. Competent media users should be able to differentiate between fiction and reality. Mold Theories versus Mirror Theories When analyzing and criticizing sexuality portrayals in pornography, it is important to realize that media do not just uni-directionally influence public opinions and behaviors (mold theory). Rather, media also bi-directionally reflect existing sexual relations and fantasies (mirror theory). Recent sex surveys, for example, demonstrate that engagement in consensual BDSM (Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism) practices and rough sex (e.g., name calling, spanking, hair pulling) is fairly widespread in the general population and enjoyed by all genders (e.g., Burch & Salmon, 2019; Herbenick et al., 2021a, 2021b; Strizzi et al., 2022). Hence, it might not always be the adult industry that influences audiences’ sexualities, but also audiences’ sexual interests that influence porn production. Particularly in the digital pornography market, producers and vendors can easily analyze audience preferences through the analysis of search terms and download statistics and adopt their content accordingly. Furthermore, general beauty trends in society (e.g., regarding shaving of pubic and body hair, growing of beards, or multiple tattoos and other body art) might be mirrored in pornography (through its selection and presentation of performers) rather than of generated by it. References/combination with other methods of data collection: Manual quantitative content analyses of pornographic material can be combined with qualitative (e.g., Keft-Kennedy, 2008) as well as computational (e.g., Seehuus et al., 2019) content analyses. Furthermore, content analyses can be complemented with qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys to investigate perceptions and evaluations of the portrayals of sexuality in pornography among pornography’s creators and performers (e.g., West, 2019) and audiences (e.g., Cowan & Dunn, 1994; Hardy et al., 2022; Paasoonen, 2021; Shor, 2022). Additionally, experimental studies are helpful to measure directly how different dimensions of pornographic portrayals of sexuality are perceived and evaluated by recipients, and if and how these portrayals can affect audiences’ sexuality-related thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (e.g., Kohut & Fisher, 2013; Miller et al., 2019). Example studies for manual quantitative content analyses: Acknowledging the multidimensionality and complexity of portrayals of sexuality in pornography, a recent research review identified eight main dimensions of analysis (Miller & McBain, 2022) that are adopted and extended in this DOCA entry as: 1) violence, 2) degradation, 3) sex acts, 4) performer demographics (sex/gender, age, race/ethnicity), 5) performer bodily appearance, 6) safer sex practices, 7) relational context of sex, and 8) consent communication. Example studies and measures for all eight dimensions of pornographic portrayals of sexuality are presented in separate DOCA entries. 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Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. Sydney: Hachette, 2011. Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: The Dial Press, 1999. Compestine, Ying Chang. Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party. New York: Square Fish, 2009. Dalton, David. “Altamont: End of the Sixties, Or Big Mix-Up in the Middle of Nowhere?” Gadfly Nov/Dec 1999. April 2014 ‹http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/NovDec99/archive-altamont.html›. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy. Los Angeles: Tarcher Putnam, 1980. Gleick, James. “What Defines a Meme?” Smithsonian Magazine 2011. April 2014 ‹http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a Meme.html›. Hair, The American Tribal Love Rock Musical. Prod. Michael Butler. Book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Music by Galt MacDermot; Musical Director: Galt MacDermot. 1968. Han, Suyin. The Crippled Tree. 1965. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. A Mortal Flower. 1966. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. Birdless Summer. 1968. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. The Morning Deluge: Mao TseTung and the Chinese Revolution 1893-1954. Boston: Little Brown, 1972. ---. My House Has Two Doors. New York: Putnam, 1980. Marsh, Victor. The Boy in the Yellow Dress. Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan Press, 2014. ---. “A Touch of Silk: A (Post)modern Faerie Tale.” Griffith Review 42: Once Upon a Time in Oz (Oct. 2013): 159-69. ---. “Bent Kid, Straight World: Life Writing and the Reconfiguration of ‘Queer’.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 15.1 (April 2011). ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/april11/marsh.htm›. ---. “The Boy in the Yellow Dress: Re-framing Subjectivity in Narrativisations of the Queer Self.“ Life Writing 4.2 (Oct. 2007): 263-286. Mol, Hans. Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976. Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Salingaros, Nikos. Theory of Architecture. Solingen: Umbau-Verlag, 2006. Stancil, E.D., and M.D. Johnson. Frisbee: A Practitioner’s Manual and Definitive Treatise. New York: Workman, 1975 Winnicott, D.W. Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers. 1958. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives 18.3 (1991): 15-31. Zimmerman, Marc. “Testimonio.” The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. Eds. Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman and Tim Futing Liao. London: Sage Publications, 2003. Zuber-Skerritt, Ortrun, ed. Australian Playwrights: David Williamson. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1988.

