Journal articles on the topic 'Teenage girls – physiology – united states'

Drawing on letters and essays written by teenage girls in the 1970s and early 1980s, and building on my historical research on same-sex desiring girls and girlhoods in the postwar United States, I ask how teenage girls in the 1970s and early 1980s pursued answers to questions about their feelings, practices, and identities and expressed their subjectivities as young lesbian feminists. These young writers, I argue, recognized that they benefitted from more resources and role models than did earlier generations, but they objected to what they saw as adult lesbians’ ageism, caution, and neglect. In reaching out to sympathetic straight and lesbian public figures and publications, girls found new ways to combat the persistent isolation and oppression faced by youth whose autonomy remained severely restricted by familial, educational, and legal structures.

Why is the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the United States as a whole, and in some U.S. states in particular? U.S. teens are two and a half times as likely to give birth as compared to teens in Canada, around four times as likely as teens in Germany or Norway, and almost ten times as likely as teens in Switzerland. A teenage girl in Mississippi is four times more likely to give birth than a teenage girl in New Hampshire—and 15 times more likely to give birth as a teen compared to a teenage girl in Switzerland. We examine teen birth rates alongside pregnancy, abortion, and “shotgun” marriage rates as well as the antecedent behaviors of sexual activity and contraceptive use. We demonstrate that variation in income inequality across U.S. states and developed countries can explain a sizable share of the geographic variation in teen childbearing. Our reading of the totality of evidence leads us to conclude that being on a low economic trajectory in life leads many teenage girls to have children while they are young and unmarried. Teen childbearing is explained by the low economic trajectory but is not an additional cause of later difficulties in life. Surprisingly, teen birth itself does not appear to have much direct economic consequence. Our view is that teen childbearing is so high in the United States because of underlying social and economic problems. It reflects a decision among a set of girls to “drop-out” of the economic mainstream; they choose nonmarital motherhood at a young age instead of investing in their own economic progress because they feel they have little chance of advancement.

There is a wealth of research on popularity among adolescents, mainly conducted in the United States. This study utilised a stimulus vignette and semi-structured focus group interviews to investigate teenage girls’ (15 year olds, n = 40) constructions of popularity in two schools of diverse socio-economic background in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia. An intensive thematic analysis revealed that the girls perceived popular same-sex peers to be publicly visible, prominent and prestigious and not necessarily well liked. In both schools, popular girls were seen to be physically and fashionably attractive and from wealthier backgrounds. Popular girls projected an image of being anti-school and antisocial rule breakers including smoking, drinking and taking drugs, more-so in the low income school. High status girls were seen as powerful and influential and they used their power in intimidating and aggressive ways including verbal harassment of peers, spreading of mean rumours and manipulation of friendships.

The dominant understanding in the United States of the relationship between pimps and minors involved in commercial sex is that it is one of “child sex trafficking,” in which pimps lure girls into prostitution, then control, exploit, and brutalize them. Such narratives of oppression typically depend on postarrest testimonials by former prostitutes and pimps in punishment and rescue institutions. In contrast, this article presents data collected from active pimps, underage prostitutes, and young adult sex workers to demonstrate the complexity of pimp-prostitute dyads and interrogate conventional stereotypes about teenage prostitution. A holistic understanding of the factors that push minors into sex work and keep them there is needed to designand implement effective policy and services for this population.

This is the inaugural volume of a new series, Studies in Language and Gender. This substantial book is an edited collection of recent research in the field of language and gender, predominantly but not exclusively focused on language use in the United States. The research represented in its 20 chapters is wide-ranging, both in terms of the genres and media explored in them and in terms of analytic approaches. The genres, media, and locations investigated include, among others, American shopping channel talk (Mary Bucholtz), self-revelatory on-line journals (Laurel Sutton), office interaction (Deborah Tannen), Latina hopscotch in Los Angeles (Marjorie Goodwin), Irish-language community radio (Colleen Cotter), British teenage girls' conversations (Jennifer Coates), and a Tunisian sociolinguistic interview (Keith Walters).

Background: World Health Organization (WHO) in 2018 stated that the number of dysmenorrhea in the world is very large, on average more than 50% of women in each country experience dysmenorrhea. In the United States, it is estimated that almost 90% of women experience dysmenorrhea and 10-15% of them experience dysmenorrhea severe, which causes them to be unable to carry out any activities. Purpose: To find out "The effect of green coconut water on reducing menstrual pain (dysmenorrhea) in adolescent girls at Junior High School 02 Bengkulu City in 2021.Method: This research was conducted using the method Quasi Experiment with a plan one grup pretest posttest design. Random sampling technique total sampling as many as 28 young women experienced it dysmenorrhea currently. Data analysis consists of univariate, bivariate and multivariate analysis. The sample tests used were Wilcoxon, Mann Whitney and Binary Logistic Regression tests.Results: The results of this study showed that the average pain dysmenorrhea before and after had given coconut water was 5.18 and the average pain after had given coconut water was 2.64. The statistical test results obtained p-value= 0.000, with a mean difference of 2.54 which shows that there is an influence on giving coconut water to young women at Junior High School 02 Bengkulu City in 2021.Conclusion: It is hoped that the school at Junior High School 02 Bengkulu City can optimize School's Health Clinic program services such as increasing the role of officers to implement canteens or school cooperatives to be able to provide coconut water which has the effect of reducing pain dysmenorrhea in teenage girls.

According to USA Archery, the National Governing Body for the Olympic and Paralympic sport of archery, since December of 2011, the number of archery clubs has nearly doubled and individual membership is up 25%. Owners of archery ranges across the United States are experiencing long waiting lists of adolescents who are interested in learning the sport, and many owners contribute this surge in popularity to The Hunger Games (2008–2010) franchise, a dystopian series featuring Katniss Everdeen, a bow and arrow wielding teenage girl who becomes a reluctant revolutionary instrumental in destroying a totalitarian government. The link between the series and the recent surge in archery is explored here. In this feminist, qualitative study, nine girls (n = 9) between the ages of 11 and 14 were interviewed about their experience participating in at least one 6-week after-school archery program. The results of this study suggest that The Hunger Games series influenced the girls, both directly and indirectly, to participate in the archery program. Additionally, this study found that archery is a sport where both active and less active girls feel they can compete with boys on a level playing field. Lastly, the participants did not report experiencing sexism or bullying as a result of their archery participation. The author provides applications and recommendations for further research.

Streetism is a growing problem worldwide and Africa is one of the continents with the highest population of street children. United Nations International Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF) refers to street children as children whom the street, more than their family, becomes their real home. The recent statistics released by UNICEF revealed that States in the North-east and North-west regions of Nigeria have female primary net attendance rates of 47.7 per cent and 47.3 per cent, which shows that more than half of the girls in those parts of the country are not in school. This paper examined streetism from the gender perspective, to draw the attention of the government, civil societies, and other stakeholders towards responding to the menace of street girls. This study was carried out by conducting document analysis and careful study of various secondary data sources obtained online. Google scholar, Scopus, and African Journals Online (AJOL) were used to retrieve journal articles, news items and other electronic materials written on the complexities of streetism as it affects girl children in Sub-Saharan Africa. High vulnerability to violence, rape, sexually transmitted diseases, and teenage pregnancy are the major problems found in the literature to be of peculiarity to street girls. Special programmes such as street education and literacy, and vocational skills acquisition programmes for street children were suggested as possible interventions to respond to the menace of streetism in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

Background: Child marriage is a marriage that is conducted formally or informally by spouses or with one of the spouses aged 18. Child marriage is a phenomenon that involves socio-cultural elements thus many factors influence it. Girls are 3 times more likely to experience child marriage than boys. Various conditions that occur in child marriage have generated interest in seeing a broader view of how married girls view their married life. Objective: This review was conducted to explore research findings related to the experiences of girls who were married under 18 years of age so that it could be used as an illustration to see the condition of girls in child marriage life. Methods: This review used three databases PubMed, ProQuest, and EbscoHost. The search for articles used main keywords, namely "child marriage", "women experience", and "marriage life" combined with helper keywords. The articles were full-text, in English, not limited by year and country, and discussed child marriage from a woman's perspective. Results: This review was done on 10 articles that were screened and analyzed out of 2259 articles. All articles used a qualitative method and were originated from Malaysia (2 articles), Pakistan (2 articles), Iran (2 articles), United States, Morocco, Jordan, and Israel. The total participants were 187 people from all articles. The causes of marriage in girls were poverty, prevention of premarital sex, adolescent pregnancy solutions, and personal desires of the girls. The state of marriage was seen from self-actualization and pressures on the role of girls in married life. Conclusion: This review summarized the reasons for marriage before the age of 18 were due to poverty factors, the avoidance of premarital sex, teenage pregnancy solutions and the willingness of girls themselves to marry. This review also summarized the situation of girls in child marriages who were unable to be self-reliant and were under pressure to perform their position in the household. Child marriage also caused new issues in the lives of girls, hence it was necessary to consider getting married at the age of under 18 years.

The infamous Boko Haram sect erupted on the world stage in 2009 with their aim to establish an Islamic State. Since its subsequent radicalisation resulting from heavy-handed treatment - including torture and murder - at the hands of state security forces, it now targets the army, police, and those associated with propagating western education. It has even degenerated into attacking the weakest participants, innocent civilians, especially school children. The most infamous act of Boko Haram was the abduction of nearly 300 female students in April 2014 from a government-run high school in the Christian town of Chibok. Over 70 percent of the girls were Christian, and reportedly a number were forcibly ‘converted’ to Islam. In February, 58 students mainly teenage boys, were burnt to death, shot or had their throats slit in a school attack. The mayhem continues as security forces seem incapable of containing the violence. 2050 people were killed in the first half of 2014 alone. The Paris Summit held in May led to a renewed military push from neighbouring countries with support from the United States, to contain Boko Haram. The Nigerian ‘ulama have condemned Boko Haram’s violence and language of arms as a fitna and cited it as “corruption on the earth” - one of the most serious crimes in Islam.

Calls now abound in a range of literatures “philosophy, education, sociology, anthropology, media studies;” to reimagine citizenship and identity in ways befitting a global age. A concept predominant in many such calls is the ancient idea of cosmopolitanism. Refashioned now to serve as a compass in a world that is at once radically interconnected and increasingly divided, a cosmopolitan point of view remains resiliently hopeful, asserting that people can both uphold local commitments and take into consideration larger arenas of concern. This article animates theorizing about cultural citizenship, identity formation, and communication with an examination of what might be considered sites for cosmopolitan practice’ an online international social network and offline local programs designed to engage youth in representing themselves and interacting with the representations of others. Specifically, we report our initial research with a group of teenage girls in India, tracing their participation online and offline and their cosmopolitan imaginings of self and other. We hope that this work with young people worlds away geographically, culturally, and ideologically will speak to English educators in the United States who feel likewise compelled to support their students in developing twenty-first-century literacies’ both the technological competencies and the values, knowledge, and dispositions’needed to participate confidently and critically as citizens of local and global worlds.

Since theRoev.WadeSupreme Court ruling in 1973 made abortion legal in the United States, it has consistently been subject to attempts to limit its reach, to make abortions harder to access, and thus to restrict their availability or frequency. In recent years, both pro-life and pro-choice groups have been reenergized, through calls to defund Planned Parenthood in Congress in 2015, and the 2016 Supreme Court ruling which prohibited a Texas “clinic-shutdown” law, for obstructing women's legal access to abortion underRoe. An era where this law was particularly contested, however, was the 1980s, which saw the Christian right crystallize and rally together to support the election of Ronald Reagan as President, in the hopes that he would promote their goals. Though extra-governmental pro-life groups and antiabortion individuals within the federal government were not ultimately able to do away withRoe, and would eventually become disappointed with Reagan's efforts in securing this, a series of measures over the course of the administration saw abortion access limited for one group of women in particular: teenage girls. This essay follows these legislative moves over the course of the 1980s, which include the first federal abstinence-only education bill, the Adolescent Family Life Act, a series of laws that allowed states to enact parental notification or consent clauses for minors’ abortions, and a “squeal rule” for doctors who treated sexually active teenagers. It analyses the discourse of and around each of these measures in order to understand how young women's sexual conduct mobilized abortion policy in this era. In doing so, it offers new perspectives on the significance of adolescent female sexuality to Reagan, to the Christian right, and to progressives involved in the heated debates over abortion and related battles of the 1980s culture wars.

Abstract Introduction Adolescents are at an increased risk of frequent mental distress, defined as experiencing poor mental health such as stress, anxiety, and depression, due to a variety of factors. In 2021 it was shown that the prevalence of frequent mental distress was higher than in previous years (NM-YRRS, 2021). According to Paruthi et. al. (2016), Adolescents require 9 to 10 hours of sleep per night. However, during the school year, the average sleep duration for adolescents is between 6.5 and 8.5 hours per night (Brand et. al., 2010). One potential solution to improve adolescent sleep is frequent moderate to vigorous exercise, which has been shown to have a positive relationship with favorable and healthy sleep patterns in adolescents. (Brand et al., 2010). Due to early school days, insufficient sleep has been found to contribute to frequent mental distress and poor academic performance in adolescents (Blackwelder, Hoskins & Huber, 2021). Aerobic exercise has been demonstrated to regulate emotions, while decreased rates of exercise have been shown to increase suicidality (Siddiqui, et. al., 2022). Thus, we hypothesize that inadequate exercise puts youth at an increased risk of frequent mental distress via the pathway of insufficient sleep. We further anticipate that boys and girls will experience this relationship at a different magnitude, with girls experiencing the effects of insufficient exercise on sleep more intensely because of gender-based differences in sleep duration requirements (Brand, et. al., 2010). Methods Using the 2021 New Mexico Youth Risk and Resiliency Survey (NM-YRRS) high school dataset, we will analyze this association using logistic regression. The NM-YRRS includes 16,000 students from across New Mexico high schools. Subgroup analyses are important considering evidence that there is a greater prevalence of frequent insufficient sleep among Native Americans (Chapman et al., 2013). The NM-YRRS oversamples Native American and rural populations in the state to ensure more representation of these populations than other surveys provide. The national CDC’s Youth Risk and Behavior Survey data across the United States will be available in January of 2023 where we will compare New Mexico’s data to National data. Results TBA Conclusion TBA Support (if any)

Adequate calcium intake and supply of vitamin D during childhood play important roles in ensuring adequate bone mass gain to achieve optimal peak bone mass. The Healthy Immigrant Children study employed a mixed-method cross-sectional study design to characterize the health and nutritional status of 300 immigrant and refugee children aged 3–13 years who had been in Canada for less than 5 years. This paper presents bone mineral content and vitamin D status data along with qualitative data that deepen the understanding of newcomer bone health status. A significantly higher percentage of refugee children (72.3%) had insufficient (<50 nmol/L) or deficient (<30 nmol/L) serum vitamin D compared with immigrants (53.2%). Vitamin D deficiency was most common among ethnic minority girls. Newcomer children with higher intakes of vitamin D, younger newcomer children, and those from western Europe or the United States had higher serum vitamin D levels. Immigrants had significantly higher mean total body bone mineral content compared with refugees. Total body fat, serum vitamin D, calcium intake, height, height by calcium intake, total body fat by calcium intake, and total body fat by height predicted total body bone mineral content levels. Vitamin D deficiency among newcomer children may be related to lack of knowledge regarding children’s vitamin D requirements in the Canadian environment, dietary habits established in country of origin, low income that limits healthy dietary choices, and lifestyle habits that limit exposure to sunlight. Results suggest a need to screen newcomer children and pregnant women for vitamin D deficiency and support early intervention.

