Academic literature on the topic 'Popular culture – China – Sichuan Sheng'

Purpose Food plays an important role in every culture around the world. Recently, cuisine preference analysis has become a popular research topic. However, most of these studies are conducted through questionnaires and interviews, which are highly limited by the time, cost and scope of data collection, especially when facing large-scale survey studies. Some researchers have, therefore, attempted to mine cuisine preferences based on online recipes, while this approach cannot reveal food preference from people’s perspective. Today, people are sharing what they eat on social media platforms by posting reviews about the meal, reciting the names of appetizers or entrees, and photographing as well. Such large amount of user-generated contents (UGC) has potential to indicate people’s preferences over different cuisines. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to explore Chinese cuisine preferences among online users of social media. Design/methodology/approach Based on both UGC and online recipes, the authors first investigated the cuisine preference distribution in different regions. Then, dish preference similarity between regions was calculated and few geographic factors were identified, which might lead to such regional similarity appeared in our study. By applying hierarchical clustering, the authors clustered regions based on dish preference and ingredient usage separately. Findings Experimental results show that, among 20 types of traditional Chinese cuisines, Sichuan cuisine is most favored across all regions in China. Geographical proximity is the more closely related to differences of regional dish preference than climate proximity. Originality/value Different from traditional definitions of regions to which cuisine belong, the authors found new association between region and cuisine based on dish preference from social media and ingredient usage of dishes. Using social media may overcome problems with using traditional questionnaires, such as high costs and long cycle for questionnaire design and answering.

In the last issue (Vol. 29, No.2), there was a mistake in Wai-Tong Lau's article, “Songs Tied onto the Chariot—Revolutionary Songs of the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–1976)” on page 106. JHRME regrets the inaccuracies. The corrected paragraph reads as follows: A number of revolutionary songs of the Cultural Revolution are written in the musical styles of the Chinese minorities. “The Great Beijing” (Wei Da De Beijing by Nu Er Mai Mai Ti), a song written by a Xinjiang composer, was very popular during the Cultural Revolution. This song is filled with syncopated rhythm typical of the Xinjiang minority dances. Another classic revolutionary song of the Cultural Revolution, “A Song within My Heart for the People's Liberation Army” (Wo Xin Zhong De Ge Xian Gei Jie Fang Jun by Chang Liuzhu), composed by a Han composer, is written with rhythmic patterns characteristic of the Tibetan dances. Other similar songs are one for the Bei Minority, “Never-Ending Singing of the Zhan Mountain” (Zhan Shan Ge Sheng Yong Bu Luo by Zhang Wen); one for the Korean minority, “Yanbian People Love Chairman Mao” (Yanbian Ren Ming Re Ai Mao Zhu Xi by Jin Fenghao); one for the Zhuang minority, “Zhuang People Sing for Chairman Mao” (Zhaung Zu Ren Ming Ge Chang Mao Zhu Xi by the Creation Group of the Department of Culture of Guangxi Zhaung Autonomous Region); and one for the Wa minority, “Ah Wa People Sing New Songs” (Ah Wa Ren Ming Chang in Ge by Yang Zhengren). These revolutionary songs of the minorities enriched the genre of revolutionary songs of the Cultural Revolution with a variety of rhythmic and tonal idioms different from those of the mainstream Han music.

Loropetalum chinense var. rubrum (Chinese Fringe Flower) is widely distributed in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, as well as northern India. It is a popular landscape plant for its red evergreen foliage and its showy red flowers in the spring. In July 2020, This leaf blight was discovered in Chengdu city (30°42＇41＂N, 103°51＇58＂E). In June 2021, the disease incidence rate at two places in Wenjiang District of Chengdu was 76% and 64%, respectively. The symptoms began to appear from May to June, worsened from July to August, and then disappeared gradually in November. Initially, brown-edged irregular necrotic patches appeared at the leaf margins. Progressively, the patches increased in number, expanded to leaf middle, and turned grayish-white. The scattered black fruiting bodies (conidia) were appeared at patches under humid conditions. Eventually, the leaves tended to dry up and fall off. Infected tissues from five samples and collected were cut into small pieces 2×2 mm, surface sterilized for 30 s in 3% sodium hypochlorite, 60 s in 75% ethanol, rinsed three times in sterile water, placed onto potato dextrose agar (PDA), and incubated at 25℃ in the dark. A total of eight isolates were collected, five isolates exhibited similar culture characteristics while two were Nigrospora sp. and one was a Fusarium sp.. The five similar isolates produced sparse, grayish-withe mycelia with a flat elevation and curled margin. Abundant globose and yellow pycnidia were formed on the PDA surface and arranged in irregular concentric zones. Conidia were 18.20 to 22.36 × 2.64 to 3.05 μm (average 20.36 × 2.82 μm, n=50) in size, fusiform, sickle-shaped, aseptate. DNA was extracted from the representative strain (HMcj B03), and the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region, the large subunit of the nuclear ribosomal DNA (LSU), translation elongation factor 1-alpha (tef1-α), and the DNA-directed RNA polymerase II second largest subunit (rpb2), were amplified by polymerase chain reaction and sequenced with primers ITS1/ITS4 (White et al. 1990), LR0R/LR7 (Rehner and Samuels 1994; Vilaglys and Hester 1990), 728F/986R (Carbome and Kohn 1999), and 5F2/7cR (Alvarez et al. 2016), respectively. The sequences were deposited in GenBank, viz. OL468959, OL469170, OL489770, and OL855833, respectively. BLAST analysis showed >98.7% identity with several reference sequences of Coniella koreana strain CBS 143.97 and Coniella quercicola strain CBS 904.69, deposited in GenBank. A conidial suspension (1 × 107 conidia/mL) having 0.05% Tween 80 buffer was used for foliar inoculation of 6-year-old Loropetalum chinense var. rubrum plants for pathogenicity test. Ten leaves of each plant (10 pots in total) were inoculated with spore suspensions (20 μL onto the wounded sites). An equal number of control leaves were sprayed with 0.05% Tween 80 buffer to serve as a control. The experiment was repeated three times, and all plants were incubated in a growth chamber (a 12h light and 12h dark period, 25°C, RH > 80%). Twenty days later, all the inoculated leaves showed similar symptoms as the original diseased plants, however, the controls remained asymptomatic. The C. koreana was re-isolated from the infected leaves. To our knowledge, this is the first report of L. chinense var. rubrum caused by C. koreana in China. The discovery of this new disease will provide useful information for developing effective control strategies, and prove beneficial in reducing economic losses in floral product.