We are enslaved by speed and have succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods. -- Manifesto of the Slow Food movement In Australia, we like our food fast. We spend more than a third of our average weekly household budget eating out or on takeaway food, a figure that may jump to 50% in the next five years (Macken). An ever increasing proportion of the food we do prepare at home has been processed for convenience, so that now we manage to spend just an hour and a half eating and drinking each day, or less time than we spend watching television (ABS, How Australians). If the sharing of food fosters family and social ties, and strong family and social relationships are an integral part of civil society, statistics such as these should give us pause. While it is beyond the scope of this article to give this topic the full attention it deserves, the article will nonetheless briefly examine some of the implications of life on the fast-food track. But first, why have we become so reliant on convenience foods? One reason is that significant numbers of women have entered the workforce during the last few decades and today, more than 60 percent of Australian women who are married work outside the home (ABS, Labour Force). As the value of women's labour in the market increases, their time becomes a more precious commodity and they seek ways to use it more efficiently (Bourdieu). Because women have traditionally been responsible for the preparation of family meals, and continue to shoulder most of the responsibility regardless of their role in the workforce, they naturally look for ways to save time buying and cooking food. However, this is not a trend confined solely to working women with families, but rather one that crosses many demographic and economic lines. We all seem to feel our time is at a premium, even though we are actually working less (ABS, Social Trends). That is because we are increasingly placing a greater value on our leisure time, and although we have more of it because of the shorter hours we work and the multitude of time-saving devices we use, we do not want to spend our free time shopping for food (Cheeseman & Breddin) or cooking it. Instead, our preferred activities are watching television and videos, socialising and talking, listening to the radio and reading (ABS, Social Trends). Interestingly, we have placed socialising and the family meal into completely separate categories. But first, why have we become so reliant on convenience foods? One reason is that significant numbers of women have entered the workforce during the last few decades and today, more than 60 percent of Australian women who are married work outside the home (ABS, Labour Force). As the value of women's labour in the market increases, their time becomes a more precious commodity and they seek ways to use it more efficiently (Bourdieu). Because women have traditionally been responsible for the preparation of family meals, and continue to shoulder most of the responsibility regardless of their role in the workforce, they naturally look for ways to save time buying and cooking food. However, this is not a trend confined solely to working women with families, but rather one that crosses many demographic and economic lines. We all seem to feel our time is at a premium, even though we are actually working less (ABS, Social Trends). That is because we are increasingly placing a greater value on our leisure time, and although we have more of it because of the shorter hours we work and the multitude of time-saving devices we use, we do not want to spend our free time shopping for food (Cheeseman & Breddin) or cooking it. Instead, our preferred activities are watching television and videos, socialising and talking, listening to the radio and reading (ABS, Social Trends). Interestingly, we have placed socialising and the family meal into completely separate categories. While the nutritional benefits derived from 'replaced' meals may be questionable, there are more important considerations at stake. People who have come to feel they do not have time to cook are not likely to feel they can spare much time to eat, either. 'Eating on the run' has now become part of our lexicon. And truthfully, who would want to linger over a meal made from reconstituted foods? But more importantly, what message do meals such as these impart to those who eat them? The social engagement, for example, that occurs over a frozen dinner "is very different to that which occurs over a long meal that has been carefully prepared and is shared with family or friends" (Finkelstein). The message inherent in quickly prepared or purchased foods that are in turn quickly consumed, often at different times by different members of the family or household, is that the family or communal meal is not an occasion worthy of much attention. Nothing can be farther from the truth. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, food is at the very core of sociality. Humans evolved as food-sharing animals (van den Berghe), and the origin of the family can be traced in large part to the necessity of sharing meals. Today, meal times not only serve to strengthen family and social ties, but also to acculturate children into the norms of 'civilised' behaviour" (Lupton). Yet, they are under attack as family members are increasingly left to forage for food on their own. We need to consider what social and emotional skills our children are developing as they nibble on leftover pizza by the kitchen sink or unwrap their microwaved meal in front of the television. In an interview with Psychology Today, Ruth Reichl, renowned food writer and current editor of Gourmet magazine, said that the trend for family members to eat five-minute meals on their own will have a profound psychological impact on future generations of children, who will have missed out on a vital part of the socialisation process (Toufexis). Perhaps the Slow Food movement, then, has hit upon something. Its manifesto states, "a firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life... . Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food. Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food" (Slow Food). The movement was founded in Italy in 1986 by Carlos Petrini as a reaction to the establishment of a McDonald's near Rome's historic Spanish Steps. While global fast food colonisation is certainly a rallying point, the movement also encourages members to eat seasonal foods, support and protect regional cuisines, reinstate the ritual of family dining and educate children's palates. Mostly, however, Slow Food is about taking the time to enjoy a meal, to value the ingredients that go into it, and to share it with friends and family. It is appropriate, then, that the movement's symbol is a snail, "a talisman against speed" (Slow Food). While speed may be exciting, fast foods are not, and the idea of slowing down to savour meals with family and friends is one that is gaining momentum. The Slow Food movement, which started with a few delegates from 15 countries just over a decade ago, has now grown to 60,000 members in 35 countries, complete with 400 