Journal articles on the topic 'Multi-party conversations'

The paper discusses cases in which referents that have not been mentioned previously are assessed without any overt mention of those referents but are rather made accessible through multimodal means, which are finely calibrated with what else is going on in the conversation. The authors suggest that the cases discussed raise important questions about reference and referentiality. The data are multiperson conversations in Italian and Finnish.

Entrainment is the propensity of speakers to begin behaving like one another in conversation. While most entrainment studies have focused on dyadic interactions, researchers have also started to investigate multi-party conversations. In these studies, multi-party entrainment has typically been estimated by averaging the pairs' entrainment values or by averaging individuals' entrainment to the group. While such multi-party measures utilize the strength of dyadic entrainment, they have not yet exploited different aspects of the dynamics of entrainment relations in multi-party groups. In this paper, utilizing an existing pairwise asymmetric entrainment measure, we propose a novel graph-based vector representation of multi-party entrainment that incorporates both strength and dynamics of pairwise entrainment relations. The proposed kernel approach and weakly-supervised representation learning method show promising results at the downstream task of predicting team outcomes. Also, examining the embedding, we found interesting information about the dynamics of the entrainment relations. For example, teams with more influential members have more process conflict.

In this paper, we discuss the efforts underway at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in understanding the dynamics of multi-party discourse across a number of communication modalities, such as email, instant messaging traffic and meeting data. Two prototype systems are discussed. The Conversation Analysis Tool (ChAT) is an experimental test-bed for the development of computational linguistic components and enables users to easily identify topics or persons of interest within multi-party conversations, including who talked to whom, when, the entities that were discussed, etc. The Retrospective Analysis of Communication Events (RACE) prototype, leveraging many of the ChAT components, is an application built specifically for knowledge workers and focuses on merging different types of communication data so that the underlying message can be discovered in an efficient, timely fashion.

This report describes the workshop on Supporting and Understanding of (multi-party) conversational Dialogues (SUD) organized as a part of the Web Search and Data Mining conference (WSDM) 2021. The aim of SUD workshop was to encourage researchers to investigate automated methods to analyze and understand conversations. We also discuss the release of a dataset that would be useful in IR research on conversations. The dataset was constructed to support the data challenge in SUD workshop and its precursor event - the Retrieval from Conversational Dialogues (RCD) track at the Forum of Information Retrieval and Evaluation (FIRE) 2020.

Using the methodology of conversation analysis to examine audio-recorded multi-party conversations between a Swedish-/Farsi-speaking resident and multilingual staff in a Swedish residential home, this article describes a practice for establishing shared understanding by one caregiver enacting the role of language broker. The focus is on caregiving settings where caregivers assist an elderly person with her personal hygiene. We demonstrate how brokering is used to (1) maintain the conversational flow in a small talk sequence and (2) address the contents in the resident’s complaints. The article thus advances our understanding of language brokering as an activity that multilingual staff in a linguistically asymmetrical workplace setting take on to assist a colleague in performing client-oriented activities.

With Conversation Analysis (CA) insights, this paper examines the textbooks used to teach oral English communication to Thai EFL learners in secondary schools. In an attempt to raise the awareness of features of naturally-occurring conversation and help increase the learners’ exposure to these features, two textbook series, hereafter A and B, were purposively sampled for a close examination of their model conversations and related exercises. Six textbooks, three from each series, were obtained from secondary school teachers voluntarily joining a CA-informed English conversation-teaching workshop in lower southern Thailand. The findings showed that textbook series A contains action-driven, function-based communicative content, whereas B is theme/situation-based, being organized around topics or events likely faced by learners in daily life. Both textbook series put more focus on face-to-face dialogues, offering a significantly smaller number of phone and multi-party conversations. The model conversations in both series are presented with punctuation symbols of written language and without any representations of spoken language features such as stress and intonation. Some of the conversations in series B are sequentially incomplete, and while offering students conversations with various types of action sequences, both series can integrate more opening and closing sequences as well as sequences with dispreferred responses into their model conversations. To raise learners’ awareness of features of natural conversation, more instances of repair and overlap may also be integrated into both audio and printed materials. Finally, to achieve the communicative unit goal, more scaffolding exercises can be provided to allow students to practice not only word and sentence pronunciation in isolation, but in relation to achieving a particular interactional goal via the construction of turns in more manageable, meaningful sequences.

Affect detection from open-ended virtual improvisational contexts is a challenging task. To achieve this research goal, the authors developed an intelligent agent which was able to engage in virtual improvisation and perform sentence-level affect detection from user inputs. This affect detection development was efficient for the improvisational inputs with strong emotional indicators. However, it can also be fooled by the diversity of emotional expressions such as expressions with weak or no affect indicators or metaphorical affective inputs. Moreover, since the improvisation often involves multi-party conversations with several threads of discussions happening simultaneously, the previous development was unable to identify the different discussion contexts and the most intended audiences to inform affect detection. Therefore, in this paper, the authors employ latent semantic analysis to find the underlying semantic structures of the emotional expressions and identify topic themes and target audiences especially for those inputs without strong affect indicators to improve affect detection performance. They also discuss how such semantic interpretation of dialog contexts is used to identify metaphorical phenomena. Initial exploration on affect detection from gestures is also discussed to interpret users’ experience of using the system and provide an extra channel to detect affect embedded in the virtual improvisation. Their work contributes to the journal themes on affect sensing from text, semantic-based dialogue processing and emotional gesture recognition.

The interactive scenarios realized in the two prototypes of Virtual Human require an approach that allows humans and virtual characters to interact naturally and flexibly. In this article we present how the autonomous control of the virtual characters and the interpretation of user interactions is realized in the Conversational Dialogue Engine (CDE) framework. For each virtual and real interlocutor one CDE is responsible for dialogue processing. We will introduce the knowledge needed for the CDE-approach and present the modules of a CDE. The real-time requirement resulted in the integrated processing of deliberative and reactive processing, which is needed, e.g., to generate an appropriate nonverbal behavior of virtual characters.

An ethnographic document of 'objet trouvé' nature was the starting point for this study: a school diary in two volumes, co-authored by two Dutch teenage girls in the early seventies, mostly during classes-in-progress. This lively collection of fieldnotes (texts, drawings, shrieks, written conversations) constructs an insider-relevant representation of what school is like, from class-to-class, day-to-day, year-to-year. The existence of this collusive document is itself a comment on our assumptions of what goes on in classrooms, what is heard and not heard, seen and not seen. I have selected two passages from "The Writ", as the girls called these unorthodox classroom data, that illustrate how current linguistic and educational paradigms, in embracing a 'conversational' view to learning and communication in school, underanalyze the complexity of multi-party interaction in social situations, both with respect to 'the' data that have to be accounted for and the analytic tools they use to account for them (cf. 'Where is the lesson in all this talk'; Van Dam van Isselt, 1995). The relevance of what is said is constructed in highly complex floors and collusive interactional positions (cf. Goffman, 1979, 'Footing'). In the first part of the paper, a refinement of hearer roles is central. In the second part, a different type of data is used: video-recordings of lessons in 'Dutch as a second language', taught to a group of refugee children recently arrived in the Netherlands. A close examination of these data shows that 'utterance that is not talk' is relevant to contexts of early socialization and language production (cf. Palloni, 1994). The main theme of the paper is that a dynamic notion of context is needed: as produced in real time on a moment-by-moment basis by the interpretative work of co-present parties. Two discourse models that partially fulfill these requirements and that could be adapted for the purpose are discussed: the Linguistic Discourse Model by Polanyi & Scha (Polanyi, 1988) and Van Kuppevelt's proposals for tracing the structure of narrative texts through underlying questions (Van Kuppevelt, 1995).

Conversational robots have been used to convey information to people in the real world. Android robots, which have a human-like appearance, are expected to be able to convey not only objective information but also subjective information, such as a robot’s feelings. Meanwhile, as an approach to realize attractive conversation, multi-party conversation by multiple robots was the focus of this study. By collaborating among several robots, the robots provide information while maintaining the naturalness of conversation. However, the effectiveness of interaction with people has not been surveyed using this method. In this paper, to develop more efficient media to convey information, we propose a scenario-based, semi-passive conversation system using two androids. To verify its effectiveness, we conducted a subjective experiment comparing it to a system that does not include any interaction with people, and we investigated how much information the proposed system successfully conveys by using a recall test and a questionnaire about the conversation and androids. The experimental results showed that participants who engaged with the proposed system recalled more content from the conversation and felt more empathic concern for androids.

AbstractIn this article we tackle the problem of multi-party conversation summarization. We investigate the role of discourse segmentation of a conversation on meeting summarization. First, an unsupervised function segmentation algorithm is proposed to segment the transcript into functionally coherent parts, such asMonologuei(which indicates a segment where speakeriis the dominant speaker, e.g., lecturing all the other participants) orDiscussionx1x2, . . .,xn(which indicates a segment where speakersx1toxninvolve in a discussion). Then the salience score for a sentence is computed by leveraging the score of the segment containing the sentence. Performance of our proposed segmentation and summarization algorithms is evaluated using the AMI meeting corpus. We show better summarization performance over other state-of-the-art algorithms according to different metrics.

Abstract This article presents a detailed analysis of (im)politeness in a naturally occurring multi-party conversation and in doing so challenges the theoretical premise of dyadic communication in traditional politeness research. Informed by the classical theories of Leech (1983) and Brown and Levinson (1987), traditional politeness research has largely been framed in the dyadic model of communication, without taking into full consideration the influence of other participants. Following a number of discursive theorists, we propose that (im)polite utterances are not always addressed exclusively at one hearer or one party of hearers. More often than not, the other parties present exert considerable influence on the design and interpretation of (im)polite utterances as well. Our analyses of three extracts of a multi-party conversation from a Chinese dinner table demonstrate that in a triad involving a relational coalition of two participants, the (im)politeness in some speech acts can be extended or transformed in specific contexts. In particular, a compliment directed at one member of the coalition tends to be polite at the same time to the other member; and a criticism between the coalition members may be polite to the third party under some circumstances. It is argued that the extension and transformation of (im)politeness in a multi-party context are culturally motivated and conditioned by the interpersonal relationships among the different parties. The study points to the need for further research on (im)politeness in a multi-party context.

3D virtual humans and physical human-like robots can be used to interact with people in a remote location in order to increase the feeling of presence. In a telepresence setup, their behaviors are driven by real participants. We envision that in the absence of the real users, when they have to leave or they do not want to do a repetitive task, the control of the robots can be handed to an artificial intelligence component to sustain the ongoing interaction. At the point when human-mediated interaction is required again, control can be returned to the real users. One of the main challenges in telepresence research is the adaptation of 3D position and orientation of the remote participants to the actual physical environment to have appropriate eye contact and gesture awareness in a group conversation. In case the human behind the robot and/or virtual human leaves, multi-party interaction should be handed to an artificial intelligence component. In this paper, we discuss the challenges in autonomous multi-party interaction among virtual characters, human-like robots, and real participants, and describe a prototype system to study these challenges.

Secara umum pertanyaan digambarkan sebagai jenis kalimat yang meminta informasi dari seseorang yang dianggap sebagai pihak yang tahu (K+) oleh pihak lain yang tidak tahu (K-) " (Stivers, 2010). Dalam hal status pengetahuan, untaian percakapan pertanyaan dan jawaban dapat secara tidak langsung menunjukkan status keilmuan dari peserta percakapan, orang yang memberi pertanyaan dianggap sebagai orang yang tidak tahu (K-) sedangkan orang yang menjawab dianggap sebagai orang yang tahu (K+). Makalah ini menyajikan sebuah studi terperinci dan mendalam tentang percakapan multi- partai di antara teman-teman, dalam bahasa Indonesia-Bali. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif Analisa Percakapan atau Conversation Analysis (CA). Metode Analisa Percakapan menggunakan percakapan yang terjadi secara alami sebagai datanya dan memperhatikan rincian percakapan secara mendetail dalam interaksi. Makalah ini menyajikan bagaimana peserta menunjukkan dan mengklaim otoritas atas kepemilikan pengetahuan (epistemic) mereka dalam untaian percakapan tanya jawab, yang kebetulan saling terkait dengan urutan lain, yaitu menggoda. Seorang peserta mengutarakan sebuah pertanyaan kepada seorang peserta lain. Pertanyaan ini dapat juga dijawab oleh peserta lainnya karena mereka bekerja di bidang yang sama (ilmuwan). Terungkap bahwa dalam untaian percakapan tanya jawab, peserta berpedoman kepada status epistemik mereka yang sifatnya relative antara satu sama lain. Peserta yang memiliki status epistemik dan otoritas tertinggi menjalankan wewenang dan klaim epistemiknya dengan mengabaikan jawaban dari peserta yang sekiranya memiliki peringkat epistemik lebih rendah dari dirinya.

We investigated the mouth-opening transition pattern (MOTP), which represents the change of mouth-opening degree during the end of an utterance, and used it to predict the next speaker and utterance interval between the start time of the next speaker’s utterance and the end time of the current speaker’s utterance in a multi-party conversation. We first collected verbal and nonverbal data that include speech and the degree of mouth opening (closed, narrow-open, wide-open) of participants that were manually annotated in four-person conversation. A key finding of the MOTP analysis is that the current speaker often keeps her mouth narrow-open during turn-keeping and starts to close it after opening it narrowly or continues to open it widely during turn-changing. The next speaker often starts to open her mouth narrowly after closing it during turn-changing. Moreover, when the current speaker starts to close her mouth after opening it narrowly in turn-keeping, the utterance interval tends to be short. In contrast, when the current speaker and the listeners open their mouths narrowly after opening them narrowly and then widely, the utterance interval tends to be long. On the basis of these results, we implemented prediction models of the next-speaker and utterance interval using MOTPs. As a multimodal-feature fusion, we also implemented models using eye-gaze behavior, which is one of the most useful items of information for prediction of next-speaker and utterance interval according to our previous study, in addition to MOTPs. The evaluation result of the models suggests that the MOTPs of the current speaker and listeners are effective for predicting the next speaker and utterance interval in multi-party conversation. Our multimodal-feature fusion model using MOTPs and eye-gaze behavior is more useful for predicting the next speaker and utterance interval than using only one or the other.

Abstract As social robots become more popular, so arises the need for these social agents to operate in environments involving multiple users. The robot control systems that govern these multi-party interactions require to be evaluated both from the technical and social standpoints. This paper presents the methodology, setup and results for experiment involving the social robot EMYS participating in multi-party interaction where pairs of participants interacted with the robot in a trivia questions game lead by the robot . In total 32 people, 16 pairs, interacted with the robot twice, which resulted in 32 interactions and 64 filled questionnaires. The developed robot’s multi-party interaction system was evaluated both in terms of performance and user assessment. The results show that the robot adhering to human turn-taking social norms reduced the number of occurring conversational errors, which improved the communicative performance from $$51.5\%$$51.5% to $$80.5\%$$80.5%, in addition, it made the robot perceived as more communicative, cooperative and fitting user expectations by up to 3 points on a 7 point scale. In addition, the study on repeated interactions revealed that user perception of the robot is affected by subsequent interactions, which can be of consequence in future experiments. This first impression caused lasting effect between 1 and 2 points on user assessment of several robot’s aspects, even when contradicted by objective performance measurement of the robot’s actual behavior.