Introduction The highly contagious COVID-19 virus has presented particularly difficult public policy challenges. The relatively late emergence of an effective treatments and vaccines, the structural stresses on health care systems, the lockdowns and the economic dislocations, the evident structural inequalities in effected societies, as well as the difficulty of prevention have tested social and political cohesion. Moreover, the intrusive nature of many prophylactic measures have led to individual liberty and human rights concerns. As noted by the Victorian (Australia) Ombudsman Report on the COVID-19 lockdown in Melbourne, we may be tempted, during a crisis, to view human rights as expendable in the pursuit of saving human lives. This thinking can lead to dangerous territory. It is not unlawful to curtail fundamental rights and freedoms when there are compelling reasons for doing so; human rights are inherently and inseparably a consideration of human lives. (5) These difficulties have raised issues about the importance of social or community capital in fighting the pandemic. This article discusses the impacts of social and community capital and other factors on the governmental efforts to combat the spread of infectious disease through the maintenance of social distancing and household ‘bubbles’. It argues that the beneficial effects of social and community capital towards fighting the pandemic, such as mutual respect and empathy, which underpins such public health measures as social distancing, the use of personal protective equipment, and lockdowns in the USA, have been undermined as preventive measures because they have been transmogrified to become a salient aspect of the “culture wars” (Peters). In contrast, states that have relatively lower social capital such a China have been able to more effectively arrest transmission of the disease because the government was been able to generate and personify a nationalist response to the virus and thus generate a more robust social consensus regarding the efforts to combat the disease. Social Capital and Culture Wars The response to COVID-19 required individuals, families, communities, and other types of groups to refrain from extensive interaction – to stay in their bubble. In these situations, especially given the asymptomatic nature of many COVID-19 infections and the serious imposition lockdowns and social distancing and isolation, the temptation for individuals to breach public health rules in high. From the perspective of policymakers, the response to fighting COVID-19 is a collective action problem. In studying collective action problems, scholars have paid much attention on the role of social and community capital (Ostrom and Ahn 17-35). Ostrom and Ahn comment that social capital “provides a synthesizing approach to how cultural, social, and institutional aspects of communities of various sizes jointly affect their capacity of dealing with collective-action problems” (24). Social capital is regarded as an evolving social type of cultural trait (Fukuyama; Guiso et al.). Adger argues that social capital “captures the nature of social relations” and “provides an explanation for how individuals use their relationships to other actors in societies for their own and for the collective good” (387). The most frequently used definition of social capital is the one proffered by Putnam who regards it as “features of social organization, such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Putnam, “Bowling Alone” 65). All these studies suggest that social and community capital has at least two elements: “objective associations” and subjective ties among individuals. Objective associations, or social networks, refer to both formal and informal associations that are formed and engaged in on a voluntary basis by individuals and social groups. Subjective ties or norms, on the other hand, primarily stand for trust and reciprocity (Paxton). High levels of social capital have generally been associated with democratic politics and civil societies whose institutional performance benefits from the coordinated actions and civic culture that has been facilitated by high levels of social capital (Putnam, Democracy 167-9). Alternatively, a “good and fair” state and impartial institutions are important factors in generating and preserving high levels of social capital (Offe 42-87). Yet social capital is not limited to democratic civil societies and research is mixed on whether rising social capital manifests itself in a more vigorous civil society that in turn leads to democratising impulses. Castillo argues that various trust levels for institutions that reinforce submission, hierarchy, and cultural conservatism can be high in authoritarian governments, indicating that high levels of social capital do not necessarily lead to democratic civic societies (Castillo et al.). Roßteutscher concludes after a survey of social capita indicators in authoritarian states that social capital has little effect of democratisation and may in fact reinforce authoritarian rule: in nondemocratic contexts, however, it appears to throw a spanner in the works of democratization. Trust increases the stability of nondemocratic leaderships by generating popular support, by suppressing regime threatening forms of protest activity, and by nourishing undemocratic ideals concerning governance (752). In China, there has been ongoing debate concerning the presence of civil society and the level of social capital found across Chinese society. If one defines civil society as an intermediate associational realm between the state and the family, populated by autonomous organisations which are separate from the state that are formed voluntarily by members of society to protect or extend their interests or values, it is arguable that the PRC had a significant civil society or social capital in the first few decades after its establishment (White). However, most scholars agree that nascent civil society as well as a more salient social and community capital has emerged in China’s reform era. This was evident after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, where the government welcomed community organising and community-driven donation campaigns for a limited period of time, giving the NGO sector and bottom-up social activism a boost, as evidenced in various policy areas such as disaster relief and rural community development (F. Wu 126; Xu 9). Nevertheless, the CCP and the Chinese state have been effective in maintaining significant control over civil society and autonomous groups without attempting to completely eliminate their autonomy or existence. The dramatic economic and social changes that have occurred since the 1978 Opening have unsurprisingly engendered numerous conflicts across the society. In response, the CCP and State have adjusted political economic policies to meet the changing demands of workers, migrants, the unemployed, minorities, farmers, local artisans, entrepreneurs, and the growing middle class. Often the demands arising from these groups have resulted in policy changes, including compensation. In other circumstances, where these groups remain dissatisfied, the government will tolerate them (ignore them but allow them to continue in the advocacy), or, when the need arises, supress the disaffected groups (F. Wu 2). At the same time, social organisations and other groups in civil society have often “refrained from open and broad contestation against the regime”, thereby gaining the space and autonomy to achieve the objectives (F. Wu 2). Studies of Chinese social or community capital suggest that a form of modern social capital has gradually emerged as Chinese society has become increasingly modernised and liberalised (despite being non-democratic), and that this social capital has begun to play an important role in shaping social and economic lives at the local