convivia, or local branches. Australia hosts eight of these chapters. Maggie Beer, the well-known Barossa Valley chef, entrepreneur and food writer, is also a Slow Food member. Her solution to the daily dinner dilemma is simple: by planning ahead and keeping a well-stocked pantry, it is possible for time-constrained cooks to have at hand many of the ingredients they need to make simple and nutritious meals in as much time as it takes to go get takeaway food (Beer). Nonetheless, keeping the pantry well-stocked with quality foods instead of dinners-in-a-packet means deciding that meals matter, that they are worthy of consideration and of time spent in preparation and consumption, and that the long-term rewards of Slow Food are worth far more than the short-term benefits of Fast Food. As the training grounds for future generations and important sites of reconnection for current ones, meals should be welcomed as opportunities for interaction rather than chores to be completed as quickly as possible. They should make people want to linger, while enjoying the company, the conversation and the food. As the French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in the early nineteenth century: One may find round a single table all the modifications which extreme sociability has introduced into our midst: love, friendship, business, speculation, influence, solicitation, patronage, ambition, intrigue; that is why conviviality affects every aspect of human life, and bears fruits of every flavour. (Brillat-Savarin). Reviving the ritual of a family meal does not mean returning to 'traditional' 1950s household dynamics, but rather, adopting a modern view that meals are important, even vital, and that all members of a family should contribute to making them special. The preparation of a meal can become part of the social process; Italo-Australians, for example, have turned the making of tomato sauce into a very communal and social event that draws friends and family closer together. It is a type of meal preparation that can be replicated on a far smaller scale by simply involving family members, housemates and partners in the making of a meal, which can be accomplished in a myriad of ways by people of varying ages and skills. However, it means periodically suspending time, for a good meal that satisfies body and soul cannot be rushed. The evidence suggests, however, that many of us are not yet able to jump off the treadmill, even though the current trend toward faster and faster foods may have a significant impact on the structure of the family and the nature of our relationships with each other. If we continue to eat on the run, if we consistently eat meals that do not make us want to linger, then we may find ourselves in danger of losing that uniquely human ritual of sharing food, which is a cornerstone of our sociality, the bedrock of family life and a building block of our collective spirit. Much does, indeed, depend on dinner. References Australian Bureau of Statistics. How Australians Use Their Time. Canberra: ABS, 1998. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Labour Force Status and Other Characteristics of Families, Australia. Canberra: ABS, 1999. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Social Trends 1999. Canberra: ABS, 1999. Beer, Maggie. "Advance Australia's Fare." The Australian Magazine 1-2 Jan. 2000: 40. Van den Berghe, Pierre. "Ethnic Cuisine: Culture in Nature." Ethnic and Racial Studies 7.3 (1984): 387-97. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. The Philosopher in the Kitchen. Trans. Anne Drayton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970. Cheeseman, Noel, and Robyn Breddin. Food Retailing in Australia. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Primary Industries, 1995. Finkelstein, Joanne. "Fast Foods: The Dangers of Eating Too Quickly." Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium of Australian Gastronomy: Much Depends on Dinner. Melbourne, 1991. 173-7. Lupton, Deborah. Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage, 1996. Macken, Deirdre. "The Death of the Kitchen: Will Cooking Survive the 1990s?" Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum 7 Sep. 1996: 10s. Mangosi, Sandro. "Pie-and-Sandwich Corner Shop Threatened by Dynamics of Fast Food Industry." BIS Shrapnel News Release. 18 May 2000. Slattery, Geoff. "Accept No Imitations." The Age Food 11 May 1999. Slow Food. "Manifesto." 2000. 1 June 2000 <http://www.slowfood.com/>. Toufexis, Anastasia. "Dishing with Ruth Reichl." Psychology Today 31.6 (Nov.-Dec. 1998): 48. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Gwendolyn Stansbury. "Arresting Fast Food." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/food.php>. Chicago style: Gwendolyn Stansbury, "Arresting Fast Food," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/food.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Gwendolyn Stansbury. (2000) Arresting fast food. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/food.php> ([your date of access]).

In July 2001, New York couple Jason Black and Francis Schroeder opened bidding on the internet for corporate sponsorship of their newborn son. Naming rights started at $US5000 000. For Black, the logic was simple: given the inescapable prevalence of commercial sponsorship in contemporary life, this was a valid way of working with corporate America. Black and Schroeder already had two daughters and lived in a small two-bedroom apartment. In exchange for their son’s financial security, they risked branding him ‘Big Mac’ or ‘Nike’ – literally. If nothing else, the case exemplified the amazing reach of brand consciousness. The couple had internalised its values and rationale with such ease and comfort, the notion of forfeiting their child’s name was not abhorrent, but a lucrative marketing opportunity. Then again, the story was not without precedent. In 2000, teenagers Chris Barrett and Luke McCabe, both from New Jersey, became ‘spokesguys’ for First USA, one of America’s top credit-card companies. By sporting the company logo on their surfboards and all their clothes, the pair receives an annual $US40 000 each in tuition, board and books for their four-year university contract. They do not just advertise the brand; they are its living embodiment. For critics of consumer culture, such stories exemplify the extent to which corporatism has become a complete and closed system, with the panoramic presence of