AbstractIn the United States, there are more than 400,000 girls and young women of reproductive-age with a history of cancer. Cancer treatments including surgery, chemotherapy, targeted therapy, and radiation can adversely impact their reproductive health. This review discusses infertility, contraception, and adverse pregnancy and child health outcomes in reproductive-aged cancer survivors, to increase awareness of these health risks for survivors and their health care providers. Infertility rates are modestly higher, while rates of using contraception and using highly effective contraceptive methods are lower in cancer survivors than in women without a history of cancer. During pregnancy, preterm births are also more common in survivors, resulting in more low-birth-weight offspring. Children of cancer survivors do not have more childhood cancers, birth defects, or chromosomal abnormalities than the general population, with the exception of families with hereditary cancer. Reproductive risks in survivors depend on cancer treatment exposures. For example, women with prior abdominal or pelvic radiation have additional risks of spontaneous abortions, small-for-gestational-age offspring and stillbirths, while those with prior chest radiation or anthracycline exposures have higher risks of cardiomyopathy. To help survivors achieve their reproductive goals safely, family planning and preconception counseling are central to survivorship care.

Abstract Introduction There is scant evidence on the health morbidities experienced by Somali women and girls affected by female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) and their resultant health-seeking behavior in the USA as compared to those who have not undergone the procedure. To fill this gap, we conducted a comprehensive examination of health morbidity among women and teenage girls with and without FGM/C in a Somali migrant community. Methods Using a comprehensive community-based participatory research approach, a cross-sectional survey was administered to 879 Somali women and teenage girls in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona. We employed Chi-square and analysis of variance to disentangle health and healthcare use among those with and without FGM/C. Results The majority of respondents had undergone FGM/C (79%). Respondents with FGM/C experienced significantly more health concerns compared to uncut women and girls, with those possessing Type III FGM/C experiencing significantly more obstetric, gynecologic, sexual, and mental health morbidity than those with Type I or Type II. Rates of service use, while varied, were low overall, particularly for mental health services, even with health insurance. The majority of respondents who sought care indicated that their concerns were resolved, and they were satisfied with the healthcare received. Conclusions Community-engaged strategies that build upon satisfaction with care of women who seek care to enhance trust, nurture community embeddedness and facilitate peer navigation, while equipping health and social service providers with the competency and tools to provide respectful, trauma-informed care, will be critical to advance health equity for FGM/C-affected communities.

BackgroundHuman trafficking is a global public health issue that affects pediatric patients widely. The International Labor Organization estimates children comprise approximately 25% of the identified trafficked persons globally, with domestic estimates including over 2000 children a year. Trafficked children experience a broad range of health consequences leading to interface with healthcare systems during their exploitation. In June 2018, International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) released diagnostic codes for human trafficking.ObjectiveTo use a large, multicenter database of US pediatric hospitalizations to describe the utilization of the ICD-10-CM codes related to child trafficking, as well as the demographic and clinical characteristics of these children.MethodsThis study was descriptive in nature. Encounters using data from the Pediatric Health Information System database (PHIS) with ICD-10-CM codes indicating trafficking from June 1, 2018 to March 1st, 2020 were included in the study cohort, with data collection continuing for 30 days after first hospital encounter, until March 31st, 2020. Patients 19 years old and younger were included. Condition-specific prevalence as well as demographic and clinical characteristics for patient encounters were analyzed. Study subjects were followed for 30 days after first hospital encounter to describe healthcare utilization patterns.ResultsDuring the study period, 0.005% (n = 293) of patient encounters in the PHIS database were identified as trafficked children. The children of our cohort were mostly female (90%), non-Hispanic Black (38%), and had public insurance (59%). Nearly two-thirds of patients (n = 190) had a documented mental health disorder at the initial encounter, with 32.1% classified as the principal diagnosis. Our cohort had a 30-day hospital inpatient, overnight observation, or emergency department readmission rate of 16% (n = 48).DiscussionOur study demonstrates a low utilization of human trafficking ICD-10-CM codes in academic children's health centers, with code usage predominantly assigned to Non-Hispanic Black teenage girls. As comparison, in 2019 the National Human Trafficking Hotline identified 2,582 trafficked US children in a single year. These results suggest widespread under-recognition of child trafficking in health care settings, including the intensive care unit, in addition to racial and socioeconomic disparities amongst trafficked children.

Introduction: Teen age births, though have reduced, are still common, with a lot of impact on mothers’, babies’, families’, communities’, nations’ health, world at large. Impact can echo throughout girl’s life, carry over to next generations. It has been revealed that globally unmarried adolescents have less access to family planning than general population and sex during adolescence is common with lack of awareness of sequlae in girls, specially in South East Asia. Objectives: To know about teen age births, effects, global challenges in prevention of teen age births, their sequlae. Methodology: Simple review about various studies, health providers views was done by different search engines like Uptodate, Pubmed, Ermed Consortium, Cochrane Library, Delnet, MedIND and self experiences were added. Results: Racial/ethnic geographic disparities in teen births persist, both within, across Countries, States, Districts, Communities, some with low rates and others with high. United States of America (USA) reported much higher teen age births compared to other developed countries though declined after 1991 dramatically between 2007 and 2016 as per published research using National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and Youth Risk Behaviour Survey in USA. Change was influenced primarily by increase in contraceptive use, to lesser degree declines in sexual activity. It was also revealed that in all countries, unmarried adolescents appeared to have less access to family planning than general population of. USA Teenage pregnancy has been reported to be associated with number of adverse health outcomes for mother, baby as well as social economic disadvantages for individuals, their future families even next generations. Existing literature suggested that the persistence of teen age births and many other aspects of girls lives reflected range of cultural, socio-economic factors. Conclusion: There is need of Improving adolescents awareness about sexuality, reproduction, sequlae. Access to contraceptives as per need, including emergency conception are essential. Public youth policies must consider the differences in stories of adolescents. Policies programs’ must go around their lives.

Introduction: LDL cholesterol transiently decreases during puberty, and then increases again in late adolescence. However, the association of earlier pubertal development and LDL-C changes among adolescents is not well established, especially among African-American girls. Objective: To examine race-specific associations of early menarche and change in LDL-C during adolescence. Methods: The National Growth and Health Study (NGHS) was a 10-year prospective study of 2,379 girls, aged 9-10 at baseline, from four areas of the United States. Girls with missing age at menarche (n=22) or clinic (n=1) information were excluded from analyses. We used mixed effects regression models to test the association of early menarche, defined as less than median age at menarche for race in NHANES III (<12.1 for African-American, and <12.6 years for white girls) and serial measures of LDL-C, adjusted for age, study center, parental education, and percent body fat at each visit. Time was defined as follow-up year 1 (mean age 10) through year 10 (mean age 19), and included as a quadratic term in all models. Results: The analytic sample included 2,356 girls (1,200 African-American; 1,156 white). Early (vs. later) menarche (-1.90 mg/dl, p=0.05) and African American race (-1.72 mg/dl, p =0.08) were associated with lower average LDL-C over the 10-year time period. LDL-C increased less during late adolescence in African-American than in white girls (β race*time 2 = -0.11 mg/dl; p-interaction=0.01), and further, the relationship of menarche to the shape of the LDL-C curve differed by race, as indicated by different quadratic time terms (race*menarche*time 2 ; p-interaction=0.02). Conclusion: LDL-C was lower among girls with early vs. later menarche during adolescence. By late adolescence, white girls with early menarche tended to experience faster gains in LDL-C compared with later maturing white girls. Additional research is needed to determine if this pattern continues into adulthood.

Background: Body mass index (BMI), a measure of obesity, is strongly associated with blood pressure (BP) in children and adolescents. Handgrip strength is a measure of muscular strength and body fitness. We hypothesized that handgrip strength modifies the relationship between BMI and BP. Methods: The sample included 3,947 children and adolescents (50.4% boys and 49.6% girls) aged 8-19 years who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) 2011-2014. The sum of the maximum handgrip strength from both hands, standardized to age- and sex-specific z-scores, was used. General linear models were used for data analyses. Results: As expected, BMI was positively correlated with systolic BP (partial correlation coefficient r=0.17, P<0.0001). After adjustment for age, race, sex, and handgrip strength, each BMI unit increase was associated with 0.47 (0.03, standard error) mm Hg increase in systolic BP (P<0.0001). Further, handgrip strength significantly (P=0.0002) attenuated the association between BMI and systolic BP. In those with handgrip strength below the median, each BMI unit increase was associated with 0.59 (0.04) mm Hg increase in systolic BP; such increase was only 0.38 (0.03) mm Hg in those with handgrip strength above the median, representing a 36% reduction in the effect size of BMI on systolic BP. Conclusion: These results suggest that high fitness, measured by handgrip strength, attenuates the adverse effect of obesity on blood pressure levels in children and adolescents, which indicates that increasing muscular strength and body fitness will have beneficial effects on obesity-associated elevated BP in children and adolescents.

Objective: While the global epidemic of diabetes mellitus in adults is well documented, there are few reliable estimates of the prevalence of diabetes and prediabetes in adolescents in the United States. We conducted systematic hemoglobin A1C (HbA1C) screening in a very large adolescent blood donor population. Methods: A screening program was implemented in which HbA1C was measured at the time of blood donation among 31,546 volunteer high-school blood donors, 16-19 years of age, who participated in school blood drives conducted by Carter BloodCare, the largest independent blood program in Texas, between 2011 and 2013. The main study measures were the prevalence of HbA1C in the prediabetes range, 5.7-6.4% (39-46 mmol/mol) and in the diabetes range, ≥ 6.5% (≥ 48 mmol/mol), in the overall cohort as well as stratified by sex, race/ethnicity, and sociodemographic characteristics. Results: In the overall cohort, the prevalence of HbA1C in the prediabetes range was 11.0% (95% CI 10.7, 11.4), and the prevalence of HbA1C in the diabetes range was 0.53% (95% CI, 0.46, 0.62). The prevalence of HbA1C ≥ 5.7% (including prediabetes and diabetes) was higher in boys compared with girls (15.7% vs.7.9%, P<0.001), and was especially high in race/ethnic minorities (32.7%, 19.7%, 13.1%, respectively in Blacks, Asians, Hispanics) compared with 8.0% in Whites (p<0.001 for each vs. Whites). In analyses of cardiovascular risk factors stratified by HbA1C categories, higher total cholesterol and systolic and diastolic blood pressure were observed in donors with HbA1C in the prediabetes and diabetes range (P trend < 0.001 for all, Table ). Conclusions: HbA1C values in the prediabetes or diabetes range are common among adolescent blood donors, particularly among boys and ethnic minorities. Blood donation programs can be used as a valuable portal for public health screening, and may provide the opportunity for targeted public health interventions, triaging of donors to medical care, and research programs for community-based participatory interventions.

Lai, Thanhha. Listen, Slowly. New York: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2015. Print.Twelve year-old Mai wants nothing more for her summer vacation than to spend her days on the beach hanging out with her best friend, getting to know her first romantic crush. Instead, her parents expect Mai to chaperone her grandmother (Bà) on a return trip to Vietnam to uncover the secrets of her grandfather’s disappearance and death in “THE WAR” over 40 years ago. Despite being raised in a home that carried on some Vietnamese traditions, Mai’s parents could not have prepared her for the heat, mosquitoes or infrequent Internet access in her grandfather’s rural northern village. In a display of her preteen angst, Mai immediately starts counting down the days until she can return to the known comforts of life back home in California.With time, however, her language skills improve and she begins to form relationships in the community, particularly with Ut, a girl her age with a serious interest in frogs, and Minh, the local teenage translator with a Texan drawl he acquired through his international studies in the United States. In Mai’s ensuing journey she travels across Vietnam, from the rural rhythms of her ancestral village to the colonial splendour of Hanoi and the humid chaos of Ho Chi Minh City. The nation’s contrasts provide her with an unforgettable summer that far surpasses anything she could have imagined with her initial Laguna Beach plans.After receiving a 2011 National Book Award and 2012 Newbery Medal Honor for Inside Out and Back Again, Thanhha Lai’s second novel continues to explore Vietnamese-American experiences. In contrast to her first book’s focus on a refugee family’s journey, Listen, Slowly examines the frustrations of a second-generation American attempting to reconcile her Vietnamese cultural deficits. Mai’s path to settle within her bicultural identity is an experience familiar to thousands of children her age, who are raised in part with traditions from their parents’ country yet never fully feel immersed in that culture. In her protagonist, Lai has created a relatable character who eventually, and maybe reluctantly, shows capacity for adaptation and resilience in the face of adversity.Lai depicts a vibrant Vietnam with verdant landscapes and mouth-watering descriptions of the nation’s notoriously fresh cuisine. The novel’s humour generally hits the mark, including a hilarious passage of cultural colonialism in which Mai convinces young Vietnamese girls to transform their comfortable underwear to thongs. While the disruption of the story’s pace during philosophical Vietnamese translations might test the patience of young readers, this challenge will be welcomed by many. Overall, this story of adventure, family history and bicultural identity is one that should have a home in all school and public libraries.Recommended: 3 out of 4 StarsReviewer: Kyle MarshallKyle Marshall is the School-Aged Services Intern Librarian for Edmonton Public Library. He graduated with his MLIS from the University of Alberta in June 2015, and is passionate about diversity in children's and youth literature.

