Journal articles on the topic 'Redditi familiari'

La letteratura sulla povertà da lavoro si è finora concentrata sullo studio dei redditi familiari. Per restituire una immagine multidimensionale del disagio economico e della vulnerabilità delle famiglie di lavoratori, questo contributo considera i trend nell'ammontare e nella composizione della ricchezza tra famiglie povere e non povere tra il 1991 e il 2016 in Italia. Inoltre, proponendo una analisi che incrocia la povertà da lavoro con i livelli di ricchezza, esploriamo le dinamiche nel tempo della prevalenza di povertà da lavoro e livelli di ricchezza per classi d'età. I risultati mostrano che le famiglie di lavoratori poveri sono anche con più probabilità meno ricche. Il gap è più marcato per attività reali e ricchezza negativa. La distanza tra le famiglie povere su quasi tutti gli indicatori è cresciuta fino al 2006 e vede una flessione a partire dal 2012. Questo andamento è dovuto principalmente all'aumentare e poi al diminuire della ricchezza delle famiglie non povere. Mostriamo infine che l'associazione tra povertà da lavoro e bassi livelli di ricchezza interessa soprattutto nuclei più giovani.

Negli ultimi anni il processo di riforme fiscali che ha coinvolto il nostro Paese ha stimolato l'interesse di accademici e amministratori riguardo alla distribuzione locale dei redditi. La mancanza di dati ha tradizionalmente limitato le possibilitŕ di indagare riguardo alla distribuzione dei redditi in contesti sub-nazionali. Le Regioni e gli enti locali solo in alcuni casi hanno risolto il problema finanziando indagini circoscritte al loro territorio, nella maggioranza dei casi il problema si č risolto cercando di approssimare la distribuzione delle variabili a livello locale utilizzando sotto campioni di indagini nazionali. Questa soluzione purtroppo raramente porta a stime sufficientemente affidabili. Una parte della letteratura propone di risolvere questo tipo di problemi sfruttando la variabilitŕ di grandezze fortemente correlate al reddito e misurabili con precisione sul territorio. Il metodo che proponiamo segue un approccio leggermente differente: otteniamo una distribuzione locale dei redditi equivalenti attraverso il matching di dataset provenienti da fonti differenti. Il nostro punto di partenza sono i dati delle dichiarazioni dei redditi pubblicati, disaggregati per comune, dall'Agenzia delle Entrate. Questi redditi sono associati a un vettore di caratteristiche socioeconomiche tramite l'iterazione di un algoritmo di Monte Carlo. L'algoritmo definisce le probabilitŕ di associazione fra un reddito e un nucleo familiare con determinate caratteristiche, sulla base della distribuzione empirica di redditi lordi e caratteristiche socioeconomiche registrate nei sottocampioni regionali dell'Indagine sui bilanci delle famiglie italiane della Banca d'Italia. La distribuzione dei redditi equivalenti č ottenuta associando a ciascun risultato di iterazione un peso tanto maggiore quanto piů la struttura demografica che descrive corrisponde a quella realmente registrata dall'Istat per il territorio considerato. Per mostrare limiti e potenzialitŕ del metodo riportiamo un'applicazione per due province italiane: Bari e Foggia.

A seguito della pandemia da Covid-19, in letteratura sono comparsi numerosi contributi che hanno esplorato l'impatto delle misure restrittive sia sul reddito sia sulla qualità delle relazioni familiari, anche nei termini di co-genitorialità e pratiche educative, considerati separatamente. Obiettivo di questo studio è di esplorare l'associazione tra stress economico e malessere psicologico dei minori, ipotizzando che il livello di conflitto co-genitoriale e le pratiche educative autoritarie materne possano fungere congiuntamente da mediatori. Hanno partecipato allo studio 277 madri ed i loro figli (44% maschi), aventi un'età compresa tra 3 e 10 anni, e provenienti da nuclei familiari di livello socio-economico medio-alto. Il 37.5% delle partecipanti ha asserito che la pandemia e le relative restrizioni hanno avuto un significativo impatto negativo sul reddito familiare. I risultati delle analisi evidenziano la presenza di un'associazione significativa tra stress economico e malessere dei minori, spiegata da livelli elevati sia di conflitto co-genitoriale sia di condotte educative autoritarie.

L'articolo affronta il problema del conflitto di genere che nasce all'interno di molte famiglie africane, quando le donne, grazie alle loro piccole attivitŕ commerciali, diventano le principali fornitrici di reddito. In molti casi, infatti, il guadagno delle donne, č l'unica entrata in denaro, che consente di andare al di lŕ della mera sussistenza. Dimostrando fantasia e notevole spirito imprenditoriale, molte donne dell'Africa occidentale, danno vita a forme di associazionismo, finalizzate al commercio, che consentono di ridurre i rischi e di ottimizzare i guadagni. Tale impegno si scontra perň con certi aspetti del pensiero maschile, retaggio di tempi andati.

Le restrizioni connesse alla gestione dell'emergenza sanitaria hanno inciso profondamente sulle opportunità di crescita dei minori, colpendo maggiormente i gruppi sociali più vulnerabili, come le famiglie a basso reddito e i bambini. Se i genitori home-workers hanno dovuto fronteggiare maggiori difficoltà di conciliazione, i caregiver che hanno perso il lavoro o subito una netta riduzione del reddito hanno vissuto un disagio economico e psicologico, che continua ad impattare sulla qualità delle relazioni familiari. L'analisi psico-sociologica delineata dal presente contributo cerca di mettere in luce gli effetti diretti e indiretti dell'emergenza sull'organizzazione del lavoro e sulla vita di minori e famiglie e pone l'attenzione sull'esigenza di promuovere il benessere individuale e professionale, attraverso la sperimentazione di misure e interventi innovativi nella fase di ripartenza.

La povertŕ urbana č riprodotta da assenza di opportunitŕ, lavoro, reddito, servizi. Le scienze sociali rivelano ancora forti limiti nell'interpretarne le traiettorie e nel pensare politiche di riduzione e contrasto. Occorre rinnovare l'immaginario dei ricercatori, deie deiper arrivare a cogliere meglio il gioco dei fattori ambientali e familiari senza escludere quelli genetici che favoriscono la cronicizzazione della povertŕ e l'esclusione sociale, anche riferendosi a concetti giŕ elaborati dagli studiosi di varie discipline.

Nell'area orientale dello stato del Minas Gerais è stato realizzato il progetto di cooperazione internazionale tra Italia e Brasile "Agroecologia e formazione socio ambientale per lo sviluppo sostenibile" con lo scopo di sostenere l'agroecologia per lo sviluppo rurale locale. L'area è caratterizzata dalla produzione estensiva di caffè principalmente a livello di agricoltura familiare. Il caffè, oltre a sostenere quasi totalmente l'economia locale, rappresenta uno dei maggiori driver di distruzione della Foresta Atlantica, bioma locale molto importante per la fornitura di servizi ambientali. Grazie alla collaborazione tra Università di Torino e RE.TE. Ong, nell'ambito del progetto Uni.Coo, è stato realizzato uno studio economico per confrontare l'utilizzo di pratiche agroecologiche e convenzionali con lo scopo di verificare se le prime potessero effettivamente contribuire allo sviluppo sostenibile dell'economia regionale. Sono state confrontate diverse variabili economiche e ambientali in 6 unità produttive. I risultati dello studio indicano che le pratiche agroecologiche siano in grado di fornire mediamente maggiori redditi, remunerare maggiormente il lavoro, diversificare i redditi e le diete, oltre a contribuire sia alla riduzione dell'uso prodotti chimici che alla conservazione forestale. Lo studio suggerisce che l'agroecologia possa rappresentare un possibile modello di sviluppo agricolo sostenibile per la regione.

Massima Il trust familiare i cui disponenti siano anche trustee e primi beneficiari (cioè beneficiari del reddito), il cui guardiano sia uno dei disponenti e i cui beneficiari finali siano i discendenti dei disponenti-trustee è nullo in quanto la coincidenza delle figure dei disponenti e dei trustee travalica i limiti di ammissibilità di cui all’art. 2 della Convenzione de L’Aja del 1985, che richiede una necessaria dissociazione tra la figura del disponente e quella del trustee. Siffatto trust deve reputarsi, ai sensi della legge inglese che lo regola, nullo in quanto sham, essendo assente l’intenzione dei disponenti di istituire effettivamente un trust (la c.d. certainty of intention to create the trust), intenzione che richiede la perdita di controllo diretto dei beni in trust da parte dei disponenti medesimi.

Why did Athenian vase-painters choose the colours they did for the vases they decorated? Why did they choose black figures on red, or red figures on black; why were lekythoi often decorated on white ground? These are basic questions, but have rarely been asked. Many books and articles deal with the technical aspects of how these effects were achieved, but never seem to ask why. A few minutes' conversation with a modern potter will dispel any illusion that the colours so familiar from Attic pottery were the only ones compatible with the local clay. Even the orange of that clay was made more intense by the addition of a thin reddish slip, and white-ground can scarcely be accidental. It is legitimate to enquire why a particular range of colour schemes was adopted.

After Marcus Atilius Regulus made inroads into North Africa as consul in 256 B.C. during the first Punic War, the Carthaginians were apparently ready to negotiate a settlement, but Regulus offered terms so harsh that they were refused out of hand. At this point Xanthippus, the Spartan mercenary-general, arrived on the Carthaginian side and soon made an impact as a shrewd and uplifting leader, not least because, in a dramatic reversal of fortunes, he captured Regulus, by then proconsul, by ambush in 255. Regulus' subsequent fate, embellished in the later literary-historical tradition, was enshrined in die familiar version here represented by Valerius Maximus:Sed quae ad custodiam religionis attinent, nescio an omnes M. Atilius Regulus praecesserit, qui ex victore speciosissimo insidiis Hasdrubalis et Xanthippi Lacedaemonii ducis ad miserabilem captiui fortunam deductus ac missus ad senatum populumque Romanum legatus, ut se et uno et sene complures Poenorum iuuenes pensarentur, in contrarium dato consilio Carthaginem petiit, non quid <em> ignarus ad quam crudeles quamque merito sibi infestos † deos † reuerteretur, uerum quia iis iurauerat, si captiui eorum redditi non forent, ad eos sese rediturum. potuerunt profecto di immortales efferatam mitigare saeuitiam. ceterum, quo clarior esset Atili gloria, Carthaginienses moribus suis uti passi sunt, tertio Punico bello religiosissimi spiritus tarn crudeliter uexati urbis eorum interitu iusta exacturi piacula.

Abstract Jago Leke is a local variety of sticky corn in the City of Bima which is very familiar and spread in the Province of NTB, especially on Sumbawa Island. This corn has a fluffier and sweet taste. However, at present its existence is in danger of being displaced by hybrid corn, which in recent years has been mass-cultivated in almost all areas on the island of Sumbawa. The purpose of this study was to determine the morphological characters and resistance to pests of sticky corn of the Jago Leke variety in an effort to preserve potential genetic resources. The method used in this research is observation and interviews. The results showed that the jago leke seed had an early maturity of 60 days, reddish stem color, shorter plant height than corn in general, small cobs, and red young cob hair. The main plant pest organisms that attack this jago leke plant are grasshoppers, stem borers, leaf blight, and leaf rust. Plant pest organism attack symptoms occur in both the vegetative and generative phases with different attack intensities.

The task of giving some sort of interpretation of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour is an extraordinarily difficult one. The book is exceptionally fragmentary. Many of the remarks seem to raise questions that are then left completely unanswered, or to invite us to imagine various circumstances that are then left without any further comment. Although nearly all the remarks are related in one way or another to the problem of colour, the range of topics that Wittgenstein touches on is extremely wide, and covers areas that are not normally mentioned in contemporary philosophical discussions of colour. For example, apart from the familiar ‘Why can't there be a transparent white?’ and ‘Why can't there be a reddish-green?’, he asks ‘Can a transparent piece of glass have the same colour as an opaque piece of paper?’, ‘Is white always the lightest colour?’, ‘Do I see blond hair in the black and white photograph of a blond youth?’, ‘Does it make sense to point to a colour in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and ask for the walls of my room to be painted the same colour?’, ‘Do the colour-blind have the same concept of colour-blindness as the normally sighted?’, ‘Can normal vision be described?’, and so on.

Abstract Bartonella henselae is implicated as the main etiologic agent of Cat scratch disease (CSD, Cat-scratch fever). A majority of domestic cats may harbor the intra-erythrocytic agent for extended periods without apparent disease. In humans, B. henselae most commonly results in a subacute, bacterial infection that presents with one or more reddish papules which may progress to pustules and regional lymph node enlargement. Usual features include fever, malaise, and a granulomatous lymphadenitis on biopsy. However, atypical clinical presentations occur, albeit with infrequence, and may result in a difficult and protracted diagnostic process. The infection in susceptible hosts such as immunocompromised or elderly patients may result in endocarditis, encephalitis, fever of unknown origin, and general malaise. It is not transmitted from person to person and quarantine is not necessary. The arthropod vector, Ctenocephalides felis, or the cat flea, plays a major role in transmission among cats and to humans. The transmission risk to humans can be substantially reduced through elimination of flea infestations in companion animals. There are numerous recent reviews and case reports in the veterinary and medical literature reflecting increased recognition of this zoonotic agent. All this notwithstanding, many physicians and other providers may not be familiar with this agent and the potential spectrum of human disease; this may lead to delays in diagnosis and unnecessary diagnostic procedures. This article emphasizes the aspects of B. henselae infection, including a typical case report and a table with selected human case reports of unusual clinical manifestations from the published literature.

Il contributo rappresenta un approfondimento del Rapporto MACREF Strategie di integrazione tra produzioni agroalimentari e turismo ed in particolar modo il ruolo della banca nei processi d'innovazione dei modelli di business per le PMI. Si è cercato di offrire un'analisi critica della letteratura sul tema della scelta relativa alla struttura finanziaria efficiente delle imprese, con particolare riguardo alla realtà delle piccole e medie imprese italiane, ed in particolar modo del settore agroalimentare, attraverso una visione della letteratura empirica sull'argomento. Le PMI si caratterizzano tradizionalmente per l'uso quasi esclusivo di capitale di debito nella copertura del fabbisogno finanziario e presentano di conseguenza una struttura finanziaria quanto mai semplificata, nella maggior parte dei casi composta dal debito bancario da una parte e dal capitale dei soci fondatori dall'altra. In questo momento di crisi e di particolare frammentazione del tessuto societario italiano, in particolar modo quello del comparto agroalimentare, un ruolo determinante è stato rivestito dagli istituti bancari anche come gestori di garanzie e contributi pubblici. La scarsa patrimonializzazione delle nostre aziende, spesso a carattere e proprietà familiare, è stata negli anni supplita con un forte ricorso al credito bancario, dal quale le imprese sono diventate dipendenti a scapito di un corretto equilibrio finanziario. L'intero sistema si trova difronte ad una rieducazione finanziaria, dunque sia le imprese che le banche, quest'ultime spinte dall'innovazione tecnologica e dalla ricerca di redditività, si accingono al superamento della loro tradizionale veste istituzionale legata alla erogazione di credito. Gli istituti di credito possono e stanno quindi trasformando in opportunità tale situazione rivedendo i propri modelli distributivi e di business per diversificare le proprie fonti di reddito concentrandosi sull'offerta di nuovi servizi ad alto valore aggiunto alle imprese, sostenendo lo sviluppo e la crescita economica del nostro paese. Oggi il ruolo trainante della ripresa è infatti rappresentato da quelle imprese che sono innovative, che sanno coniugare la produttività e la tecnologia, che si aggregano tra loro o che si internazionalizzano: è proprio a queste impr- se che il sistema bancario deve guardare offrendo loro un supporto non solo in termini finanziari ma in termini di esperienza, conoscenze, competenza e consulenza.