brands and logos and the commodification of life itself. They demonstrate the alarming readiness of some people to encode and enact the consumerist impulse. At its most malignant, this impulse appears as a crass consumerism that eats up every aspect of a culture, so much so that consumerism becomes the culture – all meaning is both anchored in and governed by the capitalist creed. For many, mass-produced contemporary culture provides a seemingly empty substitute, what Fredric Jameson (1991) termed “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense” (9), for genuine experience and emotion. In turn, the contemporary consumer has been reduced to a mere imitation of mediated expectations, a functionary cog in the corporatist machine. As this sign system infects and invades more and more space, a certain cultural literacy is inevitably called for, an intimate knowledge of symbol and significance, logo and logic. However, like all living language, this one is open to some resistance, albeit a somewhat piecemeal one. Part appropriation, part antithesis, it is a resistance that hijacks form in order to subvert content. To explain how this type of activism might work, one could consider the highly effective activist operation, ®TMark (http://rtmark.com). ®TMark is an online centre that organizes and directs funding for the ‘information alteration’ of corporate products (otherwise known as ‘sabotage’). In 1993, ®TMark was involved in its first high-profile act of sabotage when it channelled $US 8000 to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), a group that switched the voice boxes of 300 GI Joe and Barbie dolls. As befits a project affiliated with ®TMark, the critical content of BLO’s act was an alchemic stroke of humour and commentary. The protest lies within the ‘information alteration’ of commodities that usually rely on their supposed virtues. The BLO offensive drew attention to the questionable labour practices of Mattel, manufacturers of Barbie, thereby undermining the perceptions on which Barbie’s popularity rests. From the outset, ®TMark’s key feature is its corporate status. As a brokerage, ®TMark benefits from ‘limited liability’, just like any other corporation. It exploits this principle (that is, corporate protection, thereby bypassing legal responsibility) to sabotage other corporate products. Unlike other corporations, though, its bottom-line is cultural profit. As spokesperson Ray Thomas explains, the corporate model is both the object of ®TMark’s criticism, and the method by which that criticism is being facilitated: “Projects can be seen as stocks, and when you support a project you’re investing in it. When you contribute, say, $100 to a project that you would like to see accomplished, you are sort of investing in the accomplishment of the project. What you want to see out of that project is cultural dividends; you want to see a beneficial cultural event take place because of your money, as a reward. What you’re doing is investing in the improvement of the culture.” As with almost all ®TMark literature and material, the tone here is one of clipped civility, similar to the tense restraint characteristic of almost any corporation. Perhaps the closest the site gets to a ‘straightforward’ philosophy is in this piece of advice to dispirited students, fearful that, one day, they too will be sucked into the corporate void: “We believe that performing an ®TMark project can help you, psychologically at least, at such a difficult juncture; but more importantly, we urge you to at all costs remember that laws should defend human people, not corporate people like the one of which you will be a part. If you keep this in mind and work towards making it a reality, you may find your life much more bearable.” While this pseudo mission statement might be read as yet another appendage to ®TMark’s corporate veneer, it also points to some of the goals of the site. The depiction of ®TMark projects as morale boosters for disenchanted cynics goes some way in illustrating the ambitions and limits of the site. Rather than prescribe a far-reaching, holistic approach to social change (what might be termed a ‘revolutionary’ vision), ®TMark marshals ideas and initiatives a little more subtly. This is not to belittle or dispute its utility or significance; on the contrary, it is an approach that effectively (in)corporates a diverse range of people and programs. For example, rather than unifying its adherents to a common agenda, ®TMark operates as a coalition of interests. As such, the followings funds collectively serve the ®TMark project: the Labor Fund; the Frontier Fund (which challenges naïve visions of the ‘global village’); the Education Fund; the Health Fund; the Alternative Markets Fund (which considers overlooked demographics, such as poor gays); the Media Fund; the Intellectual Property Fund; the Biological Property Fund; the Corporate Law Fund; and the Environment Fund, among others. In turn, the ®TMark spectrum canvasses a plethora of pertinent, interconnected themes. This includes: the plight of workers in developing countries; censorship; institutionalised racism; the nominal triumph of consumer culture; techno-utopianism and the ‘digerati’; copyright law; and the increasing opacity of corporate activities. Underlying all these issues is ®TMark’s intention to publicise corporate abuses of democratic processes. Importantly, this multiplicity of interests is considered a suitable counterpart to the dispersed nature of corporate power. So, no one enemy is identified and targeted, since such reductionism belies the degree to which capitalism, corporatism and consumerism are irredeemably entwined in contemporary culture. In turn, these funds are often ‘managed’ by public figures whose association with certain causes lend their celebrity well to particular campaigns. For example, San Francisco band Negativeland manages the Intellectual Property Fund. This is most appropriate. Their 1991 legal battle with major label Island, on account of their ‘deceptive’ use of U2 material, cemented their place as champions of ‘creative appropriation’ and the right to create ‘with mirrors’ (as Negativeland describes it on their eponymous website). Similarly, the desire to create ‘with mirrors’ propels much of ®TMark’s work. It imbues all ®TMark projects with the same sense of calculated mischief. This suggests a mode of activism that is both opportunistic and ingenious, fashioning