Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Lune – Structure interne"

The current record of large-scale impact on Earth consists of close to 200 impact structures and some 30 impact events recorded in the stratigraphic record, only some of which are related to known structures. It is a preservation sample of a much larger production population, with the impact rate on Earth being higher than that of the moon. This is due to the Earth’s larger physical and gravitational cross-sections, with respect to asteroidal and cometary bodies entering the inner solar system. While terrestrial impact structures have been studied as the only source of ground-truth data on impact as a planetary process, it is becoming increasingly acknowledged that large-scale impact has had its effects on the geologic history of the Earth, itself. As extremely high energy events, impacts redistribute, disrupt and reprocess target lithologies, resulting in topographic, structural and thermal anomalies in the upper crust. This has resulted in many impact structures being the source of natural resources, including some world-class examples, such as gold and uranium at Vredefort, South Africa, Ni–Cu–PGE sulphides at Sudbury, Canada and hydrocarbons from the Campeche Bank, Mexico. Large-scale impact also has the potential to disrupt the terrestrial biosphere. The most devastating known example is the evidence for the role of impact in the Cretaceous–Paleocene (K–Pg) mass extinction event and the formation of the Chicxulub structure, Mexico. It also likely had a role in other, less dramatic, climatic excursions, such as the Paleocene–Eocene–Thermal Maximum (PETM) event. The impact rate was much higher in early Earth history and, while based on reasoned speculation, it is argued that the early surface of the Hadean Earth was replete with massive impact melt pools, in place of the large multiring basins that formed on the lower gravity moon in the same time-period. These melt pools would differentiate to form more felsic upper lithologies and, thus, are a potential source for Hadean-aged zircons, without invoking more modern geodynamic scenarios. The Earth-moon system is unique in the inner solar system and currently the best working hypothesis for its origin is a planetary-scale impact with the proto-Earth, after core formation at ca. 4.43 Ga. Future large-scale impact is a low probability event but with high consequences and has the potential to create a natural disaster of proportions unequalled by other geologic processes and threaten the extended future of human civilization, itself.RÉSUMÉLe bilan actuel de traces de grands impacts sur la Terre se compose de près de 200 astroblèmes et d'une trentaine d’impacts enregistrés dans la stratigraphie, dont seulement certains sont liés à des astroblèmes connus. Il s'agit d'échantillons préservés sur une population d’événements beaucoup plus importante, le taux d'impact sur Terre étant supérieur à celui de la lune. Cela tient aux plus grandes sections transversales physiques et gravitationnelles de la Terre sur la trajectoire des astéroïdes et comètes qui pénètrent le système solaire interne. Alors que les astroblèmes terrestres ont été étudiés comme étant la seule source de données avérée d’impacts en tant que processus planétaire, de plus en plus on reconnaît que les grands impacts ont eu des effets sur l'histoire géologique de la Terre. À l’instar des événements d'énergie extrême, les impacts redistribuent, perturbent et remanient les lithologies impliquées, provoquant dans la croûte terrestre supérieure des anomalies topographiques, structurelles et thermiques. Il en a résulté de nombreux astroblèmes à l’origine de ressources naturelles, dont certains exemples de classe mondiale tels que l'or et l'uranium à Vredefort en Afrique du Sud, les sulfures de Ni–Cu–PGE à Sudbury au Canada, et les hydrocarbures du Banc de Campeche au Mexique. Les grands impacts peuvent également perturber la biosphère terrestre. L'exemple le plus dévastateur connu nous est donné des indices du rôle de l'impact dans l'extinction de masse au Crétacé–Paléogène (K–Pg) et la formation de la structure de Chicxulub, au Mexique. Il a également probablement joué un rôle dans d'autres événements climatiques extraordinaires moins dramatiques, comme le Maximum thermal du Paleocène–Eocène (PETM). Le taux d'impact était beaucoup plus élevé au début de l'histoire de la Terre et, tout en étant basé sur une spéculation raisonnée, on fait valoir que la surface précoce de la Terre à l’Hadéen était tapissée de grands bassins en fusion, au lieu de grands bassins à couronnes multiples tels ceux qui se sont formés à la même période sur la lune ayant une gravité inférieure. Ces bassins en fusion se seraient différenciées pour constituer des lithologies plus felsiques sur le dessus, devenant ainsi une source potentielle de zircons d’âge Hadéen, sans qu’il soit nécessaire d’invoquer des scénarios géodynamiques plus récents. Le système Terre-lune est unique dans le système solaire interne. Actuellement la meilleure hypothèse de travail pour son origine est un impact planétaire avec la proto-Terre, après la formation du noyau à env. 4,43 Ga. La probabilité d’un futur grand impact est faible mais comporte des conséquences capables d’engendrer un désastre naturel aux proportions inégalées comparé à d'autres processus géologiques, menaçant l'avenir de la civilisation humaine elle-même.

Background: Minor emergency departments (ED) struggle to access sufficient expertise to supervise learners of lung and cardiac point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS). Using tele-ultrasound (tele-US) for remote supervision may remedy this situation. We aimed to evaluate the feasibility of real-time supervision via tele-US when applied to an everyday ED clinic. Methods: We conducted a mixed-methods study that assessed practical feasibility, determined performance, and explored users’ acceptability of supervision via tele-US. A tele-US setup was established and temporarily implemented in the emergency department of the Regional Hospital West Jutland in the Central Denmark Region. We intended to expose 10 junior doctors to five tele-supervised lung and cardiac POCUS examinations. Qualitatively, exposed doctors’ and supervisors’ acceptability were unfolded by exploratory semi-structured interviews addressing their impression, satisfaction and perceived benefits. Technical performance was assessed quantitatively by the ratio in mean grey value (MGV) between images on site and as received by the supervisor, and by after-compression frame rate; MGV and frame rate were measured on five different days with alternating on-site laptops, software and internet connection. Results: Remote supervision via tele-US was performed with 10 junior doctors scanning 45 included patients. Qualitatively, 12 exploratory semi-structured interviews were conducted with exposed junior doctors and supervisors. Supervisors stressed the importance of preserving frame rate, and junior doctors emphasized a need for shared ultrasound terminology. Overall, setup mobility, accessibility, and time consumption were emphasized as being of key importance for future clinical implementations. During performance assessment, neither alternating internet connection nor software significantly changed the mean grey value ratio. The lowest median frame rate of 4.6 (interquartile range [IQR]: 3.1–5.0) was found by using a 4G internet connection; the highest of 28.5 (IQR: 28.5–29.0) was found with alternative computer and local area network internet connection. Conclusions: Remote supervision via a commercially available and low-cost tele-US setup is operational for both junior doctors and supervisors when applied to lung and cardiac POCUS scans of hospitalized patients.

IntroductionThe burden of chronic breathlessness on individuals, family, society and health systems is significant, and set to increase exponentially with population ageing, complex multimorbidity and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-related disability. Breathlessness support services are effective; however, reach and access are limited. Delivering online breathlessness interventions may build capacity and resilience within health systems to tackle chronic breathlessness through supported self-management. The aim of this study was to explore accessibility and willingness of patients with chronic breathlessness to use an internet-based breathlessness self-management intervention (SELF-BREATHE).MethodsSemi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with adults living with advanced malignant and non-malignant disease and chronic breathlessness (July to November 2020). Interviews were analysed using conventional and summative content analysis.Results25 patients (COPD: n=13; lung cancer: n=8; interstitial lung disease (ILD): n=3; bronchiectasis: n=1) were interviewed: 17 male, median (range) age 70 (47–86) years and Medical Research Council dyspnoea score 3 (2–5). 21 patients had internet access. Participants described greater use, acceptance and normalisation of the internet since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. They described multifaceted internet use: functional, self-investment (improving health and wellbeing) and social. The concept of SELF-BREATHE was highly valued, and most participants with internet access were willing to use it. In addition to technical limitations, personal choice and perceived value of the internet were important factors that underpinned readiness to use online resources.ConclusionThese findings suggest that patients living with chronic breathlessness that have access to the internet would have the potential to benefit from the online SELF-BREATHE intervention, if given the opportunity.

Our research focuses on using big data technology with a structured and personalized nursing care approach to improve treatment for patients with COPD and respiratory arrest. This study evaluates a continuous care strategy for COPD and RF therapies using big data. The approach reduces COPD and RF severity and flare-up frequency, duration, and number to improve clients’ quality of life. A prominent university hospital’s lung health system included 100 COPD and RF patients. They were randomly assigned to the control or experimental group. A department called control group patients first. After the consultation, patients received answers to their issues. Trial participants received 24/7 care through the internet and big data analytics. The unit’s first nursing care anchored these activities. Health, fitness, function evaluation, and rehabilitation goals can be customized for each patient. Individualized therapy using big data technologies improves outcomes for stable COPD and RF patients, including lung capacity, frequency of acute episodes, readmission rates, self-management, and quality of life. This strategy may be useful in a nursing home where the patient receives constant care.

Introduction: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a recently identified coronavirus family member that triggers a respiratory disease similar to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV). SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are very similar to each other in many respects, such as structure, genetics, and pathobiology. We hypothesized that coronaviruses could affect pulmonary tissues via integration with the critical immune genes after their interaction with renin–angiotensin system (RAS) elements. The aim of the present bioinformatics study was to assess expression changes of the RAS and non-RAS genes, particularly immune response genes, in the lung epithelial cells after infection with SARS-CoV. Methods: Linear regression, hierarchical clustering, pathway analysis, and network analysis were performed using the E-GEOD-17400 data set. Results: The whole-genome expression data of the lung epithelial cells infected with SARS-CoV for 12, 24, and 48 hours were analyzed, and a total of 15 RAS family and 29 immune genes were found to be highly correlated with the exposure time to the virus in the studied groups. Conclusion: RAS genes are important at the initiation of the infections caused by coronavirus family members and may have a strong relationship with the exchange of immune genes in due course following the infection.