In recent years, studies on the user experience have emerged as an indispensable part of any gamification research. The study of user experience enables gamification designers and practitioners to design or adapt their gamification schemes in a more knowledgeable and efficacious manner. However, one popular gamification scheme that has largely remained under-researched in terms of user experience is promotional gamification, which refers to an optional and time-limited gamification program that usually mounts an already gamified platform to increase user incentive and engagement for a short span of time (e.g., during the holiday season). The current study undertakes the first steps necessary to explore users' experiences of working with a promotional gamification scheme in a large-scale online community. To this end, we conduct an extensive qualitative case study of users' experiences with a promotional gamification scheme on the Community Question Answering Website (CQA) of Stack Exchange, called Winter Bash (WB). Notably, the purpose of WB is to operate as a makeshift solution that prevents the decline in user contributions during the holiday season. However, like many other gamification schemes, WB is not devoid of issues, and our research helps identify those issues without overlooking the WB's strengths. Our study denotes not only the first (empirical) typology of users' affective responses to promotional gamification schemes but also the first classification of (de)motivational factors involved in user engagement. At its core, this study comprises two salient parts: (1) a content analysis of user-generated data regarding WB (from the past eight years), and (2) a series of semi-structured interviews with 17 international users who are familiar with WB. We triangulate our findings from (1) and (2) by performing a similar content analysis for two other promotional gamification schemes, namely "Answerathon" (from Travel Meta) and "Discussion Tournament" (from Reddit). Based on the findings of this study, we present certain guidelines for gamification designers and practitioners, enabling them to deploy or adapt their promotional gamification schemes in a more knowledgeable and effective manner. Finally, our work is concluded by highlighting a few novel research opportunities for researchers invested in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

Background COVID-19 has affected individuals with lived experience of eating disorders (EDs), with many reporting higher psychological distress, higher prevalence of ED symptoms, and compensatory behaviors. The COVID-19 pandemic and the health and safety measures taken to contain its spread also disrupted routines and reduced access to familiar coping mechanisms, social support networks, and health care services. Social media and the ED communities on social media platforms have been an important source of support for individuals with EDs in the past. So far, it is unknown how discussions in online ED communities changed as offline support networks were disrupted and people spent more time at home in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Objective The aim of this study is to identify changes in language content and style in an online ED community during the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We extracted posts and their comments from the ED community on the social media website Reddit and concatenated them to comment threads. To analyze these threads, we applied top-down and bottom-up language analysis methods based on topic modeling with latent Dirichlet allocation and 13 indicators from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program, respectively. Threads were split into prepandemic (before March 11, 2020) and midpandemic (after March 11, 2020) groups. Standardized mean differences were calculated to estimate change between pre- and midpandemic threads. Results A total of 17,715 threads (n=8772, 49.5% prepandemic threads; n=8943, 50.5% midpandemic threads) were extracted from the ED community and analyzed. The final topic model contained 21 topics. CIs excluding zero were found for standardized mean differences of 15 topics and 9 Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count categories covering themes such as ED symptoms, mental health, treatment for EDs, cognitive processing, social life, and emotions. Conclusions Although we observed a reduction in discussions about ED symptoms, an increase in mental health and treatment-related topics was observed at the same time. This points to a change in the focus of the ED community from promoting potentially harmful weight loss methods to bringing attention to mental health and treatments for EDs. These results together with heightened cognitive processing, increased social references, and reduced inhibition of negative emotions detected in discussions indicate a shift in the ED community toward a pro-recovery orientation.

Este trabalho teve por objeto a cerâmica Terena produzida na Aldeia Cachoeirinha em Miranda, Mato Grosso do Sul. Seu objetivo geral é analisar o processo de produção posto em prática pela etnia em referência. Sobre a relevância do objeto dizem os fatos de o artesanato Terena ter sido registrado como patrimônio imaterial histórico, artístico e cultural de Mato Grosso do Sul pelo Governo do Estado e a cerâmica, em especial, se constituir em expressivo instrumento de reconhecimento e diferenciação da etnia. Fontes teóricas foram buscadas em estudos de Oliveira, Ribeiro e Alves. A revisão bibliográfica e o levantamento de fontes secundárias priorizaram as abordagens sobre os Terena, mas se estenderam a outras etnias indígenas da região, também, por força da necessidade de análises comparativas. Quanto às fontes primárias, foram realizados levantamentos a campo na Reserva Indígena Cachoeirinha, além de observações sistemáticas, registros fotográficos do processo de produção e entrevistas semiestruturadas com as artesãs oleiras. Entre os resultados, foram constatadas mudanças recentes na cerâmica Terena. Distanciando-se da pigmentação avermelhada, característica da etnia, algumas peças passaram a ganhar a coloração preta, oriunda de um mineral de cor escura e brilhosa, chamado ‘pedra canga’. A partir do levantamento feito a campo foram identificadas 83 artesãs Terena. Atualmente, 45 permanecem em atividade e a maioria encontra-se na faixa etária de 26 a 50 anos. A produção da cerâmica é realizada exclusivamente pelas mulheres e se tornou importante fonte de complementação da renda familiar. Palavras-chave: Desenvolvimento Regional. Artesanato Indígena. Ceramistas Terena. AbstractThe object of this work is Terena ceramics produced at Aldeia Cachoeirinha in Miranda, Mato Grosso do Sul. The main objective is to analyze the production process practiced by this ethnicity. Regarding the relevance of the object, Terena craftwork have been registered as an intangible historical, artistic and cultural heritage of Mato Grosso do Sul by State Government and ceramics, in particular, constitute an expressive instrument of recognition and differentiation of this ethnicity. The present theoretical sources were based on studies of Oliveira, Ribeiro and Alves. The literature review and the secondary sources survey focused on the Terena, however the study extended to other ethnic groups of the region for comparative analysis. During the primary sources, field surveys were carried out at Cachoeirinha Indigenous Protected Area. In addition, systematic observations, photographic records of the production and semi-structured interviews with pottery artisans were performed. Among the results, recent changes in Terena ceramics were observed. Some pieces began to change from the traditional reddish pigmentation, characteristic feature of this ethnic group, to black coloration, originated from a mineral called “canga” stone of dark and bright color. Based on the field survey, 83 Terena artisans were identified. Currently, 45 artisans remain in activity and they fall into age group of 26 to 50 years. The ceramics production is carried out exclusively by women and has become an important supplemental source for family income. Keywords: Regional Development. Indigenous Crafts. Terena Potters.Este trabalho teve por objeto a cerâmica Terena produzida na Aldeia Cachoeirinha em Miranda, Mato Grosso do Sul. Seu objetivo geral é analisar o processo de produção posto em prática pela etnia em referência. Sobre a relevância do objeto dizem os fatos de o artesanato Terena ter sido registrado como patrimônio imaterial histórico, artístico e cultural de Mato Grosso do Sul pelo Governo do Estado e a cerâmica, em especial, se constituir em expressivo instrumento de reconhecimento e diferenciação da etnia. Fontes teóricas foram buscadas em estudos de Oliveira, Ribeiro e Alves. A revisão bibliográfica e o levantamento de fontes secundárias priorizaram as abordagens sobre os Terena, mas se estenderam a outras etnias indígenas da região, também, por força da necessidade de análises comparativas. Quanto às fontes primárias, foram realizados levantamentos a campo na Reserva Indígena Cachoeirinha, além de observações sistemáticas, registros fotográficos do processo de produção e entrevistas semiestruturadas com as artesãs oleiras. Entre os resultados, foram constatadas mudanças recentes na cerâmica Terena. Distanciando-se da pigmentação avermelhada, característica da etnia, algumas peças passaram a ganhar a coloração preta, oriunda de um mineral de cor escura e brilhosa, chamado ‘pedra canga’. A partir do levantamento feito a campo foram identificadas 83 artesãs Terena. Atualmente, 45 permanecem em atividade e a maioria encontra-se na faixa etária de 26 a 50 anos. A produção da cerâmica é realizada exclusivamente pelas mulheres e se tornou importante fonte de complementação da renda familiar. Palavras-chave: Desenvolvimento Regional. Artesanato Indígena. Ceramistas Terena. AbstractThe object of this work is Terena ceramics produced at Aldeia Cachoeirinha in Miranda, Mato Grosso do Sul. The main objective is to analyze the production process practiced by this ethnicity. Regarding the relevance of the object, Terena craftwork have been registered as an intangible historical, artistic and cultural heritage of Mato Grosso do Sul by State Government and ceramics, in particular, constitute an expressive instrument of recognition and differentiation of this ethnicity. The present theoretical sources were based on studies of Oliveira, Ribeiro and Alves. The literature review and the secondary sources survey focused on the Terena, however the study extended to other ethnic groups of the region for comparative analysis. During the primary sources, field surveys were carried out at Cachoeirinha Indigenous Protected Area. In addition, systematic observations, photographic records of the production and semi-structured interviews with pottery artisans were performed. Among the results, recent changes in Terena ceramics were observed. Some pieces began to change from the traditional reddish pigmentation, characteristic feature of this ethnic group, to black coloration, originated from a mineral called “canga” stone of dark and bright color. Based on the field survey, 83 Terena artisans were identified. Currently, 45 artisans remain in activity and they fall into age group of 26 to 50 years. The ceramics production is carried out exclusively by women and has become an important supplemental source for family income. Keywords: Regional Development. Indigenous Crafts. Terena Potters.

1. Consiglio di Stato 17.2.2009 n. 896 - carta di soggiorno e permesso di soggiorno - diversità dei due istituti - diniego di rilascio per entrambi a seguito di condanna per reati relativi alla tutela del diritto d'autore - illegittimità per errata equiparazione dei due status - esclusione di automatismo per soggiornanti di lungo periodo anche prima dell'attuazione della Direttiva 2003/109/CE - rilevanza del tempo di soggiorno2. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Veneto 3.7.2009 n. 2104 - diniego rinnovo permesso di soggiorno per attesa occupazione - insufficienza reddito e fonti sostentamento - omessa considerazione delle fonti di reddito del coniuge - omessa valutazione dell'effettività del vincolo familiare3. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Emilia Romagna 29.5.2009 n. 859 - richiesta di nulla osta lavorativo per l'ingresso di straniero (decreto flussi) - diniego motivato da presunta insufficienza reddituale - mancata valutazione del maggior reddito conseguito successivamente alla richiesta - illegittimità del diniego; capacità reddituale del datore di lavoro commisurata al doppio dell'importo della retribuzione spettante al futuro lavoratore4. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Piemonte 8.2.2010 n. 981 - permesso CE per soggiornanti di lungo periodo - revoca per intervenuta condanna ostativa (reato in materia di stupefacenti) - omessa valutazione dei criteri (durata del soggiorno, inserimento lavorativo e sociale) indicati dall'art. 9 TU n. 286/98 riformato dal d.lgs. 3/2007 per valutare la concreta pericolosità sociale - illegittimità5. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Umbria 28.5.2009 n. 263 - permesso CE per soggiornanti di lungo periodo - richiesta per il coniuge soggiornante in Italia da meno di 5 anni - diniego per difetto del requisito quinquennale - illegittimità; verifica del requisito della permanenza quinquennale esclusivamente per il titolare del diritto; familiare di straniero titolare di permesso CE per soggiornanti di lungo periodo - diversità di condizione giuridica in caso di separazione o divorzio o perdita del diritto da parte del titolare

1. Consiglio di Stato 3.3.2010 n. 1238 - permesso di soggiorno - diniego di rinnovo per insufficienza reddituale - attivitŕ lavorativa autonoma - reddito minimo annuo parametrato all'importo per l'esenzione dalla partecipazione alla spesa sanitaria - legittimitŕ; riduzione dall'importo minimo annuo dei mesi trascorsi all'estero - esclusione; irrilevanza degli elementi nuovi sopravvenuti.2. Consiglio di Stato 27.7.2010 n. 4904 - permesso di soggiorno - diniego di rinnovo per pregressa condanna ostativa - mancata valutazione dei vincoli familiari - entrata in vigore del d.lgs. 5/2007 - esclusione di ogni automatismo; applicazione della disciplina di derivazione comunitaria sia per i nuovi ingressi (dei familiari) sia per coloro che hanno esercitato giŕ il diritto al ricongiungimento.3. Consiglio di Stato 18.8.2010 n. 5890 - regolarizzazione ex lege 102/2009 - diniego per ritenuta ostativitŕ della condanna ex art. 14, co. 5 ter TU n. 286/98 - ostativitŕ ex art. 381 c.p.p. - legittimitŕ.4. Consiglio di Stato 2.9.2010 n. 4066 - regolarizzazione ex lege 102/2009 - diniego per ritenuta ostativitŕ della condanna ex art. 14, co. 5 ter TU n. 286/98 - ostativitŕ ex art. 381 c.p.p. - illegittimitŕ - deroghe.5. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Toscana 21.4.2010 n. 300 - regolarizzazione ex lege 102/2009 - diniego per ritenuta ostativitŕ della condanna ex art. 14, co. 5 ter TU n. 286/98 - ostativitŕ ex art. 381 c.p.p. - illegittimitŕ.6. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Sardegna 9.9.2010 n. 411 - regolarizzazione ex lege 102/2009 - diniego per ritenuta ostativitŕ della condanna ex art. 14, co. 5 ter TU n. 286/98 ostativitŕ ex art. 381 c.p.p. - illegittimitŕ.7. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Piemonte - 8.7.2010 n. 539 - permesso CE per soggiornanti di lungo periodo - diniego di rilascio - ritenuta inidoneitŕ di contatto di lavoro a tempo determinato - illegittimitŕ per difetto di specifica previsione normativa.

In early 2019, Overwatch professional player, “Ellie” quit playing just weeks after having been named to one of the teams seeded into the professional league. The harassment cited as a reason to leave was related especially to whether or not “Ellie” was truly “female”. Not much later, Ellie was revealed (and confirmed by Blizzard, the parent company of Overwatch) to be an account created by a male player. This paper sets out to map the controversy that ensued from a self-styled “social experiment” of playing while female. This paper brings this current “revelation” into conversation with past, more fully embodied/manufactured identities to better understand why this case is particularly important to internet studies. To this end, we begin by briefly describing some earlier, more familiar cases of people revealed to be someone other than, in online spaces, they said they were. Then, we further outline the instance of Ellie: its uptake by mainstream media, prominent Youtubers and Twitch streamers, and its discussion on internet forums like Reddit and 4Chan. Paying particular attention to the ways these discussions frame the “trick” played in disguising Ellie’s ‘true’ identity (singular), we suggest that this kind of case has always been galvanized by an underlying conviction that the best gamers are always and only men, and one contribution internet scholarship can make here is to show how these discursive patterns are unhelpful in understanding contemporary identificatory politics and practices in online spaces.

1. Consiglio di Stato Ad. Plen. 10.5.2011 n. 7 - regolarizzazione ex art. 1 ter l. 102/2009 - pregressa condanna ex art. 14, co. 5 ter TU n. 286/98 - non ostativitŕ della causa - contrasto con gli artt. 15 e 16 della direttiva 2008/115/CE (cd. direttiva rimpatri) - normativa europea direttamente applicabile - decisione della Corte di Giustizia del 28.4.2011 causa C-61/11 PPU El Dridi - non applicazione della normativa in contrasto da parte del giudice nazionale; abolitio criminis - retroattivitŕ ex art. 2 c.p. - effetti anche sui provvedimenti amministrativi - rapporto giuridici non definitivi - inapplicabilitŕ del principio tempus regit actum 2. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Emilia Romagna - 23.2.2010 n. 1339 - permesso di soggiorno - straniero soggiornante in Italia da 40 anni - attuale disagio sociale - persona sostenuta dai Servizi sociali - diniego di rinnovo del titolo per insufficienza reddituale - mancata valutazione del periodo di tempo trascorso, dei legami familiari e sociali - illegittimitŕ del diniego 3. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Lazio 3.11.2010 n. 33120 - permesso di soggiorno - procedimento per il suo rilascio - superamento del termine di conclusione del procedimento - silenzio della PA - illegittimitŕ - ordine giudiziale alla questura di provvedere; ritardo - risarcimento del danno - mancata allegazione probatoria - rigetto per genericitŕ della domanda 4. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Lombardia 1.2.2011 n. 325 - regolarizzazione - decorso del termine per la definizione del procedimento - silenzio della PA - ricorso avverso il silenzio - accoglimento per inutile decorso del termine; ostativitŕ delle condanne in capo al datore di lavoro - insussistenza; interesse giuridico anche del lavoratore all'informazione sull'esito del procedimento; ricorso avverso il silenzio - contestuale richiesta di risarcimento dei danni - necessitŕ di mutamento del rito processuale ex art. 117, co. 6 codice processo amministrativo 5. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Friuli Venezia Giulia 24.2.2011 n. 100 - regolarizzazione - ostativitŕ delle condanne ex artt. 380 e 381 c.p.c. - automatismo preclusivo - impossibilitŕ di valutare la lievitŕ o la gravitŕ del fattoreato e/o l'allarme sociale - sospetta illegittimitŕ costituzionale della norma per violazione dei principi di ragionevolezza, paritŕ di trattamento e adeguatezza - rinvio alla Corte costituzionaleRASSEGNA DI GIURISPRUDENZA6. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Emilia Romagna 25.5.2010 n. 211 - decreto flussi - nulla osta negato per asserita insufficienza reddituale del datore di lavoro - mancata valutazione del reddito attuale - illegittimitŕ; criteri di verifica della capacitŕ reddituale del datore di lavoro predeterminati dalla D.P.L. - procedimento di diniego di nulla osta - comunicazione preavviso di rigetto ex art. 10 bis l. 241/90 e s.m. - obbligo della PA di tenere conto dell'attivitŕ Partecipativa 7. Tribunale amministrativo regionale della Campania 19.1.2011 n. 362 - permesso CE per soggiornanti di lungo periodo - diniego per pregresse condanne ritenute automaticamente ostative - mancata valutazione della effettiva ed attuale pericolositŕ sociale e dei legami familiari - violazione della direttiva 2003/109/CE, dell'art. 8 CEDU e dell'art. 9 TU n. 286/98 - illegittimitŕ 8. Tribunale amministrativo regionale Sardegna 17.2.2011 n. 83 - permesso di soggiorno - diniego di rinnovo - mancata valutazione delle ragioni della mancata stipula del contratto di soggiorno con il richiedente la regolarizzazione - illegittimitŕ - omessa valutazione del principio che vieta di collegare la perdita del titolo di soggiorno alla perdita del lavoro