Introduction Nancy Thompson (Heather Langekamp) is one angry teenager. She’s just discovered that her mother Marge (Ronee Blakley) knows about Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), the strange man with the burnt flesh and the switchblade fingers who’s been killing her friends in their dreams. Marge insists that there’s nothing to worry about. “He’s dead, honey,” Marge assures her daughter, “because mommy killed him.” This now-famous line neatly encapsulates the gender politics of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). We argue that in order to fully understand how gender operates in Nightmare, it is useful to read the film within the context of the historical period in which it was produced. Nightmare appeared during the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Reagan valorised the white, middle-class nuclear family. Reagan’s presidency coincided with (and contributed to) the rise of ‘family values’ and a corresponding anti-feminism. During this era, both ‘family values’ and anti-feminism were being endorsed (and contested) in Hollywood cinema. In this article, we suggest that the kind of patriarchal family structure endorsed by Reagan is thoroughly ridiculed in Nightmare. The families in Craven’s film are dysfunctional jokes, headed by incompetent adults who, in their historical attempts to rid their community of Freddy, instead fostered Freddy’s growth from sadistic human to fully-fledged monster. Nancy does indeed slay the beast in order to save the children of Elm Street. In doing so, though, we suggest that she becomes both a maternal and paternal figure; and (at least symbolically) restores her fragmented nuclear family unit. Also, and tellingly, Nancy and her mother are punished for attempting to destroy Krueger. Nightmare in 1980s AmericaNightmare was released at the height of the popularity of the “slasher film” genre. Much scholarly attention has been given to Nightmare’s gender politics. Film theorist Carol Clover has called Nancy “the grittiest of the Final Girls” (202). Clover has used the term “Final Girl” to describe the female protagonist in slasher films who survives until the film’s ending, and who kills the monster. For Clover and other scholars, Nancy uses her physical and intellectual strength to combat Freddy; she is not the kind of passive heroine found in earlier slasher films such as 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (see Christensen; Clover 202; Trencansky). We do not disagree entirely with this reading. Nevertheless, we suggest that it can be complicated by analysing Nightmare in the historical context in which it was produced. We agree with Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner that “Hollywood films provide important insights into the psychological, socio-political, and ideological make-up of U.S. society at a given point in history” (109). This article adopts Hammer and Kellner’s analytic approach, which involves using “social realities and context to help situate and interpret key films” (109). By adopting this approach, we hope to suggest the importance of Craven’s film to the study of gender representations in 1980s Hollywood cinema. Nightmare is a 1980s film that has reached a particularly large audience; it was critically and commercially successful upon its release, and led to numerous sequels, a TV series, and a 2010 remake (Phillips 77).Significantly, Craven’s film was released three years after the Republican Ronald Reagan commenced his first term as President of the United States of America. Much has been written about the neoconservative policies and rhetoric issued by the Reagan administration (see, for example, Broussard; Tygiel). This neoconservatism encroached on all aspects of social life, including gender. According to Sara Evans: “Empowered by the Republican administration, conservatives relentlessly criticized women’s work outside the home, blocking most legislation designed to ameliorate the strains of work and family life while turning the blame for those very stresses back on feminism itself” (87). For Reagan, the nuclear family—and, more specifically, the white, middle-class nuclear family—was under threat; for example, divorce rates and single parent families had increased exponentially in the US between the 1960s and the 1980s (Popenoe 531-532). This was problematic because, as sociologist David Popenoe has argued, the nuclear family was “by far the best institution” in which to raise children (539). Popenoe approvingly cites the following passage from the National Commission on Children (1991): Substantial evidence suggests that the quality of life for many of America's children has declined. As the nation looks ahead to the twenty- first century, the fundamental challenge facing us is how to fashion responses that support and strengthen families as the once and future domain for raising children. (539)This emphasis on “family values” was shared by the Religious Right, which had been gaining political influence in North America since the late 1970s. The most famous early example of the Religious Right was the “Save Our Children” crusade. This crusade (which was led by Baptist singer Anita Bryant) protested a local gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida (Winner 184). Family values were also espoused by some commentators of a more liberal political persuasion. A prominent example is Tipper Gore, wife of Democrats senator Al Gore Jr., who (in 1985) became the chief spokesperson of the Parents’ Music Resource Center, an organisation that aimed “to inform parents about the pornographic content of some rock songs” (Chastagner 181). This organisation seemed to work on the assumption that parents know what is best for their children; and that it is parents’ moral duty to protect their children from social evils (in this case, sexually explicit popular culture). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the anti-feminism and the privileging of family values described above manifested in the Hollywood cinema of the 1980s. Susan Faludi has demonstrated how a selection of films released during that decade “struggle to make motherhood as alluring as possible,” and punish those female protagonists who are unwilling or unable to become mothers (163). Faludi does not mention slasher films, though it is telling that this genre —a genre that had its genesis in the early 1960s, with movies such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)—enjoyed considerable popularity during the 1980s. The slasher genre has been characterised by its graphic depictions of violence, particularly violence against women (Welsh). Many of the female victims in these films are shown to be sexually active prior to their murders, thus making these murders seem like punishment for their behaviour (Welsh). For example, in Nightmare, the character Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss) is killed by Freddy shortly after she has sex with her boyfriend. Our aim is not to suggest that Nightmare is automatically anti-feminist because it is a slasher film or because of the decade in which it was released. Craven’s film is actually resistant to any single and definitive reading, with its blurring of the boundaries between reality and fantasy, its blend of horror and dark humour, and its overall air of ambiguity. Furthermore, it is worth noting that Hollywood films of the 1980s contested Reaganite politics as much as they endorsed those politics; the cinema of that decade was not entirely right-leaning (Hammer and Kellner 107). Thus, our aim is to explore the extent to which Craven’s film contests and endorses the family values and the conservative gender politics that are described above. In particular, we focus on Nightmare’s representation of the nuclear family. As Sara Harwood argues, in 1980s Hollywood cinema, the nuclear family was frequently represented as a “fragile, threatened entity” (5). Within this “threatened entity”, parents (and particularly fathers) were regularly represented as being “highly problematic”, and unable to adequately protect their children (Harwood 1-2). Harwood argues this point with reference to films such as the hugely popular thriller Fatal Attraction (1987). Sarah Trencansky has noted that a recurring theme of the 1980s slasher film is “youth subjugated to an adult community that produces monsters” (Trencansky 68). Harwood and Trencansky’s insights are particularly relevant to our reading of Craven’s film, and its representation of the heroine’s family. Bad Parents and Broken FamiliesNightmare is set in white, middle-class suburbia. The families within this suburbia are, however, a long way from the idealised, comfortable nuclear family. The parents are unfeeling and uncaring—not to mention unhelpful to their teenage children. Nancy’s family is a case in point. Her parents are separated. Her policeman father Donald (John Saxon) is almost laughably unemotional; when Nancy asks him whether her boyfriend has been killed [by Freddy], he replies flatly: “Yeah. Apparently, he’s dead.” Nancy’s mother Marge is an alcoholic who installs bars on the windows of the family home in a bid to keep Nancy safe. Marge is unaware (or maybe she does not want to know) that the real danger lies in the collective unconscious of teenagers such as her daughter. Ironically, it is parents such as Marge who created the monster. Late in the film, Marge informs Nancy that Freddy was a child murderer who avoided a jail sentence due to legal technicality. A group of parents tracked Freddy down and set fire to him. This represents a particularly extreme version of parental protectiveness. Marge tries to assure Nancy that Freddy “can’t get you now”, but the execution of her friends while they sleep—not to mention Nancy’s own nocturnal encounters with the monster—suggest otherwise.Indeed, it is easy to read Freddy as a kind of monstrous doppelganger for the parents who killed him. After all, he is (like those parents) a murderous adult. David Kingsley has argued that Freddy can be read as a doppelganger for Donald, and there is evidence in the film to support this argument. For example, the mention of Freddy’s name is the only thing that can transform Donald’s perpetual stoic facial expression into a look of genuine concern. Donald himself never mentions Freddy, or even acknowledges his existence—even when the monster is in front of him, in one of the film’s several climaxes. There is a sense, then, that Freddy represents a dark, sadistic part of Donald that he is barely able to face—but also, that he is barely able to repress. Nancy as Final Girl and/or (Over-)Protective MotherIn her essay, Clover argues that to regard the Final Girl as a “feminist development” is “a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking. She is simply an agreed-upon fiction, and the male viewer's use of her as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies” (214). This is too simplistic a reading, as is suggested by a close look at the character Nancy. As Clover herself puts it, Nancy has “the quality of the Final Girl's fight, and more generally to the qualities of character that enable her, of all the characters, to survive what has come to seem unsurvivable” (Clover 64). She possesses crucial knowledge about Freddy and his powers. Nancy is indeed subject to violence at Freddy’s hands, but she also takes responsibility for destroying him— and this is something that the male characters seem unable or unwilling to do. Those men who disregard her warnings to stay awake (her boyfriend Glen) or who are unable to hear them (her friend Rod, who is incarcerated for his girlfriend Tina’s murder) die violent deaths. Nightmare is shot largely from Nancy’s point-of-view. The viewer is thus encouraged to feel the fear and terror that she feels about the monster, and want her to succeed in killing him. Nevertheless, the character Nancy is not entirely pro-feminist. There is a sense in which she becomes “the proverbial parent she never had” (Christensen 37; emphasis in original). Nancy becomes the mother who warns the neighbourhood youngsters about the danger that they are facing, and comforts them (particularly Rod, whose cries of innocence go ignored). Nancy also becomes the tough upholder of justice who punishes the monster in a way her policeman father cannot (or will not). Thus, Nancy comes to embody both, distinctly gendered parental roles; the nuclear family is to some extent restored in her very being. She answers Anita Bryant’s call to ‘save our children’, only here the threat to children and families comes not from homosexuality (as Bryant had feared), but rather from a supernatural killer. In particular, parallels are drawn between Nancy and Marge. Marge admits that “a group of us parents” hunted out Freddy. Nevertheless, in saying that “mommy killed him”, she seems to take sole responsibility for his execution. Compare Marge’s behaviour with that of Donald, who never utters Freddy’s name. In one of the climaxes, Nancy herself sets fire to Freddy, before he can hurt any other youngsters. Thus, it is the mothers in Nightmare—both the “real” mother (Marge) and the symbolic mother (Nancy)—who are punished for killing the monster. In the film’s first climax, the burning Freddy races into Marge’s bedroom and kills her, before both monster and victim mysteriously vanish. In the second climax, Marge is yanked off the front porch and through the front door, by unseen hands that most likely belong to Krueger.In the film’s final climax, Nancy wakes to find that the whole film was just a dream; her friends and mother are alive. She remarks that the morning is ‘bright’; indeed, it appears a bit too bright, especially after the darkness and bloodshed of the night before. Nancy steps into a car with her friends, but the viewer notices something odd—the car’s colours (red, with green stripes) match the colours on Freddy’s shirt. The car drives off, against the will of its passengers, and presumably powered by the apparently dead (or is he dead? Was he ever truly dead? Was he just dreamed up? Is Nancy still dreaming now?) monster. Compare the fates of these women with that of Donald. In the first climax, he watches in horror as Freddy murders Marge, but does nothing to protect her. Donald does not appear in the final climax. The viewer is left to guess what happened to him. Most likely, Donald will continue to try and protect the local community as best (or as incompetently) he can, and turn a blind eye to the teenage and female suffering around him. Conclusion We have argued that a nuanced understanding of the gender politics at the heart of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street can be achieved by reading the film within the context of the historical period in which it was released. Nightmare is an example of a Hollywood film that manages (to some extent) to contest the anti-feminism and the emphasis on “family values” that characterised mid-1980s American political culture. In Nightmare, the nuclear family is reduced to a pathetic joke; the parents are hopeless, and the children are left to fend (sometimes unsuccessfully) for themselves. Nancy is genuinely assertive, and the young men around her pay the price for not heeding or hearing her warnings. Nonetheless, as we have also argued, Nancy becomes the mother and father she never had, and in doing so she (at least symbolically) restores her fractured nuclear family unit. In Craven’s film, the nuclear family might be down, but it’s not entirely out. Finally, while both Nancy and Marge might seem to destroy Freddy, the monster ultimately punishes these women for their crimes. References A Nightmare on Elm Street. Dir. Wes Craven. New Line Cinema, 1984.A Nightmare on Elm Street. Dir. Samuel Bayer. New Line Cinema, 2010. Broussard, James H. Ronald Reagan: Champion of Conservative America. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2014. Christensen, Kyle. “The Final Girl versus Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema.” Studies in Popular Culture 34.1 (2011): 23-47. Chastagner, Claude. “The Parents’ Music Resource Center: From Information to Censorship”. Popular Music 1.2 (1999): 179-192.Clover, Carol. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”. Representations 20 (1987): 187-228. Evans, Sara. “Feminism in the 1980s: Surviving the Backlash.” Living in the Eighties. Eds. Gil Troy and Vincent J. Cannato. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 85-97. Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women. London: Vintage, 1991. Fatal Attraction. Dir. Adrian Lyne. Paramount Pictures, 1987. Hammer, Rhonda, and Douglas Kellner. “1984: Movies and Battles over Reganite Conservatism”. American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations. Ed. Stephen Prince. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 107-125. Harwood, Sarah. Family Fictions: Representations of the Family in 1980s Hollywood Cinema. Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press, 1997. Kingsley, David. “Elm Street’s Gothic Roots: Unearthing Incest in Wes Craven’s 1984 Nightmare.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 41.3 (2013): 145-153. Phillips, Kendall R. Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Popenoe, David. “American Family Decline, 1960-1990: A Review and Appraisal.” Journal of Marriage and Family 55.3 (1993): 527-542.Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount Pictures, 1960.The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Dir. Tobe Hooper. Bryanston Pictures, 1974.Trencansky, Sarah. “Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror”. Journal of Popular Film and Television 29.2 (2001): 63-73. Tygiel, Jules. Ronald Reagan and the Triumph of American Conservatism. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. Welsh, Andrew. “On the Perils of Living Dangerously in the Slasher Horror Film: Gender Differences in the Association between Sexual Activity and Survival.” Sex Roles 62 (2010): 762-773.Winner, Lauren F. “Reaganizing Religion: Changing Political and Cultural Norms among Evangelicals in Ronald Reagan’s America.” Living in the Eighties. Eds. Gil Troy and Vincent J. Cannato. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 181-198.