AbstractBedside lung ultrasound (LUS) can play a role in the setting of the SarsCoV2 pneumonia pandemic. To evaluate the clinical and LUS features of COVID-19 in the ED and their potential prognostic role, a cohort of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 patients underwent LUS upon admission in the ED. LUS score was derived from 12 fields. A prevalent LUS pattern was assigned depending on the presence of interstitial syndrome only (Interstitial Pattern), or evidence of subpleural consolidations in at least two fields (Consolidation Pattern). The endpoint was 30-day mortality. The relationship between hemogasanalysis parameters and LUS score was also evaluated. Out of 312 patients, only 36 (11.5%) did not present lung involvment, as defined by LUS score < 1. The majority of patients were admitted either in a general ward (53.8%) or in intensive care unit (9.6%), whereas 106 patients (33.9%) were discharged from the ED. In-hospital mortality was 25.3%, and 30-day survival was 67.6%. A LUS score > 13 had a 77.2% sensitivity and a 71.5% specificity (AUC 0.814; p < 0.001) in predicting mortality. LUS alterations were more frequent (64%) in the posterior lower fields. LUS score was related with P/F (R2 0.68; p < 0.0001) and P/F at FiO2 = 21% (R2 0.59; p < 0.0001). The correlation between LUS score and P/F was not influenced by the prevalent ultrasound pattern. LUS represents an effective tool in both defining diagnosis and stratifying prognosis of COVID-19 pneumonia. The correlation between LUS and hemogasanalysis parameters underscores its role in evaluating lung structure and function.

Discovery of ACE2 (angiotensin-converting enzyme 2) revealed that the renin-angiotensin system has 2 counterbalancing arms. ACE2 is a major player in the protective arm, highly expressed in lungs and gut with the ability to mitigate cardiopulmonary diseases such as inflammatory lung disease. ACE2 also exhibits activities involving gut microbiome, nutrition, and as a chaperone stabilizing the neutral amino acid transporter, B 0 AT1, in gut. But the current interest in ACE2 arises because it is the cell surface receptor for the novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2, to infect host cells, similar to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2. This suggests that ACE2 be considered harmful, however, because of its important other roles, it is paradoxically a potential therapeutic target for cardiopulmonary diseases, including coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2. This review describes the discovery of ACE2, its physiological functions, and its place in the renin-angiotensin system. It illustrates new analyses of the structure of ACE2 that provides better understanding of its actions particularly in lung and gut, shedding of ACE2 by ADAM17 (a disintegrin and metallopeptidase domain 17 protein), and role of TMPRSS2 (transmembrane serine proteases 2) in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 entry into host cells. Cardiopulmonary diseases are associated with decreased ACE2 activity and the mitigation by increasing ACE2 activity along with its therapeutic relevance are addressed. Finally, the potential use of ACE2 as a treatment target in COVID-19, despite its role to allow viral entry into host cells, is suggested.

Indocyanine green (ICG) is a water-soluble fluorescent dye that is minimally toxic and widely used in gastrointestinal surgery. ICG facilitates anatomical identification of structures (e.g., ureters), assessment of lymph nodes, biliary mapping, organ perfusion and anastomosis assessment, and aids in determining the adequacy of oncological margins. In addition, ICG can be conjugated to artificially created antibodies for tumour markers, such as carcinoembryonic antigen for colorectal, breast, lung, and gastric cancer, prostate-specific antigen for prostate cancer, and cancer antigen 125 for ovarian cancer. Although ICG has shown promising results, the optimization of patient factors, dye factors, equipment, and the method of assessing fluorescence intensity could further enhance its utility. This review summarizes the clinical application of ICG in gastrointestinal surgery and discusses the emergence of novel dyes such as ZW-800 and VM678 that have demonstrated appropriate pharmacokinetic properties and improved target-to-background ratios in animal studies. With the emergence of robotic technology and the increasing reporting of ICG utility, a comprehensive review of clinical application of ICG in gastrointestinal surgery is timely and this review serves that aim.

Lung cancer is one of the major causes of cancer-related deaths due to its aggressive nature and delayed detections at advanced stages. Early detection of lung cancer is very important for the survival of an individual, and is a significant challenging problem. Generally, chest radiographs (X-ray) and computed tomography (CT) scans are used initially for the diagnosis of the malignant nodules; however, the possible existence of benign nodules leads to erroneous decisions. At early stages, the benign and the malignant nodules show very close resemblance to each other. In this paper, a novel deep learning-based model with multiple strategies is proposed for the precise diagnosis of the malignant nodules. Due to the recent achievements of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) in image analysis, we have used two deep three-dimensional (3D) customized mixed link network (CMixNet) architectures for lung nodule detection and classification, respectively. Nodule detections were performed through faster R-CNN on efficiently-learned features from CMixNet and U-Net like encoder–decoder architecture. Classification of the nodules was performed through a gradient boosting machine (GBM) on the learned features from the designed 3D CMixNet structure. To reduce false positives and misdiagnosis results due to different types of errors, the final decision was performed in connection with physiological symptoms and clinical biomarkers. With the advent of the internet of things (IoT) and electro-medical technology, wireless body area networks (WBANs) provide continuous monitoring of patients, which helps in diagnosis of chronic diseases—especially metastatic cancers. The deep learning model for nodules’ detection and classification, combined with clinical factors, helps in the reduction of misdiagnosis and false positive (FP) results in early-stage lung cancer diagnosis. The proposed system was evaluated on LIDC-IDRI datasets in the form of sensitivity (94%) and specificity (91%), and better results were obatined compared to the existing methods.

341 Background: Symptom monitoring using electronic patient-reported outcome (ePRO) systems during cancer care has been shown to provide clinical benefits and is now recommended for routine care. Integrating existing ePRO platforms into practices may lower costs and logistical barriers to use. The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility and acceptability of a mobile app (Moovcare) for care of patients with lung cancer. Methods: In this single-site study, patients on treatment for lung cancer were recruited for 6 months of ePRO monitoring using Moovcare, an application originally designed for patients undergoing surveillance. Patients reported symptoms weekly via a survey delivered to their email address. Providers received email alerts for concerning symptoms and accessed graphical reports displaying responses over time. Providers were asked to complete an interview after 6 months of experience using Moovcare. Feasibility was assessed by the % of surveys completed per patient. Clinician acceptability was evaluated using semi-structured interviews. Results: 90 patients were recruited to participate and 46/90 (51.1%) were enrolled. 41/46 (89%) completed at least 1 survey. Patients were a mean 61.5 years of age. The majority were female (61.0%), White (73.2%), and had advanced NSCLC (92.7%). Nearly half (43.9%) had completed at least college level education. Most reported daily internet (87.8%) and email (63.4%) use. Survey completion rates are in Table 1. Alerts occurred in 78.0% of participants, with a mean of 4.2 alerts (SD=4.7) per patient. Alerts were closed by providers in a mean 2.7 days (SD=3.9). 3/7 providers participated in alert management, all of whom participated in interviews. These providers felt there was potential value for Moovcare to monitor symptoms but did find enrolled patients were already proactive about contacting the clinic for symptom management. Most interviewed providers (66.0%; 2/3) would like to use the system again and would recommend the system to others. EMR integration was strongly desired to improve workflow. Conclusions: ePRO survey completion and alert management using an existing web-based application were feasible for lung cancer patients and their providers. While concerning symptoms were commonly experienced by patients, provider perceptions of alert utility were low. Adjusting alert criteria to increase the frequency of actionable alerts and using strategies to increase ePRO use in patients with low participation levels may increase the utility of ePROs. EMR integration may improve acceptability to providers. Clinical trial information: NCT05011890 .[Table: see text]

BackgroundTumor mutational burden (TMB) has been shown to predict response to immune checkpoint inhibitors.1 Furthermore, the FDA has approved the use of TMB as a biomarker for response to pembrolizumab in solid tumors.2 Simultaneously, the relationship between tumor heterogeneity and outcome has been studied across a range of cancer indications and has shown predictive value.3 For Lung Squamous Cell Carcinoma (LUSC) the utility of heterogeneity metrics has not been established. To study this relationship we used both TMB and tumor heterogeneity to stratify patients, compare outcomes, explore differences in immune cell enrichment, and predict driver genes.MethodsWe obtained Tumor Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) LUSC SNP, CNV, and RNASeq data from the GDC Data Portal4 and clinical data from the PanCancer Atlas dataset through cBioPortal.5 TMB was calculated by dividing the number of mutations by 38 to yield a mut/Mb value. To estimate tumor heterogeneity we ran PyClone, an algorithm that estimates the number of tumor clones.6 PyClone uses a random seed and output for the same sample may differ. We ran each sample in triplicate on three separate days yielding 9 runs per sample, yielding an average PyClone clone number. Clones with >2 mutations were counted. Using p-value minimization we chose 5 for the TMB cutoff and 4.6 for the PyClone cutoff. This yielded 4 groups: HTHP, HTLP, LTHP, and LTLP, where H - high, L- low, T-TMB, and P-Pyclone. Immune cell enrichment analysis was accomplished with ssGSEA via the GenePattern platform.7 Driver gene prediction was performed with OncoDriveClust8 via the R package maftools.9ResultsA statistically significant difference was found in progression free survival (PFS) between stage I LTHP (LTHPI, N = 15) and stage I LTLP (LTLPI, N = 77) patients (51.27 months vs. 25.4 months, p-value = 0.0059). Intriguingly, highly heterogeneous tumors revealed superior survival outcomes compared to less heterogeneous tumors in this subgroup. LTLPI patients were enriched for immature B cells, regulatory T cells, and myeloid derived suppressor cells (figure 1). Three driver genes were predicted for the LTLPI cohort (NFE2L2, PIK3CA, and TP53), while none were predicted for the LTHPI cohort.Abstract 71 Figure 1Immune Cell Gene Set EnrichmentConclusionsContrary to previous literature, superior survival outcomes were observed in high tumor heterogeneity, low TMB Stage I LUSC patients. Early stage patients can be stratified using heterogeneity metrics like PyClone. Given the presence of specific driver genes and an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, this population warrants further investigation for therapeutic implications.AcknowledgementsThis research was supported in part through the computational resources and staff contributions provided by the Genomics Compute Cluster which is jointly supported by the Feinberg School of Medicine, the Center for Genetic Medicine, and Feinberg’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, the Office of the Provost, the Office for Research, and Northwestern Information Technology. The Genomics Compute Cluster is part of Quest, Northwestern University’s high performance computing facility, with the purpose to advance research in genomics.Trial RegistrationN/AReferencesSamstein RM, Lee C-H, Shoushtari AN, Hellmann MD, Shen R, Janjigian YY, et al. Tumor mutational load predicts survival after immunotherapy across multiple cancer types. Nature Genetics 2019;51(2):202–6.Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. FDA approves pembrolizumab for adults and children With TMB-H solid tu [Internet]. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. FDA; [cited 2021 Jul 28]. Available from: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-approvals-and-databases/fda-approves-pembrolizumab-adults-and-children-tmb-h-solid-tumorsMorris LGT, Riaz N, Desrichard A, Şenbabaoğlu Y, Hakimi AA, Makarov V, et al. Pan-cancer analysis of intratumor heterogeneity as a prognostic determinant of survival. Oncotarget 2016;7(9):10051–63.GDC. [cited 2021Jul28]. Available from: https://portal.gdc.cancer.gov/cBioPortal for cancer genomics [Internet]. cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics. [cited 2021Jul28]. Available from: https://www.cbioportal.org/Roth A, Khattra J, Yap D, Wan A, Laks E, Biele J, et al. PyClone: Statistical inference of CLONAL population structure in cancer. Nature Methods 2014;11(4):396–8.GenePattern [Internet]. GenePattern sign in. [cited 2021Jul28]. Available from: https://cloud.genepattern.org/gp/pages/index.jsfTamborero D, Gonzalez-Perez A, Lopez-Bigas N. OncodriveCLUST: Exploiting the Positional clustering of somatic mutations to identify CANCER GENES. Bioinformatics. 2013;29(18):2238–44.Mayakonda A, Lin D-C, Assenov Y, Plass C, Koeffler HP. Maftools: Efficient and comprehensive analysis of somatic variants in cancer. Genome Research 2018;28(11):1747–56.Ethics ApprovalN/AConsentN/A