IntroductionWhen I saw Patriots Day (Berg 2016) at my local multiplex, a family entered the theatre and sat a few rows in front of me. They had a child with them, a boy who was perhaps nine or ten years old. Upon seeing the kid, I had a physical reaction. Not quite a knee-jerk, but more of an uneasy gut punch. ‘Don't you know what this movie is about?’ I wanted to ask his parents; ‘I’ve seen Jeff Bauman’s bones, and that is not something a child should see.’ I had lived through the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt, and the memories were vivid in my mind as I waited for the movie to start, to re-present the memory on screen. Admittedly, I had lived through it from the other side of the world, watching through the mediated windows of the computer, smartphone, and television screen. Nevertheless, I remembered it in blood-soaked colour detail, brought to me by online photo galleries, social media updates, the failed amateur sleuths of Reddit, and constant cable news updates, breaking news even when the events had temporarily stalled. Alison Landsberg has coined the term “prosthetic memory” to describe how historical events are re-created and imbued with an affective experience through cinema and other sites of mass cultural mediation, allowing those who did not experience the past to form a personal connection to and subjective memory of history (2). For the boy in the cinema, Patriots Day would most likely be his first encounter with and memory of the Boston Marathon bombing. But how does prosthetic memory apply to audience members like me, who had lived through the Boston bombing from a great distance, with personalised memories mediated by the first-person perspective of social media? Does the ease of dissemination of information, particularly eyewitness photographs and videos, create possibilities for a prosthetic experience of the present? Does the online mediation of historical events of the present translate to screen dramatisations? These questions become particularly pertinent when the first-release audience of a film has recent, living memories of the real events depicted on screen.The time between when an event occurs and when it is brought to cinemas in a true-events adaptation is decreasing. Rebecca A. Sheehan argues that the cultural value of instant information has given rise to a trend in the contemporary biopic and historical film that sees our mediated world turned into a temporal "paradox in which the present is figured as both historical and ongoing" (36). Since 2005, Sheehan writes, biographical films that depict the lives of still-living public figures or in other ways comment on the ongoing history of the present have become increasingly frequent. Sheehan cites films such as The Social Network (Fincher 2010), The Queen (Frears 2006), W. (Stone 2008), and Game Change (Roach 2012) as examples of this growing biopic trend (35-36). In addition to the instantaneous remediation of public figures in the contemporary biopic, similarly there is a stable of contemporary historical films based on the true stories of ordinary people involved in extraordinary recent events. Films such as The Impossible (Bayona 2012), World Trade Center (Stone 2006), United 93 (Greengrass 2006), and Deepwater Horizon (Berg 2016) bring the death and destruction of real-world natural disasters or terrorist attacks to a sanitised but experiential cinematic event. The sensitive nature of some of the events in question often see the films labelled “too soon” and exploitative of recent tragedy. Films such as these typically do not have known public figures as their protagonists, but they arise from a similar climate of the demands of televisual and online mediation that Sheehan describes in the “instant biopics” of her study (36). Given this rise of brief temporal space between real events and their dramatisations, in this essay, I examine Patriots Day in light of the role digital experience plays in both its dramatisation and how the film's initial audience may remember the event. As Patriots Day replicates a kind of prosthetic memory of the present, it uses the first-instance digital mediation of the event to form prosthetic memories for future viewers. Through Patriots Day, I seek to gesture toward the possibilities of first-person digital mediation of major news events in shaping dramatisations of the recent past.Digital Memories of the Boston Marathon BombingTo examine the ways the Boston Marathon bombing circulated in online space, I look at the link- and image-based online discussion platform Reddit as an example of engagement with and recirculation of the event, particularly as a form of engagement defined by photographs and videos. Because the Boston Marathon is a televised and widely-reported event, professional videographers and photographers were present at the marathon’s finish line at the time of the first explosion. Thus, the first bomb and its immediate aftermath were captured in news footage and still images. The graphic nature of some of these images depicting the violence of the scene saw traditional print and television outlets cropping or otherwise editing the photographs to make them appropriate for mass broadcast (Hughney). Some online outlets, however, showed these pictures in their unedited form, often accompanied by warnings that required readers to scroll further down the page or click through the warning to see the photographs. These distinctive capabilities of the online environment allowed individuals to choose whether to view the image, while still allowing the uncensored image to circulate and be reposted elsewhere, such as on Reddit. In addition to photos and videos shot by professionals at the finish line, witnesses armed with smart phone cameras and access to social media posted their views of the aftermath to social media like Twitter, enabling the collation of both amateur and professionally shot photographs of the scene by online news aggregators such as Buzzfeed (Broderick). The Reddit community is seen as an essential part of the Boston Bombing story for the way some of its users participated in a form of ‘crowd-sourced’ investigation that resulted in the false identification of suspects (see: Nhan et al.; Tapia et al.; Potts and Harrison). There is another aspect to Reddit’s role in the circulation and mediation of the story, however, as online venues became a go-to source for news on the unfolding event, where information was delivered faster and with greater accuracy than the often-sensationalised television news coverage (Starbird et al. 347). In addition to its role in providing information that is a part of Reddit’s culture that “value[s] evidence of some kind” to support discussion (Potts and Harrison 144), Reddit played a number of roles in the sense-making process that social media can often facilitate during crisis situations (Heverin and Zach). Through its division into “subreddits,” the individual communities and discussion areas that make up the platform, Reddit accommodates an incredibly diverse range of topics and interests. Different areas of Reddit were able to play different roles in the process of sharing information and acting in a community sense-making capacity in the aftermath of the bombing. Among the subreddits involved in attempting to make sense of the event were those that served as appropriate places for posting image galleries of both professional and amateur photographs and videos, drawn from a variety of online sources. Users of subreddits such as /r/WTF and /r/MorbidReality, for example, posted galleries of “NSFL” (Not Safe For Life) images of the bombing and its aftermath (see: touhou_hijack, titan059, f00d4tehg0dz). Additionally, the /r/Boston subreddit issued calls for anyone with photographs or videos related to the attack to upload them to the thread, as well as providing an e-mail address to submit them to the FBI (RichardHerold). The /r/FindBostonBombers subreddit became a hub for analysis of the photographs. The subreddit's investigatory work was picked up by other online and traditional media outlets (including the New York Post cover photo which misidentified two suspects), bringing wider attention to Reddit’s unfolding coverage of the bombing (Potts and Harrison 148). Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory, and her application of it, largely relates to mass culture’s role in “the production and dissemination of memories that have no direct connection to a person’s lived past” (20). The possibilities for news events to be recorded and disseminated by smart phones and social media, however, help to create a deeper sense of affective engagement with a distant present, creating prosthetic memories out of the mediated first-hand experiences of others. The graphic nature of the photos and videos of the Boston bombing collected by and shared on sites like Reddit, the ongoing nature of the event (which, from detonation to the capture of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, spanned five days), and the participatory activity of scouring photographs for clues to the identity of the bombers all lend a sense of ongoing, experiential engagement with first-person, audiovisual mediations of the event. These prosthetic memories of the present are, as Landsberg writes of those created from dramatisations or re-creations of the past, transferable, able to belong to those who have no “natural” claim to them (18) with an experiential element that personalises history for those who do not directly experience it (33). If widely disseminated first-person mediations of events like the Boston bombing can be thought of as a prosthetic experience of present history, how will they play a part in the prosthetic memories of the future? How will those who did not live through the Boston bombing, either as a personal experience or a digitally mediated one, incorporate this digital memory into their own experience of its cinematic re-creation? To address this question, I turn to consider Patriots Day. Of particular note is the bombing sequence’s resemblance to digital mediations of the event as a marker of a plausible docudramatic resemblance to reality.The Docudramatic Re-Presentation of Digital MemoryAs a cinematic representation of recent history, Patriots Day sits at a somewhat uncomfortable intersection of fact and fiction, of docudrama and popcorn action movie, more so than an instant history film typically would. Composite characters or entirely invented characters and narratives that play out against the backdrop of real events are nothing out of the ordinary in the historical film. However, Patriots Day's use of real material and that of pure invention coincides, frequently in stark contrast. The film's protagonist, Boston Police Sergeant Tommy Saunders (played by Mark Wahlberg) is a fictional character, the improbable hero of the story who is present at every step of the attack and the manhunt. He is there on Boylston Street when the bombs go off. He is there with the FBI, helping to identify the suspects with knowledge of Boylston Street security cameras that borders on a supernatural power. He is there at the Watertown shootout among exploding cars and one-liner quips. When Dzokhar Tsarnaev is finally located, he is, of course, first on the scene. Tommy Saunders, as embodied by Wahlberg, trades on all the connotations of both the stereotypical Boston Southie and the action hero that are embedded in Wahlberg’s star persona. As a result, Patriots Day often seems to be a depiction of an alternate universe where Mark Wahlberg in a cop uniform almost single-handedly caught a terrorist. The improbability of Saunders as a character in a true-events drama, though, is thoroughly couched in the docudramatic material of historical depiction. Steven N. Lipkin argues that docudrama is a mode of representation that performs a re-creation of memory to persuade us that it is representing the real (1). By conjuring the memory of an event into being in ways that seem plausible and anchored to the evidence of actuality—such as integrating archival footage or an indexical resemblance to the actual event or an actual person—the representational, cinematic, or fictionalised elements of docudrama are imbued with a sense of the reality they claim to represent (Lipkin 3). Patriots Day uses real visual material throughout the film. The integration of evidence is particularly notable in the bombing sequence, which combines archival footage of the 2013 race, surveillance footage of the Tsarnaev brothers approaching the finish line, and a dramatic re-creation that visually resembles the original to such an extent that its integration with archival footage is almost seamless (Landler). The conclusion of the film draws on this evidential connection to the real as well, in the way that docudrama is momentarily suspended to become documentary, as interviews with some of the real people who are depicted as characters in the film close out the story. In addition to its direct use of the actual, Patriots Day's re-creation of the bombing itself bears an indexical resemblance to the event as seen by those who were not there and relies on memories of the bombing's initial mediation to vouch for the dramatisation's accuracy. In the moments before the bombing's re-creation, actual footage of the Tsarnaevs's route down Boylston Street plays, a low ominous tone of the score building over the silent security footage. The fictional Saunders’s fictional wife (Michelle Monaghan) has come to the finish line to bring him a knee brace, and she passes Tamerlan Tsarnaev as she leaves. This shot directly crosses a visual resemblance to the actual (Themo Melikidze playing Tsarnaev, resembling the bomber through physicality and costuming) with the fictional structuring device of the film in the form of Tommy Saunders. Next, in a long shot, we see Tsarnaev bump into a man wearing a grey raglan shirt. The man turns to look at Tsarnaev. From the costuming, it is evident that this man who is not otherwise named is intended to represent Jeff Bauman, the subject of an iconic photograph from the bombing. In the photo, Bauman is shown being taken from the scene in a wheelchair with both legs amputated from below the knee by the blast (another cinematic dramatisation of the Boston bombing, Stronger, based on Bauman’s memoir of the same name, will be released in 2017). In addition to the visual signifier of Bauman from the memorable photograph, reports circulated that Bauman's ability to describe Tsarnaev to the FBI in the immediate aftermath of the bombing was instrumental in identifying the suspects (Hartmann). Here, this digital memory is re-created in a brief but recognisable moment: this is the before picture of Jeff Bauman, this is the moment of identification that was widely circulated and talked about, a memory of that one piece of good news that helped satisfy public curiosity about the status of the iconic Man in the Wheelchair.When the bombs detonate, we are brought into the smoke and ash, closer access than the original mediation afforded by the videographers at the finish line. After the first bomb detonates, the camera follows Saunders as he walks toward the smoke cloud. As the second bomb explodes, we go inside the scene. The sequence cuts from actual security camera footage that captured the blast, to a first-person perspective of the explosion, the resulting fire and smoke, and a shot that resembles the point of view of footage captured on a smart phone. The frame shakes wildly, giving the viewer disorienting flashes of the victims, a sense of the chaos without seeing anything in lasting, specific detail, before the frame tips sideways onto the pavement, stained with blood and littered with debris. Coupled with this is a soundscape that resembles both the subjective experience of a bombing victim and what their smart phone video has captured. There is the rumble of the explosion and muffled sounds of debris hidden under the noise of shockwaves of air hitting a microphone, fading into an electronic whine and tinnitus ring. A later shot shows the frame obscured by smoke, slowly clearing to give us a high angle view of the aftermath, resembling photographs taken from a window overlooking the scene on Boylston Street (see: touhou_hijack). Archival footage of first responders and points of view resembling a running cell phone camera that captures flashes of blood and open wounds combine with shots of the actors playing characters (both fictional and based on real people) that were established at the beginning of the film. There is once again a merging of the re-created and the actual, bound together by a sense of memory that encourages the viewer to take the former as plausible, based on its resemblance to the latter.When Saunders runs for the second bombing site further down the street, he looks down at two bodies on the ground. Framed in close-up, the bloodless, empty expression and bright blue shirt of Krystle Campbell are recognisable. We can ignore the inaccuracies of this element of the digital memory amidst the chaos of the sequence. Campbell died in the first bombing, not the second. The body of a woman in a black shirt is between the camera's position on the re-created Boylston Street and the actor standing in for Campbell, the opposite of how Campbell and her friend Karen Rand lay beside each other in photographs of the bombing aftermath. The police officer who takes Krystle's pulse on film and shakes her head at Wahlberg's character is a brunette, not the blonde in the widely-circulated picture of a first responder at the actual bombing. The most visceral portion of the image is there, though, re-created almost exactly as it appeared at its first point of mediation: the lifeless eyes and gaping mouth, the bright blue t-shirt. The memory of the event is conjured into being, and the cinematic image resembles the most salient elements of the memory enough for the cinematic image to be a plausible re-creation. The cinematic frame is positioned at a lower level to the original still, as though we are on the ground beside her, bringing the viewer even closer to the event, even as the frame crops out her injuries as scene photographs did not, granting a semblance of respectful distance from the real death. This re-creation of Krystle Campbell’s death is a brief flash in the sequence, but a powerful moment of recognition for those who remember its original mediation. The result is a sequence that shows the graphic violence of the actuality it represents in a series of images that invite its viewer to expand the sequence with their memory of the event the way most of them experienced it: on other screens, at the site of its first instance of digital mediation.ConclusionThrough its use of cinematography that resembles actual photographic evidence of the Boston Marathon bombing or imbues the re-creation with a sense of a first-person, digitally mediated account of the event, Patriots Day draws on its audience's digital memory of recent history to claim accuracy in its fictionalisation. Not everyone who sees Patriots Day may be as familiar with the wealth of eyewitness photographs and images of the Boston Marathon bombing as those who may have experienced and followed the events in online venues such as Reddit. Nonetheless, the fact of this material's existence shapes the event's dramatisation as the filmmakers attempt to imbue the dramatisation with a sense of accuracy and fidelity to the event. The influence of digital memory on the film’s representation of the event gestures toward the possibilities for how online engagement with major news events may play a role in their dramatisation moving forward. Events that have had eyewitness visual accounts distributed online, such as the 2015 Bataclan massacre, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing and Westminster Bridge attack, or the 2016 police shooting of Philando Castile that was streamed on Facebook live, may become the subject of future dramatisations of recent history. The dramatic renderings of contemporary history films will undoubtedly be shaped by the recent memory of their online mediations to appeal to a sense of accuracy in the viewer's memory. As recent history films continue, digital memories of the present will help make the prosthetic memories of the future. 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Hughney, Christine. “News Media Weigh Use of Photos of Carnage.” New York Times, 17 Apr. 2013. 2 Aug. 2017 <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/business/media/news-media-weigh-use-of-photos-of-carnage.html>.Landler, Edward. “Recreating the Boston Marathon Bombing in Patriots Day.” Cinemontage, 21 Dec. 2016. 8 Aug. 2017 <http://cinemontage.org/2016/12/recreating-boston-marathon-bombing-patriots-day/>.Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia U P, 2004. Lipkin, Steven N. Docudrama Performs the Past: Arenas of Argument in Films Based on True Stories. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Nhan, Johnny, Laura Huey, and Ryan Broll. “Digilantism: An Analysis of Crowdsourcing and the Boston Marathon Bombing.” British Journal of Criminology 57 (2017): 341-361. Patriots Day. Dir. Peter Berg. CBS Films, 2016.Potts, Liza, and Angela Harrison. “Interfaces as Rhetorical Constructions. Reddit and 4chan during the Boston Marathon Bombings.” Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. Greenville, North Carolina, September-October 2013. 143-150. RichardHerold. “2013 Boston Marathon Attacks: Please Upload Any Photos in Relation to the Attacks That You Have.” Reddit, 15 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cf5wp/2013_boston_marathon_attacks_please_upload_any/>.Sheehan, Rebecca A. “Facebooking the Present: The Biopic and Cultural Instantaneity.” The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. Eds. Tom Brown and Bélen Vidal. New York: Routledge, 2014. 35-51. Starbird, Kate, Jim Maddock, Mania Orand, Peg Achterman, and Robert M. Mason. “Rumors, False Flags, and Digital Vigilantes: Misinformation on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing.” iConference 2014 Proceedings. Berlin, March 2014. 654-662. Tapia, Andrea H., Nicolas LaLone, and Hyun-Woo Kim. “Run Amok: Group Crowd Participation in Identifying the Bomb and Bomber from the Boston Marathon Bombing.” Proceedings of the 11th International ISCRAM Conference. Eds. S.R. Hiltz, M.S. Pfaff, L. Plotnick, and P.C. Shih. University Park, Pennsylvania, May 2014. 265-274. titan059. “Pics from Boston Bombing NSFL.” Reddit, 15 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1cf0po/pics_from_boston_bombing_nsfl/>.touhou_hijack. “Krystle Campbell Died Screaming. This Sequence of Photos Shows Her Final Moments.” Reddit, 18 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/MorbidReality/comments/1cktrx/krystle_campbell_died_screaming_this_sequence_of/>.