level. However, this more modern form of social capital, arising from developmental and social changes, competes with traditional social values and social capital, which stresses parochial and particularistic feelings among known individuals while modern social capital emphasises general trust and reciprocal feelings among both known and unknown individuals. The objective element of these traditional values are those government-sanctioned, formal mass organisations such as Communist Youth and the All-China Federation of Women's Associations, where members are obliged to obey the organisation leadership. The predominant subjective values are parochial and particularistic feelings among individuals who know one another, such as guanxi and zongzu (Chen and Lu, 426). The concept of social capital emphasises that the underlying cooperative values found in individuals and groups within a culture are an important factor in solving collective problems. In contrast, the notion of “culture war” focusses on those values and differences that divide social and cultural groups. Barry defines culture wars as increases in volatility, expansion of polarisation, and conflict between those who are passionate about religiously motivated politics, traditional morality, and anti-intellectualism, and…those who embrace progressive politics, cultural openness, and scientific and modernist orientations. (90) The contemporary culture wars across the world manifest opposition by various groups in society who hold divergent worldviews and ideological positions. Proponents of culture war understand various issues as part of a broader set of religious, political, and moral/normative positions invoked in opposition to “elite”, “liberal”, or “left” ideologies. Within this Manichean universe opposition to such issues as climate change, Black Lives Matter, same sex rights, prison reform, gun control, and immigration becomes framed in binary terms, and infused with a moral sensibility (Chapman 8-10). In many disputes, the culture war often devolves into an epistemological dispute about the efficacy of scientific knowledge and authority, or a dispute between “practical” and theoretical knowledge. In this environment, even facts can become partisan narratives. For these “cultural” disputes are often how electoral prospects (generally right-wing) are advanced; “not through policies or promises of a better life, but by fostering a sense of threat, a fantasy that something profoundly pure … is constantly at risk of extinction” (Malik). This “zero-sum” social and policy environment that makes it difficult to compromise and has serious consequences for social stability or government policy, especially in a liberal democratic society. Of course, from the perspective of cultural materialism such a reductionist approach to culture and political and social values is not unexpected. “Culture” is one of the many arenas in which dominant social groups seek to express and reproduce their interests and preferences. “Culture” from this sense is “material” and is ultimately connected to the distribution of power, wealth, and resources in society. As such, the various policy areas that are understood as part of the “culture wars” are another domain where various dominant and subordinate groups and interests engaged in conflict express their values and goals. Yet it is unexpected that despite the pervasiveness of information available to individuals the pool of information consumed by individuals who view the “culture wars” as a touchstone for political behaviour and a narrative to categorise events and facts is relatively closed. This lack of balance has been magnified by social media algorithms, conspiracy-laced talk radio, and a media ecosystem that frames and discusses issues in a manner that elides into an easily understood “culture war” narrative. From this perspective, the groups (generally right-wing or traditionalist) exist within an information bubble that reinforces political, social, and cultural predilections. American and Chinese Reponses to COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic first broke out in Wuhan in December 2019. Initially unprepared and unwilling to accept the seriousness of the infection, the Chinese government regrouped from early mistakes and essentially controlled transmission in about three months. This positive outcome has been messaged as an exposition of the superiority of the Chinese governmental system and society both domestically and internationally; a positive, even heroic performance that evidences the populist credentials of the Chinese political leadership and demonstrates national excellence. The recently published White Paper entitled “Fighting COVID-19: China in Action” also summarises China’s “strategic achievement” in the simple language of numbers: in a month, the rising spread was contained; in two months, the daily case increase fell to single digits; and in three months, a “decisive victory” was secured in Wuhan City and Hubei Province (Xinhua). This clear articulation of the positive results has rallied political support. Indeed, a recent survey shows that 89 percent of citizens are satisfied with the government’s information dissemination during the pandemic (C Wu). As part of the effort, the government extensively promoted the provision of “political goods”, such as law and order, national unity and pride, and shared values. For example, severe publishments were introduced for violence against medical professionals and police, producing and selling counterfeit medications, raising commodity prices, spreading ‘rumours’, and being uncooperative with quarantine measures (Xu). Additionally, as an extension the popular anti-corruption campaign, many local political leaders were disciplined or received criminal charges for inappropriate behaviour, abuse of power, and corruption during the pandemic (People.cn, 2 Feb. 2020). Chinese state media also described fighting the virus as a global “competition”. In this competition a nation’s “material power” as well as “mental strength”, that calls for the highest level of nation unity and patriotism, is put to the test. This discourse recalled the global competition in light of the national mythology related to the formation of Chinese nation, the historical “hardship”, and the “heroic Chinese people” (People.cn, 7 Apr. 2020). Moreover, as the threat of infection receded, it was emphasised that China “won this competition” and the Chinese people have demonstrated the “great spirit of China” to the world: a result built upon the “heroism of the whole Party, Army, and Chinese people from all ethnic groups” (People.cn, 7 Apr. 2020). In contrast to the Chinese approach of emphasising national public goods as a justification for fighting the virus, the U.S. Trump Administration used nationalism, deflection, and “culture war” discourse to undermine health responses — an unprecedented response in American public health policy. The seriousness of the disease as well as the statistical evidence of its course through the American population was disputed. The President and various supporters raged against the COVID-19 “hoax”, social distancing, and lockdowns, disparaged public health institutions and advice, and encouraged protesters to “liberate” locked-down states (Russonello). “Our federal overlords say ‘no singing’ and ‘no shouting’ on Thanksgiving”, Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican of Arizona, wrote as he retweeted a Centers for Disease Control list of Thanksgiving safety tips (Weiner). People were encouraged, by way of the White House and Republican leadership, to ignore health regulations and not to comply with social distancing measures and the wearing of masks (Tracy). This encouragement led to threats against proponents of face masks such as Dr Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s foremost experts on infectious