A rhetoric of freedom characterises much of the literature dealing with online communities: freedom from fixed identity and appearance, from the confines of geographic space, and from control. The prevailing view, a combination of futurism and utopianism, is that the lack of order in cyberspace enables the creation of social spaces that will enhance personal freedom and advance the common good. Sherry Turkle argues that computer-mediated communication allows us to create a new form of community, in which identity is multiple and fluid (15-17). Marcos Novak celebrates the possibilities of a dematerialized, ethereal virtual architecture in which the relationships between abstract elements are in a constant state of flux (250). John Perry Barlow employs the frontier metaphor to frame cyberspace as an unmapped, ungoverned territory in which a romantic and a peculiarly American form of individualism can be enjoyed by rough and ready pioneers (“Crime” 460). In his 1993 account as an active participant in The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), one of the earliest efforts to construct a social space online, Howard Rheingold celebrates the freedom to create a “new kind of culture” and an “authentic community” in the “electronic frontier.” He worries, however, that the freedom enjoyed by early homesteaders may be short lived, because “big power and big money” might soon find ways to control the Internet, just as they have come to dominate and direct other communications media. “The Net,” he states, “is still out of control in fundamental ways, but it might not stay that way for long” (Virtual Community 2-5). The uses of order and disorder Some theorists have identified disorder as a necessary condition for the development of healthy communities. In The Uses of Disorder (1970), Richard Sennett argues that “the freedom to accept and to live with disorder” is integral to our search for community (xviii). In his 1989 study of social space, Ray Oldenburg maintains that public hangouts, which constitute the heart of vibrant communities, support sociability best when activities are unplanned, unorganized, and unrestricted (33). He claims that without the constraints of preplanned control we will be more in control of ourselves and more aware of one another (198). More recently, Charles Landry suggests that “structured instability” and “controlled disruption,” resulting from competition, conflict, crisis, and debate, make cities less comfortable but more exciting. Further, he argues that “endemic structural disorder” requiring ongoing adjustments can generate healthy creative activity and stimulate continual innovation (156-58). Kevin Robins, too, believes that any viable social system must be prepared to accept a level of uncertainty, disorder, and fear. He observes, however, that techno-communities are “driven by the compulsion to neutralize,” and they therefore exclude these possibilities in favour of order and security (90-91). Indeed, order and security are the dominant characteristics that less idealistic observers have identified with cyberspace. Alexander Galloway explains how, despite its potential as a liberating development, the Internet is based on technologies of control. This control is exercised at the code level through technical protocols, such as TCP/IP, DNS, and HTM, that determine disconnections as well as connections (Galloway). Lawrence Lessig suggests that in our examination of the ownership, regulation, and governance of the virtual commons, we must take into account three distinct layers. As well as the “logical” or “code” layer that Galloway foregrounds, we should also consider the “physical” layer, consisting of the computers and wires that carry Internet communications, and the “content” layer, which includes everything that we see and hear over the network. In principle, each of these layers could be free and unorganized, or privately owned and controlled (Lessig 23). Dan Schiller documents the increasing privatization of the Net and argues that corporate cyberspace extends the reach of the market, enabling it to penetrate into areas that have previously been considered to be part of the public domain. For Schiller, the Internet now serves as the main production and control mechanism of a global market system (xiv). Checking into Habbo Hotel Habbo Hotel is an example of a highly ordered and controlled online social space that uses community and game metaphors to suggest something much more open and playful. Designed to attract the teenage market, this graphically intensive cartoon-like hotel is like an interactive Legoland, in which participants assemble a toy-like “Habbo” character and chat, play games, and construct personal environments. The first Habbo Hotel opened its doors in the United Kingdom in 2000, and, by September 2004, localized sites were based in a dozen countries, including Canada, the Unites States, Finland, Japan, Switzerland and Spain, with further expansion planned. At that time, there were more than seventeen million registered Habbo characters worldwide with 2.3 million unique visitors each month (“Strong Growth”). The hotel contains thousands of private rooms and twenty-two public spaces, including a welcome lounge, three lobbies, cinema, game hall, café, pub, and an extensive hallway. Anyone can go to the Room-O-Matic and instantly create a free guest room. However, there are a limited number of layouts to choose from and the furnishings, which must be purchased, have be chosen from a catalog of fixed offerings. All rooms are located on one of five floors, which categorize them according to use (parties, games, models, mazes, and trading). Paradoxically, the so-called public spaces are more restricted and less public than the private guest quarters. The limited capacity of the rooms means that all of the public spaces are full most of the time. Priority is given to paying Habbo Club members and others are denied entry or are unceremoniously ejected from a room when it becomes full. Most visitors never make it into the front lobby. This rigid and restricted construction is far from Novak’s vision of a “liquid architecture” without barriers, that morphs in response to the constantly changing desires of individual inhabitants (Novak 250). Before entering the virtual hotel, individuals must first create a Lego-like avatar. Users choose a unique name for their Habbo (no foul language is allowed) and construct their online persona from a limited selection and colour of body parts. One of two different wardrobes is available, depending on whether “Boy” or “Girl” is chosen. The gender of every Habbo is easily recognizable and the restricted wardrobe results in remarkably similar looking young characters. The lack of differentiation encourages participants to treat other Habbos as generic “Boys” or “Girls” and it encourages limited and predictable conversations that fit the stereotype of male-female interactions in most chat sites. Contrary to Turkle’s contention that computer mediated communication technologies expose the fallacy of a single, fixed, identity, and free participants to experiment with alternative selves (15-17), Habbo characters are permitted just one unchangeable name, and are capable of only limited visual transformations. A fixed link between each Habbo character and its registered user (information that is not available to other participants) allows the hotel management to track members through the site and monitor their behavior. Habbo movements are limited to walking, waving, dancing and drinking virtual alcohol-free beverages. Movement between spaces is accomplished by entering a teleport booth, or by selecting a location by name from the hotel Navigator. Habbos cannot jump, fly or walk through objects or other Habbos. They have no special powers and only a limited ability to interact with objects in their environment. They cannot be hurt or otherwise affected by anything in their surroundings, including other Habbos. The emphasis is on safety and avoidance of conflict. Text chat in Habbo Hotel is limited to one sixty-one-character line, which appears above the Habbo, floats upward, and quickly disappears off the top of the screen. Text must be typed in real time while reading on-going conversations and it is not possible to archive a chat sessions or view past exchanges. There is no way of posting a message on a public board. Using the Habbo Console, shorter messages can also be exchanged between Habbos who may be occupying different rooms. The only other narratives available on the site are in the form of official news and promotions. Before checking into the hotel, Habbos can stop to read Habbo Today, which promotes current offers and activities, and HabboHood Happenings, which offers safety tips, information about membership benefits, jobs (paid in furniture), contest winners, and polls. According to Rheingold, a virtual community can form online when enough people participate in meaningful public discussions over an extended period of time and develop “webs of personal relationships” (Virtual Community 5). By restricting communication to short, fleeting messages between individual Habbos, the hotel frustrates efforts by members to engage in significant dialogue and create a viable social group. Although “community” is an important part of the Habbo Hotel brand, it is unlikely to be a substantial part of the actual experience. The virtual hotel is promoted as a safe, non-threatening environment suitable for the teenagers is designed to attract. Parents’ concerns about the dangers of an unregulated chat space provide the hotel management with a justification for creating a highly controlled social space. The hotel is patrolled twenty-four hours a day by professional moderators backed-up by a team of 180 volunteer “Hobbas,” or guides, who can issue warnings to misbehaving Habbos, or temporarily ban them from the site. All text keyed in by Habbos passes through an automated “Bobba Filter” that removes swearing, racist words, explicit sexual comments and “anything that goes against the “Habbo Way” (“Bad Language”). Stick to the rules and you’ll have fun, Habbos are told, “break them and you’ll get yourself banned” (“Habbo Way”). In Big Brother fashion, messages are displayed throughought the hotel advising members to “Stay safe, read the Habbohood Watch,” “Never give out your details!” and “Obey the Habbo way and you’ll be OK.” This miniature surveillance society contradicts Barlow’s observation that cyberspace serves as “a perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas about liberty” (“Crime” 460). In his manifesto declaring the independence of cyberspace from government control, he maintains that the state has no authority in the electronic “global social space,” where, he asserts, “[w]e are forming our own Social Contract” based on the Golden Rule (“Declaration”). However, Habbo Hotel shows how the rule of the marketplace, which values profits more than social practices, can limit the freedoms of online civil society just as effectively as the most draconian government regulation. Place your order Far from permitting the “controlled disruption” advocated by Landry, the hotel management ensures that nothing is allowed to disrupt their control over the participants. Without conflict and debate, there are few triggers for creative activity in the site, which is designed to encourage consumption, not community. Timo Soininen, the managing director of the company that designed the hotel, states that, because teenagers like to showcase their own personal style, “self-expression is the key to our whole concept.” However, since it isn’t possible to create a Habbo from scratch, or to import clothing or other objects from outside the site, the only way for members to effectively express themselves is by decorating and furnishing their room with items purchased from the Habbo Catalogue. “You see, this,” admits Soininen, “is where our revenue model kicks in” (Shalit). Real-world products and services are also marketed through ads and promotions that are integrated into chat, news, and games. The result, according to Habbo Ltd, is “the ideal vehicle for third party brands to reach this highly desired 12-18 year-old market in a cost-effective and creative manner” (“Habbo Company Profile”). Habbo Hotel is a good example of what Herbert Schiller describes as the corporate capture of sites of public expression. He notes that, when put at the service of growing corporate power, new technologies “provide the instrumentation for organizing and channeling expression” (5-6). In an afterword to a revised edition of The Virtual Community, published in 2000, Rheingold reports on the sale of the WELL to a privately owned corporation, and its decline as a lively social space when order was imposed from the top down. Although he believes that there is a place for commercial virtual communities on the Net, he acknowledges that as economic forces become more entrenched, “more controls will be instituted because there is more at stake.” While remaining hopeful that activists can leverage the power of many-to-many communications for the public good, he wonders what will happen when “the decentralized network infrastructure and freewheeling network economy collides with the continuing growth of mammoth, global, communication empires” (Virtual Community Rev. 375-7). Although the company that built Habbo Hotel is far from achieving global empire status, their project illustrates how the dominant ethos of privatization and the increasing emphasis on consumption results in gated virtual communities that are highly ordered, restricted, and controlled. The popularity of the hotel reflects the desire of millions of Habbos to express their identities and ideas in a playful environment that they are free to create and manipulate. However, they soon find that the rules are stacked against them. Restricted design options, severe communication limitations, and fixed architectural constraints mean that the only freedom left is the freedom to choose from a narrow range of provided options. In private cyberspaces like Habbo Hotel, the logic of the market rules out unrestrained many-to-many communications in favour of controlled commercial relationships. The liberating potential of the Internet that was recognized by Rheingold and others has been diminished as the forces of globalized commerce impose their order on the electronic frontier. References “Bad Language.” Habbo Hotel. 2004. Sulake UK Ltd. 15 Apr. 2004 http://www.habbohotel.co.uk/habbo/en/help/safety/badlanguage/>. Barlow, John Perry. “Crime and Puzzlement.” High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace. Ed. Peter Ludlow. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1996. 459-86. ———. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 8 Feb. 1996. 3 July 2004 http://www.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html>. Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2004. “Habbo Company Profile.” Habbo Hotel. 2002. Habbo Ltd. 20 Jan. 2003 http://www.habbogroup.com>. “The Habbo Way.” Habbo Hotel. 2004. Sulake UK Ltd. 15 Apr. 2004 http://www.habbohotel.co.uk/habbo/en/help/safety/habboway/>. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan, 2000. Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random, 2001. Novak, Marcos. “Liquid Architecture in Cyberspace.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991. 225-54. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You through the Day. New York: Paragon, 1989. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper, 1993. ———. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2000. Robins, Kevin. “Cyberspace and the World We Live In.” The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000. 77-95. Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1999. Schiller, Herbert I. Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Sennett, Richard. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life. New York: Vintage, 1970. Shalit, Ruth. “Welcome to the Habbo Hotel.” mpulse Magazine. Mar. 2002. Hewlett-Packard. 1 Apr. 2004 http://www.cooltown.com/cooltown/mpulse/0302-habbo.asp>. “Strong Growth in Sulake’s Revenues and Profit – Habbo Hotel Online Game Will Launch in the US in September.” 3 Sept. 2004. Sulake. Sulake Corp. 9 Jan. 2005 http://www.sulake.com/>. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McGuire, Mark. "Ordered Communities." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/06-mcguire.php>. APA Style McGuire, M. (Jan. 2005) "Ordered Communities," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/06-mcguire.php>.