This issue of M/C Journal is devoted to all things cute – Internet animals and stuffed toys, cartoon characters and branded bears. In what follows our nine contributors scrutinise a diverse range of media objects, discussing everything from the economics of Grumpy Cat and the aesthetics of Furbys to Reddit’s intellectual property dramas and the ethics of kitten memes. The articles range across diverse sites, from China to Canada, and equally diverse disciplines, including cultural studies, evolutionary economics, media anthropology, film studies and socio-legal studies. But they share a common aim of tracing out the connections between degraded media forms and wider questions of culture, identity, economy and power. Our contributors tell riveting stories about these connections, inviting us to see the most familiar visual culture in a new way. We are not the first to take cute media seriously as a site of cultural politics, and as an industry in its own right. Cultural theory has a long, antagonistic relationship with the kitsch and the disposable. From the Frankfurt School’s withering critique of cultural commodification to revisionist feminist accounts that emphasise the importance of the everyday, critics have been conducting sporadic incursions into this space for the better part of a century. The rise of cultural studies, a discipline committed to analysing “the scrap of ordinary or banal existence” (Morris and Frow xviii), has naturally provided a convincing intellectual rationale for such research, and has inspired an impressive array of studies on such things as Victorian-era postcards (Milne), Disney films (Forgacs), Hallmark cards (West, Jaffe) and stock photography (Frosh). A parallel strand of literary theory considers the diverse registers of aesthetic experience that characterize cute content (Brown, Harris). Sianne Ngai has written elegantly on this topic, noting that “while the avant-garde is conventionally imagined as sharp and pointy, as hard- or cutting-edge, cute objects have no edge to speak of, usually being soft, round, and deeply associated with the infantile and the feminine” (814). Other scholars trace the historical evolution of cute aesthetics and commodities. Cultural historians have documented the emergence of consumer markets for children and how these have shaped what we think of as cute (Cross). Others have considered the history of domestic animal imagery and its symptomatic relationship with social anxieties around Darwinism, animal rights, and pet keeping (Morse and Danahay, Ritvo). And of course, Japanese popular culture – with its distinctive mobilization of cute aesthetics – has attracted its own rich literature in anthropology and area studies (Allison, Kinsella). The current issue of M/C Journal extends these lines of research while also pushing the conversation in some new directions. Specifically, we are interested in the collision between cute aesthetics, understood as a persistent strand of mass culture, and contemporary digital media. What might the existing tradition of “cute theory” mean in an Internet economy where user-generated content sites and social media have massively expanded the semiotic space of “cute” – and the commercial possibilities this entails? As the heir to a specific mode of degraded populism, the Internet cat video may be to the present what the sitcom, the paperback novel, or the Madonna video was to an earlier moment of cultural analysis. Millions of people worldwide start their days with kittens on Roombas. Global animal brands, such as Maru and Grumpy Cat, are appearing, along with new talent agencies for celebrity pets. Online portal I Can Haz Cheezburger has received millions of dollars in venture capital funding, becoming a diversified media business (and then a dotcom bubble). YouTube channels, Twitter hashtags and blog rolls form an infrastructure across which a vast amount of cute-themed user-generated content, as well as an increasing amount of commercially produced and branded material, now circulates. All this reminds us of the oft-quoted truism that the Internet is “made of kittens”, and that it’s “kittens all the way down”. Digitization of cute culture leads to some unusual tweaks in the taste hierarchies explored in the aforementioned scholarship. Cute content now functions variously as an affective transaction, a form of fandom, and as a subcultural discourse. In some corners of the Internet it is also being re-imagined as something contemporary, self-reflexive and flecked with irony. The example of 4Chan and LOLcats, a jocular, masculinist remix of the feminized genre of pet photography, is particularly striking here. How might the topic of cute look if we moving away from the old dialectics of mass culture critique vs. defense and instead foreground some of these more counter-intuitive aspects, taking seriously the enormous scale and vibrancy of the various “cute” content production systems – from children’s television to greeting cards to CuteOverload.com – and their structural integration into current media, marketing and lifestyle industries? Several articles in this issue adopt this approach, investigating the undergirding economic and regulatory structures of cute culture. Jason Potts provides a novel economic explanation for why there are so many animals on the Internet, using a little-known economic theory (the Alchian-Allen theorem) to explain the abundance of cat videos on YouTube. James Meese explores the complex copyright politics of pet images on Reddit, showing how this online community – which is the original source of much of the Internet’s animal gifs, jpegs and videos – has developed its own procedures for regulating animal image “piracy”. These articles imaginatively connect the soft stuff of cute content with the hard stuff of intellectual property and supply-and-demand dynamics. Another line of questioning investigates the political and bio-political work involved in everyday investments in cute culture. Seen from this perspective, cute is an affect that connects ground-level consumer subjectivity with various economic and political projects. Carolyn Stevens’ essay offers an absorbing analysis of the Japanese cute character Rilakkuma (“Relaxed Bear”), a wildly popular cartoon bear that is typically depicted lying on the couch and eating sweets. She explores what this representation means in the context of a stagnant Japanese economy, when the idea of idleness is taking on a new shade of meaning due to rising under-employment and precarity. Sharalyn Sanders considers a fascinating recent case of cute-powered activism in Canada, when animal rights activists used a multimedia stunt – a cat, Tuxedo Stan, running for mayor of Halifax, Canada – to highlight the unfortunate situation of stray and feral felines in the municipality. Sanders offers a rich analysis of this unusual political campaign and the moral questions it provokes. Elaine Laforteza considers another fascinating collision of the cute and the political: the case of Lil’ Bub, an American cat with a rare genetic condition that results in a perpetually kitten-like facial expression. During 2011 Lil’ Bub became an online phenomenon of the first order. Laforteza uses this event, and the controversies that brewed around it, as an entry point for a fascinating discussion of the “cute-ification” of disability. These case studies remind us once more of the political stakes of representation and viral communication, topics taken up by other contributors in their articles. Radha O’Meara’s “Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? How Cat Videos Disguise Surveillance as Unselfconscious Play” provides a wide-ranging textual analysis of pet videos, focusing on the subtle narrative structures and viewer positioning that are so central to the pleasures of this genre. O’Meara explains how the “cute” experience is linked to the frisson of surveillance, and escape from surveillance. She also explains the aesthetic differences that distinguish online dog videos from cat videos, showing how particular ideas about animals are hardwired into the apparently spontaneous form of amateur content production. Gabriele de Seta investigates the linguistics of cute in his nuanced examination of how a new word – meng – entered popular discourse amongst Mandarin Chinese Internet users. de Seta draws our attention to the specificities of cute as a concept, and how the very notion of cuteness undergoes a series of translations and reconfigurations as it travels across cultures and contexts. As the term meng supplants existing Mandarin terms for cute such as ke’ai, debates around how the new word should be used are common. De Seta shows us how deploying these specific linguistic terms for cuteness involve a range of linguistic and aesthetic judgments. In short, what exactly is cute and in what context? Other contributors offer much-needed cultural analyses of the relationship between cute aesthetics, celebrity and user-generated culture. Catherine Caudwell looks at the once-popular Furby toy brand its treatment in online fan fiction. She notes that these forms of online creative practice offer a range of “imaginative and speculative” critiques of cuteness. Caudwell – like de Seta – reminds us that “cuteness is an unstable aesthetic that is culturally contingent and very much tied to behaviour”, an affect that can encompass friendliness, helplessness, monstrosity and strangeness. Jonathon Hutchinson’s article explores “petworking”, the phenomenon of social media-enabled celebrity pets (and pet owners). Using the famous example of Boo, a “highly networked” celebrity Pomeranian, Hutchinson offers a careful account of how cute is constructed, with intermediaries (owners and, in some cases, agents) negotiating a series of careful interactions between pet fans and the pet itself. Hutchinson argues if we wish to understand the popularity of cute content, the “strategic efforts” of these intermediaries must be taken into account. Each of our contributors has a unique story to tell about the aesthetics of commodity culture. The objects they analyse may be cute and furry, but the critical arguments offered here have very sharp teeth. We hope you enjoy the issue.Acknowledgments Thanks to Axel Bruns at M/C Journal for his support, to our hard-working peer reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments, and to the Swinburne Institute for Social Research for the small grant that made this issue possible. ReferencesAllison, Anne. “Cuteness as Japan’s Millenial Product.” Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon. Ed. Joseph Tobin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 34-48. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Cross, Gary. The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Forgacs, David. "Disney Animation and the Business of Childhood." Screen 33.4 (1992): 361-374. Frosh, Paul. "Inside the Image Factory: Stock Photography and Cultural Production." Media, Culture & Society 23.5 (2001): 625-646. Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Jaffe, Alexandra. "Packaged Sentiments: The Social Meanings of Greeting Cards." Journal of Material Culture 4.2 (1999): 115-141. Kinsella, Sharon. “Cuties in Japan” Women, Media and Consumption in Japan. Ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. 220 - 54. Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris, eds. Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. New York: Routledge, 2012. Morse, Deborah and Martin Danahay, eds. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2007. Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (2005): 811-847. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. West, Emily. "When You Care Enough to Defend the Very Best: How the Greeting Card Industry Manages Cultural Criticism." Media, Culture & Society 29.2 (2007): 241-261.