criticism from the very resources it is attacking. Financial reward aside (which, in any case, is negligible, at best) the real pay-off for ®TMark saboteurs comes via media coverage of their projects. As such, it straddles an interesting divide, between public infamy and necessary stealth. ®TMark requires media attention to render its projects effective, yet must maintain the critical distance necessary for any activist potency. Indeed, the need to bolster ®TMark’s profile was one of the reasons it went from being a dial-in system to a website in 1997. Within its first eight months the site had received almost 20 000 visits. In this schema, the activism in question is assigned a somewhat smaller purpose than has been hitherto associated with protest movements generally. Rather than provide a grand panacea for all the world’s ills, ®TMark’s scale is, by its own admission, modest: “The value of ®TMark is, and has always been, not in any real pressure it can possibly bear, but rather in its ability to quickly and cheaply attract widespread interest to important issues. ®TMark is thus essentially a public relations agency for anti-corporate activism”. In this way, ®TMark is firmly positioned within that strand of activism often referred to as ‘culture jamming’. This type of protest relies on a distinct degree of media and cultural literacy, one that is consonant with, and a product of, the Information Age. As Mark Dery explains, these activists “introduce noise into the signal as it passes from transmitter to receiver, encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Intruding on the intruders, they invest ads, newscasts, and other media artefacts with subversive meanings; simultaneously, they decrypt them, rendering their seductions impotent”(http://levity.com/markdery/culturejam.html). Culture jamming draws on (and contributes to) critiques of contemporary consumer capitalism. Its premise is that too much public space has already been ceded to Hollywood, Madison Avenue et al, and that activists must seize whatever opportunities allow this space to be reclaimed, however fleetingly. Trading on publicity and shock value, jammers manipulate those icons, slogans and trademarks that will register immediate recognition, thereby rendering their efforts meaningful. It constitutes a politicised refusal to submit to the cheerful passivity scripted by the corporate class. As jammers resist this role, reclaiming rather than forfeiting public space, they create what Naomi Klein (2000) calls “a climate of semiotic Robin Hoodism” (280). This term aptly captures the spirit of moralistic idealism that is, almost inevitably, a part of the milieu. This is not to dismiss or deride the progressive agenda of most culture jammers; if anything, it is a positive endorsement of their activism, and a response to those that would deem the postmodern zeitgeist politically barren or overwhelmingly cynical. What it reveals, then, is a somewhat unexpected distribution of power, as expressions of criticism and opposition emerge at seemingly incongruous junctures. They are at once engaged and complicit, finding cracks in ‘the system’ (that is, corporate society) and co-opting them, what Linda Hutcheon (1990) calls “subversion from within” (157). Eschewing ‘big picture’ solutions, culture jammers prioritise temporary connections and hybrid forms over ideological certainties and operational rigidity. Tactical thinking, and the malleability and mobility it relies on, clearly informs and animates ®TMark’s work. As Graham Meikle (2002) explains, “Different actions and campaigns use whichever media are most appropriate at any given time for any given purpose. An event might call for making a documentary, making a website, making an A4 newsletter, or making a phone call” (120). ®TMark stops short of overstating its purpose or exaggerating its success. There is no lofty manifesto or ironclad strategy; without departing too far from its anti-corporatist stance, ®TMark encourages an almost playful combination of comedy and critique, with a thick ironic overlay. At its most ambitious, then, ®TMark can hope to alter the everyday behaviour of ordinary citizens, making inroads at the expense of powerful corporations. At the very least, it can prompt bemused surfers to rethink certain things – such as Nike’s labour practices or Shell’s environmental record. In a sense, though, the degree to which such perceptual jolts can ‘make a difference’ is almost immaterial: the fact that the status quo has been questioned is a minor triumph. Where some commentators bemoan the virtual stupor they deem characteristic of contemporary Western politics, projects like ®TMark prove that there are spaces and opportunities left for meaningful debate and dissent. Works Cited Dery, Mark. “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs”. (http://levity.com/markdery/culturejam.html). Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1990. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: Flamingo, 2000. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. New York and London: Routledge, and Annandale, Pluto Press, 2002. Rtmark. (http://rtmark.com). Links http://levity.com/markdery/culturejam.html http://rtmark.com Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Khamis, Susie. "Jamming at Work " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/04-jamming.php>. APA Style Khamis, S. (2003, Jun 19). Jamming at Work . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/04-jamming.php>