Introduction A 2021 listicle pronouncing “10 Things That Are Bisexual Culture” concludes that “claiming that random things are ‘bi culture’ is the most bi-culture thing of all” (Wilber n.p.). While posed as tongue-in-cheek, the assignment of status as a signifier of bisexuality to seemingly arbitrary actions and items reinforces the notion that bi people seek a distinct visual and cultural identity and struggle to make one. We consider how creators on the algorithmically driven social media platform TikTok responded to an open-ended 2019 prompt (“ayo, bisexual check”) to show off styles and accessories that project a bisexual display, and how these videos, understood collectively, contribute to the cohesion of a prototype for a bisexual social uniform. By social uniform, we refer to informally standardised clothing that identifies members of a group but lacks the bureaucratic regulation of an institutional uniform (Joseph). This lens is productive for interpreting subcultural dress norms, including those of queer identities at various scopes (e.g. Nelson, “Here”; Stines). The development of these social uniforms can allow for stronger group coherence and provide individuals with “self-esteem through conformity” with one’s group and “self-regard by conflict” with other groups (Joseph 74). There is added utility to this signalling for queer people as a means to seek community and partnership against a societal backdrop of stigmatisation (Brennan). Being able to identify who is like oneself at a glance lets one know when and where one is safe to outwardly present an authentic version of oneself (Huxley and Hayfield; Rostosky et al.; Wang and Feinstein). Bisexual communities notably lack such a uniform (Hayfield, Bisexual; Hayfield, “Invisibility”; Hayfield, “Never”; Hayfield and Wood; Huxley et al.). While bi people have expressed interest in having a distinct, coherent aesthetic or set of visual markers to express their bisexuality and recognise others as specifically bisexual, they have encountered obstacles towards the establishment of such a bi uniform (Madison, “Representing”; Nelson, “What”). The conception of homosexuality and heterosexuality as a binary leaves little room for the notion of bisexuality at all (Nelson, “Here”). In instances when people do attempt to stake a claim to a specifically bisexual visual identity, the result tends to be read binaristically nonetheless (Daly et al.; Hartman; Hayfield, Bisexual; Morgan and Davis-Delano; Nelson, “What”). Attempts to visually “split the middle” of established gay and straight styles have thus historically failed, with onlookers (even bisexual onlookers) either assuming the bi person in question is gay or straight (Hartman). Rosie Nelson goes so far as to contend that “the body of the bisexual is incapable of declaring itself outwardly bisexual to a monosexist society” (“Here” 87). In other words, Nelson argues that a distinctly bi visual identity—a bi social uniform—may be impossible so long as bisexuality remains invisible in broader discourses of sexual orientation and that only improved or increased representations of bisexuality in media, law, research, and culture can foment the conditions for bisexual visibility in the most literal sense (“Here”). TikTok’s Bisexual Displays Within this context of binary assumptions of gender and sexual orientation, Julie Hartman-Linck conceived the “bisexual display” (Hartman 39). By analogy with gender display as theorised by Lorber and building on Goffman’s construction of identity performance, the bisexual display refers to attempts to project a bisexual identity “using the accoutrements of gender, as well as more direct visual and verbal cues” (Hartman 43). Bisexuality is discursively erased, and even seemingly straightforward attempts to make bi identities known are often misconstrued by observers, either through ignorance (e.g., unfamiliarity with the significance of the bi pride flag) or through willful disbelief (e.g., doubt in the authenticity of bisexuality / the bisexual; see Alarie and Gaudet). Therefore, analysis of bisexual display focusses on the intended effect of the performer rather than on the actual understandings of their audiences: bisexual display offers a productive theoretical lens through which to consider how a bisexual identity is intentionally fashioned, even if attempts to fashion the bisexual identity may be misunderstood or ignored. Emiel Maliepaard, in his research on bisexual geographies, argues that bisexual spaces are “temporal, local and (often) unplanned” (47). We identified one such space on TikTok, an algorithmically driven video-centric social media platform. TikTok affords creators a great deal of power to respond to and remix other creators’ content, most prominently with the “use this sound” function which lets creators incorporate audio either originating from or used in another video (colloquially a TikTok) into their own (Abidin and Kaye). The memetic process of (re)using a sound with some amount of variation generates a constituency of creators and other users whose participation in the video creation and engagement process aligns with what Zulli and Zulli theorised as TikTok’s imitation publics: “a collection of people whose digital connectivity is constituted through the shared ritual of content imitation and replication” (1882). These imitation publics in turn may spawn these temporal, local, and unplanned spaces, including virtual bisexual spaces. Here, we conducted a content analysis of 50 short videos posted in 2019 with over 1,000 likes using the “ayo, bisexual check” (“ABC”) sound, which was first uploaded in late March 2019. The originator of the sound posted a video of themselves saying “ayo, bisexual check” and then showing off certain elements of clothing and reifying or countering certain stereotypes about bi identity. When other creators subsequently began to use the sound and associated format to do the same, they constituted the “ABC” sound’s imitation public. While there are multiple possible ways creators might have understood the prompt of a “bisexual check” (e.g., as encouraging them to dress in a way that projects their own bisexuality; to dress in a way that projects bisexuality most legibly to other bisexual or nonbisexual people; to dress in a way that feels most comfortable to them, as a bisexual; etc.), the intention behind these videos can be understood broadly to display some bisexual identity. The simple and direct nature of the prompt (“bisexual check”) generates the virtual “bisexual space”, both “highly temporal and specific” (Maliepaard 59). This space both offers an open-ended venue for creators to engage with a culture of visual identity, and maximises the potential for audiences to read what transpires in the videos as demonstrative (if not constitutive) of bisexual identity. By creating these TikToks, users are not waiting for more or better bisexual representation on TikTok but instead are actively embodying it, responding to the need identified by Nelson. Elements of the Bisexual Check At the broadest level, creators in the 50 sampled videos primarily showcased discrete fashion elements or accessories, rather than entire outfits. The structure of “ABC” TikToks allowed creators to draw attention to specific pieces of clothing, jewelry, haircuts and styles, makeup looks, and ways of fashioning clothes (see fig. 1 for an example). This mode of engaging with the “bisexual check” challenge differs from the mode of engagement we saw in videos using the “ABC” sound posted after 2019; while onscreen text, closed captions, and video descriptions in TikToks posted in 2019 were primarily in English, text in videos posted in 2020 and later was mostly in Tagalog. This suggested that 2019 and post-2019 TikToks emerged from distinct and separate cultural contexts; despite using the same “ABC” sound, they represented different imitation publics. The post-2019 videos tended to show their creators posing for one or several shots without focussing on particular elements of their outfits, instead displaying their looks as a whole. The later videos offer a useful variation in memetic content and stance (Shifman), a contrast which permits us to understand the 2019 “ABC” videos as attempts to display bisexuality chiefly through discrete visual markers (e.g., fashion elements). Fig. 1: A screencap from the authors’ mocked-up “ABC” TikTok in which the creator uses a fingergun to showcase their cuffed jeans. Studies of bi people in the past two decades (almost all of which have been about bi women; see Clarke et al., though see Rogers for a recent exception) have identified several ways bi subjects attempt to make their bisexuality known in the face of overwhelming invisibility. Hayfield summarised research about bi women’s fashion, documenting styles that are “funky, flamboyant, or associated with alternative looks and looking (e.g., hippie, Goth, punk, and so on) including through piercings and tattoos” (“Invisibility” 180). Hartman-Linck recorded bi women using bumper stickers, pride flags and pride flag iconography, pins, and jewelry using the pink-purple-blue bi pride flag design, as well as a general playfulness with specific gendered markers (Hartman). Madison likewise found bi people using the bi pride flag design and colours on clothes and jewelry, as well as bi-specific iconography like the biangles (overlapping pink and blue triangles that generate a smaller purple triangle between them), interlocking Mars and Venus signs (⚤), and pun-based symbols like the “bisexuwhale” (“Representing” 151–3). More recently, the Internet has been a fruitful venue for discussions among bisexuals about a visual culture (Madison, “Bisexual”); discourse among bisexual people on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr has generated some seemingly novel styles and fashions that have been highlighted as specifically bi looks. A 2017 tweet about jeans cuffed at the ankles (see fig. 1) and baggy shirts tucked in at the waist being “bisexual culture” has been mentioned in numerous popular news articles and blogs (e.g., Cao; Wilber). A Tumblr post from around the same time with images of three fictional characters sporting neck-length hairstyles cut straight at the bottoms appears to have been the genesis of the “bisexual bob”, a bob haircut worn by a bi person (usually a woman) that received similar coverage and discussion to the cuffed jeans and tucked-in shirts tweet (e.g., Locke; Vandervalk; Wilber). Other items identified in listicles as constituting “bi culture” include: being unable to sit in chairs “correctly”, dyed pink hair, puns, Converse brand shoes, plaid shirts, outer space, (excessive) use of the bi pride flag and colours, and anxiety disorders. Within our sample, we identified an uptake of these nascent bi fashions, with 62% of videos featuring clothing being cuffed (most frequently jeans), 36% of videos highlighting shirts tucked into pants, and 20% of videos demonstrating bi bobs. More explicit iconography like bi pride flags and colours (what Hartman-Linck referred to as “sign equipment” in her conceptualisation of bisexual display) appeared in 16% of videos, compared to more general rainbow iconography, which showed up in 20% of them (Hartman). Button-down shirts appeared in 34% of videos, and both floral print shirts and Converse shoes appeared in 18% of the total corpus. Nose piercings actively contributed to the “bisexual check” in 12% of sampled TikToks, while a full-body dress appeared in just one video (2%). We identified no instances of biangles, interlocking Mars and Venus signs, or punny sign equipment. Display Becoming Prototype, Prototype Becoming Uniform Interpreting “ABC” videos as bisexual displays on the individual level and conceptualising the community of “ABC” creators and engagers as an imitation public allows us to understand the process taking place as social identity work, “the construction of identities for groups of people” (Eschler and Menking 2). Eschler and Menking (drawing upon Donath as well as Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock) argued that for social identities (like bisexuality), certain memes can offer prototypes: “a set of minimal social cues that a person can use to infer other information about an individual’s social world” (9). Similarly, Joseph argued that for any complex of sartorial meaning, there is a minimal symbol: “the least symbol necessary to suggest a uniform” (24). By their nature, prototypes (or minimal symbols) will be limited to the fewest key elements required to demarcate a social identity. TikTok creators have the capacity to share their own “bisexual checks” with the “use this sound” feature or duet other creators’ videos to mirror or counter elements of the original creators’ checks in their own lives. Further, even if not posting their own “ABC” content, users have the ability to share, comment on, and like TikToks to engage with a creator’s bisexual display. Each new “ABC” video accomplishes what Rogers identified in his research on images of bi men on Instagram: they “add to a discourse and visual culture of bisexuality that both describes and prescribes the visual forms in which bisexuality appears” (366). Each contribution introduces a new, or more likely reifies an existing (if nascent) indicator of a bisexual identity. It is no surprise, then, that visual indicators that had already garnered some popular support within online bisexual spaces (bi bobs, cuffed jeans, tucked-in shirts) were among the most common in our sample. Still, a fashion choice having already entered the bisexual public consciousness does not solely explain why it recurred in our sample while other choices and items mentioned in listicles did not. The userbase of creators who tend to achieve virality on TikTok skews young, white, wealthy, and female (Boffone; Kennedy), so styles favoured by bi people who share at least some of these identities (e.g., white teen or twentysomething girls and women with personal or familial wealth) are likely to recur more frequently and receive increased engagement from the broader TikTok userbase, which also skews young and female (Cyca). Anecdotally, this demographic picture of TikTok mirrored our sample, suggesting