Digital culture, as we know it, owes much to space exploration. The technological pursuit of outer space has fuelled innovations in signal processing and automated computing that have left an impact on the hardware and software that make our digital present possible. Developments in satellite technologies, for example, produced far-reaching improvements in digital image processing (Gonzalez and Woods) and the demands of the Apollo missions advanced applications of the integrated circuit – the predecessor to the microchip (Hall). All the inventive digital beginnings in space found their way back to earth and contributed to the development of contemporary formations of culture composed around practices dependent on and driven by digital technologies. Their terrestrial adoption and adaptation supported a revolution in information, mediation and communication technologies, increasing the scope and speed of global production, exchange and use of data and advancing techniques of imaging, mapping, navigation, surveillance, remote sensing and telemetry to a point that could only be imagined before the arrival of the space age. Steadily knotted with contemporary scientific, commercial and military endeavours and the fabric of the quotidian, digital devices and practices now have a bearing upon all aspects of our pursuits, pleasures and politics. Our increasing reliance upon the digital shaped the shared surfaces of human societies and produced cultures in their own right. While aware of the uneasy baggage of the term ‘culture’, we use it here to designate all digitally grounded objects, systems and processes which are materially and socially inflecting our ways of life. In this sense, we consider both what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe as “those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth” (viii), and the material contexts of these products of the social. The effects of digital technologies on the socio-material ambits of human life are many and substantial and – as we want to suggest here – evolving through their ‘extraterrestrial’ beginnings. The contemporary courses of digital cultures not only continue to develop through investments in space exploration, they are themselves largely contingent on the technologies that we have placed in outer space, for instance, global telecommunications infrastructure, GPS, Google maps, weather and climate monitoring facilities and missile grids all rely on the constellation of satellites orbiting the earth. However, we have been increasingly witnessing something new: modes of social production that developed on earth from the technical demands of the space age are now being directed, or rather returned back to have new beginnings beyond the globe. Our focus in this paper is this outward momentum of digital cultures. We do not aim to overview the entire history of the digital in outer space, but instead to frame the extraterrestrial extension of human technologies in terms of the socio-material dimensions of extra-planetary digital cultures. Hannah Arendt described how the space age accelerated the already rapid pace of techno-scientific development, denying us pause during which to grasp its effects upon the “human condition”. Our treacherously fast technological conquest of outer space leaves in its wake an aporia in language and “the trouble”, as Arendt puts it, is that we will “forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do” (3). This crisis in language has at its core a problem of ontology: a failure to recognise that the words we use to describe ourselves are always, and have always been, bound up in our technological modes of being. As thinkers such as Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler argued and Arendt derided (but could not deny), our technologies are inseparably bound up with the evolutionary continuum of the human and the migration of our digital ways of life into outer space still further complicates articulation of our techno-logic condition. In Stiegler’s view the technical is the primordial supplement to the human into which we have been “exteriorising” our “interiors” of social memory and shared culture to alter, assert and advance the material-social ambits of our living milieu and which have been consequently changing the idea of what it is to be human (141). Without technologies – what Stiegler terms “organised inorganic matter” (17), which mediate our relationships to the world – there is no human in the inhuman extraterrestrial environment and so, effectively, it is only through the organisation of inert matter that culture or social life can exist outside the earth. Offering the possibility of digitally abstracting and processing the complexities and perils of outer space, space technologies are not only a means of creating a human milieu ‘out there’, but of expediting potentially endless extra-planetary progress. The transposition of digital culture into outer space occasions a series of beginnings (and returns). In this paper, we explore extra-planetary digital culture as a productive trajectory in broader discussions of the ontological status of technologies that are socially and materially imbricated in the idea of the human. We consider the digital facilitation of exchanges between earth and outer space and assign them a place in an evolving discourse concerned with expressing the human in relation to the technological. We suggest that ontological questions occasioned by the socio-material effects of technologies require consideration of the digital in outer space and that the inhuman milieu of the extraterrestrial opens up a unique perspective from which to consider the nascent shape of what might be the emerging extra-planetary beginnings of the post human. Digital Exurbias The unfolding of extra-planetary digital cultures necessitates the simultaneous exteriorisation of our production of the social into outer space and the domestication of our extraterrestrial activities here on earth. Caught in the processes of mediated exploration, the moon, Mars, Pluto and other natural or human-made celestial bodies such as the International Space Station are almost becoming remote outer suburbs – exurbias of earth. Digital cultures are reaching toward and expanding into outer space through the development of technologies, but more specifically through advancing the reciprocal processes of social exchanges between terrestrial and extraterrestrial space. Whether it be through public satellite tracking via applications such as Heavens-Above or The High Definition Earth Viewing system’s continuous video feed from the camera attached to the ISS (NASA, "High Definition") – which streams us back an image of our planetary habitat from an Archimedean point of view – we are being encouraged to embrace a kind of digital enculturation of extraterrestrial space. The production of social life outside our own planet has already had many forms, but perhaps can be seen most clearly aboard the International Space Station, presently the only extraterrestrial environment physically occupied by humans. Amongst its many landmark events, the ISS has become a vigorous node of social media activity. For example, in 2013 Chris Hadfield became a Twitter phenomenon while living aboard the ISS; the astronaut gathered over a million Twitter followers, he made posts on Facebook, Tumblr and Reddit, multiple mini-vids, and his rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity on YouTube (Hadfield) has thus far been viewed over 26 million times. His success, as has been noted, was not merely due to his use of social media in the unique environment of outer space, but rather that he was able to make the highly technical lives of those in space familiar by revealing to a global audience “how you make a sandwich in microgravity, how you get a haircut” (Potter). This techno-mediation of the everyday onboard ISS is, from a Stieglerian perspective, a gesture toward the establishment of “the relation of the living to its milieu” (49). As part of this process, the new trends and innovations of social media on earth are, for example, continuously replayed and rehearsed in the outer space, with a litany of ‘digital firsts’ such as the first human-sent extraterrestrial ‘tweet’, first Instagram post, first Reddit AMA and first Pinterest ‘pin’ (Knoblauch), betraying our obsessions with serial digital beginnings. The constitution of an extra-planetary milieu progresses with the ability to conduct real-time interactions between those on and outside the earth. This, in essence, collapses all social aspects of the physical barrier and the ISS becomes merely a high-tech outer suburb of the globe. Yet fluid, uninterrupted, real-time communications with the station have only just become possible. Previously, the Iinternet connections between earth and the ISS were slow and troublesome, akin to the early dial-up, but the recently installed Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPAL), a laser communications system, now enables the incredible speeds needed to effortlessly communicate with the human orbital outpost in real-time. After OPAL was affixed to the ISS, it was first tested using the now-traditional system test, “hello, world” (NASA, "Optical Payload"); referencing the early history of digital culture itself, and in doing so, perhaps making the most apt use of this phrase, ever. Open to Beginnings Digital technologies have become vital in sustaining social life, facilitating the immaterial production of knowledge, information and affects (Hardt and Negri), but we have also become increasingly attentive to their materialities; or rather, the ‘matter of things’ never went away, it was only partially occluded by the explosion of social interactivities sparked by the ‘digital revolution’. Within the ongoing ‘material turn’, there have been a gamut of inquiries into the material contexts of the ‘digital’, for example, in the fields of digital anthropology (Horst and Miller), media studies (Kirschenbaum, Fuller, Parikka) and science and technology studies (Gillespie, Boczkowski, and Foot) – to mention only a very few of these works. Outside the globe material things are again insistent, they contain and maintain the terrestrial life from which they were formed. Outer space quickens our awareness of the materiality underpinning the technical apparatus we use to mediate and communicate and the delicate support that it provides for the complex of digital practices built upon it. Social exchanges between earth and its extra-planetary exurbias are made possible through the very materiality of digital signals within which these immaterial interactions can take place. In the pared down reality of contemporary life in outer space, the sociality of the digital is also harnessed to bring forth forms of material production. For example, when astronauts in space recently needed a particular wrench, NASA was able to email them a digital file from which they were then able print the required tool (Shukman). Through technologies such as the 3D printer, the line between products of the social and the creation of material objects becomes blurred. In extra-planetary space, the ‘thingness’ of technologies is at least as crucial as it is on earth and yet – as it appears – material production in space might eventually rely on the infrastructures occasioned by the immaterial exchanges of digital culture. As technical objects, like the 3D printer, are evolving so too are conceptions of the relationship that humans have with technologies. One result of this is the idea that technologies themselves are becoming capable of producing social life; in this conception, the relationships and interrelationships of and with technologies become a potential field of study. We suggest here that the extra-planetary extension of digital cultures will not only involve, but help shape, the evolution of these relationships, and as such, our conceptions and articulations of a future beyond the globe will require a re-positioning of the human and technical objects within the arena of life. This will require new beginnings. Yet beginnings are duplicitous, as Maurice Blanchot wrote – “one must never rely on the word beginning”; technologies have always been part of the human, our rapport is in some sense what defines the human. To successfully introduce the social in outer space will involve an evolution in both the theory and practice of this participation. And it is perhaps through the extra-planetary projection of digital culture that this will come about. In outer space the human partnership with the objects of technology, far from being a utopian promise or dystopian end, is not only a necessity but also a productive force shaping the collective beginnings of our historical co-evolution. Objects of technology that migrate into space appear designed to smooth the ontological misgivings that might arise from our extra-planetary progress. While they are part of the means for producing the social in outer space and physical fortifications against human frailty, they are perhaps also the beginnings of the extraterrestrial enculturation of technologies, given form. One example of such technologies is the anthropomorphic robots currently developed by the Dextrous Robotics Laboratory for NASA. The latest iteration of these, Robotnaut 2 was the first humanoid robot in space; it is a “highly dexterous” robot that works beside astronauts performing a wide range of manual and sensory activities (NASA, "Robonaut"). The Robonaut 2 has recorded its own series of ‘firsts’, including being the “first robot inside a human space vehicle operating without a cage, and first robot to work with human-rated tools in space” (NASA, "Robonaut"). One of the things which mark it as a potential beginning is this ability to use the same tools as astronauts. This suggests the image of a tool using a tool – at first glance, something now quite common in the operation of machines – however, in this case the robot is able to manipulate a tool that was not designed for it. This then might also include the machine itself in our own origins, in that evolutionary moment of grasping a tool or stealing fire from the gods. As an exteriorisation of the human, these robots also suggest that a shared extra-planetary culture would involve acknowledging the participation of technologic entities, recognising that they share these beginnings with us, and thus are participating in the origins of our potential futures beyond the globe – the prospects of which we can only imagine now. Identifiably human-shaped, Robonauts are created to socialise with, and labour together with, astronauts; they share tools and work on the same complex tasks in the same environment aboard the International Space Station. In doing so, their presence might break down the separation between the living and the nonliving, giving form to Stiegler’s hypothesis regarding the ontology of technical objects, and coming to represent a mode of “being” described as “organized inert matter” (49). The robonaut is not dominated by the human, like a hand-held tool, nor is it dominating like a faceless system; it is engineered to be conducted, ‘organised’ rather than controlled. In addition to its anthropomorphic tendencies – which among other things, makes them appear more human than astronauts wearing space suits – is the robonaut’s existence as part of an assemblage of networked life that links technical objects with wet bodies into an animate system of information and matter. While this “heralds the possibility of making the technical being part of culture” (Simondon 16), it also suggests that extra-planetary digital cultures will harness what Simondon formulates as an “ensemble” of “open machines” – a system of sensitive technologies toward which the human acts as “organizer and as a living interpreter” (13). In the design of our extra-planetary envoys we are evolving toward this openness; the Robonaut, a technical object that shares in digital culture and its social and material production, might be the impetus through which the human and technological acquire a language that expresses a kind of evolutionary dialectic. As a system of inclusions that uses technologies to incorporate/socialise everything it can, including its own relationship with technical objects, digital culture in outer space clarifies how technologies might relate and “exchange information with each other through the intermediacy of the human interpreter” (Simondon 14). The Robonaut, like the tweeting astronaut, provides the test signals for what might eventually become points of communication between different modes of being. In this context, culture is collective cumulative memory; the ‘digital’ form of culture suggests an evolution of both technologic life and human life because it incorporates the development of more efficient means of storing and transmitting memory as cultural knowledge, while recognising the experience of both. Social learning and memory will first define the evolution of the Robonaut. Digital culture and the social expressed through technology – toward a shared social life and cultural landscape established in outer space – will involve the conservation, transmission and setting of common patterns that pool a composite interplay of material, neurobiologic and technologic variables. This will in turn require new practices of enculturation, conviviality with technologies, a sharing, incorporation and care. Only then might this transform into a discussion concerning the ontologies of the ‘we’. (Far from) Conclusions Hannah Arendt wrote that technologic progress could not find full expression in “normal” (3) language and that we must constantly be aware that our knowledge, politics, ethics and interactions with regard to technologies are incomplete, unformulated or unexpressed. It could be said then that our relationship with technologies is constantly beginning, that this need to keep finding new language to grasp it means that it actually progresses through its rehearsal of beginnings, through the need to maintain the productive inquisitive force of a pleasant first meeting. Yet Arendt’s idea emerges from a kind of contempt for technology and her implied separation between ‘normal’ and what could be called ‘technical’ language suggests that she privileges the lay ‘human’ tongue as the only one in which meaningful ideas can be properly expressed. What this fails to acknowledge is an appreciation of the potential richness of technical language and Arendt instead establishes a hierarchy that privileges one’s ‘natural’ language. The invocation of the term ‘normal’ is itself an admission of unequal relations with technologies. For a language to develop in which we can truly begin to express and understand the human relationship with ever-changing but ever-present technologies,, we must first allow the entrance of the language of technology into social life – it must be incorporated, learnt or translated. In the future, this might ultimately give technology a voice in a dialogue that might be half-composed of binary code. Digital culture is perhaps a forerunner of such a conversation and perhaps it is in the milieu of outer space that it could be possible to see advances in our ideas about the mutually co-constitutive relationship between the human and technical. The ongoing extra-planetary extension of the digital cultures have the productive potential to sculpt the material and social ambits of our world, and it is this capacity that may precipitate beginnings which will leave lasting imprints upon the prospects of our shared post-human futures. References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Blanchot, Maurice. Friendship. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Originally published in French in 1971 under the title L’Amitié. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Gillespie, Tarleton, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (eds.). Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014. Gonzalez, Rafael, and Richard E. Woods. Digital Image Processing. 2nd ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2002. Hadfield, Chris. “Space Oddity.” YouTube, 12 May 2013. 10 Aug. 2015 ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo›. Hall, Eldon C. Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer. Reston: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1996. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Heavens-Above. ‹http://www.heavens-above.com›. Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller. Digital Anthropology. London and New York: Berg, 2012. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Knoblauch, Max. “The 8 First Social Media Posts from Space.” Mashable 13 Aug. 2013. ‹http://mashable.com/2013/08/13/space-social-media-firsts/›. 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La publicación de la edición N° 8 de la Revista Nuevas Dimensiones inaugura una nueva etapa. En circulación electrónica desde el año 2010, como una iniciativa de profesores y profesoras de Historia, Geografía y Ciencias Sociales en Chile, hoy se encuentra adscrita a la Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades de la Universidad Alberto Hurtado y es la revista de la Asociación Chilena de Enseñanza de las Ciencias Sociales (ACHECS) y de la Red Iberoamericana en Didáctica de las Ciencias Sociales (RIDCS). Esta nueva edición comienza a gestarse a mediados del año 2020, en el contexto de la organización de la ACHECS, que reúne a académicos y académicas que trabajamos en la formación del profesorado de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, así como al profesorado en ejercicio de esa especialidad. En ese mismo periodo, vivimos la dolorosa pérdida del profesor Joan Pagés Blanch, responsable de la formación académica de varios integrantes de nuestra Asociación. Nuestras Primeras Jornadas de Enseñanza de las Ciencias Sociales, a fines del 2020, fueron en homenaje a su trayectoria, y en esa misma línea, decidimos que el relanzamiento de Nuevas Dimensiones abordara su contribución en el desarrollo de la didáctica de las ciencias sociales en el contexto Iberoamericano. Sin lugar a duda, sus aportes han permitido que hoy las reflexiones sobre la enseñanza y el aprendizaje de las ciencias sociales tengan un camino recorrido que ha permitido que en una parte importante de los países que tuvieron la oportunidad de recoger sus enseñanzas, hayan incorporado una mirada distinta con respecto a este campo de saberes. Por medio de ello se ha generado un importante aporte a la construcción de una ciudadanía crítica y empoderada que toma en sus manos la construcción de futuros alternativos que permiten el acercamiento hacia la justicia social. Esta edición comienza con una reseña de la obra de Joan titulada, Joan Pagés Blanch: el ejercicio de la ciudadanía democrática y la formación del profesorado de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, a cargo de Sixtina Pinochet y Lucía Valencia que pone foco en dos de las líneas en las que su quehacer ha sido clave para el desarrollo del campo de la didáctica: el ejercicio de la ciudadanía y su relación con la formación del profesorado de Historia y Ciencia Sociales y el rol de esos últimos en el desarrollo de esa ciudadanía. Los artículos siguientes consideran publicaciones de Pagés en números anteriores de Nuevas Dimensiones; trabajos que profundizan su aporte en la formación del profesorado en dos realidades situadas, las de México y Argentina; además de investigaciones sobre experiencias de prácticas de enseñanza en Ciencias Sociales y debates en torno a las posibilidades de enseñanza a través de la literacidad crítica y la problematización de la realidad social. El número inicia con el artículo de Paulina Latapí Escalante, titulado “Formación del profesorado de historia en México: Orientaciones determinantes”. A partir de su escrito, la autora destaca los aportes de Joan Pagès al desarrollo de la investigación en didáctica de la historia en un país caracterizado por una gran diversidad de enfoques en la formación del profesorado de esta asignatura. A través de un recorrido que pone su foco en revisar ponencias, lecturas, seminarios, talleres, entrevistas y conversaciones, entre otros, efectuados entre los años 2008 y 2020, la autora evidencia cómo Pagès invitó a la reflexión y la problematización de la enseñanza de las ciencias sociales, llegando a establecer una gran influencia tanto en la formación del profesorado como el currículo del país. El artículo, desde una descripción pormenorizada y sentida, denota los lazos de afecto que tejió el profesor Pagès con estudiantes de profesorado, académicos y académicas del ámbito de las ciencias sociales, y profesorado del sistema escolar. El artículo, además, evidencia el compromiso permanente de Joan por fortalecer lazos de colaboración a través de la conformación y consolidación de redes como REDDIHE. Destaca en el artículo el reconocimiento, desde el análisis de los planteamientos de Joan Pagès, de ciertas orientaciones nodales para la formación de profesores de historia. En ellas, es posible reconocer las enseñanzas que recogimos del profesor Pagès todas y todos quienes tuvimos la oportunidad de formarnos con él. El segundo artículo de homenaje está a cargo de Gerardo Raúl Arañal y Miguel Angél Jara, quienes titularon su propuesta “Investigar, formar e innovar. Aportes de Joan Pagès para repensar la formación del profesorado que enseña ciencias sociales, geografía e historia”. Desde una perspectiva muy similar al artículo anterior, los autores analizan los aportes de Joan Pagès al desarrollo de la didáctica en el ámbito latinoamericano, y dentro de este, en Argentina. Para ello, se enfocan en revisar la relevancia que tuvo en las obras de Pagès poner en un sitial de primera relevancia la formación inicial y continua del profesorado de ciencias sociales, entendiéndose esto como uno de los elementos claves para generar transformaciones en la enseñanza de este campo de conocimientos. Para ello, la propuesta presentada por los autores releva el interés que siempre suscito en Pagès el poder mantener una vinculación más permanente entre las escuelas y las universidades a través de prácticas que tuvieran un importante componente de reflexión profesional. Esto sería lo que permitiría establecer una relación más coherente entre lo que se investiga, y lo que termina sucediendo cuando se enseña historia, geografía y ciencias sociales. El artículo da un recorrido a través de las investigaciones, pero también de la participación en cursos, seminarios y otros por parte de Joan Pagès, por medio de ellos se evidencia la preocupación y participación constante en la formación del profesorado en contextos como el argentino. Arazy González, Carmen García y Antoni Santisteban presentan el artículo “Hacia un Modelo de Intervención Didáctica en Literacidad Crítica para la Educación Infantil. Avances en la Investigación”. Por medio de este se explicita la necesidad de abordar el desarrollo de la literacidad crítica desde la primera infancia. Para ello, se focalizan en evidenciar la relevancia que tienen la formación del profesorado de infantil en generar experiencias educativas que permitan que las maestras, maestros o educadoras y educadores adquieran estas competencias para poder desarrollarlas posteriormente con niños y niñas. Al respecto, proponen trabajar la literacidad crítica a través de materiales culturales como los cuentos o imágenes, para llevar a reflexionar a las infancias sobre presencias y ausencias, la mentira y la verdad, los intereses diversos frente a una misma situación, entre otros. En el artículo se plantea que el desarrollo de la literacidad crítica en las infancias es clave en la sociedad que vivimos hoy, ya que estas se desenvuelven en un mundo hiperconectado, donde la información (falsa y verdadera) transita sin mayores filtros. Por otra parte, el artículo plantea la experiencia implementada con el profesorado de grado de infantil para abordar el desarrollo de la literacidad crítica, y algunos de los resultados obtenidos a partir de su ejecución. Augusta Valle, Alejandra Acevedo, Alicia Chong, Ana Sánchez, Wendy Paucar y Mari Carmen Mencia presentan el artículo “Mirar la realidad y problematizarla, el trabajo de campo como una estrategia para re prensar la enseñanza de las ciencias sociales”. A través de su escrito, las autoras evidencian los resultados de una investigación desarrollada con el profesorado de educación secundaria sobre el trabajo de campo. Considerando las perspectivas de Joan Pagès, las autoras plantean que el trabajo de campo es una experiencia de aprendizaje que puede contribuir a que niños, niñas y jóvenes desarrollen el pensamiento social, y una comprensión sobre el mundo y su realidad. Para ello, se propone el trabajo con experiencias de campo que estén más cercanas al espacio cotidiano de quien aprende, ya que esto es lo que permitirá generar una comprensión que permita al estudiantado adquirir el desarrollo de competencias para un ejercicio crítico de la ciudadanía. Por su parte, Isaac Calvo nos presenta el artículo “¿Aprender la Historia de Otros o la Nuestra? Secuencia Didáctica sobre Memorias e Historia de la Unidad Popular (Chile, 1970-1973)”. A través de este, el autor nos evidencia una propuesta didáctica implementada en el marco de su investigación de posgrado con estudiantes de educación secundaria. La propuesta pone su foco en una secuencia didáctica que aborda la alfabetización del estudiantado participante en conceptos como los de memoria y memoria histórica, con tal de que, a partir de estos, sean capaces de levantar preguntas que permitan el rescate de memorias sobre la Unidad Popular en Chile. En el artículo se destaca el rol relevante las memorias como fuentes, pero también las fuentes secundarias, ya que estas últimas permiten situar y contextualizar los relatos. La propuesta didáctica finaliza con un foro a través del cual se dan a conocer los resultados del estudiantado en el proceso de investigación. En el artículo se recalca el potencial que tiene el trabajo con las memorias familiares y locales en el aula, ya que permite construir pensamiento social desde los propios intereses del estudiantado, lo que contribuye a su validación como sujetos sociales. Por otro lado, Daniela Pardo Cáceres, nos presenta el artículo “Propuesta desde la escuela: Plan Covid-19. Práctica de aula centrada en la incorporación de Problemas socialmente relevantes para el aprendizaje de las Ciencias Sociales en IV Año Medio”. En este artículo, situado desde las experiencias del profesorado en un contexto escolar en medio de la pandemia por COVID-19, la autora expresa la relevancia de trabajar a partir de Problemáticas Socialmente Relevantes (PSR), con tal de contribuir a que el estudiantado desarrolle competencias ciudadanas, y que a través de estas aprendan a leer y cuestionar la realidad vivida en Chile producto de la emergencia sanitaria. A su vez, la autora plantea que, por medio del abordaje de las PSR, se puede conducir al estudiantado para pensar y avanzar hacia el levantamiento de propuestas o alternativas que permitan abordar, una realidad social que es compleja. Javier García presenta el artículo “Modelos Docentes en Ciencias Sociales. Análisis de las Concepciones y Prácticas Docentes en el Área Metropolitana de Barcelona”. A través de este, nos presenta una investigación que tiene como objetivo describir, analizar y teorizar las concepciones y prácticas docentes del profesorado de ciencias sociales en educación secundaria. Para establecer las conclusiones de la investigación, el autor utilizó un amplio repertorio de instrumentos de investigación, entre los que destacan entrevistas, encuestas y unidades didácticas. A partir del análisis de la información, el autor nos presenta en este artículo los modelos de profesorado que logró reconocer. Destaca en el escrito el rol que el autor le asigna a la emoción en las prácticas del profesorado de ciencias sociales. Finalmente, Viviana Nancuante nos comparte el artículo “La Equidad de Género: Inclusión de la Mujer Indígena Aymara en la Enseñanza de las Ciencias Sociales”. A través del escrito, el cual se posiciona desde el estudio de las invisibilidades sociales en el ámbito de la enseñanza de la historia, la teoría crítica, y la perspectiva de los estudios de género y etnicidad, la autora nos presenta una revisión y análisis del currículo para determinar la inclusión de la mujer aymara en este. A partir de ello, se analizan las lecturas e interpretaciones que hace el profesorado sobre estas actoras, para incluir los saberes ancestrales del mundo femenino aymara en sus prácticas educativas. El artículo se plantea una serie de preguntas que apuntan a proponer cómo debería ser la inclusión de las mujeres aymaras y sus saberes en la enseñanza de las ciencias sociales.