In this study, we use a conversation analysis framework to understand the systematic organization of interactions in Periscope live video streams, and its crucial features: (a) the talking heads orientation for the video stream, in common with video-mediated communication; (b) the expectation that the streamer should attend to all messages as much as possible; (c) the ‘loose’ organization of viewers’ responses to streamers’ turn-at-talk, as in multi-party chats. We also identify a distinctive design for streamers’ responses to messages, the ‘read-aloud and respond’ practice. These distinctive features are oriented to the highly asymmetrical communicative affordances of Periscope streams. Without precluding other forms of Periscope-based activities, this systematic organization of talk and messages, coupled with the affordances of the application, favors a basic mode of topic initiation resting on a typical and minimal adjacent pair: viewer’s noticing/streamers’ reading and responding. We argue that the particular salience of this organization of topic initiation may account for the emergence of the dominant kind of use for Periscope streams, that is, the online public exposure of youth to strangers in order to elicit some conversation.

AbstractThis article discusses a neo-Gricean approach to irony, deception and humor developed by Marta Dynel, confronting some of its assumptions and implications with results of experimental research. It is stated that Dynel’s modifications and elaborations of Grice’s original theory of conversation improve its coherence and provide adequate methodological tools for a comprehensive model of irony, deception and humor in multi-party interactions, and also for teasing out subtypes of each of these phenomena. Questions regarding the compatibility of this model with experimental findings concern such issues as the relation of irony and deception to Theory of Mind, and the impact of “humor for humor’s sake” on hearers’ opinions. Although these issues are not addressed in Dynel’s philosophically-oriented framework, they are not necessarily incongruent with her perspective.

Abstract This paper explores the ways in which speakers exchange information about themselves, and the world around them, in order to create an optimal social space in which interaction and engagement may be successfully accomplished. Success, in turn, the paper argues, depends on speakers making communicative gestures that involve the expression of certain aspects of their inner world: their preferences, attitudes, interests, beliefs, characterizations, points of view, values, assessments, likes, dislikes, and related notions that are rooted in how they feel about the world. Drawing from multi-party conversational data, the paper argues that resonance is one of the most productive outlets for the construction of ordinary evaluative/emotive stances. In fact, it is through the social practice of resonance itself that the amorphous and subtle nature of affect and emotions takes shape. The utterances that are selected for resonance, the subsequent resonant patterns, and the frequency in which the pattern is reproduced in order to secure the intended meaning are also briefly addressed in the paper.

AbstractA visit to a Chinese city of any size – looking up at downtown billboards, riding public transport, shopping at a mall – is to be in the presence of a Chinese celebrity endorsing a product, lifestyle or other symbols of “the good life.” Celebrity in China is big business, feeding off and nourishing the advertising-led business model that underpins the commercialized media system and internet. It is also a powerful instrument in the party-state's discursive and symbolic repertoire, used to promote regime goals and solidify new governmentalities through signalling accepted modes of behaviour for mass emulation. The multi-dimensional celebrity persona, and the public interest it stimulates in off-stage lives, requires an academic focus on the workings of celebrity separate to the products that celebrities create in their professional roles. The potential to connect with large numbers of ordinary people, and the emergence of an informal celebrity-making scene in cyberspace symptomatic of changing attitudes towards fame among Chinese people, marks the special status of celebrity within China's constrained socio-political ecology. The motivation for this article is to further scholarly understanding of how celebrity operates in China and to bring this expression of popular culture into the broader conversation about contemporary Chinese politics and society.

AbstractContributing to research on workplace interactions and turn-taking practices, this conversation analytic study examines how people take turns during multi-party workplace meetings. In particular, we analyze 12 hours of video-recordings of faculty meetings at a U.S. school district, and show how meeting participants use explicit apology (e.g. I’m sorry; I’m sorry to interrupt) for turn-taking. The apology carries out interactional work in two ways: 1) it acknowledges that a (possible) offense (i.e. interruption) has occurred, and 2) it indicates that the current speaker will self-select to take and keep the turn. The self-selector produces the apology mid-turn after the turn-initial overlap is resolved and before continuing with her turn. We first analyze cases in which the self-selector uses explicit apology after having begun her turn during the current speaker’s ongoing turn. In most of these cases, the self-selected turn is sequentially disjunctive in that it is not directly responsive to the immediately preceding turn. We then show how the self-selector uses explicit apology when she needs to compete with another self-selector to take the turn. The study findings have implications for the turn-taking organization in meeting interactions.

Different approaches to the analysis of television production - one-dimensional and multi-dimensional, exist. All television products are classified by purpose, format, way, and frequency of display, audience, genre, country of production, by who it was produced - the channel itself, or a third-party production company, whether this project is licensed or original. In recent years, Russian TV channels have been broadcasting a large number of conversational TV programs - talk shows. In the programmed broadcasting schedule of some TV channels, they take about 9 hours of airtime, and this is without repetitions. These projects can also be classified in several directions. A discussion between people on a particular topic, which includes elements of such genres as interviews and conversation, is the main essence of a talk show. The debate is a recognized genre of analytical journalism, but at the same time, many talk shows are also defined as a genre. The theory of genre is one of the most significant theoretical development areas in art history, but no single, generally accepted definition exists. Some people believe that the tasks of modern talk shows are well known. This is primarily a desire to make a comprehensively exciting television program with elements of intrigue from a primitive topic, to attract attention and a desire to form a specific attitude to the problem under discussion. The author has a different opinion on some points. Indeed, any show is based on attracting attention. For such projects, the presence of viewers in the studio became a kind of confirmation of the audience's interest in the topic and the opportunity to include them in the discussion, to achieve social commonality. However, from the author's point of view, greater attention must be paid to the idea what the producer wants to convey to the audience and how he wants to see it in the future, to the content - with what information and in what genre to do the project, and to the understanding in what form/format to make the content. At the same time, it is essential to remember that according to the theory of V.Behterev, the process of making people have a specific emotional state occurs faster and more efficiently than an attempt to convince them with the help of logical reasoning.

Natural conversations are characterized by short transition times between turns. This holds in particular for multi-party conversations. The short turn transitions in everyday conversations contrast sharply with the much longer speech onset latencies observed in laboratory studies where speakers respond to spoken utterances. There are many factors that facilitate speech production in conversational compared to laboratory settings. Here we highlight one of them, the impact of competition for turns. In multi-party conversations, speakers often compete for turns. In quantitative corpus analyses of multi-party conversation, the fastest response determines the recorded turn transition time. In contrast, in dyadic conversations such competition for turns is much less likely to arise, and in laboratory experiments with individual participants it does not arise at all. Therefore, all responses tend to be recorded. Thus, competition for turns may reduce the recorded mean turn transition times in multi-party conversations for a simple statistical reason: slow responses are not included in the means. We report two studies illustrating this point. We first report the results of simulations showing how much the response times in a laboratory experiment would be reduced if, for each trial, instead of recording all responses, only the fastest responses of several participants responding independently on the trial were recorded. We then present results from a quantitative corpus analysis comparing turn transition times in dyadic and triadic conversations. There was no significant group size effect in question-response transition times, where the present speaker often selects the next one, thus reducing competition between speakers. But, as predicted, triads showed shorter turn transition times than dyads for the remaining turn transitions, where competition for the floor was more likely to arise. Together, these data show that turn transition times in conversation should be interpreted in the context of group size, turn transition type, and social setting.

AbstractThis study investigated self-mockery as an exemplar of jocular mockery. Drawing on authentic verbal data, collected in a university dormitory in Isfahan, Iran, this paper examined the interactional functions of self-mockery, and how self-mockery arose and was responded to in Persian face-to-face multi-party interactions. Seven cases of self-mockery were identified in the recorded transcripts of six multi-party conversations. Analysis of the transcripts indicates that self-mockery was performed to fulfill three interactional functions: (i) saving one’s own face; (ii) saving the face of the listeners; and (iii) bringing reciprocated amusement to the conversation. Furthermore, self-mockery was performed in response to either humor initiated by other interlocutors, or the display of humiliation. The results also revealed two interactional functions for the recipients’ responses, including (i) saving the face of the self-mocker; and (ii) bringing amusement to the conversation. By and large, the results indicated that the relative appropriateness of the response strategy may depend on the interactional function of self-mockery that the recipient wishes to fulfill. And finally, the results showed that the self-mockers and the recipients go along with each other’s interactional exchanges to maintain interactional solidarity.

This article offers an analysis of turn-expanding practices with the connective å sen ‘and then’ in Swedish multi-party conversations in which the participants discuss and assess works of visual art. The connective is recurrently used to introduce a turn continuation, i.e. a stretch of talk that is produced after a possibly completed turn-constructional unit (TCU). We identify three types of continuations: same-speaker continuations, occurring post gap or post-other talk, and other-continuations by the next speaker. Some of the “and then” continuations are clausal, syntactically free-standing, while non-clausal continuations have more in common with TCU increments. “And then” continuations specify, restrict or redirect the unfolding contribution while at the same time orienting to a collective interactional project. In same-speaker continuations, the speaker can introduce a new aspect of the established theme or offer an account. Other-continuations can be used to achieve a shift in footing to introduce a somewhat non-aligning contribution. Both grammar and embodied resources (especially hand gestures) are activated in the management of the completion of a prior turn unit, the initiation of a turn continuation and the recompletion of the speaker’s turn. The typical multimodal trajectory is: syntactic completion of a first unit + retracted gesture; link to prior talk and upcoming talk with “and then” followed by the core of the continuation + a redeployed gesture; and finally, syntactic completion of the continuing unit + retracted gesture to a rest position.

Predicting the roles of participants in conversations is a fundamental task to build a system that provides assessment results and feedback for each participant. Various role recognition models have been proposed. Nonetheless, most studies have only utilized verbal or nonverbal features even though people usually express what they think or feel with the combination of language, gestures, and tone of voice. In this paper, we aim to realize a high-performance role recognition model by combining features from various modalities. We design nonverbal features that can be extracted from video and audio data. Then, we construct a multimodal leader identification method that fuses nonverbal features proposed by us and verbal features proposed by a previous study. In our experiments, our multimodal model outperforms the baseline model that utilizes only verbal features. We also conduct some analysis, such as statistical tests and ablation studies, and verify the effectiveness of each modality and feature. In the end, we build a prototype of a feedback system and demonstrate how our study can be applied to the discussion assessment/feedback systems.

Patient participation is a fundamental principle in modern Western health care, but not necessarily simple to achieve. During hospital ward rounds, patient participation is further hindered by the multi-party nature of the encounter: at times, members of the medical team talk with each other rather than with the patient. This article examines patients’ opportunities to participate in ward round conversations when the patient is not the addressed recipient. The data consist of 3 hours of video-recorded ward rounds in a Finnish hospital. Using conversation analysis, we study patients’ practices for getting a turn in different sequential environments. The patients monitor the ongoing conversation and exploit its sequential organisation by producing responsive turns and repair initiations, thus becoming active participants. They also produce their own initiatives, although sequential and multimodal constraints affect their possibilities for modifying the participation framework. The results of this study can be exploited to promote patient participation.

AbstractThe language of place and space has been intensively studied in relation to grammatical characteristics, cross-linguistic variation, and cognition, as well as with regard to further questions central to social anthropology, psychology, and more. With this special issue, we focus on the pragmatic functions of references to places, as observed in informal social interaction. When people make reference to places in casual, everyday conversation, how do they do it, in what situations, and to what ends? We offer the first collection of findings from research on place reference in spontaneous, multi-party speech, with studies based on conversations recorded in the diverse geographic and cultural environments of outback Australia, highland New Guinea, island Indonesia and rural Mexico. The authors explore, from a range of angles, how and why people talk about place, for example, in regard to the vocabulary and grammar that a language has available to categorise space, and how people choose from among referential options in situated conversation to achieve communicative, social, and practical goals.

AbstractDiscourse markers in this paper are examined from a relevance theoretic perspective which highlights their contribution to the process of inference and are considered elements that encode procedural meaning. A total of 24 participants from three Arabic speaking countries: Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt took part in the study. The data used for the study was elicited through two tasks: informal multi-party conversation and structured interviews. The results show how the meaning of causality as a pragmatic variable (Schneider & Barron 2008; Terkourafi 2011) is realized by means of different pragmatic variants. Using a Relevance Theoretic framework (Sperber & Wilson 1986, 1995; Blakemore, 1987), this paper argues that DMs signal pragmatic inferences that are performed by the addressee. The choice of variants is found to be shaped by broad social categories as well as socio-psychological choices made by the individual (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985).

AbstractTroubles-telling and complaints are common in contexts of care for older people and need to be managed by care staff in a respectful manner. This paper examines the handling of an older person’s complaints in multilingual care encounters that involve participants who do not share a common language. The data consist of video-recordings and ethnographic fieldwork in a residential home for older people in Sweden that is characterised by a variety of languages and backgrounds. The findings are based on analyses of multi-party interactions involving an Arabic-speaking resident and caregivers with different levels of knowledge in different languages. We focus on complaint sequences when the resident expresses a negative stance (displeasure, anger, etc.) towards some difficult circumstance. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, we analyse the affect-regulating work through which the caregivers attempt to turn a pressing situation into a moment of cheerfulness and intimacy. The analyses bring to light the multilingual practices that the caregivers draw upon in pursuing this work, such as translating and giving voice to the resident’s complaining.

AbstractGaze control represents an important issue in the interaction between a robot and humans. Specifically, deciding who to pay attention to in a multi-party conversation is one way to improve the naturalness of a robot in human-robot interaction. This control can be carried out by means of two different models that receive the stimuli produced by the participants in an interaction, either an on-center off-surround competitive network or a recurrent neural network. A system based on a competitive neural network is able to decide who to look at with a smooth transition in the focus of attention when significant changes in stimuli occur. An important aspect in this process is the configuration of the different parameters of such neural network. The weights of the different stimuli have to be computed to achieve human-like behavior. This article explains how these weights can be obtained by solving an optimization problem. In addition, a new model using a recurrent neural network with LSTM layers is presented. This model uses the same set of stimuli but does not require its weighting. This new model is easier to train, avoiding manual configurations, and offers promising results in robot gaze control. The experiments carried out and some results are also presented.

The ability to discriminate and attend one specific sound source in a complex auditory environment is a fundamental skill for efficient communication. Indeed, it allows us to follow a family conversation or discuss with a friend in a bar. This ability is challenged in hearing-impaired individuals and more precisely in those with a cochlear implant (CI). Indeed, due to the limited spectral resolution of the implant, auditory perception remains quite poor in a noisy environment or in presence of simultaneous auditory sources. Recent methodological advances allow now to detect, on the basis of neural signals, which auditory stream within a set of multiple concurrent streams an individual is attending to. This approach, called EEG-based auditory attention detection (AAD), is based on fundamental research findings demonstrating that, in a multi speech scenario, cortical tracking of the envelope of the attended speech is enhanced compared to the unattended speech. Following these findings, other studies showed that it is possible to use EEG/MEG (Electroencephalography/Magnetoencephalography) to explore auditory attention during speech listening in a Cocktail-party-like scenario. Overall, these findings make it possible to conceive next-generation hearing aids combining customary technology and AAD. Importantly, AAD has also a great potential in the context of passive BCI, in the educational context as well as in the context of interactive music performances. In this mini review, we firstly present the different approaches of AAD and the main limitations of the global concept. We then expose its potential applications in the world of non-clinical passive BCI.