diseases, who required bodyguards because of the many threats on his life. Fauci’s critics — including President Trump — countered Fauci’s promotion of mask wearing by stating accusingly that he once said mask-wearing was not necessary for ordinary people (Kelly). Conspiracy theories as to the safety of vaccinations also grew across the course of the year. As the 2020 election approached, the Administration ramped up efforts to downplay the serious of the virus by identifying it with “the media” and illegitimate “partisan” efforts to undermine the Trump presidency. It also ramped up its criticism of China as the source of the infection. This political self-centeredness undermined state and federal efforts to slow transmission (Shear et al.). At the same time, Trump chided health officials for moving too slowly on vaccine approvals, repeated charges that high infection rates were due to increased testing, and argued that COVID-19 deaths were exaggerated by medical providers for political and financial reasons. These claims were amplified by various conservative media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham of Fox News. The result of this “COVID-19 Denialism” and the alternative narrative of COVID-19 policy told through the lens of culture war has resulted in the United States having the highest number of COVID-19 cases, and the highest number of COVID-19 deaths. At the same time, the underlying social consensus and social capital that have historically assisted in generating positive public health outcomes has been significantly eroded. According to the Pew Research Center, the share of U.S. adults who say public health officials such as those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are doing an excellent or good job responding to the outbreak decreased from 79% in March to 63% in August, with an especially sharp decrease among Republicans (Pew Research Center 2020). Social Capital and COVID-19 From the perspective of social or community capital, it could be expected that the American response to the Pandemic would be more effective than the Chinese response. Historically, the United States has had high levels of social capital, a highly developed public health system, and strong governmental capacity. In contrast, China has a relatively high level of governmental and public health capacity, but the level of social capital has been lower and there is a significant presence of traditional values which emphasise parochial and particularistic values. Moreover, the antecedent institutions of social capital, such as weak and inefficient formal institutions (Batjargal et al.), environmental turbulence and resource scarcity along with the transactional nature of guanxi (gift-giving and information exchange and relationship dependence) militate against finding a more effective social and community response to the public health emergency. Yet China’s response has been significantly more successful than the Unites States’. Paradoxically, the American response under the Trump Administration and the Chinese response both relied on an externalisation of the both the threat and the justifications for their particular response. In the American case, President Trump, while downplaying the seriousness of the virus, consistently called it the “China virus” in an effort to deflect responsibly as well as a means to avert attention away from the public health impacts. As recently as 3 January 2021, Trump tweeted that the number of “China Virus” cases and deaths in the U.S. were “far exaggerated”, while critically citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's methodology: “When in doubt, call it COVID-19. Fake News!” (Bacon). The Chinese Government, meanwhile, has pursued a more aggressive foreign policy across the South China Sea, on the frontier in the Indian sub-continent, and against states such as Australia who have criticised the initial Chinese response to COVID-19. To this international criticism, the government reiterated its sovereign rights and emphasised its “victimhood” in the face of “anti-China” foreign forces. Chinese state media also highlighted China as “victim” of the coronavirus, but also as a target of Western “political manoeuvres” when investigating the beginning stages of the pandemic. The major difference, however, is that public health policy in the United States was superimposed on other more fundamental political and cultural cleavages, and part of this externalisation process included the assignation of “otherness” and demonisation of internal political opponents or characterising political opponents as bent on destroying the United States. This assignation of “otherness” to various internal groups is a crucial element in the culture wars. While this may have been inevitable given the increasingly frayed nature of American society post-2008, such a characterisation has been activity pushed by local, state, and national leadership in the Republican Party and the Trump Administration (Vogel et al.). In such circumstances, minimising health risks and highlighting civil rights concerns due to public health measures, along with assigning blame to the democratic opposition and foreign states such as China, can have a major impact of public health responses. The result has been that social trust beyond the bubble of one’s immediate circle or those who share similar beliefs is seriously compromised — and the collective action problem presented by COVID-19 remains unsolved. Daniel Aldrich’s study of disasters in Japan, India, and US demonstrates that pre-existing high levels of social capital would lead to stronger resilience and better recovery (Aldrich). Social capital helps coordinate resources and facilitate the reconstruction collectively and therefore would lead to better recovery (Alesch et al.). Yet there has not been much research on how the pool of social capital first came about and how a disaster may affect the creation and store of social capital. Rebecca Solnit has examined five major disasters and describes that after these events, survivors would reach out and work together to confront the challenges they face, therefore increasing the social capital in the community (Solnit). However, there are studies that have concluded that major disasters can damage the social fabric in local communities (Peacock et al.). The COVID-19 epidemic does not have the intensity and suddenness of other disasters but has had significant knock-on effects in increasing or decreasing social capital, depending on the institutional and social responses to the pandemic. In China, it appears that the positive social capital effects have been partially subsumed into a more generalised patriotic or nationalist affirmation of the government’s policy response. Unlike civil society responses to earlier crises, such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, there is less evidence of widespread community organisation and response to combat the epidemic at its initial stages. This suggests better institutional responses to the crisis by the government, but also a high degree of porosity between civil society and a national “imagined community” represented by the national state. The result has been an increased legitimacy for the Chinese government. Alternatively, in the United States the transformation of COVID-19 public health policy into a culture war issue has seriously impeded efforts to combat the epidemic in the short term by undermining the social consensus and social capital necessary to fight such a pandemic. Trust in American institutions is historically low, and President Trump’s untrue contention that President Biden’s election was due to “fraud” has further undermined the legitimacy of the American government, as evidenced by the attacks directed at Congress in the U.S. capital on 6 January 2021. As such, the lingering effects the pandemic will have on social, economic, and political institutions will likely reinforce the deep cultural and political cleavages and weaken interpersonal networks in American society. Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated global public health and impacted deeply on the world economy. Unsurprisingly, given the serious economic, social, and political consequences, different government responses have been highly politicised. Various quarantine and infection case tracking methods have caused concern over state power intruding into private spheres. The usage of face masks, social distancing rules, and intra-state travel restrictions have aroused passionate debate over public health restrictions, individual liberty, and human rights. Yet underlying public health responses grounded in higher levels of social capital enhance the effectiveness of public health measures. In China, a country that has generally been associated with lower social capital, it is likely that the relatively strong policy response to COVID-19 will both enhance feelings of nationalism and Chinese exceptionalism and help create and increase the store of social capital. 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From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

In a TED talk in June 2009, media scholar Clay Shirky cited the devastating earthquake that struck the Sichuan province of China in May 2008 as an example of how media flows are changing. He explained how the first reports of the quake came not from traditional news media, but from local residents who sent messages on QQ, China’s largest social network, and on Twitter, the world’s most popular micro-blogging service. "As the quake was happening, the news was reported," said Shirky. This was neither a unique nor isolated incident. It has become commonplace for the people caught up in the news to provide the first accounts, images and video of events unfolding around them. Studies in participatory journalism suggest that professional journalists now share jurisdiction over the news in the sense that citizens are participating in the observation, selection, filtering, distribution and interpretation of events. This paper argues that the ability of citizens to play “an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information” (Bowman and Willis 9) means we need to reassess the meaning of ‘ambient’ as applied to news and journalism. Twitter has emerged as a key medium for news and information about major events, such as during the earthquake in Chile in February 2010 (see, for example, Silverman; Dickinson). This paper discusses how social media technologies such as Twitter, which facilitate the immediate dissemination of digital fragments of news and information, are creating what I have described as “ambient journalism” (Hermida). It approaches real-time, networked digital technologies as awareness systems that offer diverse means to collect, communicate, share and display news and information in the periphery of a user's awareness. Twitter shares some similarities with other forms of communication. Like the telephone, it facilitates a real-time exchange of information. Like instant messaging, the information is sent in short bursts. But it extends the affordances of previous modes of communication by combining these features in both a one-to-many and many-to-many framework that is public, archived and searchable. Twitter allows a large number of users to communicate with each other simultaneously in real-time, based on an asymmetrical relationship between friends and followers. The messages form social streams of connected data that provide value both individually and in aggregate. News All Around The term ‘ambient’ has been used in journalism to describe the ubiquitous nature of news in today's society. In their 2002 study, Hargreaves and Thomas said one of the defining features of the media landscape in the UK was the easy availability of news through a host of media platforms, such as public billboards and mobile phones, and in spaces, such as trains and aircraft. “News is, in a word, ambient, like the air we breathe,” they concluded (44). The availability of news all around meant that citizens were able to maintain an awareness of what was taking place in the world as they went about their everyday activities. One of the ways news has become ambient has been through the proliferation of displays in public places carrying 24-hour news channels or showing news headlines. In her book, Ambient Television, Anna McCarthy explored how television has become pervasive by extending outside the home and dominating public spaces, from the doctor’s waiting room to the bar. “When we search for TV in public places, we find a dense, ambient clutter of public audio-visual apparatuses,” wrote McCarthy (13). In some ways, the proliferation of news on digital platforms has intensified the presence of ambient news. In a March 2010 Pew Internet report, Purcell et al. found that “in the digital era, news has become omnipresent. Americans access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on myriad devices” (2). It seems that, if anything, digital technologies have increased the presence of ambient news. This approach to the term ‘ambient’ is based on a twentieth century model of mass media. Traditional mass media, from newspapers through radio to television, are largely one-directional, impersonal one-to-many carriers of news and information (McQuail 55). The most palpable feature of the mass media is to reach the many, and this affects the relationship between the media and the audience. Consequently, the news audience does not act for itself, but is “acted upon” (McQuail 57). It is assigned the role of consumer. The public is present in news as citizens who receive information about, and interpretation of, events from professional journalists. The public as the recipient of information fits in with the concept of ambient news as “news which is free at the point of consumption, available on demand and very often available in the background to people’s lives without them even looking” (Hargreaves and Thomas 51). To suggest that members of the audience are just empty receptacles to be filled with news is an oversimplification. For example, television viewers are not solely defined in terms of spectatorship (see, for example, Ang). But audiences have, traditionally, been kept well outside the journalistic process, defined as the “selecting, writing, editing, positioning, scheduling, repeating and otherwise massaging information to become news” (Shoemaker et al. 73). This audience is cast as the receiver, with virtually no sense of agency over the news process. As a result, journalistic communication has evolved, largely, as a process of one-way, one-to-many transmission of news and information to the public. The following section explores the shift towards a more participatory media environment. News as a Social Experience The shift from an era of broadcast mass media to an era of networked digital media has fundamentally altered flows of information. Non-linear, many-to-many digital communication technologies have transferred the means of media production and dissemination into the hands of the public, and are rewriting the relationship between the audience and journalists. Where there were once limited and cost-intensive channels for the distribution of content, there are now a myriad of widely available digital channels. Henry Jenkins has written about the emergence of a participatory culture that “contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands” (3). Axel Bruns has coined the term “produsage” (2) to refer to the blurred line between producers and consumers, while Jay Rosen has talked about the “people formerly know as the audience.” For some, the consequences of this shift could be “a new model of journalism, labelled participatory journalism,” (Domingo