This paper will use the popular television character, Dexter Morgan, to interrogate the relationship between self and persona, and unsettle the distinction between the two terms. This operation will enable me to raise a series of questions about the critical vocabulary and scholarly agenda of the nascent discipline of persona studies, which, I argue, needs to develop a critical genealogy of the term “persona.” This paper makes a modest contribution to such a project by drawing attention to some key questions regarding the discourse of authenticity in persona studies. For those not familiar with the show, Dexter portrays the life of a serial killer who only kills other serial killers. This is because Dexter, under the tutelage of his deceased father, develops a code that enables him to find a “socially useful” purpose for his homicidal impulses—by exclusively targeting other killers he rationalises his own deadly acts. Dexter necessarily leads a double life, which entails performing a series of normative social roles that conceal his true identity, and the murderous activities of his “dark passenger.” This apparent split between “true” self and “false” persona says a lot about popular conceptions of the performative nature of the self in contemporary culture, and provides a useful framework for unpacking some of the aporias generated by the concept of persona.My aim in the present context is to substantiate the argument that persona studies needs to engage with the philosophical discourse of “self” and “authenticity” if it is to provide a convincing account of the status and function of persona today. The term “persona” derives from the classical Latin word for mask, and has its roots in the theatre of ancient Greece. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term thus:1. An Assumed character or role, especially one adopted by an author in his or her writing, or by a performer.2.a. as the aspect of a person’s character that is displayed to or perceived by others.b. Psychol. In Jungian psychology: the outer or assumed aspect of character; a set of attitudes adopted by an individual to fit his or her perceived social role. Contrasted with anima.For Jung the persona is “a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual” (305). We can see that all these usages share a theatrical or actorly dimension. Persona is something we adopt, display, or assume. Further, it is an external quality, which masks, presumably, that which is not assumed or displayed—the private self. Thus, persona is predicated on an opposition between inside and outside. Moreover, it is not a value neutral concept, but one, I will argue, that connotes a sense of “inauthenticity” through suggesting a division between self and role. The “self” is a complicated word with a wide range of usages and connotations. The OED notes that when used with reference to a person the word refers to an essential entity.3. Chiefly Philos. That which in a person is really and intrinsically he (in contradistinction to what is adventitious); the ego (often identified with the soul or mind as opposed to the body); a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness.Of course both terms are further complicated by the way they function within specific specialised discourses. Jung’s use of the term “persona” is part of a complex psychological theory of personality, and the term “self” appears in a multitude of forms in a plethora of scholarly disciplines. The “self” is obviously a key concept in psychology and philosophy, where it is sometimes conflated with something called the subject, or discussed with reference to questions of personal identity. Michel Foucault’s project to track “the constitution of the subject across history which has led us up to the modern concept of the self” (202) is perhaps the most complex and rich body of work with which persona studies must reckon if it is to produce a distinctive account of the relationship between persona and self. In broad terms, this paper advocates a loosely Foucauldian approach to understanding the relationship between self and persona, but defers a detailed encounter with Foucault’s work on the subject (which requires a much larger canvas).For the moment I want to focus on the status of authenticity in the self/persona relationship with specific reference to world of Dexter, which provides an accessible forum for examining a contemporary manifestation of the self/persona relationship with specific reference to the question of authenticity. Dexter conveys the division between authentic inner self and persona through the use of a first person narrative voice that provides a running commentary on the character’s thoughts, and exposes the gap between Dexter’s various social roles and his real sociopathic self. Dexter Morgan is, of course, an unreliable narrator, yet he is acutely aware of how others perceive him, and his narrative voice-over functions as a device to bind the viewer to the character’s first-person perspective. This is important because Dexter is devoid of empathy—he lacks the ability to feel genuine emotion, and conform to the social conventions that govern everyday activities, yet he is focus of audience identification. This means the voice-over must perform the work of making Dexter sympathetic.The voice-over narration in Dexter is characterised by an obsession with the presentation of self, and the disparity between self and persona. In an early episode, Dexter’s narrative voice proclaims a love of Halloween because it is “the one time of year when everyone wears a mask—not just me. People think it's fun to pretend you're a monster. Me, I spend my life pretending I'm not. Brother, friend, boyfriend—all part of my costume collection” (Dexter “Let’s Give the Boy a Hand”).Dexter develops a series of social masks and routines to disguise his “real” self. He is compelled to develop a series of elaborate ruses to appear like a regular guy—a “normal” person who needs to perform a series of social roles. He thus becomes a studious observer of everyday life, and much of the show’s appeal lies in the way he dissects the minutiae of human behavior in order to learn how be normal. Indeed, because he does not comprehend emotion he must learn how to read the external signs that convey care, love, interest, concern and so on—“I just don't understand all that emotion, which makes it tough to fake,” he declares (Dexter, “Popping Cherry”). Each social role requires a considerable degree of actorly preparation, and Dexter demonstrates what we might call, with Erving Goffman, a dramaturgical approach to everyday life (2).For example, Dexter enters into a relationship with Rita, an ostensibly naïve, doe-eyed single mother of two children and a victim of domestic violence—he chooses her because he believes that she is as damaged as he is, and unlikely to challenge him too strongly—“Rita's ex-hubby, the crack addict, repeatedly raped her, knocked her around. Ever since then she's been completely uninterested in sex. That works for me!” (Dexter “Dexter”). Rita provides the perfect cover because she facilitates Dexter’s construction of himself as a normal, heterosexual family man. However, in order to play this most paradigmatic normative role, he must learn how to play with children, and feign affection and intimacy. J. M. Tyree observes that Dexter “employs a fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy for imitating normal life” (82). Of course, he cannot maintain the role too long before Rita becomes suspicious, and aware of Dexter’s repeated lies and evasions.In short, Dexter dramatises what Goffman calls impression management—the character of Dexter Morgan must consistently “give off” signs of normativity (80). Goffman argues that we are all compelled to perform social roles in the manner of Dexter, and this perhaps accounts for why the show appealed to such a wide audience. In many ways, Dexter exposes normative behavior as an “act” that nobody can sustain no matter how hard they try. Dexter’s struggle to decode the conventions that govern everyday life make him a sympathetic character despite his obviously sociopathic tendencies. In other words we are all a little bit like Dexter insofar we must all perform social roles we may not find comfortable. Of course, the whole question of impression management in Dexter becomes even more complex if one considers Michael C. Hall’s celebrity persona and his performance as the titular character, but I do not have the space to pursue this line of inquiry in the present context.So, Dexter is a consummate actor within his “everyday” world, and neatly, perhaps too neatly, confirms Goffman’s “dramaturgical” theory of the “self.” In his essay, “Letter to a Poor Actor” David E. R. George provides a fascinating critique of Goffman from the perspective of a theatre studies scholar. George provocatively claims that Goffman was attracted to theatrical metaphors because of the “anti-theatrical prejudice” embedded within the western tradition. George cites Jonash Barish’s authoritative tome on this topic, which argues “that with infrequent exceptions, terms borrowed from the theatre—theatrical, operatic, melodramatic, stagey, etc.—tend to be hostile or belittling” (1).Barish cites instances of this prejudice from Plato through to St Augustine and beyond, and George situates Goffman within this powerful tradition. He writes,the theatrum mundi metaphor has always been a recipe for paranoia, and in this respect Goffman appears merely to be continuing a long philosophical tradition: the actor-as-paranoiac puts on the maximum number of masks to protect a threatened and fragile self against the daily threat of intimacy, disrespect, deception. (353)It is hardly surprising, then, that Dexter, a paranoid sociopath, stands as an exemplary instance of Goffman’s dramaturgical conception of the self, for Dexter is a show that consistently presents narratives about the relationship between the need to protect the “fragile” self through the construction of various personae. George also argues, with Lyman and Scott, that a “dramatistic” approach to understanding the world produces a cynical perspective because drama is predicated on the split between appearance and reality, nothing is what it appears to be, and nobody is what they appear to be (7). The actor, traditionally, has always worn a mask in some form or another. From the literal masks worn by the actors in ancient Greece to the sophisticated make-up and prosthetic devices worn by today’s thespians, actors, even when they are supposedly playing themselves, expose the gap between self and persona. Arguably, the most challenging and provocative aspect of George’s theory of the actor for persona studies lies in his thesis about how the reviled art of the theatre, which has been pilloried for so many centuries, can function as a paradigm for authenticity. He cites Artaud and Grotowski as examples of two iconic figures that view the theatre as a sacred space that facilitates ‘close encounters of the authentic kind (George 361).George attempts to rescue an authentic core identity, which he perceives to be under siege from the likes of Goffman, who proffers an “onion” model of the self. In George’s reading, Goffman produces a self without an essential, authentic core. This is hardly surprising given Goffman’s background. As an advocate of symbolic interactionism, a school of sociology that proposes that the self is produced as a result of various acts of socialisation, Goffman’s dramaturgical account of the self reinforces George Herbert Mead’s belief that “when a self does appear it always involves an experience of another; there could not be an experience of the self simply by itself” (195).Dexter not only dramatises this self/other dynamic, but also underscores the extent to which we, to use the terminology of Benita Luckmann, inhabit a series of “small life-worlds.” In other words, we lead a series of part-time lives in part-time worlds—modern life, for Luckmann writing in 1970, unfolds on multiple stages that are not necessarily connected or operate according to the same regulatory principles. She writes,The multi-world existence of modern man requires frequent ‘gear-shifting.’ As he moves from one small world into the next, he is faced with at least marginally different expectations, requiring different role performances in concert with different sets of people. (590)Dexter must negotiate a variety of different social roles, each with different requirements and demands. He must, therefore, cultivate a professional persona as a blood-splatter analyst, and perform the personal roles of brother, lover, husband, and so on. Each of these roles occurs in a different “life world” and requires a different presentation of self. Luckmann’s analysis of modern life remains compelling despite being written more than 40 years ago, and she raises one of the most crucial questions for persona studies: what “self,” if any, functions as the executive “gear-shifter?” In Dexter, the narrative voice, the voice behind the masks implies such an essential entity—the true, authentic self, which is consistent with Jung’s account of the relationship between self and persona.Despite a welter of critical theory that debunks the possibility of an essential, self-identical, authentic self (from Adorno’s anti-Heideggerean argument in The Jargon of Authenticity to various post-structuralist theories of subjectivity, especially Judith Butler’s conception of performativity) the idea of sovereign self stubbornly persists in everyday discourse. One of the tasks of persona studies must be to examine these common notions of self and authenticity. On one level, most people experience the “self” as something that refers to what we might call a singular sense of being, and speak about when the feel “most