McDonald, Megan. Judy Moody and the Right Royal Tea Party. Illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds. Candlewick Press, 2018. The multi-volume Judy Moody series continues here as Judy attempts to complete a grade three assignment: create a family tree. Learning that one of her British ancestors was “Mudeye” Moody, rescuer of a prisoner from the Tower of London during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Judy embellishes: the rescuer was a young prince; the prisoner was a princess; she, herself, is akin to royalty, a future Queen. There is, however, a rival for her title, her schoolmate, Jessica Finch. Jessica, too, has British roots. She, too, claims kinship with Mudeye Moody. Jessica’s Mudeye, however, was a rat catcher who rescued his lady from the Tower in the time of Queen Victoria. Unaware that more than two centuries elapsed between the reigns of Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, the two girls decide that Mudeye Moody, the one-and-the-same, is their mutual ancestor. They ally; they are “step sisters.” They will keep secret Judy’s relationship to the rat catcher, but, together, they will stage a “Right Royal Tea Party.” Judy Moody is a domineering child. No constitutional monarch is she; she is a despot, her younger brother the target of her bullying. In both conversational and narrative passages, scatology is the norm. Judy and her friends belong to the “Toad Pee Club.” They meet in the “Toad Pee Tent.” Her younger brother’s Siamese Fighting Fish is named “Prince Redmond the Farter.” It communicates, of course, by ”farting.” Throughout the book, the young brother is referred to as “Stink.” (There is never any adult censure of this talk.) Dubious diction continues in Judy’s letter to the current Queen Elizabeth. She asks: “...Did you ever ride a hinny? (That’s a cross between a horse and a donkey, not a hiney?) … P.S. Sorry if I’m not supposed to say hiney in a letter to the Queen.” (Among its various uses, “hiney” is slang for “buttocks.” It is, as well, a derogatory 20th-century term for a German soldier.) Questions spring to mind as one reads this book: does the writing merely reflect the anal obsessions of children, or does it encourage them? The same could be asked about bullying behaviours. It is also curious that the historical dates of Elizabeth I (who died in 1603) and Queen Victoria (who came to the throne in 1837) are never given. There are natural opportunities within the story to do so: Peter Reynold’s illustration of “Famous Women Rulers” is one such opportunity; the Moody family’s trip to Wolff Castle is another. Of course, if Judy and Jessica discover the dates, they must give up their assumptions about Mudeye; he would have to have lived for more than two centuries to perform his dual acts of gallantry. Are the presumed readers (upper primary, lower elementary school children) thought to be too immature to appreciate this absurdity? Or must they be kept in ignorance lest the contrivance of the plot be revealed? In Canada, school children are taught that the Queen is a constitutional monarch, a symbol of national unity, not a ruler. Because she lives in England, she has a Canadian representative who performs her ceremonial duties. A Canadian Judy Moody might dream differently—perhaps pretending that she is an astronaut like Governor General Julie Payette. While much imagination went into the premise of this book, it lacks thoughtful, well considered composition. However popular the Judy Moody books, this entry in the series is weak. Not recommended: 1 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Leslie Aitken Leslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship included selection of children’s literature for school, public, special and academic libraries. She is a former Curriculum Librarian of the University of Alberta.

After grossing more than $80 million at the international box office and winning the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the international success of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Lives of Others has popularised the word “Stasi” as a “default global synonym” for the terrors associated with surveillance (Garton Ash). Just as representations of Nazism have become inextricably entwined with a specific kind of authoritarian, murderous dictatorship, Garton Ash argues that so too the Stasi and its agents have come to stand in for a certain kind of authoritarian dictatorship in the popular imagination, whose consequences aren’t necessarily as physically harmful as those of National Socialism, but are, instead, dependent on strategies encompassing surveillance, control, and coercion to achieve their objectives.Surveillance societies, such as the former German Democratic Republic, have long been settings for both influential and popular fictions. Social theory has also been illuminated by some of these fictions, with theorists such as Haggerty and Ericson claiming that surveillance models originating in the work of Jeremy Bentham and George Orwell are central to conceptualising and understanding surveillance practices, as well as social attitudes towards them. Orwell’s terminology in particular and his ideas relating to “Thought Police,” “Big Brother,” “Room 101,” “Newspeak,” and others, have entered into popular discourse and, to a large extent, have become synonymous with the idea of surveillance itself. Even the adjective “Orwellian” has come to be associated with totalitarian regimes of absolute control, so much so that “when a totalitarian setup, whether in fact or in fantasy ... is called ‘Orwellian,’ it is as if George Orwell had helped to create it instead of helping to dispel its euphemistic thrall” (James 72).As sociologist David Lyon notes: “much surveillance theory is dystopian” (201). And while the fear, helplessness, and emotional experiences of living under the suspicion and scrutiny of security services such as Von Donnersmarck’s Stasi or Orwell’s Party are necessarily muted by theory, it is often through fictions such as The Lives of Others and Nineteen Eighty-Four that these can be fully expressed. In the case of The Lives of Others and Nineteen Eighty-Four, both use central love stories to express the affective experiences associated with constant surveillance and use these as a way of contrasting and critiquing the way in which surveillance, power, and control operate in both settings. Like many other texts which represent surveillance societies, both fictions present a bleak picture, with the surveillance undertaken by the Party or Stasi being framed as a deindividualising or depersonifying social force which eliminates privacy, compromises trust, and blurs the distinction between the self and the state, the personal and the social, the individual and the ideology. This brings me to the purpose of this paper, which is concerned with two things: firstly, it will discuss these oppositions alongside the role of social surveillance and private lives in Von Donnersmarck’s film. The existing scholarly work on The Lives of Others tends to focus on its historical setting—the former East Germany—and, consequently, emphasises its generic status as a “political thriller,” “fierce and gloomy historical drama” full of “psychological terror,” and so on. Nevertheless, this overstates the film’s social milieu at the expense of the personal drama which drives the narrative—the film is underpinned by multiple overlapping love stories—so my focus is more concerned with highlighting the latter, rather than the former. I am not going to attempt to provide any sort of a comparative case study between the film’s representation of the Stasi and the historical realities upon which it is based, for example. Secondly, much has been made of the transformation of the character Gerd Wiesler, who shifts from “a loyal Stasi officer with an unswervingly grim demeanour” into “a good man” with a conscience—to borrow from Von Donnersmarck’s commentary. I will conclude by briefly addressing this transformation with reference to surveillance and its place within the film’s narrative.The Lives of Others is a film which, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, carries the signifiers of a very specific kind of surveillance. Set in the former German Democratic Republic in the year 1984—perhaps a self-conscious reference to Orwell—the film is concerned with the playwright Georg Dreyman (played by Sebastian Koch), “the only nonsubversive writer who is still read in the West”; his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (played by Martina Gedeck); and the Stasi Captain Wiesler (played by Ulrich Mühe). In his capacity as expert interrogator and security agent, Wiesler is assigned to spy on Dreyman and Sieland because they are suspected of being disloyal, and as a playwright and actress—and thus, persons of social, intellectual, and cultural influence—this will never do. Accordingly, Dreyman and Sieland’s apartment is bugged and the pair is constantly surveilled. Their home, previously a space of relative privacy, becomes the prime site for this surveillance, forcing their “private or ‘personal life’”—which is understood as “the special preserve of intimacy, affection, trust and elective affinity”—into “the larger world of impersonal and instrumental [social] relations” governed by the East German state (Weintraub and Kumar xiii). The surveillance in the film is a “creature of its social context,” to borrow James Rule’s terminology (300). Rule argued that all systems of surveillance are “distinctive of certain social orders” and that their “continued growth is closely tied to other changes in their social structural contexts” (300). This is certainly true of the surveillance in The Lives of Others, which is characterised by effectiveness through totality, rather than technological sophistication. Broadly speaking, surveillance in the former East Germany was top-down and hierarchical and connected with the maintenance of the ruling party’s power. Metaphors abound when describing the Stasi’s surveillance network—it was an “octopus,” a “multi-headed hydra,” a beast of gargantuan size at the very heart of the East German Party-State (Childs and Popplewell xiii). Needless to say, the Stasi was big. Since Die Wende, especially, much has been made of the enormity of the Stasi’s bureaucracy and its capacity to “intrude.” Between 1950 and 1989 it employed 274,000 people in an official capacity and, after the collapse of the East German regime anywhere up to 500,000 East German Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter—Unofficial Collaborators: ordinary citizens from the East German state who had been coerced into spying on friends or family members, or had volunteered their services—had been identified (Koehler 8). This equated to approximately one Stasi officer, informer or collaborator per 6.5 East German citizens (Koehler 9). Put in perspective, there was one KGB agent per 5,800 citizens in the Soviet Union, while the Gestapo—often held up as the ultimate example of the abuses and evils inherent in many secret police forces—had one officer for every 2,000 Germans (Koehler 9).And it is this hydra, this octopus that Dreyman and Sieland encounter in The Lives of Others. Led by Wiesler and driven by suspicion, the Stasi listens in on their conversations, follows the couple clandestinely, and gathers information which may reveal “politically incorrect behaviour” (Rainer and Siedler 251). The reach of the Stasi’s surveillance network and its capacity to collect information is demonstrated through a variety of means—beginning with the interrogation scene during the film’s opening where the scent of a dissident is stored in a jar for later use, to the final coercion in which Sieland becomes an IM. The Stasi in the film consistently demonstrates an uncanny ability to know: to gather information through surveillance, and to use this surveillance to demonstrate and secure its power. As Rule points out: “the ability of any system of surveillance to control and shape the behaviour of ... [those under surveillance] depends very much on the certainty with which it manages to bring information generated in one social and temporal setting to bear elsewhere” (302). Intense “surveillance and potent mechanisms of control are useless” if those under surveillance can simply hide behind closed doors or escape over a wall—so the “system must arrange its boundaries so that both its surveillance and control activities cover a sufficiently broad area” to prevent escape through movement (Rule 303–304). In a total surveillance society such as the one seen in The Lives of Others, there is no “escape” from the Stasi other than death—suicide—which defines many of the film’s key turning points. The surveillance undertaken by the Stasi may be stored in jars in some cases; however, it can also be retrieved to confirm suspicions, to coerce and control, and, ultimately, to further the objectives of the Party State.Despite the Stasi’s best attempts, however, Dreyman is consistently loyal—he believes in the principles of socialism and, to quote Wiesler’s superior Grubitz (played by Ulrich Tukur), he “thinks East Germany is the fairest land of them all.” Eventually it is revealed that the real reason for the surveillance is not about suspected disloyalty to the state, but a personal vendetta by the Party’s Minister for Culture, Bruno Hempf (played by Thomas Thieme), who wants Sieland for himself and is using his influence within the Stasi to bring Dreyman down. The use of surveillance for personal gain, rather than for social “good” proves too much for Wiesler who undergoes a “psychological and political transformation” and begins to empathise with the subjects of his investigation (Diamond 811). Dreyman undergoes a similar transformation after the suicide of his mentor and friend Albert Jerska (played by Volkmar Kleinert)—a theatre director whose life was made meaningless after he was blacklisted by the Stasi. This brings me back to the question of the personal and the social, which forms the fundamental tension within the film and is the basis of this paper. Historically, notions of “public” and “private,” “social” and “personal”—as understood in state-socialist societies such as the former East Germany—revolved around “the victimised ‘us’ and the newly powerful ‘them’ who ruled the state” (Gal 87). Nevertheless, the distinction between the personal and the social—or public and private—has long been a social organising principle and, as a result, has acted as a springboard into “many key issues of social and political analysis, of moral and political debate, and of ordering everyday life” (Weintraub and Kumar 1). The idea of “privacy”—which is often conceptualised simplistically as a “uni-dimensional, rigidly dichotomous and absolute, fixed and universal concept” (Marx 157)—is used as a shield against any number of perceived political, social, or moral infringements, including surveillance, and can be said to be organised around the idea of visibility, where “private” encompasses that which is “able and / or entitled to be kept hidden, sheltered or withdrawn from others” (Weintraub and Kumar 6). The private is thus connected with a life free of surveillance and scrutiny, where people have a reprieve from monitored social relations and the collective self. Privacy is “fundamentally rooted” in a personal life “delineated by private space” without surveillance, and is interlinked with the idea of a “society of strangers,” where strangers are, by definition, individuals who have been denied access to our personal lives and private spaces (Lyon 21). The act of disclosure and the provision of access to our personal affairs is thus regarded as a voluntary gesture of faith and trust—an invitation into the private, which makes our lives—the lives of strangers, the lives of “others”—familiar and knowable. In The Lives of Others it is Dreyman and Sieland who, because of the personal relationship they have maintained in the relative privacy of their apartment, are the “strangers” or “others” the Stasi wants to make knowable. When Wiesler first encounters the couple at the premiere of Dreyman’s play—the tellingly named The Faces of Love—he seems disturbed by the affection they share for one another and for their fellow artists. Later, it is a brief moment of intimacy between Dreyman and Sieland that motivates Wiesler into overseeing the surveillance himself—a decision that contributes to his eventual transformation. Wiesler is disturbed by Dreyman and Sieland’s relationship because it demonstrates personal loyalties born out of private emotions which exist beyond the gaze of the Stasi and, thus, beyond the control of the state. In Wiesler’s world the only true love is social love—the impersonal love of the state—and anything resembling the romantic or the personal is not only unfamiliar, but suspicious and potentially subversive. In Von Donnersmarck’s words, Wiesler has shut out his humanity to adhere to a principle, which he values above and beyond all else. His suspicion of Dreyman and Sieland thus exemplifies how the experience and interpretation of personal emotions is dependent, in part, on social and cultural circumstances. For Wiesler, private emotions are dangerous, unknowable, and unfamiliar. They belong to a realm “which places extraordinary emphasis on the concept of individuality and individual self-identity” in “a society which distinguishes more or less plainly between public positions and personal roles; ... and, perhaps most importantly, [they belong to] a society that grants a high degree of mobility and flexibility in relationships in general, [and] places personal choice at the core of mating and marriage rituals ...” (Solomon xxviii). A society, in other words, quite unlike the one in The Lives of Others. By monitoring the personal lives of Dreyman and Sieland, the Stasi thus collapses the distinction between the personal and the social, the private and the public. Surveillance transforms personal emotions into public information, and it is this information which is later manipulated for the social “good” and at the expense of Dreyman and Sieland’s personal lives. In The Lives of Others there is no separation between the personal and the social, the public and the private—there is only the Party and there is only the Stasi. I want to conclude by briefly discussing the transformation of Wiesler, which is emblematic of the film’s central message about the “capacity of human beings for goodness, [love], compassion and change” (Diamond 812–13). Von Donnersmarck makes this message clear in one of the film’s early scenes, where, at the opening of his play The Faces of Love, Dreyman appeals to Minister Hempf about Jerska’s blacklisting, suggesting that Jerska is remorseful and has changed. Hempf tells Dreyman: “That’s what we all love about your plays ... the idea that people can change. People don’t change.” Hempf is suggesting, of course, that there is no “normalising gaze” in the East German state; that there is only suspicion, discrimination and exclusion. Once you have been identified as “abnormal,” “subversive” or “an enemy” by the Stasi’s surveillance, you can never remove yourself from the category of suspicion—change is impossible. But Wiesler and Dreyman do change, however unlikely Wiesler’s transformation may be. While the film’s style suggest the men are opposites—Dreyman dresses like a chic (West) German intellectual in tweed jackets and horn-rimmed glasses, while Wiesler gets around in stiff Stasi uniforms and grey nylon tracksuits; Dreyman’s home reflects his status as a man of culture and taste, with literature, art, and music dominating the bohemian aesthetic, while Wiesler’s home is cold, empty, characterless, and generic; Dreyman shares a personal life with Sieland, while Wiesler is visited by a prostitute who services all the Stasi men in his building “on a tight schedule” and so on—they share a fundamental similarity: they both believe in socialism, in the East German state, and the utopian ideals that are now obscured under layers of bureaucracy, surveillance, corruption, and suspicion (Diamond 815). Nevertheless, after discovering that Sieland is being forced into sexual encounters with party Minister Hempf, the instigator of the surveillance, Wiesler begins to identify with the couple, and, for the first time, breaches the boundary between surveillance and interference, between social observation and personal intervention. After seeing the Minister’s car pull up with Sieland inside, Wiesler uses his surveillance technologies to alert Dreyman to her return—he rings the couple’s doorbell whilst muttering, “Time for some bitter truths.” Later, after Sieland showers and collapses “in mute despair,” Dreyman cradles her in his arms, after which the film cuts to a shot of Wiesler still listening, but mirroring their body language (Diamond 817). This is the moment at which the film makes clear that Wiesler’s role has shifted from social monitoring to something more personal—he has developed an emotional investment in the surveillance he is conducting and is identifying and empathising with the subjects of his surveillance. Eventually this goes further—he steals a copy of Brecht’s poems from their apartment and reads “Memory of Marie A.” a poem which “expresses poignant longings for a love that is both enticing and elusive” (Diamond 822). By breaching the boundary between the social and the personal, Wiesler undergoes a complete transformation, and his continued interventions drive the narrative and dictate outcomes not only for himself, but also for Dreyman and Sieland. In shifting his role from surveillance to engagement, from observation to intervention, and from state suspicion to personal investment, Wiesler eventually, and in his own way, falls in love. Surveillance is the defining characteristic of The Lives of Others—it is both oppressive and redemptive, sinister and salvational, an obstacle and an opening. It defines both the film’s social setting and enables and impacts on the personal relationships between characters. The Lives of Others brings home the horrors of East Germany under the Stasi—albeit in a stylised and technically accomplished fashion—by emphasising the personal and social costs associated with the corrupt, petty, and spiteful regime through human drama. The ultimate result is a film with a surveillance network that swings between care and control, observation and engagement, with Wiesler exemplifying all of these traits. And while the end result of the Stasi’s surveillance is destructive and despairing, in the words of Von Donnersmarck, it also gives characters “the ability to do the right thing, even in social conditions that seem to eradicate the very possibility of personal goodness.”ReferencesChilds, David and Richard Popplewell. The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service. New York: New York U P, 1996.Diamond, Diana. “Empathy and Identification in Von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 56.3 (2008): 811–32.Gal, Susan. “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction.” Differences 13.1 (2002): 77–95.Garton Ash, Timothy. “The Stasi on Our Minds.” The New York Review of Books 31 May 2007. 7 November 2010. ‹http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/may/31/the-stasi-on-our-minds/›. Haggerty, Kevin D. and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” The British Journal of Sociology 51.4 (2000): 605–22.James, Clive. “The Truthteller.” The New Yorker 18 Jan 1999: 72–78.Koehler, John O. Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police. Boulder: Westview P, 1999. Lives of Others, The. Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Perf. Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Mühe, and Sebastian Koch. Arte, 2006.Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.Marx, Gary T. “Murky Conceptual Waters: The Public and the Private.” Ethics and Information Technology 3.3 (2001): 157–69.Nineteen Eighty-Four. Dir. Michael Radford. Perf. John Hurt, Richard Burton, and Suzanna Hamilton. Virgin Films, 1984.Rainer, Helmut and Thomas Siedler. “Does Democracy Foster Trust?” Journal of Comparative Economics 37 (2009): 251–69.Rule, James B. Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age. London: Allen Lane, 1973.Solomon, Robert C. Love: Emotion, Myth and Metaphor. Buffalo: Prometheus, 1990.Weintraub, Jeff Alan and Krishan Kumar, eds. Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.