et al. 331), raising questions about who can be described as a journalist and perhaps, even, how journalism itself is defined. The trend towards a more participatory media ecosystem was evident in the March 2010 study on news habits in the USA by Pew Internet. It highlighted that the news was becoming a social experience. “News is becoming a participatory activity, as people contribute their own stories and experiences and post their reactions to events” (Purcell et al. 40). The study found that 37% of Internet users, described by Pew as “news participators,” had actively contributed to the creation, commentary, or dissemination of news (44). This reflects how the Internet has changed the relationship between journalists and audiences from a one-way, asymmetric model of communication to a more participatory and collective system (Boczkowski; Deuze). The following sections considers how the ability of the audience to participate in the gathering, analysis and communication of news and information requires a re-examination of the concept of ambient news. A Distributed Conversation As I’ve discussed, ambient news is based on the idea of the audience as the receiver. Ambient journalism, on the other hand, takes account of how audiences are able to become part of the news process. However, this does not mean that citizens are necessarily producing journalism within the established framework of accounts and analysis through narratives, with the aim of providing accurate and objective portrayals of reality. Rather, I suggest that ambient journalism presents a multi-faceted and fragmented news experience, where citizens are producing small pieces of content that can be collectively considered as journalism. It acknowledges the audience as both a receiver and a sender. I suggest that micro-blogging social media services such as Twitter, that enable millions of people to communicate instantly, share and discuss events, are an expression of ambient journalism. Micro-blogging is a new media technology that enables and extends society's ability to communicate, enabling users to share brief bursts of information from multiple digital devices. Twitter has become one of the most popular micro-blogging platforms, with some 50 million messages sent daily by February 2010 (Twitter). Twitter enables users to communicate with each other simultaneously via short messages no longer than 140 characters, known as ‘tweets’. The micro-blogging platform shares some similarities with instant messaging. It allows for near synchronous communications from users, resulting in a continuous stream of up-to-date messages, usually in a conversational tone. Unlike instant messaging, Twitter is largely public, creating a new body of content online that can be archived, searched and retrieved. The messages can be extracted, analysed and aggregated, providing a measure of activity around a particular event or subject and, in some cases, an indication of the general sentiment about it. For example, the deluge of tweets following Michael Jackson's death in July 2009 has been described as a public and collective expression of loss that indicated “the scale of the world’s shock and sadness” (Cashmore). While tweets are atomic in nature, they are part of a distributed conversation through a social network of interconnected users. To paraphrase David Weinberger's description of the Web, tweets are “many small pieces loosely joined,” (ix). In common with mass media audiences, users may be very widely dispersed and usually unknown to each other. Twitter provides a structure for them to act together as if in an organised way, for example through the use of hashtags–the # symbol–and keywords to signpost topics and issues. This provides a mechanism to aggregate, archive and analyse the individual tweets as a whole. Furthermore, information is not simply dependent on the content of the message. A user's profile, their social connections and the messages they resend, or retweet, provide an additional layer of information. This is called the social graph and it is implicit in social networks such as Twitter. The social graph provides a representation of an individual and their connections. Each user on Twitter has followers, who themselves have followers. Thus each tweet has a social graph attached to it, as does each message that is retweeted (forwarded to other users). Accordingly, social graphs offer a means to infer reputation and trust. Twitter as Ambient Journalism Services such as Twitter can be considered as awareness systems, defined as computer-mediated communication systems “intended to help people construct and maintain awareness of each others’ activities, context or status, even when the participants are not co-located” (Markopoulos et al., v). In such a system, the value does not lie in the individual sliver of information that may, on its own, be of limited value or validity. Rather the value lies in the combined effect of the communication. In this sense, Twitter becomes part of an ambient media system where users receive a flow of information from both established media and from each other. Both news and journalism are ambient, suggesting that “broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on communication systems such as Twitter are enabling citizens to maintain a mental model of news and events around them” (Hermida 5). Obviously, not everything on Twitter is an act of journalism. There are messages about almost every topic that often have little impact beyond an individual and their circle of friends, from random thoughts and observations to day-to-day minutiae. But it is undeniable that Twitter has emerged as a significant platform for people to report, comment and share news about major events, with individuals performing some of the institutionalised functions of the professional journalist. Examples where Twitter has emerged as a platform for journalism include the 2008 US presidential elections, the Mumbai attacks in November of 2008 and the January 2009 crash of US Airways flight (Lenhard and Fox 2). In these examples, Twitter served as a platform for first-hand, real-time reports from people caught up in the events as they unfolded, with the cell phone used as the primary reporting tool. For example, the dramatic Hudson River landing of the US Airways flight was captured by ferry passenger Janis Krum, who took a photo with a cell phone and sent it out via Twitter.One of the issues associated with services like Twitter is the speed and number of micro-bursts of data, together with the potentially high signal to noise ratio. For example, the number of tweets related to the disputed election result in Iran in June 2009 peaked at 221,774 in one hour, from an average flow of between 10,000 and 50,000 an hour (Parr). Hence there is a need for systems to aid in selection, organisation and interpretation to make sense of this ambient journalism. Traditionally the journalist has been the mechanism to filter, organise and interpret this information and deliver the news in ready-made packages. Such a role was possible in an environment where access to the means of media production was limited. But the thousands of acts of journalism taking place on Twitter every day make it impossible for an individual journalist to identify the collective sum of knowledge contained in the micro-fragments, and bring meaning to the data. Rather, we should look to the literature on ambient media, where researchers talk about media systems that understand individual desires and needs, and act autonomously on their behalf (for example Lugmayr). Applied to journalism, this suggests a need for tools that can analyse, interpret and contextualise a system of collective intelligence. An example of such a service is TwitterStand, developed by a group of researchers at the University of Maryland (Sankaranarayanan et al.). The team describe