Introduction Scholars, journalists, conspiracists, and public-facing groups have employed a variety of analogies to discuss the role that misleading content (conspiracy theory, disinformation, malinformation, and misinformation), plays in our everyday lives. Terms like the “disinformation war” (Hwang) or the “Infodemic” (United Nations) attempt to summarise the issues of misleading content to aide public understanding. This project studies the effectiveness of these analogies in conveying the movement of online conspiracy theory in social media networks by simulating them in a game. Building from growing comparisons likening conspiracy theories to game systems (Berkowitz; Kaminska), we used game design as a research tool to test these analogies against theory. This article focusses on the design process, rather than implementation, to explore where the analogies succeed and fail in replication. Background and Literature Review Conspiracy Theories and Games Online conspiracy theories reside in the milieu of misinformation (unintentionally incorrect), disinformation (intentionally incorrect), and malinformation (intentionally harmful) (Wardle and Derakhshan 45). They are puzzled together through the vast amount of information available online (Hannah 1) creating a “hunt” for truth (Berkowitz) that refracts information through deeply personal narratives that create paradoxical interpretations (Hochschild xi). Modern social media networks offer curated but fragmented content distribution where information discovery involves content finding users through biased sources (Toff and Nielsen 639). This puzzling together of theories gives conspiracy theorists agency in ‘finding the story’, giving them agency in a process with underlining goals (Kaminska). A contemporary example is QAnon, where the narrative of a “secret global cabal”, large-scale pedophile rings, and overstepping government power is pieced together through Q-drops or cryptic clues that users decipher (Bloom and Moskalenko 5). This puzzle paints a seemingly hidden reality for players to uncover (Berkowitz) and offers gripping engagement which connects “disparate data” into a visualised conspiracy (Hannah 3). Despite their harmful impacts, conspiracy theories are playful (Sobo). They can be likened to playful acts of make-belief (Sobo), reality-adjacent narratives that create puzzles for exploration (Berkowitz), and community building through playful discovery (Bloom and Moskalenko 169). Not only do conspiracies “game the algorithm” to promote content, but they put players into in a self-made digital puzzle (Bloom and Moskalenko 17, 18). This array of human and nonhuman actors allows for truth-spinning that can push people towards conspiracy through social bonds (Moskalenko). Mainstream media and academic institutions are seen as biased and flawed information sources, prompting these users to “do their own research” within these spaces (Ballantyne and Dunning). However, users are in fragmented worldviews, not binaries of right and wrong, which leaves journalism and fact-checkers in a digital world that requires complex intervention (De Maeyer 22). Analogies Analogies are one method of intervention. They offer explanation for the impact conspiracy has had on society, such as the polarisation of families (Andrews). Both conspiracists and public-facing groups have commonly used an analogy of war. The recent pandemic has also introduced analogies of virality (Hwang; Tardáguila et al.). A war analogy places truth on a battleground against lies and fiction. “Doing your own research” is a combat maneuver for conspiracy proliferation through community engagement (Ballantyne and Dunning). Similarly, those fighting digital conspiracies have embraced the analogy to explain the challenges and repercussions of content. War suggests hardened battlelines, the need for public mobilisation, and a victory where truth prevails, or defeat where fallacy reigns (Shackelford). Comparatively, a viral analogy, or “Infodemic” (United Nations), suggests misleading content as moving through a network like an infectious system; spreading through paths of least resistance or effective contamination (Scales et al. 678; Graham et al. 22). Battlelines are replaced with paths or invasion, where the goal is to infect the system or construct a rapid response vaccine that can stymie the ever-growing disease (Tardáguila et al.). In both cases, victorious battles or curative vaccinations frame conspiracy and disinformation as temporary problems. The idea of the rise and falls of a conspiracy’s prominence as link to current events emulates Byung-Chung Han’s notion of the digital swarm, or fragmented communities that coalesce, bubble up into volatile noise, and then dissipate without addressing the “dominant power relations” (Han 12). For Han, swarms arise in digital networks with intensive support before disappearing, holding an influential but ephemeral life. Recently, scholarship has applied a media ecology lens to recognise the interconnection of actors that contribute to these swarms. The digital-as-ecosystem approach suggests a network that needs to be actively managed (Milner and Phillips 8). Tangherlini et al.’s work on conspiracy pipelines highlights the various actors that move information through them to make the digital ecosystem healthy or unhealthy (Tangherlini et al.). Seeing the Internet, and the movement of information on it, as an ecology posits a consideration of processes that are visible (i.e., conspiracy theorists) and invisible (i.e., algorithms etc.) and is inclusive of human and non-human actors (Milner and Phillips). With these analogies as frames, we answer Sobo’s call for a playful lens towards conspiracy alongside De Maeyer’s request for serious interventions by using serious play. If we can recognise both conspiracy and its formation as game-like and understand these analogies as explanatory narratives, we can use simulation game design to ask: how are these systems of conspiracy propagation being framed? What gaps in understanding arise when we frame conspiracy theory through the analogies used to describe it? Method Research-Creation and Simulation Gaming Our use of game design methods reframed analogies through “gaming literacy”, which considers the knowledge put into design and positions the game as a set of practices relating to the everyday (Zimmerman 24). This process requires constant reflection. In both the play of the game and the construction of its parts we employed Khaled’s critical design framework (10-11). From March to December 2021 we kept reflective logs, notes from bi-weekly team meetings, playtest observations, and archives of our visual design to consistently review and reassess our progression. We asked how the visuals, mechanics, and narratives point to the affordances and drawbacks of these analogies. Visual and Mechanical Design Before designing the details of the analogies, we had to visualise their environment – networked social media. We took inspiration from existing visual representations of the Internet and social media under the hypothesis that employing a familiar conceptual model could improve the intelligibility of the game (figs. 1 and 2). In usability design, this is referred to as "Jakob's law" (Nielsen), in which, by following familiar patterns, the user can focus better on content, or in our case, play. Fig. 1: “My Twitter Social Ego Networks” by David Sousa-Rodrigues. A visual representation of Sousa-Rodrigues’s social media network. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/11452351@N00/2048034334>. We focussed on the networked publics (Itō) that coalesce around information and content disclosure. We prioritised data practices that influence community construction through content (Bloom and Moskalenko 57), and the larger conspiracy pipelines of fragmented data (Tangherlini et al. 30). Fig. 2: "The Internet Map" by Ruslan Enikeev. A visual, 2D, interactive representation of the Internet. <http://internet-map.net/>. Our query focusses on how play reciprocated, or failed to reciprocate, these analogies. Sharp et al.’s suggestion that obvious and simple models are intuitively understood allowed us to employ simplification in design in the hopes of parsing down complex social media systems. Fig. 3 highlights this initial attempt where social media platforms became “networks” that formed proximity to specific groups or “nodes”. Fig. 3: Early version of the game board, with a representation of nodes and networks as simplified visualisations for social networks. This simplification process guided the scaling of design as we tried to make the seemingly boundless online networks accessible. Colourful tokens represented users, placed on the nodes (fig. 4). Tokens represented portions of the user base, allowing players to see the proliferation of conspiracy through the network. Unfortunately, this simplification ignores the individual acts of users and their ability to bypass these pipelines as well as the discovery-driven collegiality within these communities (Bloom and Moskalenko 57). To help offset this, we designed an overarching scenario and included “flavour text” on cards (fig. 5) which offered narrative vignettes that grounded player actions in dynamic story. Fig. 4: The first version for the printed playtest for the board, with the representation of “networks” formed by a clustering of "nodes". The movement of conspiracy was indicated by colour-coded tokens. Fig. 5: Playing cards. They reference a particular action which typically adds or removes token. They also reference a theory and offer text to narrativise the action. Design demonstrates that information transmission is not entirely static. In the most recent version (fig. 6), this meant having the connections between nodes become subverted through player actions. Game mechanics, such as playing cards (fig. 5), make these pipelines interactive and visible by allowing players to place and move content throughout the space in response to each other’s actions. Fig. 6: The most updated version of the board, now named "Lizards and Lies". Red regions are initial starting points for conspiracy to enter mainstream social media (purple). Design adaptations focussed on making conspiracy theory dynamic. Player choice (i.e. where to add conspiracy) had to consider a continuously changing board created by other actors to reflect the adaptive nature of conspiracy theories. In this way, analogies came alive or died through the actions of players within a visually responsive system. This meant that each game had different swarms of conspiracy, where player decisions “wrote” a narrative through play. By selecting how and where conspiracy might be placed or removed, players created a narrative distinct to their game. For example, a conspiracy theorist player (one playable character) might explain their placing of conspiracy theory within the Chrpr/Twitter network as a community response to fact-checking (second playable character) in the neighbouring Shreddit/Reddit community. Results War Analogy Initial design took inspiration from wargaming to consider battlelines, various combatants, and a simulated conflict. Two player characters were made. Conspiracy theorists were posited against fact-checkers, where nodes and networks functioned as battlelines of intervention. The war narrative was immediately challenged by the end-state. Either conspiracy overtook networks or the fact checkers completely stymied conspiracy’s ability to exist. Both end-states seemed wrong for players. Battle consistently felt futile as conspiracists could always add more content, and fact-checkers could always remove something. Simply put, war fell flat. While the game could depict communities and spaces of combat, it struggled to represent how fragmented conspiracy theories are. In play, conspiracy theory became stagnant, the flow of information felt compelled, and the actors entered uneven dynamics. Utopia was never achieved, and war always raged on. Even when players did overtake a network, the victory condition (needing to control the most networks) made this task, which would normally be compelling, feel lacklustre. To address this, we made changes. We altered the win condition to offer points at the end of each turn depending on what the player did (i.e., spreading conspiracy into networks). We expanded the number of networks and connections between them (fig. 3 and fig. 6) to include more fluid and fragmented pipelines of conspiracy dissemination. We included round-end events which shifted the state of the game based on other actors, and we pushed players to focus on their own actions more than those of the others on the board. These changes naturally shifted the battleground from hardened battle lines to a fragmented amorphous spread of disinformation; it moved war to virality. Viral Analogy As we transitioned towards the viral, we prioritised the reflexive, ephemeral movements of conspiracy proliferating through networks. We focussed less on adding and removing content and shifted to the movement of actors through the space. Some communities became more susceptible to conspiracy content, fact-checkers relied on flagging systems, and conspiracy theories followed a natural, but unexpected pipeline of content dissemination. These changes allowed players to feel like individual actors with specific goals rather than competing forces. Fact-checkers relied on mitigation and response while conspiracists evaluated the susceptibility of specific communities to conspiracy content. This change illuminated a core issue with fact-checking; it is entirely responsive, endless, and too slow to stop content from having an impact. While conspiracists could play one card to add content, fact-checkers had to flag content, move their token, and use a player card to eliminate content – all of which exacerbated this issue. In this manner, the viral approach rearticulated how systems themselves afford the spread of conspiracy, where truly effective means to stop the spread relied on additional system actors, such as training algorithms to help remove and flag content. While a more effective simulation, the viral analogy struggled in its presentation of conspiracy theory within social media. Play had a tipping point, where given enough resources, those stopping the spread of conspiracy could “vaccinate” it and clean the board. To alter this, our design began to consider actions and reactions, creating a push and pull of play focussed on balancing or offsetting the system. This transition naturally made us consider a media ecology analogy. Media Ecology Replacing utopic end-states with a need to maintain network health reframed the nature of engagement within this simulation. An ecological model recognises that harmful content will exist in a system and aims not at elimination, but at maintaining a sustainable balance. It is responsive. It considers the various human and non-human actors at play and focusses on varied actor goals. As our game shifted to an ecological model, homogenous actors of conspiracists or fact-checkers were expanded. We transitioned a two-player game into a four-player variant, testing options like literacy educators, content recommending algorithms, and ‘edgelords'. Rather than defeating or saving social media, play becomes focussed on actors in the system. Play and design demonstrated how actions would shape play decisions. Characters were seen as network actors rather than enemies, changing interaction. Those spreading conspiracy began to focus less on “viral paths”, or lines of battle, and instead on where or how they could impact system health. In some cases, conspiracists would build one network of support, in others they created pockets around the board from which they could run campaigns. Those stopping the spread came to see their job as management. Rather than try and eliminate all conspiracy, they determined which sites to engage with, what content held the greatest threat, and which tools would be most effective. Media ecology play focussed less on outsmarting opponents and instead on managing an actor’s, and other players’, goals within an evolving system. Challenging Swarms and a Turn to Digital Ecology Using games to evaluate analogies illuminates clear gaps in their use, and the value of a media ecology lens. A key issue across the two main analogies (war and virality) was a utopic endstate. The idea that conspiracy can be beaten back, or vaccinated, fails to consider the endless amount of conspiracy possible to be made, or the impossibility of vaccinating the entire system. As our transitionary design process shows, the notion of winners and losers misplaces the intent of various actors groups where conspiracy is better framed as community-building rather than “controlling” a space (Bloom and Moskalenko 57). In design, while Han’s notion of the swarm was helpful, it struggled to play out in our simulations because fragments of conspiracy always remained on the board. This lingering content suggests that fact-checking does not actually remove ideological support. Swarms could quickly regrow around lingering support presenting them not as ephemeral as Han argued. As design transitioned towards ecology, these “fragments” were seen as part of a system of actors. Gameplay shows a deep interplay between the removal of content and its spread, arguing that removing conspiracy is a band-aid solution to a larger problem. Our own simplification of analogy into a game is not without limitations. Importantly, the impact of user specific acts for interpreting a movement (Toff and Nielsen 640), and the underlying set of networks that create “dark platforms” (Zeng and Schäfer 122) were lost in the game’s translation. Despite this, our work provides directions for scholarship and those engaging with the public on these issues to consider. Reframing our lens to understand online conspiracy as an aspect of digital ecological health, asks us to move away from utopic solutions and instead focus on distinct actors as they relate to the larger system. Conclusion Employing serious play as a lens to our framing of digital conspiracy, this project emphasises a turn towards media ecology models. Game design functioned as a tool to consider the actors, behaviours, and interactions of a system. Our methodological approach for visualising war and viral analogies demonstrates how playful responses can prompt questions and considerations of theory. Playing in this way, offers new insights for how we think about and grapple with the various actors associated with conspiracy theory and scholarship should continue to embrace ecological models to weigh the assemblage of actors. References Andrews, Travis. “QAnon Is Tearing Families Apart.” Washington Post, 2020. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/14/qanon-families-support-group/>. Ballantyne, Nathan, and David Dunning. “Skeptics Say, ‘Do Your Own Research.’ It’s Not That Simple.” The New York Times, 3 Jan. 2022. <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/opinion/dyor-do-your-own-research.html>. Berkowitz, Reed. “QAnon Resembles the Games I Design. But for Believers, There Is No Winning.” Washington Post, 2021. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/qanon-game-plays-believers/2021/05/10/31d8ea46-928b-11eb-a74e-1f4cf89fd948_story.html>. Bloom, Mia, and Sophia Moskalenko. Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford University Press, 2021. De Maeyer, Juliette. “Taking Conspiracy Culture Seriously: Journalism Needs to Face Its Epistemological Trouble.” Journalism 20.1 (2019): 21–23. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918807037>. Graham, Timothy, et al. Like a Virus: The Coordinated Spread of Coronavirus Disinformation. The Australia Institute, 2020. <https://apo.org.au/node/305864>. Han, Byung-Chul. In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. Trans. Erik Butler. MIT Press, 2017. Hannah, Matthew N. “A Conspiracy of Data: QAnon, Social Media, and Information Visualization.” Social Media + Society, 7.3 (2021). <https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211036064>. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press, 2016. Hwang, Tim. “Deconstructing the Disinformation War.” MediaWell, Social Science Research Council 1 June 2020. <https://mediawell.ssrc.org/expert-reflections/deconstructing-the-disinformation-war/>. Itō, Mizuko. “Introduction.” Networked Publics. Ed. Kazys Varnelis. MIT Press, 2008. Kaminska, Izabella. “The ‘Game Theory’ in the Qanon Conspiracy Theory.” Financial Times 16 Oct. 2020. <https://www.ft.com/content/74f9d20f-9ff9-4fad-808f-c7e4245a1725>. Khaled, Rilla. “Questions over Answers: Reflective Game Design.” Playful Disruption of Digital Media. Ed. Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath. Singapore: Springer, 2018. 3–27. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1891-6_1>. Milner, Ryan M., and Whitney Phillips. You Are Here. MIT Press, 2020. <https://you-are-here.pubpub.org/>. Moskalenko, Sophia. “Evolution of QAnon & Radicalization by Conspiracy Theories.” The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare 4.2 (2021): 109–14. <https://doi.org/10.21810/jicw.v4i2.3756>. Nielsen, Jakob. “End of Web Design.” Nielsen Norman Group, 2000. <https://www.nngroup.com/articles/end-of-web-design/>. Scales, David, et al. “The Covid-19 Infodemic — Applying the Epidemiologic Model to Counter Misinformation.” New England Journal of Medicine 385.8 (2021): 678–81. <https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2103798>. Shackelford, Scott. “The Battle against Disinformation Is Global.” The Conversation 2020. <http://theconversation.com/the-battle-against-disinformation-is-global-129212>. Sharp, Helen, et al. Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. 5th ed. Wiley, 2019. Sobo, Elisa Janine. “Playing with Conspiracy Theories.” Anthropology News 31 July 2019. <https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/playing-with-conspiracy-theories/>. Tangherlini, Timothy R., et al. “An Automated Pipeline for the Discovery of Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theory Narrative Frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and Storytelling on the Web.” PLoS ONE 15.6 (2020). <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233879>. Tardáguila, Cristina, et al. “Taking an Ecological Approach to Misinformation.” Poynter 5 Dec. 2019. <https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2019/taking-an-ecological-approach-to-misinformation/>. Toff, Benjamin, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. “‘I Just Google It’: Folk Theories of Distributed Discovery.” Journal of Communication 68.3 (2018): 636–57. <https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy009>. United Nations. “UN Tackles ‘Infodemic’ of Misinformation and Cybercrime in COVID-19 Crisis.” 2020. <https://www.un.org/en/un-coronavirus-communications-team/un-tackling-%E2%80%98infodemic%E2%80%99-misinformation-and-cybercrime-covid-19>. Wardle, Claire, and Hossein Derakhshan. “Thinking about ‘Information Disorder’: Formats of Misinformation, Disinformation, and Mal-Information.” Journalism, ‘Fake News’ & Disinformation. Eds. Cherilyn Ireton and Julie Posetti. Paris: Unesco, 2018. 43–54. Zeng, Jing, and Mike S. Schäfer. “Conceptualizing ‘Dark Platforms’. Covid-19-Related Conspiracy Theories on 8kun and Gab.” Digital Journalism 9.9 (2021): 1321–43. <https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1938165>. Zimmerman, Eric. “Gaming Literacy: Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the Twenty-First Century.” The Video Game Theory Reader 2. 2008. 9.