IntroductionAlt, or alternative, accounts are secondary profiles people use in addition to a main account on a social media platform. They are a kind of automediation, a way of representing the self, that deliberately displays a different identity facet, and addresses a different audience, to what someone considers to be their main account. The term “alt” seems to have originated from videogame culture and been incorporated into understandings of social media accounts. A wiki page about alternate accounts on virtual world Second Life calls an alt “an account used by a resident for something other than their usual activity or to do things in privacy” (n.p.).Studying alts gives an insight into practices of managing and contextualising identities on networked platforms that are visible, persistent, editable, associable (Treem and Leonardi), spreadable, searchable (boyd), shareable (Papacharissi "Without"), and personalised (Schmidt). When these features of social media are understood as limitations that lead to context collapse (Marwick and boyd 122; Wesch 23), performative incoherence (Papacharissi Affective 99), and the risk of overexposure, people respond by developing alternative ways to use platforms.Plenty of scholarship on social media identities claims the self is fragmented, multifaceted, and contextual (Marwick 355; Schmidt 369). But the scholarship on multiple account use on single platforms is still emerging. Joanne Orlando writes for The Conversation that teens increasingly have more than one account on Instagram: “finstas” are “fake” or secondary accounts used to post especially candid photos to a smaller audience, thus they are deployed strategically to avoid the social pressure of looking polished and attractive. These accounts are referred to as “fake” because they are often pseudonymous, but the practice of compartmentalising audiences makes the promise that the photos posted are more authentic, spontaneous, and intimate. Kylie Cardell, Kate Douglas, and Emma Maguire (162) argue that while secondary accounts promise a less constructed version of life, speaking back to the dominant genre of aesthetically pleasing Instagram photos, all social media posts are constructed within the context of platform norms and imagined audiences (Litt & Hargittai 1). Still, secondary accounts are important for revealing these norms (Cardell, Douglas & Maguire 163). The secondary account is particularly prevalent on Twitter, a platform that often brings together multiple audiences into a public profile. In 2015, author Emily Reynolds claimed that Twitter alts were “an appealingly safe space compared to main Twitter where abuse, arguments and insincerity are rife” (n.p.).This paper draws on a survey of Twitter users with alts to argue that the strategic use of pseudonyms, profile photos without faces, locked accounts, and smaller audiences are ways to overcome some of the built-in limitations of social media automediality.Identity Is Multiple Chris Poole, founder of anonymous bulletin board 4chan, believes identity is a fluid concept, and designed his platform as a space in which people could connect over interests, not profiles. Positioning 4chan against real-name platforms, he argues:Your identity is prismatic […] we’re all multifaceted people. Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror, that there is one reflection that you have, there is one idea of self. But in fact we’re more like diamonds. You can look at people from any angle and see something totally different, but they’re still the same. (n.p.)Claiming that identities are contextual performances stems from longstanding sociological and philosophical work on identity from theorists like Erving Goffman, who in the 1950s proposed a dramaturgical framework of the self to consider interactions as fundamentally social and performative rather than reflecting one core, essential inner self.Social media profiles allow people to use the language of the platform to represent themselves (Marwick 362), meaning identity performances are framed by platform architecture and features, formal and informal rules, and social ties (Schmidt 369). Social media profiles shape how people can engage in how they represent themselves, argue Shelly Farnham and Elizabeth Churchill, who claim that the assumption that a single, unified online identity is sufficient is a problematic trend in platform design. They argue that when facets of their lives are incompatible, people segment those lives into separate areas in order to maintain social norms and boundaries.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson consider identity multiplicities to be crucial to automediality, which is built on an aesthetic of bricolage and pastiche rather than understanding subjectivity to be the essence of the self. In her work on automediality and online girlhood, Maguire ("Home"; "Self-Branding" 74) argues that an automedial approach attends to how mediation shapes the way selves can be represented online, claiming that the self is brought into being through these mediation practices.This article understands alt accounts as a type of social media practice that Nick Couldry (52) identifies as presencing: sustaining a public presence with media. I investigate presencing through studying alts as a way to manage separate publics, and the tension between public and private, on Twitter by surveying users who have a main and an alt account. Although research into multiple account use is nascent, Alice Marwick lists maintaining multiple accounts as a tactic to mitigate context collapse, alongside other strategies such as using nicknames, only sharing posts when they are appropriate for multiple audiences, and keeping more personal interactions to private messenger and text message.Ben Light argues that while connection is privileged on social media, disconnective practices like editing out, deleting, unfriending, untagging, rejecting follower requests, and in this case, creating alt accounts, are crucial. Disconnecting from some aspects of the social media experience allows people to stay connected on a particular platform, by negotiating the dynamics that do not appeal to them. While the disconnective practice of presencing through an alt has not been studied in detail, research I discuss in the next section focuses on multi-account use to argue that people who have more than one account on a single platform are aware of their audiences, and want control over which people see which posts.Multi-Platform and Multi-Account UseA conference presentation by Frederic Stutzman and Woodrow Hartzog calls maintaining multiple profiles on a single platform a strategy for boundary regulation, through which access is selectively granted to specific people. Stutzman and Hartzog interviewed 20 people with multiple profiles to determine four main motives for this kind of boundary regulation: privacy, identity management, utility (using one profile for a distinct purpose, like managing a restaurant page), and propriety (conforming to social norms around appropriate disclosure).Writing about multiple profiles on Reddit, Alex Leavitt argues that temporary or “throwaway” accounts give people the chance to disclose sensitive or off-topic information. For example, some women use throwaways when posting to a bra sizing subreddit, so men don’t exploit their main account for sexual purposes. Throwaways are a boundary management technique Leavitt considers beneficial for Redditors, and urges platform designers to consider implementing alternatives to single accounts.Jessa Lingel and Adam Golub also call for platforms to allow for multiple accounts, suggesting Facebook should let users link their profiles at a metadata level and be able to switch between them. They argue that this would be especially beneficial for those who take on specific personas, such as drag queens. In their study of drag queens with more than one Facebook profile, Lingel and Golub suggest that drag queens need to maintain boundaries between fans and friends, but creating a separate business page for their identity as a performer was inadequate for the kind of nuanced personal communication they engaged in with their fans. Drag queens considered this kind of communication relationship maintenance, not self-branding. This demonstrates that drag queens on Facebook are attentive to their audience, which is a common feature of users posting to social media: they have an idea, no matter how accurate, of who they are posting to.Eden Litt and Eszter Hargittai (1) call this perception the imagined audience, which serves as a guide for how to present the self and what to post about when an audience is unknown or not physically present. People in their study would either claim they were posting to no-one in particular, or that they had an audience in mind, whether this was personal ties (close friends, family, specific individuals like a best friend), communal ties (people interested in cleaning tips, local art community, people in Portland), professional ties (colleagues, clients, my radio show audience), and phantasmal ties (people with whom someone has an imaginary relationship, like famous people, brands, animals, and the dead).Based on these studies of boundary regulation, throwaway accounts, separate Facebook pages for fans and friends, and imagined audiences on social media, I designed a short survey that would prompt respondents to reflect on their own practices of negotiating platform limitations through their alt account.Asking Twitter about AltsTo research alts, I asked my own Twitter followers to tell me about theirs. I’ve been tweeting from @emvdn since 2010, and I have roughly 5,500 followers, mostly Melbourne academics, writers, and professionals. This method of asking my own Twitter followers questions builds on a study by Alice Marwick and danah boyd, in which they investigated context collapse on social media by tweeting questions like “who do you tweet to?” and monitoring the replies.I sent out a tweet with a link to the survey on 31 January 2018, and left it open for responses until I submitted this draft article on 18 February 2018:I’m writing about alt (alternative/secondary) accounts on social media. If you have an alt account, on Twitter or elsewhere, could you tell me about it, in survey form? (van der Nagel)The tweet was retweeted 161 times, spreading the survey to other accounts and contexts, and I received a total of 326 responses to the survey. For a full list of survey questions, see Appendix. I asked people to choose one alt (if they had more than one), and answer questions about it, including what prompted them to start the account, how they named it, who the audience is for their main and their alt, and how similar they perceived their main and alt to be. I also asked whether they would like to remain anonymous or be quoted under a pseudonym, which I have followed in this article.Of course, by posting the Twitter survey to my own followers, I am necessarily asking a specific group of people whose alt practices might not be indicative of broader trends. Just like any research done on Twitter, this research attracted a particular group: the results of this survey give a snapshot of the followers of a 29 year old female Melbourne academic, and the wider networks it was retweeted into.Although I asked anyone with more than one account on the same platform to fill out the survey, I’ll be focusing on pseudonymous alts here. Not everyone is pseudonymous on their alt: 61 per cent of respondents said they use a pseudonym, and half (51 per cent) said theirs was locked, or unavailable to the public. Some people have an alt in order to distinguish themselves from their professional account, some are connecting with those who share a specific interest, and others deliberately created an alt to harass and troll others on Twitter. But I regard pseudonymous alts as especially important to this article, as they evidence particular understandings of social media.Asking how people named their alt gave me an insight into how they framed it: as another facet of their identity: “I chose something close, but not too close to my main twitter handle,” or directed towards one particular subject they use the alt for: “I wanted a personal account which would be about all sorts, and one just for women’s sport” (Danielle Warby). Some changed the name of their account often, to further hide the account away: “I have renamed it several times, usually referencing in jokes with friends.”Many alt usernames express that the account is an alternative to a main one: people often said their alt username was their main username with a prefix or suffix like “alt,” “locked,” “NSFW” (Not Safe For Work, adult content), “priv” (short for “private”), or “2”, so if their main account was @emvdn, their alt account might be @emvdn_alt. Some used a username or nickname from another part of their life, used a pop culture reference, or wanted a completely random username, so they used a username generator or simply mashed the keyboard to get a string of random characters. Others used their real name for their alt account: “It’s my name. The point wasn’t to hide, it was to separate/segment conversiations [sic]” (knitmeapony).When asked who their audience was for their main and their alt, most people spoke of a smaller, more intimate audience of close friends or trusted accounts. On Twitter, people with locked accounts must approve followers before they can see their tweets, so it’s likely they are thinking of a specific group. One person said their alt was “locked behind a trust-wall (like a paywall, but you need to pay with a life-long friendship).” A few people said their audience for their alt was just one person: themselves. While their main account was for friends, or just “anyone who wants to follow me” (Brisbane blogger), their alt would simply be for them alone, to privately post and reflect.Asking how similar the main and alt account was led people reflecting on how they used multiple accounts to manage their multifaceted identity. “My alt account is just me unfiltered,” said one anonymous respondent, and another called their accounts “two sides of the same coin. Both me, just public and private versions.” One respondent said, “I would communicate differently in the boardroom from the bedroom. And I guess my alt is more like a private bedroom party, so it doesn’t matter if my bra comes off.”Many people signalled their awareness or experience of harassment when asked about benefits or drawbacks of alt accounts: people started theirs to avoid being harassed, bullied, piled-on, or judged. While an alt account gave people a private, safe channel in which to reach close friends and share intimate parts of their life, they also spoke about difficulties with maintaining more than one account, and potential awkwardness if someone requested to follow them that they did not want to connect with.It seemed that asking about benefits and drawbacks of alts led to articulations of labour—keeping accounts separate, and deciding on who to allow into this private space—but fears about social media more generally also surfaced. Although creating an alt meant people were consciously taking steps to compartmentalise their identity, this did not make them feel completely impervious to harassment, context collapse, and overexposure. “Some dingus will screencap and create drama,” was one potential drawback of having an alt: just because confessions and intimate or sexual photos were shared privately doesn’t mean they will stay private. People were keen to acknowledge that alts involved ongoing labour and platform negotiations.Multiple Identity Facets; Multiple AccountsWhen I released the survey, I was expecting most people to discuss their alt, locked, private account, which existed in contrast to their main, unlocked, professional one. Some people did just that, like Sarah:I worked in the media and needed a place to put my thoughts ABOUT my job/the media that I didn’t want my boss reading – not necessarily negative, just private thoughts I wanted to write somewhere.Wanting to maintain a public presence while still having an intimate space for personal self-disclosure was a common theme, which showed an awareness of imagined audiences, and a desire to disconnect from certain audiences, particularly colleagues and family members. Some didn’t necessarily want an intimate alt, but a targeted one: there were accounts for dog photos, weight loss journeys, fandoms, pregnancies, fetishes, a positive academic advice account using a Barbie doll called @barbie_phd, and one for cataloguing laundromats around London. It also seemed alts were contagious: people regularly admitted they began theirs because a friend had one. “Friends were using alts and it looked like a cool world;” “my friends seemed to be having a good time with it, and I wanted to try something they were interested in;” “wanted to be part of the ‘little twitter’ community.”Fluidities I wasn’t expecting also emerged. One respondent considered both of their accounts to be primary:it’s not clear for me which of my accounts is the “alt”. i had my non-professional one first, but i don’t consider either of them secondary, though the professional one is much more active.Along with those that changed the name of their alt often, L said they “initially kept private to only me to rant, record very private thoughts etc., have since extended it to 3 followers.” Platforms encourage continuous, active, engaged participation with ever-expanding networks of followers and friends. As José van Dijck (12) argues, platforms privilege connections, even as they stress human connectedness and downplay the automated connectivity from which they profit. Twitter’s homepage urges people to “follow your interests. Hear what people are talking about. Join the conversation. See what’s happening in the world right now,” and encourages people to keep adding more connections by featuring a recommendation panel that displays suggestions next to the main feed for “who to follow”, and links to import contacts from Gmail and other address books. In this instance, L’s three followers is an act of resistance, a disconnective practice that only links L with the very specific people they want to be an audience for their private thoughts, not to the extended networks of people L knows.ConclusionThis article has provided further evidence that on social media platforms, people don’t just have one account with their real name that faithfully expresses their one true identity. Even among those with alts, practices vary immensely, with some people using their alt as a quieter, more private space, and others creating a public identity and stream of posts catering to a niche audience.When users understand social media’s visibility, persistence, editability, association, spreadability, searchability, shareability, and personalisation as limitations, they seek ways to compartmentalise their identity facets so they can have access to the conversations, contexts, and audiences they want.There is scope for future research in this area on how alts are created, perceived, and managed, and how they relate to the broader social media landscape and its emphasis on real names, expanding networks, and increasingly sophisticated connections between people, platforms, and data. A larger study encompassing multiple platforms and accounts would reveal wider patterns of use and give more insight into this common, yet understudied, disconnective practice of selective presencing.Referencesboyd, danah. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.Cardell, Kylie, Kate Douglas, and Emma Maguire. “‘Stories’: Social Media and Ephemeral Narratives as Memoir.” Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir. Eds. Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph. New York: Routledge, 2018. 157–172.Couldry, Nick. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Cambridge: Polity P, 2012.Farnham, Shelly D., and Elizabeth F. Churchill. “Faceted Identity, Faceted Lives: Social and Technical Issues with Being Yourself Online.” CSCW ’11: Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Hangzhou, China, 19–23 March 2011. 359–68.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 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London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.Lingel, Jessa, and Adam Golub. “In Face on Facebook: Brooklyn’s Drag Community and Sociotechnical Practices of Online Communication.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20.5 (2015): 536–553.Litt, Eden, and Eszter Hargittai. “The Imagined Audience on Social Network Sites.” Social Media + Society 2.1 (2016).Maguire, Emma. “Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website.” M/C Journal 17.3 (2014). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/821>.———. “Self-Branding, Hotness, and Girlhood in the Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles.” Biography 38.1 (2015): 72–86.Marwick, Alice. “Online Identity.” A Companion to New Media Dynamics. Eds. John Hartley, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 355–64.———, and danah boyd. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13.1 (2011): 114–133.Orlando, Joanne. “How Teens Use Fake Instagram Accounts to Relieve the Pressure of Perfection.” The Conversation, 7 Mar. 2018. <http://theconversation.com/how-teens-use-fake-instagram-accounts-to-relieve-the-pressure-of-perfection-92105>.Papacharissi, Zizi. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199999736.001.0001.———. “Without You, I’m Nothing: Performances of the Self on Twitter.” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 1989–2006.Poole, Chris. “Prismatic Identity.” Chris Hates Writing 9 Oct. 2013 <http://chrishateswriting.com/post/63564095133/prismatic-identity>.Reynolds, Emily. “Alt Twitter: Where Brutal Honesty Hides behind Pseudonyms.” Gadgette 10 Aug. 2015 <https://www.gadgette.com/2015/08/10/welcome-to-alt-twitter-where-brutal-honesty-hides-behind-pseudonyms/>.Schmidt, Jan-Hinrik. “Practices of Networked Identity.” A Companion to New Media Dynamics. Eds. John Hartley, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 365–74.Second Life Wiki. “Alternate Account.” Second Life Wiki (2018). <http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Alternate_Account>.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.Stutzman, Frederic D., and Woodrow Hartzog. “Boundary Regulation in Social Media.” CSCW ’12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11–15 February, Seattle, USA (2012).Treem, Jeffrey W., and Paul M. Leonardi. “Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association.” Communication Yearbook 36 (2012): 143–89. Van der Nagel, Emily. “Writing about Alt Accounts.” Twitter 31 Jan. 2018, 4.42 p.m. <https://twitter.com/emvdn/status/958576094713696262>.Van Dijck, José. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.Wesch, Michael. “YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-Awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam.” Explorations in Media Ecology 8.2 (2009): 19–34. Appendix: List of Survey QuestionsDemographic informationAll the questions in this survey are optional, so feel free to skip any if you’re not comfortable sharing.How old are you?What is your gender identity?What is your main occupation?What is your city and country of residence?Which social media platforms do you use? Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, Tencent QQ, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Renren, other?Which social media platforms do you have an alt account on? Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, Tencent QQ, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Renren, other?Your alt accountThis section asks you to pick one of your alt accounts - for example, your locked account on Twitter separate from your main account, a throwaway on Reddit, or a close-friends-only Facebook account - and tell me about it.Which platform is your alt account on?Is your alt locked (unavailable to the public)? Yes/NoWhat prompted you to start your alt account?Do you use a pseudonym on your alt? Yes/NoDo you use a photo of yourself as the profile image? Yes/NoDo you share photos of yourself on your alt? Yes/NoCan you tell me about how you named your alt?Which account do you use more often? My main/my alt/I use them about the sameWhich has a bigger audience? My main/my alt/They’re about the sameWho is the audience for your main account? Who is the audience for your alt account? What topics would you post about on your alt that you’d never post about on your main? How similar do you think your main and alt accounts are? What are the benefits of having an alt?What are the drawbacks of having an alt? Thank you!If I quote you in my research project, what name/pseudonym would you like me to use? My name/pseudonym is___________ OR I would like to remain anonymous and be assigned a participant number