TwitterStand as “an attempt to harness this emerging technology to gather and disseminate breaking news much faster than conventional news media” (51). In their paper, they describe in detail how their news processing system is able to identify and cluster news tweets in a noisy medium. They conclude that “Twitter, or most likely a successor of it, is a harbinger of a futuristic technology that is likely to capture and transmit the sum total of all human experiences of the moment” (51). While such a comment may be something of an overstatement, it indicates how emerging real-time, networked technologies are creating systems of distributed journalism.Similarly, the US Geological Survey (USGS) is investigating social media technologies as a way quickly to gather information about recent earthquakes. It has developed a system called the Twitter Earthquake Detector to gather real-time, earthquake-related messages from Twitter and filter the messages by place, time, and keyword (US Department of the Interior). By collecting and analysing the tweets, the USGS believes it can access anecdotal information from citizens about a quake much faster than if it only relied on scientific information from authoritative sources.Both of these are examples of research into the development of tools that help users negotiate and regulate the streams and information flowing through networked media. They address issues of information overload by making sense of distributed and unstructured data, finding a single concept such as news in what Sankaranarayanan et al., say is “akin to finding needles in stacks of tweets’ (43). danah boyd eloquently captured the potential for such as system, writing that “those who are most enamoured with services like Twitter talk passionately about feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate.” Conclusion While this paper has focused on Twitter in its discussion of ambient journalism, it is possible that the service may be overtaken by another or several similar digital technologies. This has happened, for example, in the social networking space, with Friendster been supplanted by MySpace and more recently by Facebook. However, underlying services like Twitter are a set of characteristics often referred to by the catchall phrase, the real-time Web. As often with emerging and rapidly developing Internet trends, it can be challenging to define what the real-time Web means. Entrepreneur Ken Fromm has identified a set of characteristics that offer a good starting point to understand the real-time Web. He describes it as a new form of loosely organised communication that is creating a new body of public content in real-time, with a related social graph. In the context of our discussion of the term ‘ambient’, the characteristics of the real-time Web do not only extend the pervasiveness of ambient news. They also enable the former audience to become part of the news environment as it has the means to gather, select, produce and distribute news and information. Writing about changing news habits in the US, Purcell et al. conclude that “people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory” (2). Ambient news has evolved into ambient journalism, as people contribute to the creation, dissemination and discussion of news via social media services such as Twitter. To adapt Ian Hargreaves' description of ambient news in his book, Journalism: Truth or Dare?, we can say that journalism, which was once difficult and expensive to produce, today surrounds us like the air we breathe. Much of it is, literally, ambient, and being produced by professionals and citizens. The challenge going forward is helping the public negotiate and regulate this flow of awareness information, facilitating the collection, transmission and understanding of news. References Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge, 1991. Boczkowski, Pablo. J. Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. boyd, danah. “Streams of Content, Limited Attention.” UX Magazine 25 Feb. 2010. 27 Feb. 2010 ‹http://uxmag.com/features/streams-of-content-limited-attention›. Bowman, Shayne, and Chris Willis. We Media: How Audiences Are Shaping the Future of News and Information. The Media Center, 2003. 10 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php›. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Cashmore, Pete. “Michael Jackson Dies: Twitter Tributes Now 30% of Tweets.” Mashable 25 June 2009. 26 June 2010 ‹http://mashable.com/2009/06/25/michael-jackson-twitter/›. Department of the Interior. “U.S. Geological Survey: Twitter Earthquake Detector (TED).” 13 Jan. 2010. 12 Feb. 2010 ‹http://recovery.doi.gov/press/us-geological-survey-twitter-earthquake-detector-ted/›. Deuze, Mark. “The Web and Its Journalisms: Considering the Consequences of Different Types of Newsmedia Online.” New Media and Society 5 (2003): 203-230. Dickinson, Elizabeth. “Chile's Twitter Response.” Foreign Policy 1 March 2010. 2 March 2010 ‹http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/01/chiles_twitter_response›. Domingo, David, Thorsten Quandt, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Jane B. Singer and Marina Vujnovic. “Participatory Journalism Practices in the Media and Beyond.” Journalism Practice 2.3 (2008): 326-342. Fromm, Ken. “The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 1.” ReadWriteWeb 29 Aug. 2009. 7 Dec. 2009 ‹http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_real-time_web_a_primer_part_1.php›. Hargreaves, Ian. Journalism: Truth or Dare? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Hargreaves, Ian, and Thomas, James. “New News, Old News.” ITC/BSC, Oct. 2002. 5 Dec. 2009 ‹http://legacy.caerdydd.ac.uk/jomec/resources/news.pdf›. Hermida, Alfred. “Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism.” Journalism Practice. First published on 11 March 2010 (iFirst). 12 March 2010 ‹http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a919807525›. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Lenhard, Amanda, and Susannah Fox. “Twitter and Status Updating.” Pew Internet and American Life Project, 12 Feb. 2009. 13 Feb. 2010 ‹http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Twitter-and-status-updating.aspx›. Lugmayr, Artur. “The Future Is ‘Ambient.’” Proceedings of SPIE Vol. 6074, 607403 Multimedia on Mobile Devices II. Vol. 6074. Eds. Reiner Creutzburg, Jarmo H. Takala, and Chang Wen Chen. San Jose: SPIE, 2006. Markopoulos, Panos, Boris De Ruyter and Wendy MacKay. Awareness Systems: Advances in Theory, Methodology and Design. Dordrecht: Springer, 2009. McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. McQuail, Denis. McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory. London: Sage, 2000. Parr, Ben. “Mindblowing #IranElection Stats: 221,744 Tweets per Hour at Peak.” Mashable 17 June 2009. 10 August 2009 ‹http://mashable.com/2009/06/17/iranelection-crisis-numbers/›. Purcell, Kristen, Lee Rainie, Amy Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel, and Kenny Olmstead, “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer.” Pew Internet and American Life Project, 1 March 2010. 2 March 2010 ‹http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Online-News.aspx?r=1›. Rosen Jay. “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” Pressthink 27 June 2006. 8 August 2009 ‹http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html›. Sankaranarayanan, Jagan, Hanan Samet, Benjamin E. Teitler, Michael D. Lieberman, and Jon Sperling. “TwitterStand: News in Tweets. Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS '09). New York: ACM, 2009. 42-51. 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Examining Board: Professor Stephen A. Smith (EUI/All Souls, Oxford) (supervisor) Professor Mark Gamsa (EUI) Professor Joshua H. Howard (University of Mississippi) Professor Vibeke Børdahl (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen).