that markers posited by creators and received by users were most likely to reflect the tastes and norms of young, white, and female creators. Indeed, one of the few nonwhite “ABC” creators was the only person in our sample to use the sound to argue against the core premise of the videos, contending that all one needed to be bisexual was attraction to people of multiple genders rather than any of the specific visual markers posed by others in the sample. While a universal “bisexual check” is suggested by the sparse wording of the challenge, the resulting videos nonetheless demonstrate a specific racially, temporally, and culturally positioned understanding of bi identity. Just because anyone has the capacity to contribute their own vision of the “bisexual check” does not mean that all “ABC” videos will land with equal frequency on users’ For You Page feeds (TikTok’s “homepage” where videos are algorithmically delivered to users; see Simpson and Semaan), nor enjoy the same volume of attention from TikTok’s userbase. Eschler and Menking consider the prototype to be “the least common denominator” (9), meaning that users will take the few most common elements shared amongst the “ABC” videos as symbols of a bisexual style. That the top “ABC” videos (those we sampled) heavily skew young, white, and female means that a bi uniform emerges from elements favoured by users sharing those demographics. Our mode of investigating this sound’s videos (moving systematically through all the videos using the “ABC” sound from most liked to less liked) does not contravene the affordances of TikTok’s platform but is somewhat outside of the app’s environment of expected use (Light et al.), which we understand to be either scrolling through the user’s For You Page or receiving and viewing TikToks messaged privately by friends. Still, users in these settings served two or more “ABC” videos are likely to consciously or unconsciously begin to identify the prototypical elements of a bisexual look as being those shared across multiple videos: the most frequently recurring markers creators choose to share as part of their bisexual displays reify existing styles already identified as “bi looks” or introduce new ones to the viewer. Through the continuous and repeated proposal of bisexual looks, the prototype emerges for a bisexual uniform. These accoutrements (cuffed sleeves and pantlegs, especially on jeans, bi bob haircuts, tucked-in shirts) point towards a bi uniform that is put-together and favours clothes like jeans and button-down shirts that are commonly worn across genders. That a bisexual uniform that may be comfortably worn by members of any gender follows logically from the necessity for a bi look that is both shaped by and liable to be worn by bisexuals, who may be of any gender. Further, this bi uniform emphasises alterations that may be undertaken on items commonly already held rather than distinct new pieces that must first be acquired. This may be one reason that creators favoured these styles, rather than more blatant sign equipment like pins or shirts with bi iconography on them: they were simply more likely to have jeans in their closet than a biangles T-shirt. The creators in our sample, regardless of the specific accoutrements displayed, answered Nelson’s call for increased and better bisexual representation, building one of many possible images for how bi people can fashion themselves (“Here”). The “ABC” imitation public’s collagic vision of a bisexual uniform may, in the future, be adapted, rejected, or serve as inspiration for others in the endlessly cyclical process of identity formation and reinforcement. Conclusion We have sought to understand what TikTok users have accomplished through the creation of and engagement with “ABC” videos, both specifically (i.e., what are the predominant visual indicators across the most popular videos) and generally (i.e., what processes are taking place and how they contribute towards the establishment of a bisexual social uniform). Creators are unlikely to have set out with a larger project of developing a bi uniform in mind when posting their 15-second “ayo, bisexual check” videos, but as part of one of TikTok’s innumerable imitation publics, their personal bisexual displays nonetheless offer prototypes for what a bisexual uniform could be. Any single “ABC” video is an example of a creator using TikTok’s affordances to respond individually to an open-ended prompt, but taken collectively, a consensus about the least common denominators for a bisexual uniform begins to emerge. Whether this online effort to cohere bisexual style results in bi people being able to identify one another (and/or be identified by nonbisexuals) remains to be seen, but we hope this article provides both a useful record of styles favoured by bisexuals on TikTok in 2019 and a productive explanation of the way individual posts in TikTok’s ecosystem of imitation publics may begin to constitute a social uniform for a community whose members have historically lacked one. Acknowledgments Thanks to Elizabeth Fetterolf, Amy Giacomucci, Trevor Harty, and the editors and reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. All online sources have been archived via Archive.org. References Abidin, Crystal, and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye. “Audio Memes, Earworms, and Templatability: The ‘Aural Turn’ of Memes on TikTok.” Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image. Eds. Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson, and Daniel de Zeeuw. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2021. 58–68. Alarie, Milaine, and Stéphanie Gaudet. “‘I Don’t Know If She Is Bisexual or If She Just Wants to Get Attention’: Analyzing the Various Mechanisms through Which Emerging Adults Invisibilize Bisexuality.” Journal of Bisexuality 13.2 (2013): 191–214. <https://doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2013.780004>. Boffone, Trevor. “The D’Amelio Effect: TikTok, Charli D’Amelio, and the Construction of Whiteness.” TikTok Cultures in the United States. Ed. Trevor Boffone. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. 17–27. <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003280705-3>. Brennan, Samantha. “Fashion and Sexual Identity, or Why Recognition Matters.” Fashion: Philosophy for Everyone: Thinking with Style. Eds. Jessica Wolfendale and Jeanette Kennett. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 120–34. <https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444345568.ch8>. Cao, Linh. “The Definitive List of Things We Are Claiming as Bisexual.” Wear Your Voice, 28 Sep. 2017. <https://web.archive.org/web/20210918124202/https://www.wearyourvoicemag.com/definitive-list-things-claiming-bisexual/>. Clarke, Victoria, Nikki Hayfield, and Caroline Huxley. “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Appearance and Embodiment: A Critical Review of the Psychological Literature.” Psychology of Sexualities Review 3.1 (2012): 51–70. Cyca, Michelle. “23 Important TikTok Stats Marketers Need to Know in 2022.” Hootsuite, 9 Mar. 2022. <https://web.archive.org/web/20221017052222/https://blog.hootsuite.com/tiktok-stats/>. Daly, Sarah Jane, Nigel King, and Tracey Yeadon-Lee. “‘Femme It Up or Dress It Down’: Appearance and Bisexual Women in Monogamous Relationships.” Journal of Bisexuality 18.3 (2018): 257–77. <https://doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2018.1485071>. Donath, Judith. The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2014. <https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8340.001.0001>. Eschler, Jordan, and Amanda Menking. “‘No Prejudice Here’: Examining Social Identity Work in Starter Pack Memes.” Social Media + Society 4.2 (2018): 1–13. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118768811>. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Hartman, Julie E. “Creating a Bisexual Display: Making Visexuality Visible.” Journal of Bisexuality 13.1 (2013): 39–62. <https://doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2013.755727>. Hayfield, Nikki. Bisexual and Pansexual Identities: Exploring and Challenging Invisibility and Invalidation. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429464362>. ———. “The Invisibility of Bisexual and Pansexual Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance Norms, and Visual Identities.” Bisexuality in Europe: Sexual Citizenship, Romantic Relationships, and Bi+ Identities. Eds. Emiel Maliepaard and Renate Baumgartner. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. 178–91. <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367809881-15>. ———. “‘Never Judge a Book by Its Cover?’: Students’ Understandings of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Appearance.” Psychology & Sexuality 4.1 (2013): 16–24. <https://doi.org/10.1080/19419899.2013.748261>. ———, and Matthew Wood. “Looking Heteronormatively Good! Combining Story Completion with Bitstrips to Explore Understandings of Sexuality and Appearance.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 16.1 (2019): 115–35. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2018.1536390>. Huxley, Caroline, and Nikki Hayfield. “Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Sexualities: Appearance and Body Image.” The Oxford Handbook of the Psychology of Appearance. Eds. Nichola Rumsey and Diana Harcourt. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 190–202. <https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199580521.013.0017>. ———, Victoria Clarke, and Emma Halliwell. “Resisting and Conforming to the ‘Lesbian Look’: The Importance of Appearance Norms for Lesbian and Bisexual Women.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 24.3 (2014): 205–19. <https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2161>. Joseph, Nathan. Uniforms and Nonuniforms: Communication through Clothing. New York: Greenwood, 1986. Kennedy, Melanie. “‘If the Rise of the TikTok Dance and E-Girl Aesthetic Has Taught Us Anything, It’s That Teenage Girls Rule the Internet Right Now’: TikTok Celebrity, Girls and the Coronavirus Crisis.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 23.6 (2020): 1069–76. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420945341>. Light, Ben, Jean Burgess, and Stefanie Duguay. “The Walkthrough Method: An Approach to the Study of Apps.” New Media & Society 20.3 (2018): 881–900. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438>. Locke, Ashley. “The ‘Bisexual Bob,’ Explained.” Mane Addicts, 2 Aug. 2021. <https://maneaddicts.com/the-bisexual-bob-haircut/>. Lorber, Judith. “Embattled Terrain: Gender and Sexuality.” Revisioning Gender. Eds. Myra Marx Ferree, Judith Lorber, and Beth B. Hess. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1999. 416–30. Madison, Nora. “The Bisexual Seen: Countering Media Misrepresentation.” M/C Journal 20.4 (2017) <https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1271>. ———. “Representing Bisexuality in the Digital Age.” Sex in the Digital Age. Eds. Paul G. Nixon and Isabel K. Düsterhöft. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. 147–57. <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315446240-14>. Maliepaard, Emiel. “Spaces with a Bisexual Appearance: Reconceptualizing Bisexual Space(s) through a Study of Bisexual Practices in the Netherlands.” Social & Cultural Geography 21.1 (2020): 45–63. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1454979>. Morgan, Elizabeth M., and Laurel R. Davis-Delano. “Heterosexual Marking and Binary Cultural Conceptions of Sexual Orientation.” Journal of Bisexuality 16.2 (2016): 125–43. <https://doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2015.1113906>. Nelson, Rosie. “Here and Queer (?): Monosexism and the Bisexual Body.” Talking Bodies Vol. II: Bodily Languages, Selfhood and Transgression. Eds. Bodie A. Ashton, Amy Bonsall, and Jonathan Hay. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 67–92. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36994-1_4>. ———. “‘What Do Bisexuals Look Like? I Don’t Know!’ Visibility, Gender, and Safety among Plurisexuals.” Journal of Sociology 56.4 (2020): 591–607. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783320911455>. Rogers, Brandon. “#Biguys and #Biboys: The Discursive Production of Bisexual Men through Instagram’s Homonormative Visual Culture.” Journal of Bisexuality 20.4 (2020): 361–82. <https://doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2020.1823298>. Rostosky, Sharon Scales, Ellen D.B. Riggle, David Pascale-Hague, and LaWanda E. McCants. “The Positive Aspects of Bisexual Self-Identification.” Psychology & Sexuality 1.2 (2010): 131–44. <https://doi.org/10.1080/19419899.2010.484595>. Schwalbe, Michael L., and Douglas Mason-Schrock. “Identity Work as Group Process.” Advances in Group Processes 13 (1996): 113–47. Shifman, Limor. “Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18.3 (2013): 362–77. <https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12013>. Simpson, Ellen, and Bryan Semaan. “For You, or for ‘You’?: Everyday LGBTQ+ Encounters with TikTok.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4. CSCW3 (2021): 252. <https://doi.org/10.1145/3432951>. Stines, Steven. “Cloning Fashion: Uniform Gay Images in Male Apparel.” Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion 4.2 (2017): 129–51. <https://doi.org/10.1386/csmf.4.2.129_1>. Vandervalk, Kathryn. “How My ‘Bisexual Bob’ Helped Me Come Out.” Byrdie, 4 Feb. 2020. <https://www.byrdie.com/bisexual-bob-4784125>. Wang, Abigail Y., and Brian A. Feinstein “The Perks of Being Bi+: Positive Sexual Orientation-Related Experiences among Bisexual, Pansexual, and Queer Male Youth.” Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity 9.1 (2022): 58–70. <https://doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000459>. Wilber, Jennifer. “10 Things That Are Bisexual Culture.” Paired Life, 12 Aug. 2019. <https://pairedlife.com/gender-sexuality/10-Things-that-are-Bisexual-Culture>. Zulli, Diana, and David James Zulli. “Extending the Internet Meme: Conceptualizing Technological Mimesis and Imitation Publics on the TikTok Platform.” New Media & Society 24.8 (2022): 1872–90. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603>.