Mobile In many countries, more people have mobile phones than they do fixed-line phones. Mobile phones are one of the fastest growing technologies ever, outstripping even the internet in many respects. With the advent and widespread deployment of digital systems, mobile phones were used by an estimated 1, 158, 254, 300 people worldwide in 2002 (up from approximately 91 million in 1995), 51. 4% of total telephone subscribers (ITU). One of the reasons for this is mobility itself: the ability for people to talk on the phone wherever they are. The communicative possibilities opened up by mobile phones have produced new uses and new discourses (see Katz and Aakhus; Brown, Green, and Harper; and Plant). Contemporary soundscapes now feature not only voice calls in previously quiet public spaces such as buses or restaurants but also the aural irruptions of customised polyphonic ringtones identifying whose phone is ringing by the tune downloaded. The mobile phone plays an important role in contemporary visual and material culture as fashion item and status symbol. Most tragically one might point to the tableau of people in the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, or aboard a plane about to crash, calling their loved ones to say good-bye (Galvin). By contrast, one can look on at the bathos of Australian cricketer Shane Warne’s predilection for pressing his mobile phone into service to arrange wanted and unwanted assignations while on tour. In this article, I wish to consider another important and so far also under-theorised aspect of mobile phones: text. Of contemporary textual and semiotic systems, mobile text is only a recent addition. Yet it is already produces millions of inscriptions each day, and promises to be of far-reaching significance. Txt Txt msg ws an acidnt. no 1 expcted it. Whn the 1st txt msg ws sent, in 1993 by Nokia eng stdnt Riku Pihkonen, the telcom cpnies thought it ws nt important. SMS – Short Message Service – ws nt considrd a majr pt of GSM. Like mny teks, the *pwr* of txt — indeed, the *pwr* of the fon — wz discvrd by users. In the case of txt mssng, the usrs were the yng or poor in the W and E. (Agar 105) As Jon Agar suggests in Constant Touch, textual communication through mobile phone was an after-thought. Mobile phones use radio waves, operating on a cellular system. The first such mobile service went live in Chicago in December 1978, in Sweden in 1981, in January 1985 in the United Kingdom (Agar), and in the mid-1980s in Australia. Mobile cellular systems allowed efficient sharing of scarce spectrum, improvements in handsets and quality, drawing on advances in science and engineering. In the first instance, technology designers, manufacturers, and mobile phone companies had been preoccupied with transferring telephone capabilities and culture to the mobile phone platform. With the growth in data communications from the 1960s onwards, consideration had been given to data capabilities of mobile phone. One difficulty, however, had been the poor quality and slow transfer rates of data communications over mobile networks, especially with first-generation analogue and early second-generation digital mobile phones. As the internet was widely and wildly adopted in the early to mid-1990s, mobile phone proponents looked at mimicking internet and online data services possibilities on their hand-held devices. What could work on a computer screen, it was thought, could be reinvented in miniature for the mobile phone — and hence much money was invested into the wireless access protocol (or WAP), which spectacularly flopped. The future of mobiles as a material support for text culture was not to lie, at first at least, in aping the world-wide web for the phone. It came from an unexpected direction: cheap, simple letters, spelling out short messages with strange new ellipses. SMS was built into the European Global System for Mobile (GSM) standard as an insignificant, additional capability. A number of telecommunications manufacturers thought so little of the SMS as not to not design or even offer the equipment needed (the servers, for instance) for the distribution of the messages. The character sets were limited, the keyboards small, the typeface displays rudimentary, and there was no acknowledgement that messages were actually received by the recipient. Yet SMS was cheap, and it offered one-to-one, or one-to-many, text communications that could be read at leisure, or more often, immediately. SMS was avidly taken up by young people, forming a new culture of media use. Sending a text message offered a relatively cheap and affordable alternative to the still expensive timed calls of voice mobile. In its early beginnings, mobile text can be seen as a subcultural activity. The text culture featured compressed, cryptic messages, with users devising their own abbreviations and grammar. One of the reasons young people took to texting was a tactic of consolidating and shaping their own shared culture, in distinction from the general culture dominated by their parents and other adults. Mobile texting become involved in a wider reworking of youth culture, involving other new media forms and technologies, and cultural developments (Butcher and Thomas). Another subculture that also was in the vanguard of SMS was the Deaf ‘community’. Though the Alexander Graham Bell, celebrated as the inventor of the telephone, very much had his hearing-impaired wife in mind in devising a new form of communication, Deaf people have been systematically left off the telecommunications network since this time. Deaf people pioneered an earlier form of text communications based on the Baudot standard, used for telex communications. Known as teletypewriter (TTY), or telecommunications device for the Deaf (TDD) in the US, this technology allowed Deaf people to communicate with each other by connecting such devices to the phone network. The addition of a relay service (established in Australia in the mid-1990s after much government resistance) allows Deaf people to communicate with hearing people without TTYs (Goggin & Newell). Connecting TTYs to mobile phones have been a vexed issue, however, because the digital phone network in Australia does not allow compatibility. For this reason, and because of other features, Deaf people have become avid users of SMS (Harper). An especially favoured device in Europe has been the Nokia Communicator, with its hinged keyboard. The move from a ‘restricted’, ‘subcultural’ economy to a ‘general’ economy sees mobile texting become incorporated in the semiotic texture and prosaic practices of everyday life. Many users were already familiar with the new conventions already developed around electronic mail, with shorter, crisper messages sent and received — more conversation-like than other correspondence. Unlike phone calls, email is asynchronous. The sender can respond immediately, and the reply will be received with seconds. However, they can also choose to reply at their leisure. Similarly, for the adept user, SMS offers considerable advantages over voice communications, because it makes textual production mobile. Writing and reading can take place wherever a mobile phone can be turned on: in the street, on the train, in the club, in the lecture theatre, in bed. The body writes differently too. Writing with a pen takes a finger and thumb. Typing on a keyboard requires between two and ten fingers. The mobile phone uses the ‘fifth finger’ — the thumb. Always too early, and too late, to speculate on contemporary culture (Morris), it is worth analyzing the textuality of mobile text. Theorists of media, especially television, have insisted on understanding the specific textual modes of different cultural forms. We are familiar with this imperative, and other methods of making visible and decentring structures of text, and the institutions which animate and frame them (whether author or producer; reader or audience; the cultural expectations encoded in genre; the inscriptions in technology). In formal terms, mobile text can be described as involving elision, great compression, and open-endedness. Its channels of communication physically constrain the composition of a very long single text message. Imagine sending James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in one text message. How long would it take to key in this exemplar of the disintegration of the cultural form of the novel? How long would it take to read? How would one navigate the text? Imagine sending the Courier-Mail or Financial Review newspaper over a series of text messages? The concept of the ‘news’, with all its cultural baggage, is being reconfigured by mobile text — more along the lines of the older technology of the telegraph, perhaps: a few words suffices to signify what is important. Mobile textuality, then, involves a radical fragmentation and unpredictable seriality of text lexia (Barthes). Sometimes a mobile text looks singular: saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or sending your name and ID number to obtain your high school or university results. Yet, like a telephone conversation, or any text perhaps, its structure is always predicated upon, and haunted by, the other. Its imagined reader always has a mobile phone too, little time, no fixed address (except that hailed by the network’s radio transmitter), and a finger poised to respond. Mobile text has structure and channels. Yet, like all text, our reading and writing of it reworks those fixities and makes destabilizes our ‘clear’ communication. After all, mobile textuality has a set of new pre-conditions and fragilities. It introduces new sorts of ‘noise’ to signal problems to annoy those theorists cleaving to the Shannon and Weaver linear model of communication; signals often drop out; there is a network confirmation (and message displayed) that text messages have been sent, but no system guarantee that they have been received. Our friend or service provider might text us back, but how do we know that they got our text message? Commodity We are familiar now with the pleasures of mobile text, the smile of alerting a friend to our arrival, celebrating good news, jilting a lover, making a threat, firing a worker, flirting and picking-up. Text culture has a new vector of mobility, invented by its users, but now coveted and commodified by businesses who did not see it coming in the first place. Nimble in its keystrokes, rich in expressivity and cultural invention, but relatively rudimentary in its technical characteristics, mobile text culture has finally registered in the boardrooms of communications companies. Not only is SMS the preferred medium of mobile phone users to keep in touch with each other, SMS has insinuated itself into previously separate communication industries arenas. In 2002-2003 SMS became firmly established in television broadcasting. Finally, interactive television had arrived after many years of prototyping and being heralded. The keenly awaited back-channel for television arrives courtesy not of cable or satellite television, nor an extra fixed-phone line. It’s the mobile phone, stupid! Big Brother was not only a watershed in reality television, but also in convergent media. Less obvious perhaps than supplementary viewing, or biographies, or chat on Big Brother websites around the world was the use of SMS for voting. SMS is now routinely used by mainstream television channels for viewer feedback, contest entry, and program information. As well as its widespread deployment in broadcasting, mobile text culture has been the language of prosaic, everyday transactions. Slipping into a café at Bronte Beach in Sydney, why not pay your parking meter via SMS? You’ll even receive a warning when your time is up. The mobile is becoming the ‘electronic purse’, with SMS providing its syntax and sentences. The belated ingenuity of those fascinated by the economics of mobile text has also coincided with a technological reworking of its possibilities, with new implications for its semiotic possibilities. Multimedia messaging (MMS) has now been deployed, on capable digital phones (an instance of what has been called 2.5 generation [G] digital phones) and third-generation networks. MMS allows images, video, and audio to be communicated. At one level, this sort of capability can be user-generated, as in the popularity of mobiles that take pictures and send these to other users. Television broadcasters are also interested in the capability to send video clips of favourite programs to viewers. Not content with the revenues raised from millions of standard-priced SMS, and now MMS transactions, commercial participants along the value chain are keenly awaiting the deployment of what is called ‘premium rate’ SMS and MMS services. These services will involve the delivery of desirable content via SMS and MMS, and be priced at a premium. Products and services are likely to include: one-to-one textchat; subscription services (content delivered on handset); multi-party text chat (such as chat rooms); adult entertainment services; multi-part messages (such as text communications plus downloads); download of video or ringtones. In August 2003, one text-chat service charged $4.40 for a pair of SMS. Pwr At the end of 2003, we have scarcely registered the textual practices and systems in mobile text, a culture that sprang up in the interstices of telecommunications. It may be urgent that we do think about the stakes here, as SMS is being extended and commodified. There are obvious and serious policy issues in premium rate SMS and MMS services, and questions concerning the political economy in which these are embedded. Yet there are cultural questions too, with intricate ramifications. How do we understand the effects of mobile textuality, rewriting the telephone book for this new cultural form (Ronell). What are the new genres emerging? And what are the implications for cultural practice and policy? Does it matter, for instance, that new MMS and 3rd generation mobile platforms are not being designed or offered with any-to-any capabilities in mind: allowing any user to upload and send multimedia communications to other any. True, as the example of SMS shows, the inventiveness of users is difficult to foresee and predict, and so new forms of mobile text may have all sorts of relationships with content and communication. However, there are worrying signs of these developing mobile circuits being programmed for narrow channels of retail purchase of cultural products rather than open-source, open-architecture, publicly usable nodes of connection. Works Cited Agar, Jon. Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone. Cambridge: Icon, 2003. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974. Brown, Barry, Green, Nicola, and Harper, Richard, eds. Wireless World: Social, Cultural, and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age. London: Springer Verlag, 2001. Butcher, Melissa, and Thomas, Mandy, eds. Ingenious: Emerging youth cultures in urban Australia. Melbourne: Pluto, 2003. Galvin, Michael. ‘September 11 and the Logistics of Communication.’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17.3 (2003): 303-13. Goggin, Gerard, and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Digital in New Media. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Harper, Phil. ‘Networking the Deaf Nation.’ Australian Journal of Communication 30. 3 (2003), in press. International Telecommunications Union (ITU). ‘Mobile Cellular, subscribers per 100 people.’ World Telecommunication Indicators <http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/> accessed 13 October 2003. Katz, James E., and Aakhus, Mark, eds. Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2002. Morris, Meaghan. Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: U of Indiana P, 1998. Plant, Sadie. On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life. < http://www.motorola.com/mot/documents/0,1028,296,00.pdf> accessed 5 October 2003. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology—schizophrenia—electric speech. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "‘mobile text’" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (2004, Jan 12). ‘mobile text’. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.php>