Abstract Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can imitate human conversation and produce rapid, coherent responses, which may mask their potential for inaccuracies. With patients increasingly turning to the internet for medical information, the use of LLM chatbots for cancer-related queries risks spreading misinformation. Our study assessed ChatGPT’s accuracy and reproducibility in offering valid information and treatment advice for lung cancer in line with established guidelines. In the evolving landscape of AI-driven healthcare support, the ability of language models to provide accurate and reliable information is crucial. Our study delves into the effectiveness of OpenAI's ChatGPT models (versions 3.5 and 4.0) in responding to patient inquiries about lung cancer across various domains including general information, clinical presentation, risk factors, screening, diagnosis, staging, treatment options, prognosis, post-treatment follow-up, lifestyle recommendations, and psychosocial/educational aspects. We conducted a structured assessment, posing identical sets of questions to both ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.0. A total of 47 questions were posed with each query being repeated twice per model to evaluate both the accuracy and reproducibility of the responses. The scoring system focused on the accuracy and comprehensiveness of each response. Our findings revealed a notable disparity in the performance of the two models. GPT 4.0 demonstrated higher consistency and accuracy, with 41 out of 47 (87.2%) responses deemed accurate and comprehensive, compared to 36 out of 47 (76.6%) for GPT 3.5. In terms of reproducibility, both models exhibited strong performance: 42 out of 47 (89.3%) for GPT 3.5 and 45 out of 47 for GPT 4.0 (95.7%). When comparing responses between the models, we observed good reproducibility in 38 out of 47 questions (80.8%). A key observation was that GPT 4.0 significantly outperformed its predecessor GPT 3.5 in terms of both accuracy as well as reproducibility within its own responses, indicating a more reliable and consistent performance. The area most lacking in accuracy for both models was lung cancer staging, indicating a need for further refinement in this domain. Another key observation was the models' tendency to incorporate empathetic language, often beginning responses with expressions of sympathy and consistently advising confirmation with a medical professional. Our study underscores the potential and limitations of current AI models in patient education and support, highlighting areas for improvement and the importance of empathetic communication in AI interactions with patients. As the model continues to be trained on a larger and more comprehensive set of data, it is reasonable to anticipate further improvements in its ability to provide precise, detailed, and contextually appropriate responses. Citation Format: Asiyah Allibhai, Ahmed Allibhai, Anthony Brade, Zishan Allibhai. Evaluating the accuracy and reproducibility of ChatGPT models in answering lung cancer patient queries [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 1296.

e24185 Background: IT and TT have improved survival for many pts with mNSCLC. However, the lived experience of these pts is under-studied. We conducted a single centre, qualitative study to understand concerns and supportive care needs of this novel survivor population. Methods: Eligible pts had mNSCLC, aged >18, English speaking and > 6 months post initiation of IT/TT without progressive disease. Semi-structured interviews were conducted focusing on physical, psychological, social and functional impacts of diagnosis, therapy and prognosis. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. The framework method of analysis was used. Results: 20 pts were interviewed between May-December 2019; median age 62 years (range 34-83), 13 (65%) female; median time since diagnosis of mNSCLC 27 months (range 10-108). 12/20 (60%) had tumours with a targetable molecular alteration (EGFR/ALK/BRAF). 6 were receiving IT, 11 TT, 2 IT and chemotherapy, 1 IT and TT. Dominant themes included: the experience of chronic toxicities (cutaneous, gastrointestinal, fatigue); psychological concerns (living with uncertainty, fear of cancer progression [FCP], scan-related anxiety, stigma around smoking, loneliness) and coping strategies (living in the present, practising self-care with exercise and meditation, early discussions with their treating team regarding future treatment options, and accessing psychology services); the desire for tailored information (internet resources, support groups, challenges in accessing pertinent information); and the desire for assistance with practical issues (financial planning, returning to work, challenges of long-term clinical trial participation, difficulty planning for the future). Conclusions: Longer term survivors of mNSCLC report significant physical, psychological and functional concerns and unmet needs. Self-management strategies for chronic toxicities, professional psychological services to manage FCP and scan-related anxiety, and tailored information regarding work and financial planning may mitigate these concerns. Future work should examine these issues in a larger population.

Sistemul imunitar joacă un rol complex în apărarea organismului ca răspuns la „non-self“, răspunde anormal la antigenii alergeni (hipersensibilitate şi autoimunitate) şi este caracterizat prin toleranţă imună cu lipsa de reactivitate la propriile structuri (auto). Scop. Scopul acestui studiu este de a demonstra că, în dermatita atopică, deficitul imun influenţează dezvoltarea atopiei, severitatea bolii şi dezvoltarea de comorbidităţi. Material şi metode. În urma analizei foilor de observaţie, 135 de cazuri diagnosticate cu AD au fost incluse în studiu. Analiza statistică a fost realizată cu ajutorul SPSS V20 pentru determinarea frecvenţei şi testarea ipotezelor, pentru p <0,05, prin testele T şi OneWay ANOVA. Rezultate. Din cele 135 de cazuri, 51,9% au fost copii de sex masculin şi 48,1% de copii de sex feminin, cu vârsta cuprinsă între 1 lună şi 127 luni, cu o medie de 26,21. Potrivit IgE serice totale, 64,4% dintre pacienţi au avut niveluri ridicate de IgE, 35,6% niveluri normale. În conformitate cu SCORAD, copiii au avut forma uşoară în 20,7% din cazuri, forma moderată în 70,4%, iar severă în 8,9% din cazuri. Deficitul de IgA a fost găsit în 48,1% din cazuri, iar deficitul de IgG a fost găsit în 38,5% din cazuri. Testele t de corelaţie pe eşantioane independente constată valori semnificative statistic între nivelul IgE şi deficitul de IgA, între SCORAD şi deficitul de IgG şi IgA. Marşul atopic este influenţat de valorile crescute ale IgE şi deficitul de IgA pentru un p<0,05. Concluzii. Atopia în DA poate fi influenţată de factori complecşi, atât interni, cât şi de mediu, dar acest lucru rămâne un subiect controversat. Factorii externi care acţionează pe un fundal genetic predispus la atopie poate declanşa manifestarea DA.

Introduction. The economic aspects of providing cancer care to the public attract increasing attention of scientists, economists, physicians and other healthcare professionals. Currently, the healthcare economics of oncological institutions is defined as part of the national economy that implements cancer care programs and provide a wide range of medical and pharmaceutical services to the public.Aim. The study was conducted as part of the program for improvement of financial spending in order to facilitate cancer care for Moscow residents. The aim of this study was to identify the crucial areas of the cost analysis and thus improve the public health service.Materials and methods. We used the methodology of targeted and consistent search of the literature. The data search and analysis was carried out using the US National Medical Library (PubMed database), National Electronic Library (e-LIBRARY, Russia), and other Internet resources. Whenever possible, articles on the most common and socially significant types of cancer (breast, colon, prostate, lung etc.) were selected. In addition, we focused on significant studies conducted either on the national or international level.Results and discussion. In principle, the structure of total costs is determined by the health policy regarding the cancer care system. Six main areas of oncological care that require careful economic analysis have been identified: those are prevention, oncoscreening, diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, and palliative care. In order to implement the economic goals of the healthcare system, the cost of cancer treatment should be discussed. The relevant programs are expected to be based on 1) prevalence and incidence; 2) impact on health; 3) results of the integrative methodological approach to cancer treatment; 4) implementation of comprehensive measures of medical and social assistance; 5) use of financial mechanisms and their impact on economic indicators.Conclusion. The set of measures related to the direct costs as identified in this study include the development, planning and provision of cancer care. These specific features of the direct cost analysis are important for organizing medical care in oncological institutions.

BACKGROUND: Patients with Type 2 Diabetes (T2DM) and patients on maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) are at a high risk of adverse clinical course of COVID-19. To date, the causes of high mortality in these groups are not fully understood. Data about peculiarity of clinical course and Tocilizumab (TCZ) administration in patients with T2DM receiving MHD due to outcome of diabetic kidney disease (DKD) are not yet highlighted in current publications.AIMS: Identification of risk factors (RF) of adverse COVID-19 outcome and evaluation of TCZ administration in patients with T2DM receiving MHD due to DKD.MATERIALS AND METHODS: The patients treated in Moscow City Hospital No52 were included in retrospective observational study. The observation period was from 04.15 to 07.30 2020. The study endpoints were the outcomes of hospitalization — discharge or lethal outcome. Data were collected from electronic medical database. The following independent variables were analysed: gender, age, body mass index, time from the onset of symptoms to hospital admission, cardiovascular and general comorbidity (Charlson Index, CCI), cardiovascular event (CVE) during hospitalization, treatment in ICU, mechanical ventilation (MV), degree of lung damage according to CT data, level of prandial glycemia at admission, MHDassociated parameters (vintage, type of vascular access, frequency of complications). The autopsy reports were evaluated for the purpose of lethal structure investigation. In a subgroup treated TCZ the time from symptoms onset to TCZ administration and number of laboratory indicators were evaluated.RESULTS: 53 patients were included, mean age 68 ±9 y, males — 49%. General mortality in observation cohort was 45%, mortality in ICU — 81%, mortality on MV — 95%. High cardiovascular and general comorbidity was revealed (mean CCI — 8,3 ±1,5 points). The causes of outcomes according to autopsy reports data: CVE 37,5% (among them — acute myocardial infarction during hospitalization), severe respiratory failure — 62,5%. The independent predictors of lethal outcome were: MV (OR 106; 95% CI 11,5–984; р <0,001), 3-4 degree of lung damage according to CT data (ОR 6,2; 95% CI 1,803–21,449; р = 0,005), CVE during hospitalization (ОR 18,9; 95% CI 3,631–98,383; р <0,001); CCI ≥10 points (ОR 4,33; 95% CI 1,001–18,767; р = 0,043), level of prandial glycemia at admission ≥10 mmol/l (ОR 10,4; 95% CI 2,726–39,802; р <0,001). For risk identification of upcoming lethal outcome a predictive model was created with the use of discovered RF as variables. The predictive value of this model is 92,45% (positive prognostic value — 96,5%, negative prognostic value — 87,5%).In TCZ treated subgroup the laboratory markers of adverse outcome were detected with application of correlation analysis. Among them: increasing level of CPR 24-48 hours before lethal outcome (r = 0,82), the reduction of lymphocytes count after TCZ administration (r = -0,49), increasing of leukocytes and further reduction of lymphocytes count 24-48 hours before lethal outcome (r = 0,55 и r = -0,52, resp.)).CONCLUSIONS: The number of RF of adverse COVID-19 outcome in patients with T2DM receiving MHD due to DKD are identified. CVE is one of the leading causes of mortality in study cohort. According to our experience the preventive (instead of rescue) strategy of TCZ administration should be used.