Did you see the videos where the cat jumps in the box, attacks the printer or tries to leap from the snowy car? As the availability and popularity of watching videos on the Internet has risen rapidly in the last decade, so has the prevalence of cat videos. Although the cuteness of YouTube videos of cats might make them appear frivolous, in fact there is a significant irony at their heart: online cat videos enable corporate surveillance of viewers, yet viewers seem just as oblivious to this as the cats featured in the videos. Towards this end, I consider the distinguishing features of contemporary cat videos, focusing particularly on their narrative structure and mode of observation. I compare cat videos with the “Aesthetic of Astonishment” of early cinema and with dog videos, to explore the nexus of a spectatorship of thrills and feline performance. In particular, I highlight a unique characteristic of these videos: the cats’ unselfconsciousness. This, I argue, is rare in a consumer culture dominated by surveillance, where we are constantly aware of the potential for being watched. The unselfconsciousness of cats in online videos offers viewers two key pleasures: to imagine the possibility of freedom from surveillance, and to experience the power of administering surveillance as unproblematic. Ultimately, however, cat videos enable viewers to facilitate our own surveillance, and we do so with the gleeful abandon of a kitten jumping in a tissue box What Distinguishes Cat Videos? Cat videos have become so popular, that they generate millions of views on YouTube, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis now holds an annual Internet Cat Video Festival. If you are not already a fan of the genre, the Walker’s promotional videos for the festival (2013 and 2012) provide an entertaining introduction to the celebrities (Lil Bub, Grumpy Cat, and Henri), canon (dancing cats, surprised cat, and cat falling off counter), culture and commodities of online cat videos, despite repositioning them into a public exhibition context. Cats are often said to dominate the internet (Hepola), despite the surprise of Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Domestic cats are currently the most popular pet in the world (Driscoll), however they are already outnumbered by smartphones. Cats have played various roles in our societies, cultures and imaginations since their domestication some 8-10,000 years ago (Driscoll). A potent social and cultural symbol in mythology, art and popular culture, the historical and cultural significance of cats is complex, shifting and often contradictory. They have made their way across geographic, cultural and class boundaries, and been associated with the sacred and the occult, femininity and fertility, monstrosity and domesticity (Driscoll, Rogers). Cats are figured as both inscrutable and bounteously polysemic. Current representations of cats, including these videos, seem to emphasise their sociability with humans, association with domestic space, independence and aloofness, and intelligence and secretiveness. I am interested in what distinguishes the pleasures of cat videos from other manifestations of cats in folklore and popular culture such as maneki-neko and fictional cats. Even within Internet culture, I’m focusing on live action cat videos, rather than lolcats, animated cats, or dog videos, though these are useful points of contrast. The Walker’s cat video primer also introduces us to the popular discourses accounting for the widespread appeal of these videos: cats have global reach beyond language, audiences can project their own thoughts and feelings onto cats, cats are cute, and they make people feel good. These discourses circulate in popular conversation, and are promoted by YouTube itself. These suggestions do not seem to account for the specific pleasures of cat videos, beyond the predominance of cats in culture more broadly. The cat videos popular on the Internet tend to feature several key characteristics. They are generated by users, shot on a mobile device such as a phone, and set in a domestic environment. They employ an observational mode, which Bill Nichols has described as a noninterventionist type of documentary film associated with traditions of direct cinema and cinema verite, where form and style yields to the profilmic event. In the spirit of their observational mode, cat videos feature minimal sound and language, negligible editing and short duration. As Leah Shafer notes, cat videos record, “’live’ events, they are mostly shot by ‘amateurs’ with access to emerging technologies, and they dramatize the familiar.” For example, the one-minute video Cat vs Printer comprises a single, hand-held shot observing the cat, and the action is underlined by the printer’s beep and the sounds created by the cat’s movements. The patterned wallpaper suggests a domestic location, and the presence of the cat itself symbolises domesticity. These features typically combine to produce impressions of universality, intimacy and spontaneity – impressions commonly labelled ‘cute’. The cat’s cuteness is also embodied in its confusion and surprise at the printer’s movements: it is a simpleton, and we can laugh at its lack of understanding of the basic appurtenances of the modern world. Cat videos present minimalist narratives, focused on an instant of spectacle. A typical cat video establishes a state of calm, then suddenly disrupts it. The cat is usually the active agent of change, though chance also frequently plays a significant role. The pervasiveness of this structure means that viewers familiar with the form may even anticipate a serendipitous event. The disruption prompts a surprising or comic effect for the viewer, and this is a key part of the video’s pleasure. For example, in Cat vs Printer, the establishing scenario is the cat intently watching the printer, a presumably quotidian scene, which escalates when the cat begins to smack the moving paper. The narrative climaxes in the final two seconds of the video, when the cat strikes the paper so hard that the printer tray bounces, and the surprised cat falls off its stool. The video ends abruptly. This disruption also takes the viewer by surprise (at least it does the first time you watch it). The terse ending, and lack of resolution or denouement, encourages the viewer to replay the video. The minimal narrative effectively builds expectation for a moment of surprise. These characteristics of style and form typify a popular body of work, though there is variation, and the millions of cat videos on YouTube might be best accounted for by various subgenres. The most popular cat videos seem to have the most sudden and striking disruptions as well as the most abrupt endings. They seem the most dramatic and spontaneous. There are also thousands of cat videos with minor disruptions, and some with brazenly staged events. Increasingly, there is obvious use of postproduction techniques, including editing and music. A growing preponderance of compilations attests to the videos’ “spreadability” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green). The conventional formal structure of these videos effectively homogenises the cat, as if there is a single cat performing in millions of videos. Indeed, YouTube comments often suggest a likeness between the cat represented in the video and the commenter’s own cat. In this sense, the cuteness so readily identified has an homogenising effect. It also has the effect of distinguishing cats as a species from other animals, as it confounds common conceptions of all (other) animals as fundamentally alike in their essential difference from the human (animal). Cat videos are often appreciated for what they reveal about cats in general, rather than for each cat’s individuality. In this way, cat videos symbolise a generic feline cuteness, rather than identify a particular cat as cute. The cats of YouTube act “as an allegory for all the cats of the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literature and fables” (Derrida 374). Each cat swiping objects off shelves, stealing the bed of a dog, leaping onto a kitchen bench is the paradigmatic cat, the species exemplar. Mode of Spectatorship, Mode of Performance: Cat Videos, Film History and Dog Videos Cat videos share some common features with early cinema. In his analysis of the “Aesthetic of Astonishment,” which dominated films until about 1904, film historian Tom Gunning argues that the short, single shot films of this era are characterised by exciting audience curiosity and fulfilling it with visual shocks and thrills. It is easy to see how this might describe the experience of watching Cat vs Printer or Thomas Edison’s Electrocution of an Elephant from 1903. The thrill of revelation at the end of Cat vs Printer is more significant than the minimal narrative it completes, and the most popular videos seem to heighten this shock. Further, like a rainy afternoon spent clicking the play button on a sequence of YouTube’s suggested videos, these early short films were also viewed in variety format as a series of attractions. Indeed, as Leah Shafer notes, some of these early films even featured cats, such as Professor Welton’s Boxing Cats from 1894. Each film offered a moment of spectacle, which thrilled the modern viewer. Gunning argues that these early films are distinguished by a particular relationship between spectator and film. They display blatant exhibitionism, and address their viewer directly. This highlights the thrill of disruption: “The directness of this act of display allows an emphasis on the thrill itself – the immediate reaction of the viewer” (Gunning “Astonishment” 122). This is produced both within the staging of the film itself as players look directly at the camera, and by the mode of exhibition, where a showman primes the audience verbally for a moment of revelation. Importantly, Gunning argues that this mode of spectatorship differs from how viewers watch narrative films, which later came to dominate our film and television screens: “These early films explicitly acknowledge their spectator, seeming to reach outwards and confront. Contemplative absorption is impossible here” (“Astonishment” 123). Gunning’s emphasis on a particular mode of spectatorship is significant for our understanding of pet videos. His description of early cinema has numerous similarities with cat videos, to be sure, but seems to describe more precisely the mode of spectatorship engendered by typical dog videos. Dog videos are also popular online, and are marked by a mode of performance, where the dogs seem to present self-consciously for the camera. Dogs often appear to look at the camera directly, although they are probably actually reading the eyes of the camera operator. One of the most popular dog videos, Ultimate dog tease, features a dog who appears to look into the camera and engage in conversation with the camera operator. It has the same domestic setting, mobile camera and short duration as the typical cat video, but, unlike the cat attacking the printer, this dog is clearly aware of being watched. Like the exhibitionistic “Cinema of Attractions,” it is marked by “the recurring look at the camera by [canine] actors. This action which is later perceived as spoiling the realistic illusion of the cinema, is here undertaken with brio, establishing contact with the audience” (Gunning “Attractions” 64). Dog videos frequently feature dogs performing on command, such as the countless iterations of dogs fetching beverages from refrigerators, or at least behaving predictably, such as dogs jumping in the bath. Indeed, the scenario often seems to be set up, whereas cat videos more often seem to be captured fortuitously. The humour of dog videos often comes from the very predictability of their behaviour, such as repeatedly fetching or rolling in mud. In an ultimate performance of self-consciousness, dogs even seem to act out guilt and shame for their observers. Similarly, baby videos are also popular online and were popular in early cinema, and babies also tend to look at the camera directly, showing that they are aware of bring watched. This emphasis on exhibitionism and modes of spectatorship helps us hone in on the uniqueness of cat videos. Unlike the dogs of YouTube, cats typically seem unaware of their observers; they refuse to look at the camera and “display their visibility” (Gunning “Attractions,” 64). This fits with popular discourses of cats as independent and aloof, untrainable and untameable. Cat videos employ a unique mode of observation: we observe the cat, who is unencumbered by our scrutiny. Feline Performance in a World of Pervasive Surveillance This is an aesthetic of surveillance without inhibition, which heightens the impressions of immediacy and authenticity. The very existence of so many cat videos online is a consequence of camera ubiquity, where video cameras have become integrated with common communications devices. Thousands of cameras are constantly ready to capture these quotidian scenes, and feed the massive economy of user-generated content. Cat videos are obviously created and distributed by humans, a purposeful labour to produce entertainment for viewers. Cat videos are never simply a feline performance, but a performance of human interaction with the cat. The human act of observation is an active engagement with the other. Further, the act of recording is a performance of wielding the camera, and often also through image or voice. The cat video is a companion performance, which is part of an ongoing relationship between that human and that other animal. It carries strong associations with regimes of epistemological power and physical domination through histories of visual study, mastery and colonisation. The activity of the human creator seems to contrast with the behaviour of the cat in these videos, who appears unaware of being watched. The cats’ apparent uninhibited behaviour gives the viewer the illusion of voyeuristically catching a glimpse of a self-sufficient world. It carries connotations of authenticity, as the appearance of interaction and intervention is minimised, like the ideal of ‘fly on the wall’ documentary (Nichols). This lack of self-consciousness and sense of authenticity are key to their reception as ‘cute’ videos. Interestingly, one of the reasons that audiences may find this mode of observation so accessible and engaging, is because it heeds the conventions of the fourth wall in the dominant style of fiction film and television, which presents an hermetically sealed diegesis. This unselfconscious performance of cats in online videos is key, because it embodies a complex relationship with the surveillance that dominates contemporary culture. David Lyon describes surveillance as “any focused attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, or control” (“Everyday” 1) and Mark Andrejevic defines monitoring as “the collection of information, with or without the knowledge of users, that has actual or speculative economic value” (“Enclosure” 297). We live in an environment where social control is based on information, collected and crunched by governments, corporations, our peers, and ourselves. The rampancy of surveillance has increased in recent decades in a number of ways. Firstly, technological advances have made the recording, sorting and analysis of data more readily available. Although we might be particularly aware of the gaze of the camera when we stand in line at the supermarket checkout or have an iPhone pointed at our face, many surveillance technologies are hidden points of data collection, which track our grocery purchases, text messages to family and online viewing. Surveillance is increasingly mediated through digital technologies. Secondly, surveillance data is becoming increasingly privatised and monetised, so there is strengthening market demand for consumer information. Finally, surveillance was once associated chiefly with institutions of the state, or with corporations, but the process is increasingly “lateral,” involving peer-to-peer surveillance and self-surveillance in the realms of leisure and domestic life (Andrejevic “Enclosure,” 301). Cat videos occupy a fascinating position within this context of pervasive surveillance, and offer complex thrills for audiences. The Unselfconscious Pleasures of Cat Videos Unselfconsciousness of feline performance in cat videos invites contradictory pleasures. Firstly, cat videos offer viewers the fantasy of escaping surveillance. The disciplinary effect of surveillance means that we modify our behaviour based on a presumption of constant observation; we are managed and manipulated as much by ourselves as we are by others. This discipline is the defining condition of industrial society, as described by Foucault. In an age of traffic cameras, Big Brother, CCTV, the selfie pout, and Google Glass, modern subjects are oppressed by the weight of observation to constantly manage their personal performance. Unselfconsciousness is associated with privacy, intimacy, naivety and, increasingly, with impossibility. By allowing us to project onto the experience of their protagonists, cat videos invite us to imagine a world where we are not constantly aware of being watched, of being under surveillance by both human beings and technology. This projection is enabled by discourse, which constructs cats as independent and aloof, a libertarian ideal. It provides the potential for liberation from technologized social surveillance, and from the concomitant self-discipline of our docile bodies. The uninhibited performance of cats in online videos offers viewers the prospect that it is possible to live without the gaze of surveillance. Through cat videos, we celebrate the untameable. Cats model a liberated uninhibitedness viewers can only desire. The apparent unselfconsciousness of feline performance is analogous to Derrida’s conception of animal nakedness: the nudity of animals is significant, because it is a key feature which distinguishes them from humans, but at the same time there is no sense of the concept of nakedness outside of human culture. Similarly, a performance uninhibited by observation seems beyond humans in contemporary culture, and implies a freedom from social expectations, but there is also little suggestion that cats would act differently if they knew they were observed. We interpret cats’ independence as natural, and take pleasure in cats’ naturalness. This lack of inhibition is cute in the sense that it is attractive to the viewer, but also in the sense that it is naïve to imagine a world beyond surveillance, a freedom from being watched. Secondly, we take pleasure in the power of observing another. Surveillance is based on asymmetrical regimes of power, and the position of observer, recorder, collator is usually more powerful than the subject of their gaze. We enjoy the pleasure of wielding the unequal gaze, whether we hit the “record” button ourselves or just the “play” button. In this way, we celebrate our capacity to contain the cat, who has historically proven conceptually uncontainable. Yet, the cats’ unselfconsciousness means we can absolve ourselves of their exploitation. Looking back at the observer, or the camera, is often interpreted as a confrontational move. Cats in videos do not confront their viewer, do not resist the gaze thrown on them. They accept the role of subject without protest; they perform cuteness without resistance. We internalise the strategies of surveillance so deeply that we emulate its practices in our intimate relationships with domestic animals. Cats do not glare back at us, accusingly, as dogs do, to remind us we are exerting power over them. The lack of inhibition of cats in online videos means that we can exercise the power of surveillance without confronting the oppression this implies. Cat videos offer the illusion of watching the other without disturbing it, brandishing the weapon without acknowledging the violence of its impact. There is a logical tension between these dual pleasures of cat videos: we want to escape surveillance, while exerting it. The Work of Cat Videos in ‘Liquid Surveillance’ These contradictory pleasures in fact speak to the complicated nature of surveillance in the era of “produsage,” when the value chain of media has transformed along with traditional roles of production and consumption (Bruns). Christian Fuchs argues that the contemporary media environment has complicated the dynamics of surveillance, and blurred the lines between subject and object (304). We both create and consume cat videos; we are commodified as audience and sold on as data. YouTube is the most popular site for sharing cat videos, and a subsidiary of Google, the world’s most visited website and a company which makes billions of dollars from gathering, collating, storing, assessing, and trading our data. While we watch cat videos on YouTube, they are also harvesting information about our every click, collating it with our other online behaviour, targeting ads at us based on our specific profile, and also selling this data on to others. YouTube is, in fact, a key tool of what David Lyon calls “liquid surveillance” after the work of Zygmunt Bauman, because it participates in the reduction of millions of bodies into data circulating at the service of consumer society (Lyon “Liquid”). Your views of cats purring and pouncing are counted and monetised, you are profiled and targeted for further consumption. YouTube did not create the imbalance of power implied by these mechanisms of surveillance, but it is instrumental in automating, amplifying, and extending this power (Andrejevic “Lateral,” 396). Zygmunt Bauman argues that in consumer society we are increasingly seduced to willingly subject ourselves to surveillance (Lyon “Liquid”), and who better than the cute kitty to seduce us? Our increasingly active role in “produsage” media platforms such as YouTube enables us to perform what Andrejevic calls “the work of being watched” (“Work”). When we upload, play, view, like and comment on cat videos, we facilitate our own surveillance. We watch cat videos for the contradictory pleasures they offer us, as we navigate and negotiate the overwhelming surveillance of consumer society. Cat videos remind us of the perpetual possibility of observation, and suggest the prospect of escaping it. ReferencesAndrejevic, Mark. “The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (2002): 230-248. Andrejevic, Mark. “The Discipline of Watching: Detection, Risk, and Lateral Surveillance.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23.5 (2006): 391-407. Andrejevic, Mark. “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure.” The Communication Review 10.4 (2007): 295-317. Berners-Lee, Tim. “Ask Me Anything.” Reddit, 12 March 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2091d4/i_am_tim_bernerslee_i_invented_the_www_25_years/cg0wpma›. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Project MUSE, 4 Mar. 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://muse.jhu.edu/›. Driscoll, Carlos A., et al. "The Taming of the Cat." Scientific American 300.6 (2009): 68-75. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995. Fuchs, Christian. “Web 2.0, Prosumption, and Surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 8.3 (2011): 288-309. Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the Incredulous Spectator.” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995. 114-133. Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde." Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 63-70. Hepola, Sarah. “The Internet Is Made of Kittens.” Salon, 11 Feb 2009. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.salon.com/2009/02/10/cat_internet/›. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Network Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2013. Lyon, David. “Liquid Surveillance: The Contribution of Zygmunt Bauman to Surveillance Studies.” International Political Sociology 4 (2010): 325–338 Lyon, David. “Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life.” In Robin Mansell et al., eds., Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies. Oxford: Oxford Handbooks, 2007. 449-472. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.sscqueens.org/sites/default/files/oxford_handbook.pdf›. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Rogers, Katharine. The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Shafer, Leah. “I Can Haz an Internet Aesthetic?!? LOLCats and the Digital Marketplace.” Paper presented at the Northeast Popular/American Culture Association Conference, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York, 2012. 5 Mar. 2014 ‹http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=nepca›.