IntroductionThe American artist Ryan Trecartin makes digital videos that centre on the self-presentations common to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Named by New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s” (84), Trecartin’s works are like high-octane domestic dramas told in the first-person, blending carnivalesque and horror sensibilities through multi-layered imagery, fast-paced editing, sprawling mise-en-scène installations and heavy-handed digital effects. Featuring narcissistic young-adult characters (many of whom are played by the artist and his friends), Trecartin’s scripted videos portray the self as fundamentally performed and kaleidoscopically mediated. His approach is therefore exemplary of some of the key concepts of automediality, which, although originating in literary studies, address concerns relevant to contemporary art, such as the blurring of life-story, self-performance, identity, persona and technological mediation. I argue that Trecartin’s work is a form of automedial art that combines camp personas with what Sianne Ngai calls the “zany” aesthetics of neoliberalism—the 24/7 production of affects, subjectivity and sociability which complicate distinctions between public and private life.Performing the Script: The Artist as Automedial ProsumerBoth “automedia” and “automediality” hold that the self (the “auto”) and its forms of expression (its “media”) are intimately linked, imbricated within processes of cultural and technological mediation. However, whereas “automedia” refers to general modes of self-presentation, “automediality” was developed by Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser to explicitly relate to the autobiographical. Noting a tendency in literary studies to under-examine how life stories are shaped by their mediums, Dünne and Moser argued that the digital era has made it more apparent how literary forms are involved in complex processes of mediation. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in response, called for an expansion of autobiography into “life writing,” claiming that automediality is useful as a theoretical frame for contemplating the growth of self-presentation platforms online, shifting from the life-narrative genre of autobiography towards more discursive and irresolute forms of first-person expression (4). One’s life story, in this context, can be communicated obliquely and performatively, with the choice of media inextricably contributing to the subjectivity that is being produced, not just as a tool for rendering a pre-existent self. Lauren Berlant conceives of life writing as a laboratory for “theorizing ‘the event’” of life rather than its narration or transcription (Prosser 181). Smith and Watson agree, describing automediality as the study of “life acts” that operate as “prosthetic extension[s] of the self in networks” (78). Following this, both “automedia” and “automediality” can be understood as expanding upon the “underlying intermedial premises” (Winthrop-Young 188) of media theory, addressing how technologies and mediums do not just constitute sensory extensions of the body (Mcluhan) but also sensory extensions of identity—armed with the potential to challenge traditional ideas of how a “life” is conveyed. For Julie Rak, “automedia” describes both the theoretical framing of self-presentation acts and the very processes of mediation the self-presenter puts themselves through (161). She prefers “automedia” over “automediality” due to the latter’s tendency to be directed towards the textual products of self-presentation, rather than their processes (161). Given Trecartin’s emphasis on narrative, poetic text, performativity, technology and commodification, both “automedia” and “automediality” will be relevant to my account here, highlighting not just the crossovers between the two terms but also the dual roles his work performs. Firstly, Trecartin’s videos express his own identity through the use of camp personas and exaggerated digital tropes. Secondly, they reflexively frame the phenomenon of online self-presentation, aestheticizing the “slice of life” and “personal history” posturings found on YouTube in order to better understand them. The line between self-presenter and critic is further muddied by the fact that Trecartin makes many of his videos free to download online. As video artist and YouTuber, he is interested in the same questions that Smith and Watson claim are central to automedial theory. When watching Youtube performers, they remind themselves to ask: “How is the aura of authenticity attached to an online performance constructed by a crew, which could include a camera person, sound person, director, and script-writer? Do you find this self-presentation to be sincere or to be calculated authenticity, a pose or ‘manufactured’ pseudo-individuality?” (124). Rather than setting out to identify “right” from “wrong” subjectivities, the role of both the automedia and automediality critic is to illuminate how and why subjectivity is constructed across distinct visual and verbal forms, working against the notion that subjectivity can be “an entity or essence” (Smith and Watson 125).Figure 1: Ryan Trecartin, Item Falls (2013), digital video stillGiven its literary origins, automediality is particularly relevant to Trecartin’s work because writing is so central to his methods, grounding his hyperactive self-presentations in the literary as well as the performative. According to Brian Droitcour, all of Trecartin’s formal devices, from the camerawork to the constructed sets his videos are staged in, are prefigured by the way he uses words. What appears unstructured and improvised is actually closely scripted, with Trecartin building on the legacies of conceptual poetry and flarf poetry (an early 2000s literary genre in which poetry is composed of collages of serendipitously found words and phrases online) to bring a loose sense of narrativization to his portrayals of characters and context. Consider the following excerpt from the screenplay for K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009)— a work which centres on a CEO named Global Korea (a pun on “career”) who presides over symbolic national characters whose surnames are also “Korea”:North America Korea: I specialize in Identity Tourism, ?Agency...I just stick HERE, and I Hop Around–HEY GLOBAL KOREA!?Identifiers: That’s Global, That’s Global, That’s GlobalFrench adaptation Korea: WHAT!?Global Korea: Guys I just Wanted to show You Your New Office!Health Care, I don’t Care, It’s All WE Care, That’s WhyWE don’t Care.THIS IS GLOBAL!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGlobal Korea: Global, Global !!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFigure 2: Ryan Trecartin, K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), digital video stillTrecartin’s performers are guided by their lines, even down to the apparently random use of commas, question marks and repeated capital letters. As a consequence, what can be alienating on the page is made lively when performed, his words instilled with the over-the-top personalities of each performer. For Droitcour, Trecartin’s genius lies in his ability to use words to subliminally structure his performances. Each character makes the artist’s poetic texts—deranged and derivative-sounding Internet-speak—their own “at the moment of the utterance” (Droitcour). Wayne Koestenbaum similarly argues that voice, which Trecartin often digitally manipulates, is the “anxiety point” in his works, fixing his “retardataire” energies on the very place “where orality and literacy stage their war of the worlds” (276).This conflict that Koestenbaum describes, between orality and literacy, is constitutive of Trecartin’s automedial positioning of the self, which presents as a confluence of life narrative, screenplay, social-media posing, flarf poetry and artwork. His videos constantly criss-cross between pre-production, production and postproduction, creating content at every point along the way. This circuitousness is reflected by the many performers who are portrayed filming each other as they act, suggesting that their projected identities are entangled with the technologies that facilitate them.Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)—a frenetic straight-to-camera chronicle of the coming-out of a gay teenager named Skippy (played by the artist)—was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, after which time his work became known around the world as an example of “postproduction” art. This refers to French curator and theorist Nicholas Bourriaud’s 2001 account of the blurring of production and consumption, following on from his 1997 theory of relational aesthetics, which became paradigmatic of critical art practice at the dawn of Web 2.0. Drawing from Marcel Duchamp and the Situationists, in Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud addressed new forms of citation, recycling and détournement, which he saw as influenced by digital computing, the service economies and other forms of immaterial social relations that, throughout the 1990s, transformed art from a subcultural activity to a key signifier and instrument of global capitalism.Because “word processing” was “indexed to the formal protocol of the service industry, and the image-system of the home computer […] informed and colonized from the start by the world of work” (78), Bourriaud claimed that artists at the start of the twenty-first century were responding to the semiotic networks that blur daily and professional life. Postproduction art looked like it was “issued from a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly” (19). However, whereas the artists in Bourriaud’s publication, such as Plamen Dejanov and Philippe Parreno, made art in order to create “more suitable [social] arrangements” (76), Trecartin is distinctive not only because of his bombastic style but also his apparent resistance to socio-political amelioration.Bourriaud’s call for the elegant intertextual “scriptor” as prosumer (88)—who creatively produces and consumes, arranges and responds—was essentially answered by Trecartin with a parade of hyper-affective and needy Internet characters whose aims are not to negotiate new social terrain so much as to perform themselves crazy, competing with masses of online information, opinions and jostling identities. Against Bourriaud’s strategic prosumerism, Trecartin, in his own words, chases “a kind of natural prosumerism synonymous with existence” (471). Although his work can be read as a response to neoliberal values, unlike Bourriaud, he refuses to treat postproduction methods as tools to conciliate this situation. Instead, his scripted videos present postproduction as the lingua franca of daily life. In aiming for a “natural prosumerism,” his work rhetorically asks, in paraphrase of Berlant: “What does it mean to have a life, is it always to add up to something?” (Prosser 181). Figure 3: Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), digital video stillPluralist CampTrecartin’s scripts direct his performers but they are also transformed by them, his words acquiring their individualistic tics, traits and nuances. As such, his self-presentations are a long way from Frederic Jameson’s account of pastiche as a neutral practice of imitation—“a blank parody” (125) that manifests as an addiction rather than a critical judgement. Instead of being uncritically blank, we could say that Trecartin’s characters have too much content and too many affects, particularly those of the Internet variety. In Ready (Re’Search Wait’S) (2009-2010), Trecartin (playing a character named J.J. Check, who wants to re-write the U.S constitution) states at one point: “Someone just flashed an image of me; I am so sure of it. I am such as free download.” Here, pastiche turns into a performed glitch, hinting at how authentic speech can be composed of an amalgam of inauthentic sources—a scrambling of literary forms, movie one-liners, intrusive online advertising and social media jargon. His characters constantly waver between vernacular clichés and accretions of data: “My mother accused me of being accumulation posing as independent free will,” says a character from Item Falls (2013)What makes Trecartin’s video work so fascinating is that he frames what once would have been called “pastiche” and fills it with meaning, as if sincerely attuned to the paradoxes of “anti-normative” posturing contained in the term “mass individualism.” Even when addressing issues of representational politics, his dialogue registers as both authentic and insipid, as when, in CENTER JENNY (2013), a conversation about sexism being “the coolest style” ends with a woman in a bikini asking: “tolerance is inevitable, right?” Although there are laugh-out-loud elements in all of his work—often from an exaggeration of superficiality—there is a more persistent sense of the artist searching for something deeper, perhaps sympathetically so. His characters are eager to self-project yet what they actually project comes off as too much—their performances are too knowing, too individualistic and too caught up in the Internet, or other surrounding technologies.When Susan Sontag wrote in 1964 of the aesthetic of “camp” she was largely motivated by the success of Pop art, particularly that of her friend Andy Warhol. Warhol’s work looked kitsch yet Sontag saw in it a genuine love that kitsch lacks—a sentiment akin to doting on something ugly or malformed. Summoning the dandy, she claimed that whereas “the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves” (292).As an artistic device, camp essentially wallows in all the bad fetishisms that Frankfurt School theorists lamented of capitalism. The camp appropriator, does, however, convey himself as existing both inside and outside this low culture, communicating the “stink” of low culture in affecting ways. Sontag viewed camp, in other words, as at once deconstructive and reconstructive. In playing appearances off against essences, camp denies the self as essence only to celebrate it as performance.In line with accounts of identity in automediality and automedia theory, camp can be understood as performing within a dialectical tension between self and its representation. The camp aesthetic shows the self as discursively mediated and embedded in subjective formations that are “heterogeneous, conflictual, and intersectional” (Smith and Watson 71). Affiliated with the covert expression of homosexual and queer identity, the camp artist typically foregrounds art as taste, and taste as mere fashion, while at the same time he/she suggests how this approach is shaped by socio-political marginalization. For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the criticality of camp is “additive and accretive” rather than oppositional; it is a surplus form that manifests as “the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products” (149).Trecartin, who identifies as gay, parodies the excesses of digital identity while at the same time, from camp and queer perspectives, he asks us to take these identifications seriously—straight, gay, transsexual, bisexual, inter-sexual, racial, post-racial, mainstream, alternative, capitalist or anarchist. This pluralist agenda manifests in characters who speak as though everything is in quotation marks, suggesting that everything is possible. Dialogue such as “I’m finally just an ‘as if’”, “I want an idea landfill”, and “It reminds me of the future” project feelings of too much and not enough, transforming Warhol’s cool, image-oriented version of camp (transfixed by TV and supermarket capitalism) into a hyper-affective Internet camp—a camp that feeds on new life narratives, identity postures and personalities, as stimuli.In emphasising technology as intrinsic to camp self-presentation, Trecartin treats intersectionality and intermediality as if corresponding concepts. His characters, caught between youthhood and adulthood, are inbetweeners. Yet, despite being nebulous, they float free of normative ideals only in the sense that they believe everybody not only has the right to live how they want to, but to also be condemned for it—the right to intolerance going hand-in-hand with their belief in plurality. This suggests the paradoxical condition of pluralist, intersectional selfhood in the digital age, where one can position one’s identity as if between social categories while at the same time weaponizing it, in the form of identity politics. In K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), Global Korea asks: “Who the fuck is that baby shit-talker? That’s not one of my condiments,” which is delivered with characteristic confidence, defensiveness and with gleeful disregard for normative speech. Figure 4: Ryan Trecartin, CENTER JENNY (2013), digital video stillThe Zaniness of the Neoliberal SelfIf, as Koestenbaum claims, Trecartin’s host of characters are actually “evolving mutations of a single worldview” (275), then the worldview they represent is what Sianne Ngai calls the “hypercommodified, information saturated, performance driven conditions of late capitalism” (1). Self-presentation in this context is not to be understood so much as experienced through prisms of technological inflection, marketing spiel and pluralist interpretative schemas. Ngai has described the rise of “zaniness” as an aesthetic category that perfectly encapsulates this capitalist condition. Zany hyperactivity is at once “lighthearted” and “vehement,” and as such it is highly suited to the contemporary volatility of affective labour; its tireless overlapping of work and play, and the networking rhetoric of global interconnectedness (Ngai, 7). This is what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have termed the “connexionist” spirit of capitalism, where a successful career is measured by one’s capacity to be “always pursuing some sort of activity, never to be without a project, without ideas, to be always looking forward to, and preparing for, something along with other persons, whose encounter is the result of being always driven by the drive for activity” (Chiapello and Fairclough 192).For Ngai, the zany—epitomized by Jim Carrey’s character in Cable Guy (1996) or Wile E. Coyote from the Looney Tunes cartoons—performs first and asks questions later. As such, their playfulness is always performed in a way that could spin out of control, as when Trecartin’s humour can, in the next moment, appear psychotic. Ngai continues:What is essential to zaniness is its way of evoking a situation with the potential to cause harm or injury […]. For all their playfulness and commitment to fun, the zany’s characters give the impression of needing to labor excessively hard to produce our laughter, straining themselves to the point of endangering not just themselves but also those around them. (10)Using sinister music scores, anxiety-inducing editing and lighting that references iconic DIY horror films such as the Blair Witch Project (1999), Trecartin comically frames the anxieties and over-produced individualism of the global neoliberalist project, but in ways that one is unsure what to do with it. “Don’t look at me—look at your mother, and globalize at her,” commands Global Korea. Set in temporary (read precarious) locations that often resemble both domestic and business environments, his world is one in which young adults are incessantly producing themselves as content, as if unstable market testers run riot, on whose tastes our future global economic growth depends.Michel Foucault defined this neoliberal condition as “the application of the economic grid to social phenomena” (239). As early as 1979 he claimed that workers in a neoliberal context begin to regard the self as an “abilities-machine” (229) where they are less partners in the processes of economic exchange than independent producers of human capital. As Jodi Dean puts it, with the totalization of economic production, neoliberal processes “simultaneously promote the individual as the primary unit of capitalism and unravel the institutions of solidaristic support on which this unit depends” (32). As entrepreneurs of the self, people under neoliberalism become producers for whom socialization is no longer a byproduct of capitalist production but can be the very means through which capital is produced. With this in mind, Trecartin’s portrayal of the straight-to-camera format is less a video diary than a means for staging social auditions. His performers (or contestants), although foregrounding their individualism, always have their eyes on group power, suggesting a competitive individualism rather than the countering of normativity. Forever at work and at play, these comic-tragics are ur-figures of neoliberalism—over-connected and over-emotional self-presenters who are unable to stop, in fear they will be nothing if not performing.ConclusionPortraying a seemingly endless parade of neoliberal selves, Trecartin’s work yields a zany vision that always threatens to spin out of control. As a form of Internet-era camp, he reproduces automedial conceptions of the self as constituted and expanded by media technologies—as performative conduits between the formal and the socio-political which go both ways. This process has been described by Berlant in terms of life writing, but it applies equally to Trecartin, who, through a “performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity,” facilitates “a performance of being” for the viewer “made possible by the proximity of the object” (Berlant 25). Inflating for both comic and tragic effect a profoundly nebulous yet weaponized conception of identity, Trecartin’s characters show the relation between offline and online life to be impossible to essentialize, laden with a mix of conflicting feelings and personas. As identity avatars, his characters do their best to be present and responsive to whatever precarious situations they find themselves in, which, due to the nature of his scripts, seem at times to have been automatically generated by the Internet itself.ReferencesBourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction: Culture as a Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lucas & Stenberg, 2001.Chiapello, E., and N. Fairclough. “Understanding the New Management Ideology: A Transdisciplinary Contribution from Critical Discourse Analysis and New Sociology of Capitalism.” Discourse and Society 13.2 (2002): 185–208.Dean, Jodi. Crowds and Party. London & New York: Verso, 2016.Droitcour, Brian. “Making Word: Ryan Trecartin as Poet.” Rhizome 27 July 2001. 18 Apr. 2015 <http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/jul/27/making-word-ryan-trecartin-poet/>.Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. 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Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.Prosser, Jay. “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.” Biography 34.1 (Winter 2012): 180- 87.Rak, Julie. “Life Writing versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab.” Biography 38.2 (Spring 2015): 155-180.Schjeldahl, Peter. “Party On.” New Yorker, 27 June 2011: 84-85.Smith, Sidonie. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.———, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 2010———, and Julia Watson. Life Writing in the Long Run: Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, 2016.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001.Trecartin, Ryan. “Ryan Trecartin.” Artforum (Sep. 2012): 471.Wayne Koestenbaum. “Situation Hacker.” Artforum 47.10 (Summer 2009): 274-279.Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Hardware/Software/Wetware.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T. Mitchell and M. Hansen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