Se presenta el caso de una paciente de 67 años con antecedentes de hipertensión arterial, diabetes mellitus tipo II, fumadora inveterada hasta la fecha de diagnóstico de la enfermedad. En noviembre del 2013, se presenta por haber tenido un cuadro de tos persistente, expectoración hemoptoica, dolor en hemitórax izquierdo y pérdida de peso de 8 kg. Fue valorada por servicio de Medicina Interna realizándose los estudios de una masa tumoral pulmonar; se diagnosticó un carcinoma de pulmón no células pequeñas, situado hacia lóbulo superior izquierdo con extensión a mediastino posterior que englobaba las estructuras vasculares y estaba asociado con engrosamiento pleural. La lesión invadía tercio inferior de la tráquea, carina y provocaba disminución de la movilidad de hemilaringe izquierda. Se valoró en consulta de oncología y se indicó tratamiento combinado de régimen quimio-radioterapia. Los estudios imagenológicos evolutivos evidenciaron respuesta objetiva al culminar el tratamiento, por lo que se inició inmunoterapia con el anticuerpo monoclonal humanizado Nimotuzumab como tratamiento que se mantiene hasta la fecha de este reporte. Se destaca de forma positiva la mínima toxicidad presentada, la consolidación de la respuesta objetiva alcanzada después de la primera línea de tratamiento y la supervivencia libre de progresión hasta la actualidad, con óptima calidad de vida, manteniéndose asintomática, y conforme a la escala Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group, ECOG. Palabras clave: Cáncer de Pulmón de células no pequeñas, Nimotuzumab, Oncología, inmunoterapia, escala Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group. Abstract This case is the report of a 67-year-old female patient with a history of arterial hypertension, diabetes mellitus Type II, an inveterate smoker until the date of diagnosis of the disease. In November 2013 presented a persistent cough, expectoration of the hemoptysis, pain in left hemithorax and weight loss of 8 kg, she was assessed by the Internal Medicine department, performing studies of a pulmonary tumor mass; a non-small cell lung carcinoma located towards the left upper lobe was diagnosed with extension to the posterior mediastinum that encompassed the vascular structures associated with pleural thickening. The lesion invaded the lower third of the trachea, carina and caused a decrease in the mobility of the left hemilarynx. It was assessed in oncology consultation and combined treatment with chemo-radiotherapy regimen was indicated. Evolutionary imaging studies showed an objective response at the end of the treatment, so immunotherapy was initiated with the humanized monoclonal antibody Nimotuzumab as a treatment that is maintained until the date of this report. The minimal toxicity presented was positively highlighted, the objective response reached after the first line of treatment and the progression-free survival to the present, with optimal quality of life, remained asymptomatic, Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group ECOG. Key words: Lung Cancer, Non-Small-Cell, Nimotuzumab, Oncology, inumotherapy, Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group scale.

Se presenta el caso de una paciente de 67 años con antecedentes de hipertensión arterial, diabetes mellitus tipo II, fumadora inveterada hasta la fecha de diagnóstico de la enfermedad. En noviembre del 2013, se presenta por haber tenido un cuadro de tos persistente, expectoración hemoptoica, dolor en hemitórax izquierdo y pérdida de peso de 8 kg. Fue valorada por servicio de Medicina Interna realizándose los estudios de una masa tumoral pulmonar; se diagnosticó un carcinoma de pulmón no células pequeñas, situado hacia lóbulo superior izquierdo con extensión a mediastino posterior que englobaba las estructuras vasculares y estaba asociado con engrosamiento pleural. La lesión invadía tercio inferior de la tráquea, carina y provocaba disminución de la movilidad de hemilaringe izquierda. Se valoró en consulta de oncología y se indicó tratamiento combinado de régimen quimio-radioterapia. Los estudios imagenológicos evolutivos evidenciaron respuesta objetiva al culminar el tratamiento, por lo que se inició inmunoterapia con el anticuerpo monoclonal humanizado Nimotuzumab como tratamiento que se mantiene hasta la fecha de este reporte. Se destaca de forma positiva la mínima toxicidad presentada, la consolidación de la respuesta objetiva alcanzada después de la primera línea de tratamiento y la supervivencia libre de progresión hasta la actualidad, con óptima calidad de vida, manteniéndose asintomática, y conforme a la escala Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group, ECOG. Palabras clave: Cáncer de Pulmón de células no pequeñas, Nimotuzumab, Oncología, inmunoterapia, escala Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group. Abstract This case is the report of a 67-year-old female patient with a history of arterial hypertension, diabetes mellitus Type II, an inveterate smoker until the date of diagnosis of the disease. In November 2013 presented a persistent cough, expectoration of the hemoptysis, pain in left hemithorax and weight loss of 8 kg, she was assessed by the Internal Medicine department, performing studies of a pulmonary tumor mass; a non-small cell lung carcinoma located towards the left upper lobe was diagnosed with extension to the posterior mediastinum that encompassed the vascular structures associated with pleural thickening. The lesion invaded the lower third of the trachea, carina and caused a decrease in the mobility of the left hemilarynx. It was assessed in oncology consultation and combined treatment with chemo-radiotherapy regimen was indicated. Evolutionary imaging studies showed an objective response at the end of the treatment, so immunotherapy was initiated with the humanized monoclonal antibody Nimotuzumab as a treatment that is maintained until the date of this report. The minimal toxicity presented was positively highlighted, the objective response reached after the first line of treatment and the progression-free survival to the present, with optimal quality of life, remained asymptomatic, Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group ECOG. Key words: Lung Cancer, Non-Small-Cell, Nimotuzumab, Oncology, inumotherapy, Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group scale.

Background. Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a severe orphan disease, one of the systemic pathologies of connective tissue. This disease has a significant negative impact on the patient’s quality of life and has a high mortality rate. Treatment of its various complications imposes a great financial burden on the healthcare system. The difficulties of daily functioning and social adaptation and the overall burden of SSc for patients, as well as their caregivers, also contribute to the economic component of the disease.Aim. To assess the social and economic burden of SSc.Materials and methods. A systematic review was conducted according to the PRISMA guidelines using predefined PICO(S) criteria. The search was carried out in December 2019 using the MeSH terms in the Embase, MEDLINE / PubMed, Cochrane library databases. The publication date range was 10 years. To identify Russian-language studies, an additional search was conducted in eLIBRARY.ru and the Internet network. The evidence levels of the included studies were determined.Results. A total of 934 studies were identified from all databases; 53 publications were selected for eligibility; 9 of which were included in the final review. There were no studies identified to assess the burden of SSc in Russia, so the evaluations were based on foreign studies. The estimates of the annual direct costs per patient with SSc for the past decade were almost similar in different countries: 5 038 Canadian dollars in Canada, 11 607 Australian dollars in Australia, 17 365-22 016 US dollars in the USA, and 1 413-17 300 Euros in Europe (an average of about 8 000 euros). The cost structure was dominated by direct medical costs for hospitalization and drug therapy and indirect costs were mostly associated with the loss of productivity and early retirement. The costs associated with the diffuse cutaneous form of SSc were statistically higher if compared to the costs for the limited form of the disease. Among the clinical manifestations of the disease, lung lesions and gastrointestinal problems made the largest contribution to the economic burden.Conclusion. SSc is associated with significant healthcare resource use compared to the general population. The economic burden of SS has grown significantly in recent years, and this trend is global. At the same time, it is difficult to evaluate the disease costs in Russia due to a lack of information on the patient population.

Aim: To analyze the features of clinical signs, quality of life and psycho-emotional state in patients with heart failure with preserved left ventricular ejection fraction (HFpEF) and non-obstructive atherosclerosis of the coronary arteries, depending on the presence of echocardiographic criteria for dysfunction of the right heart.Material and Methods. Patients underwent an extended protocol of echocardiography with an assessment of the structure and function of the right heart; ultrasound examination of the lungs with the determination of the number of B-lines; a six-minute walk test, a test for the presence of a symptom of bendopnea with the determination of blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) before and during the test. In addition, quality of life was assessed using the Minnesota questionnaire and the SF-36 questionnaire (The Short Form-36); the psycho-emotional state of patients was analyzed according to the HADS (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale), the level of adherence to treatment was analyzed according to the Morisky – Green questionnaire. Patients were divided into two groups depending on signs of right heart dysfunction: Tei index more than 0.54, tricuspid annulus systolic excursion (TAPSE) less than 17 mm, tricuspid annulus systolic velocity (RV S’) less than 9,5 cm/sec.Results. Echocardiographic signs of right heart dysfunction in patients with HFpEF was associated with lower quality of life indicators according to the SF-36 questionnaire, in particular, general health status (p = 0.008) and role limitations due to emotional problems (p = 0.03). During the bendopnea test (p = 0.04), the majority of patients with signs of dysfunction of the right heart (66.7%) had a decrease in SpO2, while in the comparison group the proportion of such patients was 36.7% (p = 0.04). The psycho-emotional state according to the HADS scale and adherence to treatment did not differ in both groups (p > 0.05). The frequency of detection of B-lines according to lung ultrasound was also comparable.