Defence date: 24 June 2013
First made available online on 10 July 2014.
This thesis, based on Eastern Sichuan boatmen's work songs, haozi, analyzes the way river workers understood and interpreted the world, work and society that they lived in. Spanning the period between 1880s and 1930s, it explains how such professional groups dealt with the dissolving social and economic order of the late-Qing China and the chaotic republican decades. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part reconstructs the social history of Sichuan boatmen, discusses the methodological issues connected with working on popular song traditions, and explains the importance of work songs as tools of boatmen's work. The second part is devoted to reading, analysis and discussion of these traditions. Three fundamental topics are analyzed in this section: boatmen's understanding of the social world they lived in the way they perceived their work and the manner in which they comprehended their social position. The thesis demonstrates that boatmen created representations of the Sichuan river towns to claim their own social, cultural and physical spaces. Boatmen largely refused elite aesthetics and shaped their own ones, corresponding to their tastes, habits and forms of socialization. Analyzing the issue of work and labor relations, the thesis demonstrates that boatmen resisted exploitation by stating their moral superiority enshrined in the ideal of brotherhood and by bemoaning their harrowing labor, cruelty of the bosses and lack of family life. Finally, by examining boatmen's imagination of death, the thesis unveils how culturally potent representations were exploited in order to protest against the social injustice, at the same time expressing vulnerability, weakness and lack of control over one's destiny. The thesis provides us with deeper understanding of the way early twentieth century non-industrial Chinese workers conceptualized their social standing, interpreted surrounding reality and struggled to adjust to oppressive social conditions.

Tan, Xilin.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-127).
Abstracts in English and Chinese ; includes Chinese.
Chapter Chapter 1: --- Introduction --- p.1
Controversies over the Ghost City --- p.1
Fengdu --- p.2
The Ghost City and Popular Religion --- p.3
The Three Gorges Reservoir and the Relocation --- p.8
Developing Tourism --- p.9
Popular Religion in China --- p.13
Revival of Popular Religion --- p.13
Legitimatization of Popular Religion --- p.15
Organization of the thesis --- p.17
Chapter Chapter 2: --- The Landscape of Fengdu --- p.20
Landscape of Fengdu County --- p.20
The Reservoir Area in Chongqing --- p.20
Population --- p.23
Influence of the Dam --- p.25
Fengdu Religious Landscape --- p.30
The Ghost City after the 1980s --- p.33
The Divine Palace: A Modern Amusement Park --- p.48
Chapter Chapter 3: --- Legitimating the Ghost City --- p.51
The Ghost City in Dispute --- p.51
The Ambiguous Use of Wenhua --- p.52
“The Culture of the Ghost City´ح --- p.54
Promoting Righteousness --- p.56
New Symbols of Fengdu: from Ghost to Divinity --- p.60
Promoting the Ghost City --- p.63
Another Version of Local Culture --- p.65
Conclusion --- p.67
Chapter Chapter 4: --- Fengdu Temple Festival 2009 --- p.70
Fengdu Incense Festival in the Past --- p.70
Festival Origins and the Incense Festival Before 1949 --- p.70
Names and Organization --- p.73
The Fengdu Temple Festival in 2009 --- p.75
The Parade: Memories of Fengdu --- p.77
Emperor of the Netherworld and His Wedding --- p.78
Fengdu in History and the New Cultural Symbolism --- p.80
People's Participation --- p.80
Conclusion --- p.84
Chapter Chapter 5: --- People's Religious Life in Current Fengdu --- p.87
Tourism and Its Influence --- p.87
Tour Guides --- p.87
Communal Temples --- p.96
The Wantian Shrine --- p.101
Why do local people go to the Ghost City? --- p.102
Spirit Mediums --- p.107
Grandma Long --- p.108
Water Bowl Augur --- p.109
A Physiognomist --- p.110
Conclusion --- p.111
Chapter Chapter 6: --- Conclusion --- p.113
A Rise of Superstition? --- p.113
In the Name of Development --- p.115
Promoting Tourism as a Means to Vitalize the County's Economy --- p.116
The Wenhua of the Ghost City --- p.117
The Culture of the Ghost City --- p.118
The Lost Ghost --- p.118
Popular Religious Practices in Daily Life --- p.119
Alternative Interpretations of the Ghost City --- p.119
Local Pilgrim --- p.121
Bibliography --- p.124