While exploring the virtual world Second Life one day, I received a group message across the in-world communication system – “there’s a griefer on the beach. Stay away from the beach till we catch him.” There was no need to explain; everyone receiving the message knew what a griefer was and had a general idea of the kinds of things that could be happening. We’d all seen griefers at work before – someone monopolising the chat channel so no one else can communicate, people being “caged” at random, or even weapons fire causing so much “overhead” that all activity in the area slows to a crawl. These kinds of attacks are not limited to virtual worlds. Most people have experienced griefing in their everyday lives, which might best be defined as having fun at someone else’s expense. More commonly seen examples of this in the real world include teasing, bullying, and harassment; playground bullies have long made other children’s free time miserable. More destructive griefing includes arson and theft. Griefing activities happen in all kinds of games and virtual worlds. Griefers who laugh at new users and “yell” (so that all players can hear) that they stink, have followed new users of Disney’s tween-popular ToonTown. Griefers pose as friendly, helpful players who offer to show new users a path through difficult parts of a game, but then who abandon the new user in a spot where he or she does not have the skills to proceed. In World of Warcraft, a popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) created by Blizzard with more than seven million registered, if not active, users, griefers engage in what is known as corpse camping; they sit by a corpse, killing it over and over every time the player tries to get back into the game. The griefer gets a small number of experience points; the player being killed gets aggravated and has to wait out the griefing to play the game again (Warner & Raiter). Griefing in World of Warcraft was featured in an award nominated episode of the television program South Park, in which one character killed every other player he met. This paper considers different types of griefing, both in online games and virtual worlds, and then looks at the actions other players, those being griefed, take against griefers. A variety of examples from Second Life are considered because of the open-structure of the world and its developing nature. Definitions and Types Griefing in online environments such as video games and virtual worlds has been defined as “purposefully engaging in activities to disrupt the gaming experience of other players” (Mulligan & Patrovsky 250). The “purposeful” part of the definition means that accidental bumping and pushing, behaviours often exhibited by new users, are not griefing (Warner & Raiter). Rossingol defines a griefer as, “a player of malign intentions. They will hurt, humiliate and dishevel the average gamer through bending and breaking the rules of online games. ...They want glory, gain or just to partake in a malignant joy at the misfortune of others.” Davis, who maintains a gaming blog, describes Second Life as being populated by “those who build things and those who like to tear them down,” with the latter being the griefers who may be drawn to the unstructured anything-goes nature of the virtual world (qtd. in Girard). Definitions of griefing differ based on context. For instance, griefing has been examined in a variety of multi-player online games. These games often feature missions where players have to kill other players (PvP), behaviour that in other contexts such as virtual worlds would be considered griefing. Putting a monster on the trail of a player considered rude or unskilled might be a way to teach a lesson, but also an example of griefing (Taylor). Foo and Koivisto define griefing in MMORPGs as “play styles that disrupt another player’s gaming experience, usually with specific intention. When the act is not specifically intended to disrupt and yet the actor is the sole beneficiary, it is greed play, a subtle form of grief play” (11). Greed play usually involves actions that disrupt the game play of others but without technically breaking any game rules. A different way of looking at griefing is that it is a sign that the player understands the game or virtual world deeply enough to take advantage of ambiguities in the rules by changing the game to something new (Koster). Many games have a follow option; griefers pick a victim, stand near them, get as naked as possible, and then just follow them around without talking or explaining their actions (Walker). Another example is the memorial service in World of Warcraft for a player who died in real life. The service was interrupted by an attack from another clan; everyone at the memorial service was killed. It is not clear cut who the griefers actually were in this case – the mourners who chose to have their peaceful service in an area marked for player combat or the attackers following the rules for that area and working to earn points and progress in the game. In the case of the mourners, they were changing the rules of the game to suit them, to create something unique – a shared space to mourn a common friend. But they were definitely not playing by the rules. The attackers, considered griefers by many both in and outside of the game, did nothing that broke any rules of the game, though perhaps they broke rules of common decency (“World”); what they did does not fit into the definition of griefing, as much as do the actions of the mourners (Kotaku). Reshaping the game can be done to embed a new, sometimes political, message into the game. A group named Velvet Strike formed to protest US military action. They went into Counter Strike to bring a “message of peace, love and happiness to online shooters by any means necessary” (King). They placed spray painted graphics containing anti-war messages into the game; when confronted with people from other teams the Velvet Strike members refused to shoot (King). The group website contains “recipes” for non-violent game play. One “recipe” involved the Velvet Strike member hiding at the beginning of a mission and not moving for the rest of the game. The other players would shoot each other and then be forced to spend the rest of the game looking for the last survivor in order to get credit for the win. Similar behaviour has been tried inside the game America’s Army. Beginning March, 2006, deLappe, an artist who opposes the U.S. government’s involvement in Iraq, engaged in griefing behaviour by filling (spamming) the in-game text channel with the names of the people killed in the war; no one else can communicate on that channel. Even his character name, dead-in-Iraq, is an anti-war protest (deLappe). “I do not participate in the proscribed mayhem. Rather, I stand in position and type until I am killed. After death, I hover over my dead avatar’s body and continue to type. Upon being re-incarnated in the next round, I continue the cycle” (deLappe n.p.). What about these games and virtual worlds might lead people to even consider griefing? For one thing, they seem anonymous, which can lead to irresponsible behaviour. Players use fake names. Characters on the screen do not seem real. Another reason may be that rules can be broken in videogames and virtual worlds with few consequences, and in fact the premise of the game often seems to encourage such rule breaking. The rules are not always clearly laid out. Each game or world has a Terms of Service agreement that set out basic acceptable behaviour. Second Life defines griefing in terms of the Terms of Service that all users agree to when opening accounts. Abuse is when someone consciously and with malicious intent violates those terms. On top of that limited set of guidelines, each landowner in a virtual world such as Second Life can also set rules for their own property, from dress code, to use of weapons, to allowable conversation topics. To better understand griefing, it is necessary to consider the motivations of the people involved. Early work on categorising player types was completed by Bartle, who studied users of virtual worlds, specifically MUDs, and identified four player types: killers, achievers, socialisers, and explorers. Killers and achievers seem most relevant in a discussion about griefing. Killers enjoy using other players to get ahead. They want to do things to other people (not for or with others), and they get the most pleasure if they can act without the consent of the other player. Knowing about a game or a virtual world gives no power unless that knowledge can be used to gain some advantage over others and to enhance your standing in the game. Achievers want power and dominance in a game so they can do things to the game and master it. Griefing could help them feel a sense of power if they got people to do their will to stop the griefing behavior. Yee studied the motivations of people who play MMORPGs. He found that people who engage in griefing actually scored high in being motivated to play by both achieving and competition (“Facets”). Griefers often want attention. They may want to show off their scripting skills in the hope of earning respect among other coders and possibly be hired to program for others. But many players are motivated by a desire to compete and to win; these categories do not seem to be adequate for understanding the different types of griefing (Yee, “Faces of Grief”). The research on griefing in games has also suggested ways to categorise griefers in virtual worlds. Suler divides griefers into two types (qtd. in Becker). The first is those who grief in order to make trouble for authority figures, including the people who create the worlds. A few of the more spectacular griefing incidents seem designed to cause trouble for Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. Groups attacked the servers that run Second Life, known as the grid, in October of 2005; this became known as the “gray goo attack” (Second Life; Wallace). Servers were flooded with objects and Second Life had to be taken off line to be restored from backups. More organised groups, such as the W-hats, the SL Liberation Army, and Patriotic Nigas engage in more large scale and public griefing. Some groups hope to draw attention to the group’s goals. The SL Liberation Army wants Linden Lab to open up the governance of the virtual world so that users can vote on changes and policies being implemented and limit corporate movement into Second Life (MarketingVox). Patriotic Nigas, with about 35 active members, want to slow the entry of corporations into Second Life (Cabron, “Who are Second Life’s”). One often discussed griefer attack in Second Life included a flood of pink flying penises directed against land owner and the first person to have made a profit of more than one million United States dollars in a virtual world, Anshe Chung, during a well-publicised and attended interview in world with technology news outlet CNET (Walsh, “Second Life Millionaire” ). The second type proposed by Suler is the griefer who wants to hurt and victimise others (qtd. in Becker). Individual players often go naked into PG-rated areas to cause trouble. Weapons are used in areas where weapons are banned. Second Life publishes a police blotter, which lists examples of minor griefing and assigned punishment, including incidents of disturbing the peace and violating community standards for which warnings and short bans have been issued. These are the actions of individuals for the most part, as were the people who exploited security holes to enter the property uninvited during the grand opening of Endemol’s Big Brother island in Second Life; guests to the opening were firebombed and caged. One of the griefers explained her involvement: Well I’m from The Netherlands, and as you might know the tv concept of big brother was invented here, and it was in all the newspapers in Holland. So I thought It would be this huge event with lots of media. Then I kinda got the idea ‘hey I could ruin this and it might make the newspaper or tv. So that’s what set me off, lol. (qtd. in Sklar) Some groups do grief just to annoy. The Patriotic Nigas claim to have attacked the John Edwards headquarters inside SL wearing Bush ‘08 buttons (Cabron, “John Edwards Attackers”), but it was not a political attack. The group’s founder, Mudkips Acronym (the name of his avatar in SL) said, “I’m currently rooting for Obama, but that doesn’t mean we won’t raid him or anything. We’ll hit anyone if it’s funny, and if the guy I want to be president in 2008’s campaign provides the lulz, we’ll certainly not cross him off our list” (qtd. in Cabron, “John Edwards Attackers”). If they disrupt a high profile event or site, the attack will be covered by media that can amplify the thrill of the attack, enhance their reputation among other griefers, and add to their enjoyment of the griefing. Part of the definition of griefing is that the griefer enjoys causing other players pain and disrupting their game. One resident posted on the SL blog, “Griefers, for the most part, have no other agenda other than the thrill of sneaking one past and causing a big noise. Until a spokesperson comes forward with a manifesto, we can safely assume that this is the work of the “Jackass” generation, out to disrupt things to show that they can“ (Scarborough). Usually to have fun, griefers go after individuals, rather than the owners and administrators of the virtual world and so fit into Suler’s second type of griefing. These griefers enjoy seeing others get angry and frustrated. As one griefer said: Understanding the griefer mindset begins with this: We don’t take the game seriously at all. It continues with this: It’s fun because you react. Lastly: We do it because we’re jerks and like to laugh at you. I am the fly that kamikazes into your soup. I am the reason you can’t have nice things … . If I make you cry, you’ve