Analysis of Social Networks on Multiculturalism: Youtube Reaction Videos Abstract Multiculturalism is one of the most important concepts brought about by the disappearance of borders in the geographical and cultural areas, the acceleration of mobility and information flow in the international arena, and especially in the 20th century. The concept of multiculturalism, which has the ideals of preventing racism and discrimination, increasing tolerance and sensitivity towards differences and providing intercultural interaction, has been moved to a different dimension at the point where today's world has come. Multiculturalism serves cultural processes by gaining meaning in internet environments as a field that allows cultural construction processes to take place. The study aims to contribute to the definition of the concept of multiculturalism at the level of state policies as well as its definition in the digital field. In this direction, it is aimed to reveal the contribution of multiculturalism with examples via YouTube, one of the most used social networks worldwide. On YouTube, the channel containing the reactions of a user of different cultures by watching Turkish music videos and examples from this channel were analyzed using content analysis method. Structured Abstract: The most common interpretation of globalization is the idea that the world has become more homogeneous and standardized through a technological, commercial and cultural synchronization spreading from the West, and that globalization is connected with modernity. Globalization, which is frequently discussed today, is a comprehensive concept that is based on geographical discoveries and extends to the state it has taken under the influence of today's technological developments. In today's world, globalization has turned into a way of life and has become the normal of our daily lives. Globalization in general; the disappearance of national borders, allowing the free movement of goods, services and cultures around the world. Robertson says that globalization is centered around two main orientations. While the first refers to economic interdependence, the other refers to the globalization of institutions, communities and practices (2013: 136). Globalization includes several dimensions. The cultural dimension is among the most important of these. The cultural dimension of globalization can be considered within the scope of transportation, communication and communication as a result of its economic basis. The fact that different parts of the world are in contact with economic purposes has allowed different cultures to get to know each other, and cultures that include small groups to be noticed. Intercultural interaction has reached a high level with digital communication channels. The cultural dimension of globalization has led to the emergence of various concepts. Multiculturalism is one of these concepts. Multiculturalism, as a system of thought, defines the fair promotion of different cultures in the public sphere and the peaceful coexistence of different cultural communities within the same political organization (Dotycheva, 2009:12). In the digital age we live in, every field has a multicultural structure. The fact that communication tools enable universal communication has led to the emergence of social networks. The borderless structure of social networks directly serves multiculturalism. Youtube, chosen as the subject of analysis of the study, is a social network that is visited and content is produced by millions of people around the world. Cultural content is also produced on YouTube, where all kinds of videos can be shared. It allows a culture to introduce itself and spread it from various aspects. It does this effectively with the power of visuality. By accessing the content on this network from all over the world, it is possible to watch videos, obtain information, give feedback and contribute to the expansion of the content by producing. YouTube's “Kingdom of Luke” channel, chosen as the field of study, shows its experiences about different cultures by watching music clips from different countries. While creating content, it does a preliminary research about the video to watch instead of just watching. Considering the five videos selected as a sample, 60% of the videos explain the content and give information about the song. It gives information about the song genre in 40% of the videos. Explains the musical genres that have their own characteristics as “anthem” and “folk song” and indicates their characteristics. The channel owner gives information about the singers in 100% of the videos. Explain what kind of music the singers make, their life, their place and importance in Turkish music. In this way, he gets information about the culture he is foreign to through the artists. It gives historical information on 60% of the pieces. The channel owner makes inferences about culture in 60% of the videos he examines. All of these videos are pieces with historical content. He states that as a result of his viewing experience, he was influenced by pieces with historical content and shared a sense of victory and struggle. This shows that even though it is experienced by different societies, all world rights can develop common feelings in situations such as war, destruction and victory. There are Turkish and English comments in all of the videos and in the comments under the video. This shows that besides being watched by users from Turkey, it is watched by different cultures or that users use the universal language English to appeal to all cultures. Thanks to the video content, a content producer from a different culture gained knowledge as a result of his researches and impressions about the culture he is foreign to; It has made them accessible to millions of people by publishing them on the most used video sharing site all over the world. Many people had the opportunity to access this video, and those who watched the content had the opportunity to have information about Turkish culture. These contents, which contribute to the multicultural structure in the digital field, contribute to the empathy of different cultures with each other and to develop positive thoughts about culture; It emphasizes love and respect by preventing racism and discrimination. Keywords: Social Sciences, Social Networks, Globalization, Multiculturalism, YouTube

Abstract Background: Cancer patients who use tobacco often decline to participate in structured tobacco cessation programs. and personal barriers and priorities vary. To overcome barriers and improve pt engagement, we constructed a Personal Pathway to Success (PPS) program which enabled patients to choose cessation components they could effectively use. Methods: City of Hope (COH) constructed a comprehensive list of cessation tools. Patients completed tobacco use and Lifestress social domain stress assessments. PPS was then proposed to patients who selected tools they would initially use in quit attempts. Pts could add or delete tools at any time but were encouraged to add likely effective tools. Since tobacco use is associated with adverse surgical outcomes, the PPS program was pilot tested at the preoperative anesthesia testing clinic (PATC). Patients were evaluated for acceptance of cessation and follow through with counseling. Results were compared by Chi square statistic to pt cessation results before PPS program implementation. Study data collection was 9/11/21 to 1/3/22.Results: The tools in PPS were Individual cessation counseling, nicotine replacement and cessation medications, signed personal commitment agreement, cessation support group, choosing a buddy partner (family, friends or support group), lung cancer screening, letter to primary care physicians requesting assistance for non-responding patients, SmokeFree Text support, Kick It California or Asian Quitline support, rapid action plan for relapses, 5Ds cessation and 7 self-care skills, COH relaxation and/or hypnosis videos, guidance for cinnamon stick/bubble blowing, stress management and smoking cessation apps, cessation videos and audios, educational brochures, advice on vaping, assistance with internet and digital devices, family education and support, and psycho-social or substance abuse referrals. At PATC 36 evaluable patients were offered the PPS program, counseling and/or video education. Nineteen patients (53%) agreed to cessation, 14 (74%) scheduled a definite date for counseling. 42% completed the counseling. Video education was watched by 6 (32%) patients. Thirty two % had future appointments, but 26% had not yet scheduled. Three patients (8%) desired more time to evaluate cessation. Fourteen patients did not respond despite 3 attempts and were referred back to their attending physician. Compared to results pre-PPS, patient initiation was increased from 8.7% to 53% (p&lt;.001). Conclusions: The Personal Pathway to Success program empowered patients to select among different cessation tools and increased pt acceptance of cessation. Offering comprehensive tobacco cessation during cancer surgery pre-anesthesia visits represents a teachable moment when patients are more motivated to accept behavioral interventions and tobacco cessation. Further research will develop additional methods to further increase engagement of hard to reach patients, family and caregivers. Citation Format: Cary A. Presant, Kimlin Ashing, Sophia Yeung, Jonjon Macalintal, Brenda Gascon, Argelia Sandoval, Brian Tiep, Mary Cianfrocca, Ravi Salgia, Dan Raz, Loretta Erhunmwunsee, Yuman Fong, Steven Rosen. Empowering tobacco using cancer patient initiation of tobacco cessation by a personal pathway to success program during preoperative patient counseling: A feasibility study [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr LB553.

A Review of: Lund, B. D., & Maurya, S. K. (2022). How older adults in the USA and India seek information during the COVID-19 pandemic: A comparative study of information behavior. IFLA Journal, 48(1), 205–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/03400352211024675 Objective – To investigate and compare the information-seeking behaviors of older adults in one developing and one developed country during the COVID-19 pandemic. Design – Structured interviews via Zoom (video), telephone, or email. Setting – Two towns with moderately large populations (about 300,000), one in eastern India and one in the Midwest of the USA. Subjects – Sixty adults ages 65 and older, 35 in the India cohort and 25 in the USA cohort. Methods – The researchers recruited participants from the communities in which their respective institutions are located by using online advertisements in Facebook groups, local (print) advertisements/flyers, and word of mouth. The ten interview questions were informed by Dervin’s (1998) sense-making methodology and sought to identify a specific information need, behavior to address the need, and the influences on and outcomes of the behavior. They conducted the interviews in July and August of 2020, translated the questions into Hindi for Hindi-speaking participants, and analyzed responses using qualitative content analysis. Within each of the resulting themes and categories, the researchers compared the responses of American and Indian participants. Main Results – The researchers found many significant differences between the information behaviors of Indian and American participants. Some of the biggest differences were in the information needs expressed by the participants, as well as the sources consulted and the reasons for consulting those sources. For example, when asked about the types of information needed, 77% of Indians focused on a “COVID and health-related” information need, as opposed to only 33% of Americans. And 37% of Americans indicated information needs related to “political and economic issues,” especially the upcoming 2020 election, as opposed to only 3% of Indians. When asked about sources, 28% of Indians consulted television, compared to only 6% of Americans. Web-based sources were generally used more by Americans, with 31% of Americans consulting websites, compared to 13% of Indians. In regard to their reasons for consulting a source, 28% of Indians chose a source based on availability, compared to only 9% of Americans. And 32% and 36% of Americans chose information based on ease and familiarity (“I know how to find it”), compared to only 18% and 13% of Indians, respectively. Only 3% of Indians met all their information needs, as opposed to 43% of Americans, and Indians were more likely to stop searching after encountering barriers. Americans had more confidence in their information behavior overall, and only 32% of Americans were interested in taking a class on how to find information, as opposed to 97% of Indians. Conclusion – Older adults in developing and developed countries described very different information-seeking experiences. The disparities between the types of information sought, sources consulted, and barriers encountered highlight not only cultural differences, but also systemic inequities that exist between the information infrastructure of the two countries, especially as concerns access to computers and the Internet. The study points to areas for future improvement, including the need for interventions such as information literacy instruction.