In the last decade, the cell phone’s transformation from a tool for mobile telephony into a multi-modal, computational “smart” media device has engendered a new kind of emplacement, and the ubiquity of technological mediation into the everyday settings of urban life. With it, a new kind of media literacy has become necessary for participation in the networked social publics (Ito; Jenkins et al.). Increasingly, the way we experience our physical environments, make sense of immediate events, and form impressions is through the lens of the camera and through the ear of the microphone, framed by the mediating possibilities of smartphones. Adopting these practices as a kind of new media “grammar” (Burn 29)—a multi-modal language for public and interpersonal communication—offers new perspectives for thinking about the way in which mobile computing technologies allow us to explore our environments and produce new types of cultural knowledge. Living in the Social Multiverse Many of us are concerned about new cultural practices that communication technologies bring about. In her now classic TED talk “Connected but alone?” Sherry Turkle talks about the world of instant communication as having the illusion of control through which we micromanage our immersion in mobile media and split virtual-physical presence. According to Turkle, what we fear is, on the one hand, being caught unprepared in a spontaneous event and, on the other hand, missing out or not documenting or recording events—a phenomenon that Abha Dawesar calls living in the “digital now.” There is, at the same time, a growing number of ways in which mobile computing devices connect us to new dimensions of everyday life and everyday experience: geo-locative services and augmented reality, convergent media and instantaneous participation in the social web. These technological capabilities arguably shift the nature of presence and set the stage for mobile users to communicate the flow of their everyday life through digital storytelling and media production. According to a Digital Insights survey on social media trends (Bennett), more than 500 million tweets are sent per day and 5 Vines tweeted every second; 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; more than 20 billion photos have been shared on Instagram to date; and close to 7 million people actively produce and publish content using social blogging platforms. There are more than 1 billion smartphones in the US alone, and most social media platforms are primarily accessed using mobile devices. The question is: how do we understand the enormity of these statistics as a coherent new media phenomenon and as a predominant form of media production and cultural participation? More importantly, how do mobile technologies re-mediate the way we see, hear, and perceive our surrounding evironment as part of the cultural circuit of capturing, sharing, and communicating with and through media artefacts? Such questions have furnished communication theory even before McLuhan’s famous tagline “the medium is the message”. Much of the discourse around communication technology and the senses has been marked by distinctions between “orality” and “literacy” understood as forms of collective consciousness engendered by technological shifts. Leveraging Jonathan Sterne’s critique of this “audio-visual litany”, an exploration of convergent multi-modal technologies allows us to focus instead on practices and techniques of use, considered as both perceptual and cultural constructs that reflect and inform social life. Here in particular, a focus on sound—or aurality—can help provide a fresh new entry point into studying technology and culture. The phenomenon of everyday photography is already well conceptualised as a cultural expression and a practice connected with identity construction and interpersonal communication (Pink, Visual). Much more rarely do we study the act of capturing information using mobile media devices as a multi-sensory practice that entails perceptual techniques as well as aesthetic considerations, and as something that in turn informs our unmediated sensory experience. Daisuke and Ito argue that—in contrast to hobbyist high-quality photographers—users of camera phones redefine the materiality of urban surroundings as “picture-worthy” (or not) and elevate the “mundane into a photographic object.” Indeed, whereas traditionally recordings and photographs hold institutional legitimacy as reliable archival references, the proliferation of portable smart technologies has transformed user-generated content into the gold standard for authentically representing the everyday. Given that visual approaches to studying these phenomena are well underway, this project takes a sound studies perspective, focusing on mediated aural practices in order to explore the way people make sense of their everyday acoustic environments using mobile media. Curation, in this sense, is a metaphor for everyday media production, illuminated by the practice of listening with mobile technology. Everyday Listening with Technology: A Case Study The present conceptualisation of curation emerged out of a participant-driven qualitative case study focused on using mobile media to make sense of urban everyday life. The study comprised 10 participants using iPod Touches (a device equivalent to an iPhone, without the phone part) to produce daily “aural postcards” of their everyday soundscapes and sonic experiences, over the course of two to four weeks. This work was further informed by, and updates, sonic ethnography approaches nascent in the World Soundscape Project, and the field of soundscape studies more broadly. Participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their media and technology use, in order to establish their participation in new media culture and correlate that to the documentary styles used in their aural postcards. With regard to capturing sonic material, participants were given open-ended instructions as to content and location, and encouraged to use the full capabilities of the device—that is, to record audio, video, and images, and to use any applications on the device. Specifically, I drew their attention to a recording app (Recorder) and a decibel measurement app (dB), which combines a photo with a static readout of ambient sound levels. One way most participants described the experience of capturing sound in a collection of recordings for a period of time was as making a “digital scrapbook” or a “media diary.” Even though they had recorded individual (often unrelated) soundscapes, almost everyone felt that the final product came together as a stand-alone collection—a kind of gallery of personalised everyday experiences that participants, if anything, wished to further organise, annotate, and flesh out. Examples of aural postcard formats used by participants: decibel photographs of everyday environments and a comparison audio recording of rain on a car roof with and without wipers (in the middle). Working with 139 aural postcards comprising more than 250 audio files and 150 photos and videos, the first step in the analysis was to articulate approaches to media documentation in terms of format, modality, and duration as deliberate choices in conversation with dominant media forms that participants regularly consume and are familiar with. Ambient sonic recordings (audio-only) comprised a large chunk of the data, and within this category there were two approaches: the sonic highlight, a short vignette of a given soundscape with minimal or no introduction or voice-over; and the process recording, featuring the entire duration of an unfolding soundscape or event. Live commentaries, similar to the conventions set forth by radio documentaries, represented voice-over entries at the location of the sound event, sometimes stationary and often in motion as the event unfolded. Voice memos described verbal reflections, pre- or post- sound event, with no discernable ambience—that is, participants intended them to serve as reflective devices rather than as part of the event. Finally, a number of participants also used the sound level meter app, which allowed them to generate visual records of the sonic levels of a given environment or location in the form of sound level photographs. Recording as a Way of Listening In their community soundwalking practice, Förnstrom and Taylor refer to recording sound in everyday settings as taking world experience, mediating it through one’s body and one’s memories and translating it into approximate experience. The media artefacts generated by participants as part of this study constitute precisely such ‘approximations’ of everyday life accessed through aural experience and mediated by the technological capabilities of the iPod. Thinking of aural postcards along this technological axis, the act of documenting everyday soundscapes involves participants acting as media producers, ‘framing’ urban everyday life through a mobile documentary rubric. In the process of curating these documentaries, they have to make decisions about the significance and stylistic framing of each entry and the message they wish to communicate. In order to bring the scope of these curatorial decisions into dialogue with established media forms, in this work’s analysis I combine Bill Nichols’s classification of documentary modes in cinema with Karin Bijsterveld’s concept of soundscape ‘staging’ to characterise the various approaches participants took to the multi-modal curation of their everyday (sonic) experience. In her recent book on the staging of urban soundscapes in both creative and documentary/archival media, Bijsterveld describes the representation of sound as particular ‘dramatisations’ that construct different kinds of meanings about urban space and engender different kinds of listening positions. Nichols’s articulation of cinematic documentary modes helps detail ways in which the author’s intentionality is reflected in the styling, design, and presentation of filmic narratives. Michel Chion’s discussion of cinematic listening modes further contextualises the cultural construction of listening that is a central part of both design and experience of media artefacts. The conceptual lens is especially relevant to understanding mobile curation of mediated sonic experience as a kind of mobile digital storytelling. Working across all postcards, settings, and formats, the following four themes capture some of the dominant stylistic dimensions of mobile media documentation. The exploratory approach describes a methodology for representing everyday life as a flow, predominantly through ambient recordings of unfolding processes that participants referred to in the final discussion as a ‘turn it on and forget it’ approach to recording. As a stylistic method, the exploratory approach aligns most closely with Nichols’s poetic and observational documentary modes, combining a ‘window to the world’ aesthetic with minimal narration, striving to convey the ‘inner truth’ of phenomenal experience. In terms of listening modes reflected in this approach, exploratory aural postcards most strongly engage causal listening, to use Chion’s framework of cinematic listening modes. By and large, the exploratory approach describes incidental documentaries of routine events: soundscapes that are featured as a result of greater attentiveness and investment in the sonic aspects of everyday life. The entries created using this approach reflect a process of discovering (seeing and hearing) the ordinary as extra-ordinary; re-experiencing sometimes mundane and routine places and activities with a fresh perspective; and actively exploring hidden characteristics, nuances of meaning, and significance. For instance, in the following example, one participant explores a new neighborhood while on a work errand:The narrative approach to creating aural postcards stages sound as a springboard for recollecting memories and storytelling through reflecting on associations with other soundscapes, environments, and interactions. Rather than highlighting place, routine, or sound itself, this methodology constructs sound as a window into the identity and inner life of the recordist, mobilising most strongly a semantic listening mode through association and narrative around sound’s meaning in context (Chion 28). This approach combines a subjective narrative development with a participatory aesthetic that draws the listener into the unfolding story. This approach is also performative, in that it stages sound as a deeply subjective experience and approaches the narrative from a personally significant perspective. Most often this type of sound staging was curated using voice memo narratives about a particular sonic experience in conjunction with an ambient sonic highlight, or as a live commentary. Recollections typically emerged from incidental encounters, or in the midst of other observations about sound. In the following example a participant reminisces about the sound of wind, which, interestingly, she did not record: Today I have been listening to the wind. It’s really rainy and windy outside today and it was reminding me how much I like the sound of wind. And you know when I was growing up on the wide prairies, we sure had a lot of wind and sometimes I kind of miss the sound of it… (Participant 1) The aesthetic approach describes instances where the creation of aural postcards was motivated by a reduced listening position (Chion 29)—driven primarily by the qualities and features of the soundscape itself. This curatorial practice for staging mediated aural experience combines a largely subjective approach to documenting with an absence of traditional narrative development and an affective and evocative aesthetic. Where the exploratory documentary approach seeks to represent place, routine, environment, and context through sonic characteristics, the aesthetic approach features sound first and foremost, aiming to represent and comment on sound qualities and characteristics in a more ‘authentic’ manner. The media formats most often used in conjunction with this approach were the incidental ambient sonic highlight and the live commentary. In the following example we have the sound of coffee being made as an important domestic ritual where important auditory qualities are foregrounded: That’s the sound of a stovetop percolator which I’ve been using for many years and I pretty much know exactly how long it takes to make a pot of coffee by the sound that it makes. As soon as it starts gurgling I know I have about a minute before it burns. It’s like the coffee calls and I come. (Participant 6) The analytical approach characterises entries that stage mediated aural experience as a way of systematically and inductively investigating everyday phenomena. It is a conceptual and analytical experimental methodology employed to move towards confirming or disproving a ‘hypothesis’ or forming a theory about sonic relations developed in the course of the study. As such, this approach most strongly aligns with Chion’s semantic listening mode, with the addition of the interactive element of analytical inquiry. In this context, sound is treated as a variable to be measured, compared, researched, and theorised about in an explicit attempt to form conclusions about social relationships, personal significance, place, or function. This analytical methodology combines an explicit and critical focus to the process of documenting itself (whether it be measuring decibels or systematically attending to sonic qualities) with a distinctive analytical synthesis that presents as ‘formal discovery’ or even ‘truth.’ In using this approach, participants most often mobilised the format of short sonic highlights and follow-up voice memos. While these aural postcards typically contained sound level photographs (decibel measurement values), in some cases the inquiry and subsequent conclusions were made inductively through sustained observation of a series of soundscapes. The following example is by a participant who exclusively recorded and compared various domestic spaces in terms of sound levels, comparing and contrasting them using voice memos. This is a sound level photograph of his home computer system: So I decided to record sitting next to my computer today just because my computer is loud, so I wanted to see exactly how loud it really was. But I kept the door closed just to be sort of fair, see how quiet it could possibly get. I think it peaked at 75 decibels, and that’s like, I looked up a decibel scale, and apparently a lawn mower is like 90 decibels. (Participant 2) Mediated Curation as a New Media Cultural Practice? One aspect of adopting the metaphor of ‘curation’ towards everyday media production is that it shifts the critical discourse on aesthetic expression from the realm of specialised expertise to general practice (“Everyone’s a photographer”). The act of curation is filtered through the aesthetic and technological capabilities of the smartphone, a device that has become co-constitutive of our routine sensorial encounters with the world. Revisiting McLuhan-inspired discourses on communication technologies stages the iPhone not as a device that itself shifts consciousness but as an agent in a media ecology co-constructed by the forces of use and design—a “crystallization of cultural practices” (Sterne). As such, mobile technology is continuously re-crystalised as design ‘constraints’ meet both normative and transgressive user approaches to interacting with everyday life. The concept of ‘social curation’ already exists in commercial discourse for social web marketing (O’Connell; Allton). High-traffic, wide-integration web services such as Digg and Pinterest, as well as older portals such as Reddit, all work on the principles of arranging user-generated, web-aggregated, and re-purposed content around custom themes. From a business perspective, the notion of ‘social curation’ captures, unsurprisingly, only the surface level of consumer behaviour rather than the kinds of values and meaning that this process holds for people. In the more traditional sense, art curation involves aesthetic, pragmatic, epistemological, and communication choices about the subject of (re)presentation, including considerations such as manner of display, intended audience, and affective and phenomenal impact. In his 2012 book tracing the discourse and culture of curating, Paul O’Neill proposes that over the last few decades the role of the curator has shifted from one of arts administrator to important agent in the production of cultural experiences, an influential cultural figure in her own right, independent of artistic content (88). Such discursive shifts in the formulation of ‘curatorship’ can easily be transposed from a specialised to a generalised context of cultural production, in which everyone with the technological means to capture, share, and frame the material and sensory content of everyday life is a curator of sorts. Each of us is an agent with a unique aesthetic and epistemological perspective, regardless of the content we curate. The entire communicative exchange is necessarily located within a nexus of new media practices as an activity that simultaneously frames a cultural construction of sensory experience and serves as a cultural production of the self. To return to the question of listening and a sound studies perspective into mediated cultural practices, technology has not single-handedly changed the way we listen and attend to everyday experience, but it has certainly influenced the range and manner in which we make sense of the sensory ‘everyday’. Unlike acoustic listening, mobile digital technologies prompt us to frame sonic experience in a multi-modal and multi-medial fashion—through the microphone, through the camera, and through the interactive, analytical capabilities of the device itself. Each decision for sensory capture as a curatorial act is both epistemological and aesthetic; it implies value of personal significance and an intention to communicate meaning. The occurrences that are captured constitute impressions, highlights, significant moments, emotions, reflections, experiments, and creative efforts—very different knowledge artefacts from those produced through textual means. Framing phenomenal experience—in this case, listening—in this way is, I argue, a core characteristic of a more general type of new media literacy and sensibility: that of multi-modal documenting of sensory materialities, or the curation of everyday life. 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