like themselves.” For some, the self emerges within the private realm, the “backstage” areas to use Goffman’s terminology (3). Others speak of feeling most like themselves in executing a social role or some kind of professional occupation. For example, take this extract from a contemporary self-growth web site:Are you feeling like you don’t know who you are anymore? Or maybe you feel like you never really knew yourself. Perhaps you’ve gone through most of your life living by other people’s agendas or ideas of who you should be, and are just now realizing that you really don’t know yourself, your dreams, or your purpose. (Ewing 2013)From the Platonic exhortation to “know thyself” through to the advice dispensed by self-help gurus, the self emerges as a persistent, if elusive, trope in scholarly and everyday discourse. Persona studies needs to reckon with the scope and breadth of the deployment of the self. Indeed it is the very ubiquity of terms like self, authenticity, and persona that require genealogical analysis in the Foucauldian sense of the term. This task entails looking for and uncovering the conditions of possibility for talking about the self across a wide range of contexts.In summary, then, I contend that persona studies needs to carefully examine the relationship between various theories of self and the discourse of authenticity, and establish the extent to which Goffman’s apparently cynical account for the self challenges the assumed authenticity of the self in the Jungian paradigm. Of course, there are many other approaches one could take to this question. For example, Sartrean existentialism problematises any simple opposition between self and persona in its insistence that the self is the product of the others’ perceptions of the subject. This position is captured in his famous maxim that “hell is other people.” This is not because other people are inherently antagonistic or hostile, but that one’s sense of self is in the hands of others. Sartre dramatises this conundrum elegantly in his 1944 play, No Exit.Sartre’s philosophy also engages with the discourse of authenticity, which it borrows from Heidegger’s Being and Time. Existentialism, in its many guises, dominated continental philosophy up until the 1960s and popularised the idea of “authenticity” as an ideal, which enables one to avoid the tyranny of the “They” and avoid the pitfalls of living in bad faith. There is a possibility that the nascent discipline of Persona Studies, as articulated by P. David Marshall and others, risks ignoring the crucial relationship between the discourse of authenticity and the presentation of self by concentrating on the “presentational self” as a set of pragmatic, tactical techniques designed to maximise the impact of impression management within a variety of social and professional contexts (Marshall “Persona”; Barbour and Marshall “Academic”). A more detailed and direct engagement with Foucault’s account of the emergence and constitution of the modern subject, as well as with theories of performativity and authenticity that challenge the arguments and verities of Goffman, and Jung, can provide a richer account of how the concept of persona operates today with reference to, say, “the networked self” (Papacharissi; Barbour and Marshall).So, I would like to conclude by returning to Dexter and the question of authenticity. Dexter can never really manage to identify his authentic self—his “gear-changing” core.It’s there always, this Dark Passenger. And when he’s driving, I feel alive, half sick with the thrill of complete wrongness [...] lately there are these moments when I feel connected to something else... someone. It’s like the mask is slipping and things... people... who never mattered before are suddenly starting to matter. (Dexter, “An Inconvenient Lie”)In this speech, he paradoxically identifies his “dark passenger” as the driver (Luckmann’s “gear-changer”) but then feels “the mask” slipping. There is something beyond what he assumed to be his dark core—the innermost aspect of being that makes executive decisions. Moreover, the status of Dexter’s “dark passenger” is unclear in this speech—is he ‘”he self” or some external agent impelling Dexter to commit murder. Either way Dexter questions the motives and authenticity of this “dark passenger” and those of us with a stake in the nascent discipline of persona studies would do well to be equally skeptical about the status of our key terms.References Adorno, Theodor. The Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. Tarnowski, Knut and Will, Fredric. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.“An Inconvenient Lie.” Dexter. Season 2, Episode 3. DVD Showtime, 2007.Barbour K and Marshall P. D. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web.” First Monday 17.9 (2012). 16 May 2014 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3969/3292.Barish, Jonas. The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice. University of California Press, 1981.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.“Dexter.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 1. DVD Showtime, 2006.Ewing, Catherine. ‘Do You Feel Like a Stranger to Yourself?’ 17 April 2014 ‹ http://reawakenyourdreamer.com/2013/09/feel-like-stranger/ ›.Foucault, Michel. “About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth.” Political Theory (1993): 198-227.George, David E.R. “Letter to a Poor Actor.” New Theatre Quarterly 2.8 (1986): 352-362.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson. London: Blackwell, 2006.Jung, Carl. Collected Works 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 4. DVD Showtime, 2006.Luckmann, Benita. “The Small Life-Worlds of Modern Man.” Social Research 37.4 (1970): 580-596.Lyman, S. M., and Scott, M. B. The Drama of Social Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Presss, 1975.Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15 (2014): 153-170.Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.Papacharissi, Zizi (ed.). A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.“persona, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. 12 April 2014.“Popping Cherry.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 3. DVD Showtime, 2006.Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1989.“self, pron., adj., and n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. 13 April 2014.Tyree, J.M. “Spatter Pattern.” Film Quarterly 62.1 (2008): 82-85.