Rong Cave is one of the more important caves in northern Vietnam’s Dong Van Karst Plateau Geopark (part of the Global Geoparks Network), because its subterranean lake provides agricultural and domestic water for neighboring communities. Maintenance and utilization of Rong Cave’s water reservoir, as well as touristic cave use, require frequent human access to Rong Cave. Depending on the availability of seasonal drip water and the water level of the lake, the abundant clay-rich sediment in the back portion of Rong Cave and possible seepage of gas from deeper strata along geologic faults provide seasonally elevated concentrations of radon in cave air. Based on repeated measurements over 10 months in 2015 and 2016 of the concentrations of radon isotopes (222Rn and 220Rn, also called thoron) with a portable SARAD® RTM 2200 instrument (SARAD® GmbH, Germany), the human total annual inhalation dose was estimated according to the UNSCEAR (2000) algorithm. The result indicates that the radon-related radiation exposure is insignificant for short-term visitors but may reach ~1.8 mSv a-1 for tour guides and ~25 mSv a-1 for cave utility workers. The latter values exceed the IAEA-recommended safety threshold of 1 mSv a-1 (IAEA, 1996). We recommend radiation monitoring for cave utility workers and tour guides. Prolonged human presence in Rong Cave should be avoided during periods of seasonally elevated radon concentrations.References Cigna A.A., 2005. Radon in caves. Interna-tional Journal of Speleology 34(1-2), 1-18. Ha Giang Statistics Office (GSO), 2016. Statistical Yearbook of Ha Giang 2015, 404 pages, Ha Giang (in Vietnamese). Dumitru O.A., Onac B.P., Fornós J.J., Cosma C., Ginés A., Ginés J., Merino A., 2015. Radon survey in caves from Mallorca Island, Spain. Science of The Total Environment, 526, 196-203. Etiope G., Martinelli G., 2002. Migration of carrier and trace gases in the geosphere: An overview. 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Abstract Introduction Children interstitial lung dieses (CHILD) is a heterogeneous group of disorders that overlap with ILD seen in adults, some are primary lung disorders while others are associated with systemic disease processes. Objectives This review aims to role of MSCT in Diagnosis of Interstitial Lung Disease in Children. Data Sources Medline databases (PubMed, Medscape, Science Direct. EMF-Portal) and all materials available in the Internet till 2018. Study Selection This search presented 55 articles. The articles studied the Role of MSCT in Diagnosis of Interstitial Lung Disease in Children. Data Extraction If the studies did not fulfill the inclusion criteria, they were excluded. Study quality assessment included whether ethical approval was gained, eligibility criteria specified, appropriate controls, and adequate information and defined assessment measures. Data Synthesis Comparisons were made by structured review with the results tabulated. Conclusions MSCT continues to be the preferred imaging study for the initial evaluation of suspected child.

AbstractPurposeCough is one of the most common symptoms after lung cancer surgery, which seriously affects the quality of life. Little research has been conducted on patient's experiences of cough following lung surgery. This study aimed to elucidate the experience of coughing after lung cancer surgery from the patient's perspective regarding symptoms and their impacts on daily life, as well as triggers and dealing strategies.MethodsBetween June 2023 and July 2023, we conducted semi‐structured interviews with patients from outpatient clinics of two hospitals who were pathologically diagnosed with lung cancer and experienced cough after surgery through convenience sampling. The interview recordings were transcribed and analyzed by two researchers. The traditional content analysis and thematic analysis were used to identify the common codes, subthemes, and themes.ResultsA total of 28 participants were interviewed. The mean age of the participants was 55.21 years (range: 36–75 years), and 21 participants were female. Most patients (75%) were interviewed within 6 months of surgery. We identified five themes (accompanying symptoms, incentives, effects, solution, and information sources) and 12 subthemes (local symptoms, systemic symptoms, personal factors, external factors, emotion, relationship with others, reduced quality of life, medical measures, nonmedical measures, no measures, relatives and friends, and the Internet). Patients with lung cancer may experience various cough symptoms after surgery, which a variety of internal and external factors can trigger. The coughing imposes a double burden on the physical and psychological due to the negative emotions it provokes.ConclusionWe generated a concept framework of cough after lung cancer surgery, providing a basis for further development of measurement tools from the patients' perspective. The lack of knowledge related to coughing highlights the need for adequate and timely health education and professional medical care.

Introduction: Lymphangiomas are rare, congenital malformations arising from lymphatic hyperplasia. More than 90% of cases are found in children under 2 years of age. Cystic lymphangiomas usually occur in the neck and axillary region and only rarely extend to the mediastinum. Case Description: We present the case of a middle-aged woman who presented with dyspnoea and productive cough. A chest x-ray showed right lower medial lung opacity, and a CT scan of the thorax showed a cystic mediastinal mass, encroaching on the superior vena cava and approaching the trachea and mainstem bronchus. An anterior thoracotomy with tumour resection was performed to relieve compression symptoms. The final pathology report confirmed the diagnosis of mediastinal lymphangioma. Discussion: Lymphangioma should be considered as one of the differential diagnoses when mediastinal widening is found on chest x-ray, and it should be investigated further with a CT scan and biopsy. Infiltration of surrounding structures can cause compression symptoms and can also make surgical resection more challenging.

Abstract Introduction Interstitial lung disease encompasses a group of rare lung conditions causing inflammation and scarring of lung tissue. The typical method of monitoring disease activity is through pulmonary function tests performed in a hospital setting. However, accessing care can be difficult for rural patients due to numerous barriers. This study assesses the feasibility and acceptability of home spirometry telemonitoring using MIR-Spirometers and the patientMpower home-monitoring platform for rural patients with interstitial lung disease. Methods Unblinded, uncontrolled, prospective, multiple-methods study of the feasibility and utility of remote monitoring of 20 rural subjects with interstitial lung disease. Study assessments include adherence to twice weekly spirometry for 3 months in addition to mMRC dyspnea and EQ-5D-5L health-related quality of life questionnaires with each spirometry maneuver. Upon completion, subjects were encouraged to complete an 11-question satisfaction survey and participate in semi-structured qualitative interviews to further explore expectations and perceptions of rural patients to telehealth and remote patient monitoring. Results 19 subjects completed the 3-month study period. Adherence to twice weekly spirometry was mean 53% ± 38%, with participants on average performing 2.26 ± 1.69 maneuvers per week. The median (Range) number of maneuvers per week was 2.0 (0.0, 7.0). The majority of participants responded favorably to the patient satisfaction survey questions. Themes regarding barriers to access included: lack of local specialty care, distance to center with expertise, and time, distance, and high cost associated with travel. Remote monitoring was well perceived amongst subjects as a way to improve access and overcome barriers. Conclusions Remote spirometry monitoring through web-based telehealth is acceptable and feasible for rural patients. Perceived benefits include overcoming access barriers like time, distance, and travel costs. However, cost, reimbursement, and internet access must be addressed before implementing it widely. Future studies are needed to ensure long-term feasibility and to compare outcomes with usual care.

AbstractLung ultrasonography (LUS) is an accurate method of estimating lung congestion but there is ongoing debate on the optimal number of scanning points. The aim of the present study was to compare the reproducibility (i.e. interobserver agreement) and the feasibility (i.e. time consumption) of the two most practiced protocols in patients hospitalized for acute heart failure (AHF). This prospective trial compared 8- and 28-point LUS protocols. Both were performed by an expert–novice pair of sonographers at admission and after 4 to 6 days on patients admitted for AHF. A structured bio-clinical evaluation was simultaneously carried out by the treating physician. The primary outcome was expert-novice interobserver agreement estimated by kappa statistics. Secondary outcomes included time spent on image acquisition and interpretation. During the study period, 43 patients underwent a total of 319 LUS exams. Expert–novice interobserver agreement was moderate at admission and substantial at follow-up for 8-point protocol (weighted kappa of 0.54 and 0.62, respectively) with no significant difference for 28-point protocol (weighted kappa of 0.51 and 0.41; P value for comparison 0.74 at admission and 0.13 at follow-up). The 8-point protocol required significantly less time for image acquisition at admission (mean time difference − 3.6 min for experts, − 5.1 min for novices) and interpretation (− 6.0 min for experts and − 6.3 min for novices; P value < 0.001 for all time comparisons). Similar differences were observed at follow-up. In conclusion, an 8-point LUS protocol was shown to be timesaving with similar reproducibility when compared with a 28-point protocol. It should be preferred for evaluating lung congestion in AHF inpatients.

AbstractThe popular success of the Mars Pathfinder mission, especially in terms of individual access to “live”pictures over the internet, demonstrates substantial mass appeal of space exploration on a personal level. Teleoperation provides an inexpensive approach to remote presence, but is distance-limited due to finite signal propagation times. The proximity of the Lunar surface permits near real-time teleoperation, and through a Virtual Reality approach, presents a sense of “being there” without the difficulty of getting there (and back).While limited single user teleoperated Lunar Rovers concepts have been proposed (Luna Corp., Inc.), an on-going and economically self supporting venture would require simultaneous teleoperation of many vehicles on a large scale. In addition, each vehicle would carry several simultaneous stereoscopic remote viewing television camera heads, whose position is controlled by the head movements of Earth bound viewers. The overall concept is similar to a small fleet of touring busses, although some smaller scout vehicles may be included, as well as a tow truck. An access fee structure for Earth bound teleoperators provides for return on investment.Technical issues for an on-going operation in the Lunar environment include temperature extremes, high vacuum, solar radiation, micrometeorites, abrasive nature of Lunar dust and its capacity to electrostatically attach to surfaces are discussed, as are their impact on vehicle design and operation. Optical data links are considered to handle bandwidth requirements of 500 simultaneous users. The economics of scale, on multiple levels, demonstrates the feasibility of large scale teleoperation. Various base-line studies are presented.

BackgroundKorean society has faced challenges in communicating with cancer patients about false information related to complementary alternative medicine. As the situation has become severe with the 2020 fenbendazole scandal, the demand for reliable information from health authorities has increased.ObjectivesThis study aimed to examine patients’ acquisition patterns and perception of false information by presenting empirical evidence to help health authorities enable effective preemptive responses in the cancer communication context.MethodWe conducted a focus group interview with 21 lung cancer patients who were informed about fenbendazole based on a semi-structured questionnaire with three categories: 1) acquisition channel of the general cancer information and the false information, 2) quality of obtained information, and 3) perception toward it. The interviewees, comprising 13 men and eight women, were aged 50 or older. Participants’ current stages of cancer were stages one, three, and four and there were seven people in each stage.Results1) Acquisition channel: Participants had their first encounter with false information through the TV, while the channels to obtain general cancer information were through Internet communities or portal sites. YouTube was a second channel to actively search for information regardless of the information type. 2) Information quality: participants had only fragmented information through media. 3) Perception: Most patients had a negative attitude toward complementary and alternative medicine information such as fenbendazole. They perceive that it needs to be verified by experts and filtered according to their arbitrary criteria. They had vague expectations based on a hope for “what if” at the same time.ConclusionsDespite the complex media environment, traditional or legacy media is an important channel to encounter information. YouTube is independent of other media as an “active” information-seeking channel. Patients required the appropriate intervention of experts and governments because they perceived that they had obtained irrational and unreliable information from the media. Suggestions are made about how health authorities can construct an effective communication system focusing on the user to prevent patients from getting false cancer information.