made my day. (Drake) They have fun by making the other players mad. “Causing grief is the name of his game. His objective is simple: Make life hell for anyone unlucky enough to be playing with him. He’s a griefer. A griefer is a player bent on purposely frustrating others during a multiplayer game” (G4). “I’m a griefer. It’s what I do,” the griefer says. “And, man, people get so pissed off. It’s great” (G4). Taking Action against Griefers Understanding griefing from the griefer point of view leads us to examine the actions of those being griefed. Suler suggests several pairs of opposing actions that can be taken against griefers, based on his experience in an early social environment called Palace. Many of the steps still being used fit into these types. He first describes preventative versus remedial action. Preventative steps include design features to minimise griefing. The Second Life interface includes the ability to build 3D models and to create software; it also includes a menu for land owners to block those features at will, a design feature that helps prevent much griefing. Remedial actions are those taken by the administrators to deal with the effects of griefing; Linden Lab administrators can shut down whole islands to keep griefer activities from spreading to nearby islands. The second pair is interpersonal versus technical; interpersonal steps involve talking to the griefers to get them to stop ruining the game for others, while technical steps prevent griefers from re-entering the world. The elven community in Second Life strongly supports interpersonal steps; they have a category of members in their community known as guardians who receive special training in how to talk to people bent on destroying the peacefulness of the community or disturbing an event. The creators of Camp Darfur on Better World island also created a force of supporters to fend off griefer attacks after the island was destroyed twice in a week in 2006 (Kenzo). Linden Lab also makes use of technical methods; they cancel accounts so known griefers can not reenter. There were even reports that they had created a prison island where griefers whose antics were not bad enough to be totally banned would be sent via a one-way teleporter (Walsh, “Hidden Virtual World Prison”). Some users of Second Life favour technical steps; they believe that new users should be held a fixed amount of time on the Orientation island which would stop banned users from coming back into the world immediately. The third is to create tools for average users or super users (administrators); both involve software features, some of which are available to all users to help them make the game good for them while others are available only to people with administrator privileges. Average users who own land have a variety of tools available to limit griefing behaviour on their own property. In Second Life, the land owner is often blamed because he or she did not use the tools provided to landowners by Linden Lab; they can ban individual users, remove users from the land, mute their conversation, return items left on the property, and prevent people from building or running scripts. As one landowner said, “With the newbies coming in there, I’ve seen their properties just littered with crap because they don’t know protective measures you need to take as far as understanding land control and access rights” (qtd. in Girard). Super users, those who work for Linden Lab, can remove a player from the game for a various lengths of time based on their behaviour patterns. Responses to griefers can also be examined as either individual or joint actions. Individual actions include those that land owners can take against individual griefers. Individual users, regardless of account type, can file abuse reports against other individuals; Linden Lab investigates these reports and takes appropriate action. Quick and consistent reporting of all griefing, no matter how small, is advocated by most game companies and user groups as fairly successful. Strangely, some types of joint actions have been not so successful. Landowners have tried to form the Second Life Anti-Griefing Guild, but it folded because of lack of involvement. Groups providing security services have formed; many event organisers use this kind of service. (Hoffman). More successful efforts have included the creation of software, such as SLBanLink.com, Karma, and TrustNet that read lists of banned users into the banned list on all participating property. A last category of actions to be taken against griefers, and a category used by most residents of virtual worlds, is to leave them alone—to ignore them, to tolerate their actions. The thinking is that, as with many bullies in real life, griefers want attention; when deprived of that, they will move on to find other amusements. Yelling and screaming at griefers just reinforces their bad behaviour. Users simply teleport to other locations or log off. They warn others of the griefing behaviour using the various in-world communication tools so they too can stay away from the griefers. Most of the actions described above are not useful against griefers for whom a bad reputation is part of their credibility in the griefer community. The users of Second Life who staged the Gray Goo denial of service attack in October, 2005 fit into that category. They did nothing to hide the fact that they wanted to cause massive trouble; they named the self-replicating object that they created Grief Spawn and discussed ways to bring down the world on griefer forums (Wallace) Conclusion The most effective griefing usually involves an individual or small group who are only looking to have fun at someone else’s expense. It’s a small goal, and as long as there are any other users, it is easy to obtain the desired effect. In fact, as word spreads of the griefing and users feel compelled to change their behaviour to stave off future griefer attacks, the griefers have fun and achieve their goal. The key point here is that everyone has the same goal – have fun. Unfortunately, for one group – the griefers – achieving their goal precludes other users from reaching theirs. Political griefers are less successful in achieving their goals. Political creative play as griefing, like other kinds of griefing, is not particularly effective, which is another aspect of griefing as error. Other players react with frustration and violence to the actions of griefers such as deLappe and Velvet-Strike. If griefing activity makes people upset, they are less open to considering the political or economic motives of the griefers. Some complaints are relatively mild; “I’m all for creative protest and what not, but this is stupid. It’s not meaningful art or speaking out or anything of the type, its just annoying people who are never going to change their minds about how awesome they think war is” (Borkingchikapa). Others are more negative: “Somebody really needs to go find where that asshole lives and beat the shit out of him. Yeah, it’s a free country and he can legally pull this crap, but that same freedom extends to some patriot kicking the living shit out of him” (Reynolds). In this type of griefing no one’s goals for using the game are satisfied. The regular users can not have fun, but neither do they seem to be open to or accepting of the political griefer’s message. This pattern of success and failure may explain why there are so many examples of griefing to disrupt rather then the politically motivated kind. It may also suggest why efforts to curb griefing have been so ineffective in the past. Griefers who seek to disrupt for fun would see it as a personal triumph if others organised against them. Even if they found themselves banned from one area, they could quickly move somewhere else to have their fun since whom or where they harass does not really matter. Perhaps not all griefing is in error, rather, only those griefing activities motivated by any other goal than have fun. People invest their time and energy in creating their characters and developing skills. The behaviour of people in these virtual environments has a definite bearing on the real world. And perhaps that explains why people in these virtual worlds react so strongly to the behaviour. So, remember, stay off the beach until they catch the griefers, and if you want to make up the game as you go along, be ready for the other players to point at you and say “Bad, Bad Avatar.” References Bartle, Richard. “Players Who Suit MUDs.” Journal of MUD Research 1.1 (June 1996). 10 Sep. 2007 http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm>. Becker, David. Inflicting Pain on “Griefers.” 13 Dec. 2004. 10 Oct. 2007 http://www.news.com/Inflicting-pain-on-griefers/2100-1043_3-5488403.html>. Borkingchikapa. Playing America’s Army. 30 May 2006. 10 Aug. 2007 http://www.metafilter.com/51938/playing-Americas-Army>. Cabron, Lou. John Edwards Attackers Unmasked. 5 Mar. 2007. 29 Apr. 2007 http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/03/05/john-edwards-virtual-attackers-unmasked/>. Cabron, Lou. Who Are Second Life’s “Patriotic Nigas”? 8 Mar. 2007. 30 Apr. 2007 http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/03/08/patriotic-nigras-interview-john-edwards-second-life/>. DeLappe, Joseph. Joseph deLappe. 2006. 10 Aug. 2007. http://www.unr.edu/art/DELAPPE/DeLappe%20Main%20Page/DeLappe%20Online%20MAIN.html>. Drake, Shannon. “Jerk on the Internet.” The Escapist Magazine 15 Nov. 2005: 31-32. 20 June 2007 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/19/31>. Foo, Chek Yang. Redefining Grief Play. 2004. 10 Oct. 2007 http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:1mBYzWVqAsIJ:www.itu.dk/op/papers/ yang_foo.pdf+foo+koivisto&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us&client=firefox-a>. Foo, Chek Yang, and Elina Koivisto. Grief Player Motivations. 2004. 15 Aug. 2007 http://www.itu.dk/op/papers/yang_foo_koivisto.pdf>. G4. Confessions of a Griefer. N.D. 21 June 2007 http://www.g4tv.com/xplay/features/42527/Confessions_of_a_Griefer.html>. Girard, Nicole. “Griefer Madness: Terrorizing Virtual Worlds.”_ Linux Insider_ 19 Sep. 2007. 3 Oct. 2007 http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/59401.html>. Hoffman, E. C. “Tip Sheet: When Griefers Attack.” Business Week. 2007. 21 June 2007 http://www.businessweek.com/playbook/07/0416_1.htm>. Kenzo, In. “Comment: Has Plastic Duck Migrated Back to SL?” Second Life Herald Apr. 2006. 10 Oct. 2007 http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/04/has_plastic_duc.html>. King, Brad. “Make Love, Not War.” Wired June 2002. 10 Aug. 2007 http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2002/06/52894>. Koster, Raph. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Scotsdale, AZ: Paraglyph, 2005. Kotaku. _WoW Funeral Party Gets Owned. _2006. 15 Aug. 2007 http://kotaku.com/gaming/wow/wow-funeral-party-gets-owned-167354.php>. MarketingVox. Second Life Liberation Army Targets Brands. 7. Dec. 2006. 10 Aug. 2007 http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2006/12/07/second-life-liberation-army-targets-brands/>. Mulligan, Jessica, and Bridget Patrovsky. Developing Online Games: An Insider’s Guide. Indianapolis: New Riders, 2003. Reynolds, Ren. Terra Nova: dead-in-iraq. 7 May 2006. 15 Aug. 2007 http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/05/deadiniraq_.html>. Rossingnol, Jim. “A Deadly Dollar.” The Escapist Magazine 15 Nov. 2005: 23-27. 20 June 2007 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/19/23>. Scarborough, Solivar. Mass Spam Issue Inworld Being Investigated. 13 Oct. 2006. 20 June 2007 http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/13/mass-spam-issue-inworld-being-investigated/>. Sklar, Urizenus. “Big Brother Opening Hypervent Griefed for 4 Hours.” Second Life Herald 12 Dec. 2006. 10 Aug. 2007 http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/12/big_brother_ope.html>. Suler, John. The Bad Boys of Cyberspace. 1997. 10 Oct. 2007 http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/badboys.html>. Taylor, T.L. Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. Velvet Strike. Velvet-Strike. N.D. 10 Aug. 2007 http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike/nonflame.html>. Walker, John. “How to Be a Complete Bastard.” PC Gamer 13 Mar. 2007. 10 Aug. 2007 http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=159883&site=pcg>. Wallace, Mark. “The Day the Grid Disappeared.” Escapist Magazine 15 Nov. 2005: 11. 20 June 2007 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/19/11>. Walsh, Tony. Hidden Virtual-World Prison Revealed. 3 Jan. 2006. 10 Oct. 2007 http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/hidden_virtual_world_prison_revealed/>. Walsh, Tony. Second Life Millionaire Interview Penis-Bombed. 20 Dec. 2006. 10 Oct. 2007 http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/second_life_millionaire_interview_penis_bombed/>. Warner, Dorothy, and Mike Raiter. _Social Context in Massively-Multiplayer Online Games. _2005. 20 Aug. 2007 http://www.i-r-i-e.net/inhalt/004/Warner-Raiter.pdf>. “World of Warcraft: Funeral Ambush.” 2006. YouTube. 15 Aug. 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31MVOE2ak5w>. Yee, Nicholas. Facets: 5 Motivational Factors for Why People Play MMORPG’s. 2002. 10 Oct. 2007 http://www.nickyee.com/facets/home.html>. Yee, Nicholas. Faces of Grief. 2005. June 2007 http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000893.php?page=1>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gregson, Kimberly. "Bad Avatar!: Griefing in Virtual Worlds." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/06-gregson.php>. APA Style Gregson, K. (Oct. 2007) "Bad Avatar!: Griefing in Virtual Worlds," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/06-gregson.php>.

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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