Introduction In a period marked by the pervasiveness of new mobile technologies saturating urban areas of the Asia-Pacific region, it can be easy to forget the realities of life in the rural areas. In a location such as Australia, in which 80% of the population lives in urban areas, one must be reminded of the sociotechnological realities of rural existence where often-newer mobile communication devices cease to function. This paper focuses on these black spots – and often forgotten areas – where examples of older, mediated technologies such as UHF Citizen Band (CB) radios can be found as integral to practices of everyday rural life. As Anderson notes, constructs of the nation are formed through contested notions of what individuals and communities imagine and project as a sense of place. In Australia, one of the dominant contested imageries can be found in the urban and rural divide, a divide that is not just social and cultural but technological; it is marked by a digital divide. This divide neatly corresponds to the images of Australia experienced by Australians (predominantly living in urban areas) and exported tourist images of the rugged vast rural landscapes. The remote Australia Outback is a popular destination for domestic tourists. Its sparsely populated and rough terrain attracts tourists seeking a quintessentially Australian experience. Roads are often unmade and in poor condition. Fuel and food supplies and health services are widely separated and there is almost no permanent accommodation. Apart from a small number of regional centres there is no access to mobile phones or radio broadcasts. As a consequence tourists must be largely self sufficient. While the primary roads carry significant road traffic it is possible to drive all day on secondary roads without seeing another person. Isolation and self-sufficiency are both an attraction and a challenge. Travelling in campervans, towing caravans or camper trailers and staying in caravan parks, national parks, roadside stops or alone in the bush, tourists spend extended times in areas where there are few other tourists. Many tourists deal with this isolation by equipping their vehicles with CB radios. Depending on the terrain, they are able to listen to, and participate in conversations with other CB users within a 10-20 kilometre range. In some areas where there are repeater stations, the range of radio transmissions can be extended. This paper examines the role of these CB radios in the daily life of tourists in the Australian Outback. Theoretical Issues The links between travel, the new communications technologies and the diminished spatial-time divide have been explored by John Urry. According to Urry, mobile electronic devices make it possible for people “to leave traces of their selves in informational space” (266). Using these informational traces, mobile communication technologies ‘track’ the movements of travellers, enabling them to communicate synchronously. People become ’nodes in multiple networks of communication and mobility’ (266). Another consequence of readily available communication independent of location is for the meaning of social connections. Social encounters provide tourists with the opportunity to develop and affirm understandings of their shared common occupation of unfamiliar social and cultural landscapes (Harrison). Both transitory and enduring relationships provide information, companionship and resources that allow tourists to create, share and give meaning to their experiences (Stokowski). Communication technology also enables individuals to enter and remain part of social networks while physically absent and distant from them (Johnsen; Makimoto and Manners, Urry). The result is a “nomadic intimacy” in an everyday social and physical environment characterised by extended spaces and individual freedom to move around in these spaces (Fortunati). For travellers in the Australian Outback, this “nomadic intimacy” is both literal and metaphorical. Research has shown that travellers use mobile communications services and a range of other communication strategies to maintain a “symbolic proximity” with family, friends and colleagues (Wurtzel and Turner) and to promote a sense of “presence while absent”, or ‘co-presence’ (Gergen; Lury; Short, Williams and Christie; White and White, “Keeping Connected”; White and White, “Home and Away”). Central to the original notion of co-presence was that it was contingent on those involved in a given communication both being and feeling close enough to perceive each other and to be perceived in the course of their activities (Goffman). That is, the notion of co-presence initially referred to physical presence in face-to-face contact and interactions. However, increasing use of mobile phones in particular has meant that this sense of connection can be affirmed at a distance. But what happens when travellers do not have access to mobile phones and the Internet, and as a consequence, do not have access to their networks of family, friends and colleagues? How do they deal with travel and isolation in a harsh environment? These issues are the starting point for the present paper, which examines travellers’ experience of CB radio in the remote Australian Outback. This exploration of how the CB radio has been incorporated into the daily lives of these travellers can be seen as a contribution to an understanding of the domestication of mobile communications (Haddon). Methodology People were included in the study if they used CB radios while travelling in remote parts of Western Australian and the Northern Territory. The participants were approached in caravan parks, camping grounds and at roadside stops. Most were travelling in caravans while others were using camper trailers and campervans. Twenty-four travellers were interviewed, twelve men and twelve women. All were travelling with partners or spouses, and one group of two couples was travelling together. They ranged in age from twenty five to seventy years, and all were Australian residents. The duration of their travels varied from six weeks to eleven months. Participants were interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. The interviews were transcribed and then thematically coded with respect to regularly articulated points of view. Where points of view were distinctive, they were noted during the coding process as contrasting instances. While the relatively small sample size limits generalizability, the issues raised by the respondents provide insights into the meaning of CB radio use in the daily life of travellers in the Australian Outback. Findings Staying Safe The primary reason given for travelling with a CB radio was personal safety. The tourists interviewed were aware of the risks associated with travelling in the Outback. Health emergencies, car accidents and problems with tyres in a harsh and hot environment without ready access to water were often mentioned. ‘If you call a May Day someone will come out and answer…” (Female, 55). Another interviewee reported that: Last year we helped some folk who were bogged in the sand right at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere. The wife just started calling the various channels explaining that they were bogged and asking whether there was anyone out there….We went and towed them out. …. It would have been a long walk for them to get help. (Female, 55) Even though most interviewees had not themselves experienced a personal emergency, many recounted stories about how CB radio had been used to come to the aid of someone in distress. Road conditions were another concern. Travellers were often rightly very concerned about hazards ahead. One traveller noted: You are always going to hear someone who gives you an insight as to what is happening up ahead on the road. If there’s an accident up ahead someone’s going to get on the radio and let people know. Or there could be road works or the road could be shitty. (Male, 50) Safety arose in another context. Tourists share the rough and often dusty roads with road trains towing up to three trailers. These vehicles can be 50 metres long. A road train creates wind turbulence when it passes a car and trailer or caravan and the dust it raises reduces visibility. Because of this car drivers and caravanners need to be extremely careful when they pass or are passed by one. Passing a road train at 100 km can take 2.5km. Interviewees reported that they communicated with road train drivers to negotiate a safe time and place to pass. One caravanner noted: Sometimes you see a road train coming up behind you. You call him up and say ” I’ll pull over for you mate and slow down and you go”. You use it a lot because it’s safer. We are not in a hurry. Road trains are working and they are in a hurry and he (sic.) is bigger, so he has the right of way. (Male, 50) As with the dominant rationale for installing and using a CB radio, Rice and Katz showed that concern about safety is the primary motive for women acquiring a mobile phone, and safety was also important for men. The social contact enabled by CB radio provided a means of tracking the movements of other travellers who were nearby. This tracking ability engendered a sense of comfort and enabled them to communicate and exchange information synchronously in a potentially dangerous environment. As a consequence, a ‘metaworld’ (Suvantola) of ‘informational traces’ (Urry) was created. Making Oneself Known All interactions entail conventions and signals that enable a conversation to commence. These conventions were also seen to apply to CB conversations. Driving in a car or truck involves being physically enclosed with the drivers and passengers being either invisible or only partially visible to other travellers. Caravanners deal with this lack of visibility in a number of ways. Many have their first names, the name of their caravan and the channel they use on the rear of their van. A typical sign was “Bill and Rose, Travelling Everywhere, Channel 18” or “Harry and Mary, Bugger Work, Gone Fishing”, Channel 18” clearly visible to anyone coming from behind. (The male partner’s name was invariably first.) A sign that identified the occupants was seen as an invitation to chat by other travellers. One traveller said that if he saw such a sign he would call up by saying: “Hello Harry and Mary”. From then on who knows where it goes. It depends on the people. If someone comes back really cheery and a bit cheeky I can be cheery and cheeky back. (Male, 50) The names of caravans were used in other more personal ways. One couple from South Africa had given their van a Zulu name and that was seen as a way of identifying their origins and encouraging a specific kind of conversation while they were on the road. This couple reported that People call us up and ask us what it means. We have lots of calls about that. We’ve had more conversations about that than anything else. (Male, 67) Another caravanner reported that he had seen a van with “Nanna and Poppa’ on the back. They used that as a cue to start a conversation about their grandchildren. But caravan names linked to their CB radio channel can have a deeper personal meaning. One couple had their first names and the number 58 on the rear of their van. (The number 58 is beyond the range of CB channels.) On further questioning the number 58 was revealed to be the football club number of a daughter who had died. The sign was an attempt to deal with their grief and its public display a way of entering into a conversation about grief and loss. It has probably backfired because it puts people back into their shell because they think “We don’t want to talk about death”. But because of the sign we’ve met people who’ve lost a child too. (Male, 50) As Featherstone notes, drivers develop competence in switching between a range of communicative modes while they are travelling. These range from body gestures to formal signalling devices on other cars. Signage on caravans designed to invite conversation was a specialised signalling device specific to the CB user. Talking Loneliness was another theme emerging from the interviews. One of the attractions of the Outback is its sparse population. As one interviewee noted ‘You can travel all day and not see another soul’ (Female, 35). But this loneliness can be a challenge. Some of these roads are pretty lonely, the radio lets you know that there’s somebody else out there. (Male, 54) Hearing other travellers talk was comforting. As with previous research showing that travellers use mobile communications services to maintain a “symbolic proximity” (Gergen; Lury; Short, Williams and Christie; White and White, “Keeping Connected”) the CB conversations enabled the travellers to feel this sense of connection. These interactions also offered them the possibility of converting mediated relationships into face-to-face encounters along the road. That is, some travellers reported that CB-based chats with people while they were driving would lead to a decision to stop along the road for a shared morning tea or lunch. Conventions governed the use of specific channels. Some of these are government regulated, while others are user generated. For instance, Channels 18 and 40, were seen as ‘working channels’. Some interviewees felt very strongly about people who ‘cluttered up’ these channels and moved to another unused channel when they wanted to have an extended conversation. One couple was unaware of the local convention and could not understand why no one was calling them up. They later discovered that they were on the ‘wrong channel’. Interviewees travelling in a convoy would use the standard channel for travellers and then agree to move to another channel of their choice. When we travelling in a convoy we go off Channel 18 and use another channel to talk. The girls love it to talk about their knitting and work out what they’ve done wrong. We sometimes tell jokes. Also we work out what we are going to do in the next town. (Male, 67) These extended conversations parallel the lengthy conversations between drivers equipped with CB radio in the United States during the 1970’s which Dannaher described as ‘as diverse as those found at a cocktail party’. They also provided a sense of the “nomadic intimacy” described by Fortunati. Eavesdropping While travellers used Channel 18 for conversations they set their radio to automatically scan all forty channels. When a conversation was located the radio would stop scanning and they could listen to what was being said. This meant that travellers would overhear conversations between strangers. We scan all the channels so you can hear anyone coming up behind, especially trucks and you can hear them say “that damn caravan” and you can say ’ that damn caravan will pull over at the first opportunity.” (Female, 44) But the act of listening in to other people’s conversations created moral dilemmas for some travellers. One interviewee described it as “voyeurism for the ears”. While she described listening to farm conversations as giving her an insight into daily life on huge cattle station she was tempted to butt into one conversation that she was listening to. On reflection she decided against entering the conversation. She said: I didn’t want them to know that we were eavesdropping on their conversation. I’d be embarrassed if a third-party knew that we were listening in. I guess that I’ve been taught that you shouldn’t listen in to other people’s conversations. It’s not good manners… (Female, 35) When travellers overheard conversations between road train or truck drivers they had mixed responses. These conversations were often sexually loaded and seen as coarse by the middle class travellers. Some were forgiving of the conversational excesses, distinguishing themselves from the rough and tumble world of the ‘truckies’. One traveller noted that the truck drivers use a lot of bad language, but you’ve got to go with that, because that’s the type of people they are. But you have to go with the flow. We know that we are ‘playing’ and the truckies are ‘working’ so you have to be considerate to them. (Female, 50) While the language of the truck drivers was often threatening to middle class travellers, overhearing their conversations was also seen as a comfort. One traveller remarked that sometimes you hear truckies talking about their families and they obviously know each other. It’s kind of nice to see how they think. (Female, 50) Travellers had similar feelings when they overheard conversations from cattle stations. Also, local cattle station workers and their families would use CB radios for their social and working communications. Travellers would often overhear these conversations. One traveller noted that when we are driving through a cattle station we work out which channel they are using, and we lock it on that one. And then we listen until they are out of range. We are city people and listening to the station chatter gives us a bit of an insight into what it must be like as a farmer working land out here. And then we talk about the farmers’ conversations. (Female, 35) Another traveller noted: If you are travelling and there’s nothing you can see you can listen to the farmer talking to his wife or the kids. It’s absolutely awesome to hear conversations on radio. (Female, 67) This empathic listening allows the travellers to imagine the lives of others in settings quite different from those with which they are familiar. Furthermore, hearing farmers talking about fixing the fence in the left paddock or rounding up strays makes ‘you feel that you’re not alone’. The networking of the travellers’ social life arising from listening in to others meant that they were able to learn about the environment in which they found themselves, as well as enabling them to feel that they continued to remain embedded or ‘co-present’ in social relationships in circumstances of considerable physical isolation. Conclusions The accounts provided by tourists illustrated the way communications technologies – in this case, CB radio – enabled people to become ’nodes in multiple networks of communication and mobility’ described by Urry and to maintain ‘co-presence’. The CB radio allowed tourists to remain part of social networks while being physically absent from them (Gergen). Their responses also demonstrated the significance of CB radio in giving meaning to the experience of travel. The CB radio was shown to be an important part of the travel experience in the remote Australian Outback. The use of CB made it possible for travellers in the Australian Outback to obtain information vital for the safe traverse of the huge distances and isolated roads. The technology enabled them to break down the atomism and frontier-like isolation of the highway. Drivers and their passengers could reach out to other travellers and avoid remaining unconnected strangers. Long hours on the road could be dealt with by listening in on others’ conversations, even though some ambivalence was expressed about this activity. Despite an awareness that they could be violating the personal boundaries of others and that their conversations could be overheard, the use of CB radio meant staying safe and enjoying guilty pleasures. Imagined or not. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Community. London: Verso, 1983 Dannefer, W. Dale. “The C.B. Phenomenon: A Sociological Appraisal.” Journal of Popular Culture 12 (1979): 611-19. Featherstone, Mike. “Automobilities: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture and Society 21.4/5 (2004): 1-24. Fortunati, Leopoldina. “The Mobile Phone: Towards New Categories and Social Relations.” Information, Communication and Society 5.2 (2002): 513-28. Gergen, Kenneth. “The Challenge of Absence Presence.” Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communications, Private Talk, Public Performance. Ed. James Katz. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 227-54. Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963. Haddon, Leslie. “Domestication and Mobile Telephony.” Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology. Ed. James E. Katz. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 43-55. Harrison, Julia. Being a Tourist: Finding Meaning in Pleasure Travel. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2003. Johnsen, Truls Erik. “The Social Context of Mobile Use of Norwegian Teens.” Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology. Ed. James Katz. London: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 161-69. Ling, Richard. “One Can Talk about Common Manners! The Use of Mobile Telephones in Inappropiate Situations.” Communications on the Move: The Experience of Mobile Telephony in the 1990s (Report of Cost 248: The Future European Telecommunications User Mobile Workgroup). Ed. Leslie Haddon. Farsta, Sweden: Telia AB, 1997. 97-120. Lury, Celia. “The Objects of Travel.” Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. Eds. Chris Rojek and John Urry. London: Routledge, 1997. 75-95. Rice, Ronald E., and James E. Katz. “Comparing Internet and Mobile Phone Usage: Digital Divides of Usage, Adoption and Dropouts.” Telecommunications Policy 27 (2003): 597-623. Short, J., E. Williams, and B. Christie. The Social Psychology of Telecommunications. New York: Wiley, 1976. Stokowski, Patricia. “Social Networks and Tourist Behavior.” American Behavioural Scientist 36.2 (1992): 212-21. Suvantola, Jaakko. Tourist’s Experience of Place. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Urry, John. “Mobility and Proximity.” Sociology 36.2 (2002): 255-74. ———. “Social Networks, Travel and Talk.” British Journal of Sociology 54.2 (2003): 155-75. White, Naomi Rosh, and Peter B. White. “Home and Away: Tourists in a Connected World.” Annals of Tourism Research 34. 1 (2007): 88-104. White, Peter B., and Naomi Rosh White. “Keeping Connected: Travelling with the Telephone.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 11.2 (2005): 102-18. Williams, Stephen, and Lynda Williams. “Space Invaders: The Negotiation of Teenage Boundaries through the Mobile Phone.” The Sociological Review 53.2 (2005): 314-31. Wurtzel, Alan H., and Colin Turner. “Latent Functions of the Telephone: What Missing the Extension Means.” The Social Impact of the Telephone. Ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977. 246-61. Citation reference for this article MLA Style White, Peter B., and Naomi White. "Staying Safe and Guilty Pleasures: Tourists and CB Radio in the Australian Outback." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/11-white-white.php>. APA Style White, P., and N. White. (Mar. 2007) "Staying Safe and Guilty Pleasures: Tourists and CB Radio in the Australian Outback," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/11-white-white.php>.