Scientific writing is an important aspect of the student's education. Writing requires the student to give reference sources in a proper manner in accordance with a certain style. Experience has found that the process to deal with different styles requires time. Critical thinking is a fundamental requirement in scientific work and as such requires no detailed knowledge about different styles structure. Today's technology makes it possible to facilitate scientific writing using reference management software. The current reference management tools available are license-based and others are available free through the Internet. In recent years, social media, such as Facebook, Blogs and Wikipedia have received increasing attention. The discussion, in educational settings, has touched on the pros and cons, but also on the potential opportunities using social media in educational settings. Social media creates opportunities for communication, which in turn affects learning. This learning can be described as collaborative. Illeris (2007) points out that such learning refers to activities where a group of people strive to learn and develop something together. Thus, it is the technical possibilities that facilitate communication and learning. From an educational point of view Vygotsky appears to be central in terms of pedagogy and technology. His theoretical argument is based on a sociocultural perspective where people learn from each other and are believed to be active in its social context using technology as a helpful instrument. Individual knowledge thus grows between individuals (Vygotsky, 1978). The teacher's role, based on Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective, is to encourage good learning environments, and thus use existing technology in the educational setting. With this background, the purpose of this study was to examine two different reference management software tools, Zotero (a social media free downloaded from Internet) and EndNote (license based), and how these can help to encourage positive learning environments that are connected to the new generation of students. A pedagogical implementation was conducted in spring 2010 for all students (semester 1) in occupational therapist and physical therapist programs. The methods used were interviews as well as a questionnaire. The material was analyzed according to content analysis. The result showed three categories: Usability, Accessibility and Learning Situation. These illustrated the students' perception of how easy, convenient and time saving it is to use reference management software tools. Accessibility describes the technical requirements associated with the tool and learning situation is described by the increased communication through networking and the students feel that they're willing to use the tool in different contexts in the future. Based on the results, we noted that students are positive about the use of reference management software tool. From the results we can conclude that it is crucial to select a reference management software tool which fulfills the requirement of availability. This study shows that neither EndNote nor Zotero meet the requirements regarding the availability of an optimal learning situation. As an educator it is most important to take into consideration, when using technical devices, that the student feels competent when using devices. This is advantageous for the student by offering them a sense of security and continuity in the learning process. ReferencesIlleris, K. (2007). Lärande [Learning] (2. ed.). Lund: Studentlittertur.Vygotskij, L. S., & Clole, M. (1978). Mind in society; the development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge: Harvard U.P.

This paper vindicates the current US television drama as an example of quality television able to entertain the audience and to stimulate its intelligence as well with complex dramatic structures and thematic density. The starting point is Robert S. Thompson's statement that in the eighties the US television began his second golden age. Next we will analyze four network dramas, two remarkable for their thematic quality (The west wing and Buffy, the vampire slayer) and two for their fascinating plot structures (24 and Lost). Según Robert Thompson, la ficción televisiva norteamericana vive en la actualidad una segunda edad dorada que remite a la primera, ese corto periodo de tiempo en los años cincuenta en el que el género de la antología ofreció a la entonces minoritaria pero influyente audiencia una visión crítica de la sociedad vedada para el cine. Se trató de una experiencia corta debido a la influencia de las agencias de publicidad, el primer paso hacia una trivialización del medio que sería satirizada con fortuna en «Network, un mundo implacable» por Paddy Chayefsky, uno de los autores más sobresalientes de la antología dramática. Sin embargo, a principios de los años ochenta algo cambió: mientras los informativos se dejaban llevar por las fórmulas de infotainment, el drama televisivo se hacía más rico a nivel narrativo y temático. El resultado fueron un puñado de series como «Canción triste de Hill Street», «Hospital», «Luz de luna» y «Playas de China» que casi nunca aspiraron a ser grandes éxitos de audiencia, pero que se convirtieron en el referente de un nuevo tipo de televisión de calidad que inspiró el nacimiento de asociaciones como Viewers for Quality Television. El resultado de esa evolución es una ficción altamente estimulante que incorpora con rapidez los tópicos de actualidad (como los atentados del 11 de septiembre de 2001) y analiza todo tipo de temas controvertidos aprovechándose de la libertad de la ficción a la vez que su complejidad estructural tiene un notable efecto cognitivo (como defiende Steven Johnson). El presente trabajo pretende analizar desde esta perspectiva la producción más reciente partiendo de la noción de televisión de calidad de Thompson y ampliándola con las aportaciones de autores como Glen Creeber y Jane Feuer para reivindicar a la ficción televisiva norteamericana actual como un ejemplo a seguir en países como España. En este apartado centraremos nuestra atención en dos aspectos de la calidad, la calidad temática y la calidad formal. Para lo primero analizaremos el drama político «El ala oeste de la Casa Blanca», que ha sabido hacer atractivo y estimulante el funcionamiento de las instituciones democráticas, y el serial fantástico «Buffy, cazavampiros», que tomando como punto de partida la vida de un instituto ha creado un rico entramado metafórico sobre el paso a la vida adulta. En el apartado de la calidad formal dedicaremos nuestros análisis a la riqueza de las fórmulas narrativas de 24, que se desarrolla en tiempo real y cuenta con una compleja estructura argumental, y Perdidos, un relato coral donde se explota el desorden temporal y la focalización interna.

Abstract Objectives SARS-Cov-2 virus preferentially binds to the Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2 (ACE2) on alveolar epithelial type II cells, initiating an inflammatory response and tissue damage which may impair surfactant synthesis contributing to alveolar collapse, worsening hypoxia and leading to respiratory failure. The objective of this study is to evaluate the feasibility, safety and efficacy of nebulised surfactant in COVID-19 adult patients requiring mechanical ventilation for respiratory failure. Trial design This study is a dose-escalating randomized open-label clinical trial of 20 COVID-19 patients. Participants This study is conducted in two centres: University Hospital Southampton and University College London Hospitals. Eligible participants are aged ≥18, hospitalised with COVID-19 (confirmed by PCR), who require endotracheal intubation and are enrolled within 24 hours of mechanical ventilation. For patients unable to consent, assent is obtained from a personal legal representative (PerLR) or professional legal representative (ProfLR) prior to enrolment. The following are exclusion criteria: imminent expected death within 24 hours; specific contraindications to surfactant administration (e.g. known allergy, pneumothorax, pulmonary hemorrhage); known or suspected pregnancy; stage 4 chronic kidney disease or requiring dialysis (i.e., eGFR < 30); liver failure (Child-Pugh Class C); anticipated transfer to another hospital, which is not a study site, within 72 hours; current or recent (within 1 month) participation in another study that, in the opinion of the investigator, would prevent enrollment for safety reasons; and declined consent or assent. Intervention and comparator Intervention: The study is based on an investigational drug/device combination product. The surfactant product is Bovactant (Alveofact®), a natural animal derived (bovine) lung surfactant formulated as a lyophilized powder in 108 mg vials and reconstituted to 45 mg/mL in buffer supplied in a prefilled syringe. It is isolated by lung lavage and, by weight, is a mixture of: phospholipid (75% phosphatidylcholine, 13% phosphatidylglycerol, 3% phosphatidylethanolamine, 1% phosphatidylinositol and 1% sphingomyelin), 5% cholesterol, 1% lipid-soluble surfactant-associated proteins (SP-B and SP-C), very low levels of free fatty acid, lyso-phosphatidylcholine, water and 0.3% calcium. The Drug Delivery Device is the AeroFact-COVID™ nebulizer, an investigational device based on the Aerogen® Solo vibrating mesh nebulizer. The timing and escalation dosing plans for the surfactant are as follows. Cohort 1: Three patients will receive 10 vials (1080 mg) each of surfactant at dosing times of 0 hours, 8 hours and 24 hours. 2 controls with no placebo intervention. Cohort 2: Three patients will receive 10 vials (1080 mg) of surfactant at dosing times of 0 hours and 8 hours, and 30 vials (3240 mg) at a dosing time of 24 hours. 2 controls with no placebo intervention. Cohort 3: Three patients will receive 10 vials (1080 mg) of surfactant at a dosing time of 0 hours, and 30 vials (3240 mg) at dosing times of 8 hours and 24 hours. 2 controls with no placebo intervention. Cohort 4: Three patients will receive 30 (3240 mg) vials each of surfactant at dosing times of 0 hours, 8 hours and 24 hours. 2 controls. 2 controls with no placebo intervention. The trial steering committee, advised by the data monitoring committee, will review trial progression and dose escalation/maintenance/reduction after each cohort is completed (48-hour primary outcome timepoint reached) based on available feasibility, adverse event, safety and efficacy data. The trial will not be discontinued on the basis of lack of efficacy. The trial may be stopped early on the basis of safety or feasibility concerns. Comparator: No placebo intervention. All participants will receive usual standard of care in accordance with the local policies for mechanically ventilated patients and all other treatments will be left to the discretion of the attending physician. Main outcomes The co-primary outcome is the improvement in oxygenation (PaO2/FiO2 ratio) and pulmonary ventilation (Ventilation Index (VI), where VI = [RR x (PIP − PEEP) × PaCO2]/1000) at 48 hours after study initiation. The secondary outcomes include frequency and severity of adverse events (AEs), Adverse Device Effects (ADEs), Serious Adverse Events (SAEs) and Serious Adverse Device Events (SADEs), change in pulmonary compliance, change in positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP) requirement of ventilatory support at 24 and 48 hours after study initiation, clinical improvement defined by time to one improvement point on the ordinal scale described in the WHO master protocol (2020) recorded while hospitalised, days of mechanical ventilation, mechanical ventilator free days (VFD) at day 21, length of intensive care unit stay, number of days hospitalised and mortality at day 28. Exploratory end points will include quantification of SARS-CoV-2 viral load from tracheal aspirates using PCR, surfactant dynamics (synthesis and turnover) and function (surface tension reduction) from deep tracheal aspirate samples (DTAS), surfactant phospholipid concentrations in plasma and DTAS, inflammatory markers (cellular and cytokine) in plasma and DTAS, and blood oxidative stress markers. Randomisation After informed assent, patients fulfilling inclusion criteria will be randomised to 3:2 for the treatment and control arms using an internet-based block randomization service (ALEA tool for clinical trials, FormsVision BV) in combination with electronic data collection. Randomisation will be done by the recruiting centre with a unique subject identifier specific to that centre. Blinding (masking) This is an open-labelled unblinded study. Numbers to be randomised (sample size) The total sample size is 20 COVID-19 mechanically ventilated patients (12 intervention; 8 control). Trial Status Current protocol version is V2 dated 5th of June 2020. The recruitment is currently ongoing and started on the 14th of October 2020. The anticipated study completion date is November 2021. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT04362059 (Registered 24 April 2020), EUDAMED number: CIV-GB-20-06-033328, EudraCT number: 2020-001886-35 (Registered 11 May 2020) Full protocol The full protocol is attached as an additional file, accessible from the Trials website (Additional file 1). In the interest in expediting dissemination of this material, the familiar formatting has been eliminated; this Letter serves as a summary of the key elements of the full protocol. The study protocol has been reported in accordance with the Standard Protocol Items: Recommendations for Clinical Interventional Trials (SPIRIT) guidelines (Additional file 2).