Introduction The accelerometer seems, at first, both advanced and dated, both too complex and not complex enough. It sits in our video game controllers and our smartphones allowing us to move beyond mere button presses into immersive experiences where the motion of the hand is directly translated into the motion on the screen, where our flesh is transformed into the flesh of a superhero. Or at least that was the promise in 2005. Since then, motion control has moved from a promised revitalization of the video game industry to a not-quite-good-enough gimmick that all games use but none use well. Rogers describes the diffusion of innovation, as an invention or technology comes to market, in five phases: First, innovators will take risks with a new invention. Second, early adopters will establish a market and lead opinion. Third, the early majority shows that the product has wide appeal and application. Fourth, the late majority adopt the technology only after their skepticism has been allayed. Finally the laggards adopt the technology only when no other options are present (62). Not every technology makes it through the diffusion, however, and there are many who have never warmed to the accelerometer-controlled video game. Once an innovation has moved into the mainstream, additional waves of innovation may take place, when innovators or early adopters may find new uses for existing technology, and bring these uses into the majority. This is the case with the accelerometer that began as an airbag trigger and today is used for measuring and augmenting human motion, from dance to health (Walter 84). In many ways, gestural control of video games, an augmentation technology, was an interlude in the advancement of motion control. History In the early 1920s, bulky proofs-of-concept were produced that manipulated electrical voltage levels based on the movement of a probe, many related to early pressure or force sensors. The relationships between pressure, force, velocity and acceleration are well understood, but development of a tool that could measure one and infer the others was a many-fronted activity. Each of these individual sensors has its own specific application and many are still in use today, as pressure triggers, reaction devices, or other sensor-based interactivity, such as video games (Latulipe et al. 2995) and dance (Chu et al. 184). Over the years, the probes and devices became smaller and more accurate, and eventually migrated to the semiconductor, allowing the measurement of acceleration to take place within an almost inconsequential form-factor. Today, accelerometer chips are in many consumer devices and athletes wear battery-powered wireless accelerometer bracelets that report their every movement in real-time, a concept unimaginable only 20 years ago. One of the significant initial uses for accelerometers was as a sensor for the deployment of airbags in automobiles (Varat and Husher 1). The sensor was placed in the front bumper, detecting quick changes in speed that would indicate a crash. The system was a significant advance in the safety of automobiles, and followed Rogers’ diffusion through to the point where all new cars have airbags as a standard component. Airbags, and the accelerometers which allow them to function fast enough to save lives, are a ubiquitous, commoditized technology that most people take for granted, and served as the primary motivating factor for the mass-production of silicon-based accelerometer chips. On 14 September 2005, a device was introduced which would fundamentally alter the principal market for accelerometer microchips. The accelerometer was the ADXL335, a small, low-power, 3-Axis device capable of measuring up to 3g (1g is the acceleration due to gravity), and the device that used this accelerometer was the Wii remote, also called the Wiimote. Developed by Nintendo and its holding companies, the Wii remote was to be a defining feature of Nintendo’s 7th-generation video game console, in direct competition with the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. The Wii remote was so successful that both Microsoft and Sony added motion control to their platforms, in the form of the accelerometer-based “dual shock” controller for the Playstation, and later the Playstation Move controller; as well as an integrated accelerometer in the Xbox 360 controller and the later release of the Microsoft Kinect 3D motion sensing camera. Simultaneously, computer manufacturing companies saw a different, more pedantic use of the accelerometer. The primary storage medium in most computers today is the Hard Disk Drive (HDD), a set of spinning platters of electro-magnetically stored information. Much like a record player, the HDD contains a “head” which sweeps back and forth across the platter, reading and writing data. As computers changed from desktops to laptops, people moved their computers more often, and a problem arose. If the HDD inside a laptop was active when the laptop was moved, the read head might touch the surface of the disk, damaging the HDD and destroying information. Two solutions were implemented: vibration dampening in the manufacturing process, and the use of an accelerometer to detect motion. When the laptop is bumped, or dropped, the hard disk will sense the motion and immediately park the head, saving the disk and the valuable data inside. As a consequence of laptop computers and Wii remotes using accelerometers, the market for these devices began to swing from their use within car airbag systems toward their use in computer systems. And with an accelerometer in every computer, it wasn’t long before clever programmers began to make use of the information coming from the accelerometer for more than just protecting the hard drive. Programs began to appear that would use the accelerometer within a laptop to “lock” it when the user was away, invoking a loud noise like a car alarm to alert passers-by to any potential theft. Other programmers began to use the accelerometer as a gaming input, and this was the beginning of gesture control and the augmentation of human motion. Like laptops, most smartphones and tablets today have accelerometers included among their sensor suite (Brezmes et al. 796). These accelerometers strictly a user-interface tool, allowing the phone to re-orient its interface based on how the user is holding it, and allowing the user to play games and track health information using the phone. Many other consumer electronic devices use accelerometers, such as digital cameras for image stabilization and landscape/portrait orientation. Allowing a device to know its relative orientation and motion provides a wide range of augmentation possibilities. The Language of Measuring Motion When studying accelerometers, their function, and applications, a critical first step is to examine the language used to describe these devices. As the name implies, the accelerometer is a device which measures acceleration, however, our everyday connotation of this term is problematic at best. In colloquial language, we say “accelerate” when we mean “speed up”, but this is, in fact, two connotations removed from the physical property being measured by the device, and we must unwrap these layers of meaning before we can understand what is being measured. Physicists use the term “accelerate” to mean any change in velocity. It is worth reminding ourselves that velocity (to the physicists) is actually a pair of quantities: a speed coupled with a direction. Given this definition, when an object changes velocity (accelerates), it can be changing its speed, its direction, or both. So a car can be said to be accelerating when speeding up, slowing down, or even turning while maintaining a speed. This is why the accelerometer could be used as an airbag sensor in the first place. The airbags should deploy when a car suddenly changes velocity in any direction, including getting faster (due to being hit from behind), getting slower (from a front impact crash) or changing direction (being hit from the side). It is because of this ability to measure changes in velocity that accelerometers have come into common usage for laptop drop sensors and video game motion controllers. But even this understanding of accelerometers is incomplete. Because of the way that accelerometers are constructed, they actually measure “proper acceleration” within the context of a relativistic frame of reference. Discussing general relativity is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is sufficient to describe a relativistic frame of reference as one in which no forces are felt. A familiar example is being in orbit around the planet, when astronauts (and their equipment) float freely in space. A state of “free-fall” is one in which no forces are felt, and this is the only situation in which an accelerometer reads 0 acceleration. Since most of us are not in free-fall most of the time, any accelerometers in devices in normal use do not experience 0 proper acceleration, even when apparently sitting still. This is, of course, because of the force due to gravity. An accelerometer sitting on a table experiences 1g of force from the table, acting against the gravitational acceleration. This non-zero reading for a stationary object is the reason that accelerometers can serve a second (and, today, much more common) use: measuring orientation with respect to gravity. Gravity and Tilt Accelerometers typically measure forces with respect to three linear dimensions, labeled x, y, and z. These three directions orient along the axes of the accelerometer chip itself, with x and y normally orienting along the long faces of the device, and the z direction often pointing through the face of the device. Relative motion within a gravity field can easily be inferred assuming that the only force acting on the device is gravity. In this case, the single force is distributed among the three axes depending on the orientation of the device. This is how personal smartphones and video game controllers are able to use “tilt” control. When held in a natural position, the software extracts the relative value on all three axes and uses that as a reference point. When the user tilts the device, the new direction of the gravitational acceleration is then compared to the reference value and used to infer the tilt. This can be done hundreds of times a second and can be used to control and augment any aspect of the user experience. If, however, gravity is not the only force present, it becomes more difficult to infer orientation. Another common use for accelerometers is to measure physical activity like walking steps. In this case, it is the forces on the accelerometer from each footfall that are interpreted to measure fitness features. Tilt is unreliable in this circumstance because both gravity and the forces from the footfall are measured by the accelerometer, and it is impossible to separate the two forces from a single measurement. Velocity and Position A second common assumption with accelerometers is that since they can measure acceleration (rate of change of velocity), it should be possible to infer the velocity. If the device begins at rest, then any measured acceleration can be interpreted as changes to the velocity in some direction, thus inferring the new velocity. Although this is theoretically possible, real-world factors come in to play which prevent this from being realized. First, the assumption of beginning from a state of rest is not always reasonable. Further, if we don’t know whether the device is moving or not, knowing its acceleration at any moment will not help us to determine it’s new speed or position. The most important real-world problem, however, is that accelerometers typically show small variations even when the object is at rest. This is because of inaccuracies in the way that the accelerometer itself is interpreted. In normal operation, these small changes are ignored, but when trying to infer velocity or position, these little errors will quickly add up to the point where any inferred velocity or position would be unreliable. A common solution to these problems is in the combination of devices. Many new smartphones combine an accelerometer and a gyroscopes (a device which measures changes in rotational inertia) to provide a sensing system known as an IMU (Inertial measurement unit), which makes the readings from each more reliable. In this case, the gyroscope can be used to directly measure tilt (instead of inferring it from gravity) and this tilt information can be subtracted from the accelerometer reading to separate out the motion of the device from the force of gravity. Augmentation Applications in Health, Gaming, and Art Accelerometer-based devices have been used extensively in healthcare (Ward et al. 582), either using the accelerometer within a smartphone worn in the pocket (Yoshioka et al. 502) or using a standalone accelerometer device such as a wristband or shoe tab (Paradiso and Hu 165). In many cases, these devices have been used to measure specific activity such as swimming, gait (Henriksen et al. 288), and muscular activity (Thompson and Bemben 897), as well as general activity for tracking health (Troiano et al. 181), both in children (Stone et al. 136) and the elderly (Davis and Fox 581). These simple measurements are the first step in allowing athletes to modify their performance based on past activity. In the past, athletes would pour over recorded video to analyze and improve their performance, but with accelerometer devices, they can receive feedback in real time and modify their own behaviour based on these measurements. This augmentation is a competitive advantage but could be seen as unfair considering the current non-equal access to computer and electronic technology, i.e. the digital divide (Buente and Robbin 1743). When video games were augmented with motion controls, many assumed that this would have a positive impact on health. Physical activity in children is a common concern (Treuth et al. 1259), and there was a hope that if children had to move to play games, an activity that used to be considered a problem for health could be turned into an opportunity (Mellecker et al. 343). Unfortunately, the impact of children playing motion controlled video games has been less than successful. Although fitness games have been created, it is relatively easy to figure out how to activate controls with the least possible motion, thereby nullifying any potential benefit. One of the most interesting applications of accelerometers, in the context of this paper, is the application to dance-based video games (Brezmes et al. 796). In these systems, participants wear devices originally intended for health tracking in order to increase the sensitivity and control options for dance. This has evolved both from the use of accelerometers for gestural control in video games and for measuring and augmenting sport. Researchers and artists have also recently used accelerometers to augment dance systems in many ways (Latulipe et al. 2995) including combining multiple sensors (Yang et al. 121), as discussed above. Conclusions Although more and more people are using accelerometers in their research and art practice, it is significant that there is a lack of widespread knowledge about how the devices actually work. This can be seen in the many art installations and sports research studies that do not take full advantage of the capabilities of the accelerometer, or infer information or data that is unreliable because of the way that accelerometers behave. This lack of understanding of accelerometers also serves to limit the increased utilization of this powerful device, specifically in the context of augmentation tools. Being able to detect, analyze and interpret the motion of a body part has significant applications in augmentation that are only starting to be realized. The history of accelerometers is interesting and varied, and it is worthwhile, when exploring new ideas for applications of accelerometers, to be fully aware of the previous uses, current trends and technical limitations. It is clear that applications of accelerometers to the measurement of human motion are increasing, and that many new opportunities exist, especially in the application of combinations of sensors and new software techniques. The real novelty, however, will come from researchers and artists using accelerometers and sensors in novel and unusual ways. References Brezmes, Tomas, Juan-Luis Gorricho, and Josep Cotrina. “Activity Recognition from Accelerometer Data on a Mobile Phone.” In Distributed Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Soft Computing, and Ambient Assisted Living. Springer, 2009. Buente, Wayne, and Alice Robbin. “Trends in Internet Information Behavior, 2000-2004.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59.11 (2008).Chu, Narisa N.Y., Chang-Ming Yang, and Chih-Chung Wu. “Game Interface Using Digital Textile Sensors, Accelerometer and Gyroscope.” IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics 58.2 (2012): 184-189. Davis, Mark G., and Kenneth R. Fox. “Physical Activity Patterns Assessed by Accelerometry in Older People.” European Journal of Applied Physiology 100.5 (2007): 581-589.Hagstromer, Maria, Pekka Oja, and Michael Sjostrom. “Physical Activity and Inactivity in an Adult Population Assessed by Accelerometry.” Medical Science and Sports Exercise. 39.9 (2007): 1502-08. Henriksen, Marius, H. Lund, R. Moe-Nilssen, H. Bliddal, and B. Danneskiod-Samsøe. “Test–Retest Reliability of Trunk Accelerometric Gait Analysis.” Gait & Posture 19.3 (2004): 288-297. Latulipe, Celine, David Wilson, Sybil Huskey, Melissa Word, Arthur Carroll, Erin Carroll, Berto Gonzalez, Vikash Singh, Mike Wirth, and Danielle Lottridge. “Exploring the Design Space in Technology-Augmented Dance.” In CHI’10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2010. Mellecker, Robin R., Lorraine Lanningham-Foster, James A. Levine, and Alison M. McManus. “Energy Intake during Activity Enhanced Video Game Play.” Appetite 55.2 (2010): 343-347. Paradiso, Joseph A., and Eric Hu. “Expressive Footwear for Computer-Augmented Dance Performance.” In First International Symposium on Wearable Computers. IEEE, 1997. Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962. Stone, Michelle R., Ann V. Rowlands, and Roger G. Eston. "Relationships between Accelerometer-Assessed Physical Activity and Health in Children: Impact of the Activity-Intensity Classification Method" The Free Library 1 Mar. 2009. Thompson, Christian J., and Michael G. Bemben. “Reliability and Comparability of the Accelerometer as a Measure of Muscular Power.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. 31.6 (1999): 897-902.Treuth, Margarita S., Kathryn Schmitz, Diane J. Catellier, Robert G. McMurray, David M. Murray, M. Joao Almeida, Scott Going, James E. Norman, and Russell Pate. “Defining Accelerometer Thresholds for Activity Intensities in Adolescent Girls.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 36.7 (2004):1259-1266Troiano, Richard P., David Berrigan, Kevin W. Dodd, Louise C. Masse, Timothy Tilert, Margaret McDowell, et al. “Physical Activity in the United States Measured by Accelerometer.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 40.1 (2008):181-88. Varat, Michael S., and Stein E. Husher. “Vehicle Impact Response Analysis through the Use of Accelerometer Data.” In SAE World Congress, 2000. Walter, Patrick L. “The History of the Accelerometer”. Sound and Vibration (Mar. 1997): 16-22. Ward, Dianne S., Kelly R. Evenson, Amber Vaughn, Anne Brown Rodgers, Richard P. Troiano, et al. “Accelerometer Use in Physical Activity: Best Practices and Research Recommendations.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 37.11 (2005): S582-8. Yang, Chang-Ming, Jwu-Sheng Hu, Ching-Wen Yang, Chih-Chung Wu, and Narisa Chu. “Dancing Game by Digital Textile Sensor, Accelerometer and Gyroscope.” In IEEE International Games Innovation Conference. IEEE, 2011.Yoshioka, M., M. Ayabe, T. Yahiro, H. Higuchi, Y. Higaki, J. St-Amand, H. Miyazaki, Y. Yoshitake, M. Shindo, and H. Tanaka. “Long-Period Accelerometer Monitoring Shows the Role of Physical Activity in Overweight and Obesity.” International Journal of Obesity 29.5 (2005): 502-508.