The Alt Right Are Not Alright Academic explorations complicating both the Internet and whiteness have often focussed on the rise of the “alt-right” to examine the co-option of digital technologies to extend white supremacy (Daniels, “Cyber Racism”; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise”; Nagle). The term “alt-right” refers to media organisations, personalities, and sarcastic Internet users who promote the “alternative right”, understood as extremely conservative, political views online. The alt-right, in all of their online variations and inter-grouping, are infamous for supporting white supremacy online, “characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes. Alt-righters eschew ‘establishment’ conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethnonationalism as a fundamental value” (Southern Poverty Law Center). Theoretical studies of the alt-right have largely focussed on its growing presence across social media and websites such as Twitter, Reddit, and notoriously “chan” sites 4chan and 8chan, through the political discussions referred to as “threads” on the site (Nagle; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise”; Hawley). As well, the ability of online users to surpass national boundaries and spread global white supremacy through the Internet has also been studied (Back et al.). The alt-right have found a home on the Internet, using its features to cunningly recruit members and to establish a growing community that mainstream politically extreme views (Daniels, “Cyber Racism”; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise; Munn). This body of knowledge shows that academics have been able to produce critically relevant literature regarding the alt-right despite the online anonymity of the majority of its members. For example, Conway et al., in their analysis of the history and social media patterns of the alt-right, follow the unique nature of the Christchurch Massacre, encompassing the use and development of message boards, fringe websites, and social media sites to champion white supremacy online. Positioning my research in this literature, I am interested in contributing further knowledge regarding the alt-right, white supremacy, and the Internet by exploring the sinister conducting of Zoom-bombing anti-racist events. Here, I will investigate how white supremacy through the Internet can lead to violence, abuse, and fear that “transcends the virtual world to damage real, live humans beings” via Zoom-bombing, an act that is situated in a larger co-option of the Internet by the alt-right and white supremacists, but has been under theorised as a hate crime (Daniels; “Cyber Racism” 7). Shitposting I want to preface this chapter by acknowledging that while I understand the Internet, through my own external investigations of race, power and the Internet, as a series of entities that produce racial violence both online and offline, I am aware of the use of the Internet to frame, discuss, and share anti-racist activism. Here we can turn to the work of philosopher Michel de Certeau who conceived the idea of a “tactic” as a way to construct a space of agency in opposition to institutional power. This becomes a way that marginalised groups, such as racialised peoples, can utilise the Internet as a tactical material to assert themselves and their non-compliance with the state. Particularly, shitposting, a tactic often associated with the alt-right, has also been co-opted by those who fight for social justice and rally against oppression both online and offline. As Roderick Graham explores, the Internet, and for this exploration, shitposting, can be used to proliferate deviant and racist material but also as a “deviant” byway of oppositional and anti-racist material. Despite this, a lot can be said about the invisible yet present claims and support of whiteness through Internet and digital technologies, as well as the activity of users channelled through these screens, such as the alt-right and their digital tactics. As Vikki Fraser remarks, “the internet assumes whiteness as the norm – whiteness is made visible through what is left unsaid, through the assumption that white need not be said” (120). It is through the lens of white privilege and claims to white supremacy that online irony, by way of shitposting, is co-opted and understood as an inherently alt-right tool, through the deviance it entails. Their sinister co-option of shitposting bolsters audacious claims as to who has the right to exist, in their support of white identity, but also hides behind a veil of mischief that can hide their more insidious intention and political ideologies. The alt-right have used “shitposting”, an online style of posting and interacting with other users, to create a form of online communication for a translocal identity of white nationalist members. Sean McEwan defines shitposting as “a form of Internet interaction predicated upon thwarting established norms of discourse in favour of seemingly anarchic, poor quality contributions” (19). Far from being random, however, I argue that shitposting functions as a discourse that is employed by online communities to discuss, proliferate, and introduce white supremacist ideals among their communities as well as into the mainstream. In the course of this article, I will introduce racist Zoom-bombing as a tactic situated in shitposting which can be used as a means of white supremacist discourse and an attempt to block anti-racist efforts. By this line, the function of discourse as one “to preserve or to reproduce discourse (within) a closed community” is calculatingly met through shitposting, Zoom-bombing, and more overt forms of white supremacy online (Foucault 225-226). Using memes, dehumanisation, and sarcasm, online white supremacists have created a means of both organising and mainstreaming white supremacy through humour that allows insidious themes to be mocked and then spread online. Foucault writes that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and danger, to cope with chance events, to evade ponderous, awesome materiality” (216). As Philippe-Joseph Salazar recontextualises to online white supremacists, “the first procedure of control is to define what is prohibited, in essence, to set aside that which cannot be spoken about, and thus to produce strategies to counter it” (137). By this line, the alt-right reorganises these procedures and allocates a checked speech that will allow their ideas to proliferate in like-minded and growing communities. As a result, online white supremacists becoming a “community of discourse” advantages them in two ways: first, ironic language permits the mainstreaming of hate that allows sinister content to enter the public as the severity of their intentions is doubted due to the sarcastic language employed. Second, shitposting is employed as an entry gate to more serious and dangerous participation with white supremacist action, engagement, and ideologies. It is important to note that white privilege is embodied in these discursive practices as despite this exploitation of emerging technologies to further white supremacy, there are approaches that theorise the alt-right as “crazed product(s) of an isolated, extremist milieu with no links to the mainstream” (Moses 201). In this way, it is useful to consider shitposting as an informal approach that mirrors legitimised white sovereignties and authorised white supremacy. The result is that white supremacist online users succeed in “not only in assembling a community of actors and a collective of authors, on the dual territory of digital communication and grass-roots activism”, but also shape an effective fellowship of discourse that audiences react well to online, encouraging its reception and mainstreaming (Salazar 142). Continuing, as McBain writes, “someone who would not dream of donning a white cap and attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting might find themselves laughing along to a video by the alt-right satirist RamZPaul”. This idea is echoed in a leaked stylistic guide by white supremacist website and message board the Daily Stormer that highlights irony as a cultivated mechanism used to draw new audiences to the far right, step by step (Wilson). As showcased in the screen capture below of the stylistic guide, “the reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points” (Feinburg). The result of this style of writing is used “to immerse recruits in an online movement culture built on memes, racial panic and the worst of Internet culture” (Wilson). Figure 1: A screenshot of the Daily Stormer’s playbook, expanding on the stylistic decisions of alt-right writers. Racist Zoom-Bombing In the timely text “Racist Zoombombing”, Lisa Nakamura et al. write the following: Zoombombing is more than just trolling; though it belongs to a broad category of online behavior meant to produce a negative reaction, it has an intimate connection with online conspiracy theorists and white supremacy … . Zoombombing should not be lumped into the larger category of trolling, both because the word “trolling” has become so broad it is nearly meaningless at times, and because zoombombing is designed to cause intimate harm and terrorize its target in distinct ways. (30) Notwithstanding the seriousness of Zoom-bombing, and to not minimise its insidiousness by understanding it as a form of shitposting, my article seeks to reiterate the seriousness of shitposting, which, in the age of COVID-19, Zoom-bombing has become an example of. I seek to purport the insidiousness of the tactical strategies of the alt-right online in a larger context of white violence online. Therefore, I am proposing a more critical look at the tactical use of the Internet by the alt-right, in theorising shitposting and Zoom-bombing as means of hate crimes wherein they impose upon anti-racist activism and organising. Newlands et al., receiving only limited exposure pre-pandemic, write that “Zoom has become a household name and an essential component for parties (Matyszczyk, 2020), weddings (Pajer, 2020), school and work” (1). However, through this came the strategic use of co-opting the application by the alt-right to digitise terror and ensure a “growing framework of memetic warfare” (Nakamura et al. 31). Kruglanski et al. label this co-opting of online tools to champion white supremacy operations via Zoom-bombing an example of shitposting: Not yet protesting the lockdown orders in front of statehouses, far-right extremists infiltrated Zoom calls and shared their screens, projecting violent and graphic imagery such as swastikas and pornography into the homes of unsuspecting attendees and making it impossible for schools to rely on Zoom for home-based lessons. Such actions, known as “Zoombombing,” were eventually curtailed by Zoom features requiring hosts to admit people into Zoom meetings as a default setting with an option to opt-out. (128) By this, we can draw on existing literature that has theorised white supremacists as innovation opportunists regarding their co-option of the Internet, as supported through Jessie Daniels’s work, “during the shift of the white supremacist movement from print to digital online users exploited emerging technologies to further their ideological goals” (“Algorithmic Rise” 63). Selfe and Selfe write in their description of the computer interface as a “political and ideological boundary land” that may serve larger cultural systems of domination in much the same way that geopolitical borders do (418). Considering these theorisations of white supremacists utilising tools that appear neutral for racialised aims and the political possibilities of whiteness online, we can consider racist Zoom-bombing as an assertion of a battle that seeks to disrupt racial justice online but also assert white supremacy as its own legitimate cause. My first encounter of local Zoom-bombing was during the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) Seminar titled “Intersecting Crises” by Western Sydney University. The event sought to explore the concatenation of deeply inextricable ecological, political, economic, racial, and social crises. An academic involved in the facilitation of the event, Alana Lentin, live tweeted during the Zoom-bombing of the event: Figure 2: Academic Alana Lentin on Twitter live tweeting the Zoom-bombing of the Intersecting Crises event. Upon reflecting on this instance, I wondered, could efforts have been organised to prevent white supremacy? In considering who may or may not be responsible for halting racist shit-posting, we can problematise the work of R David Lankes, who writes that “Zoom-bombing is when inadequate security on the part of the person organizing a video conference allows uninvited users to join and disrupt a meeting. It can be anything from a prankster logging on, yelling, and logging off to uninvited users” (217). However, this beckons two areas to consider in theorising racist Zoom-bombing as a means of isolated trolling. First, this approach to Zoom-bombing minimises the sinister intentions of Zoom-bombing when referring to people as pranksters. Albeit withholding the “mimic trickery and mischief that were already present in spaces such as real-life classrooms and town halls” it may be more useful to consider theorising Zoom-bombing as often racialised harassment and a counter aggression to anti-racist initiatives (Nakamura et al. 30). Due to the live nature of most Zoom meetings, it is increasingly difficult to halt the threat of the alt-right from Zoom-bombing meetings. In “A First Look at Zoom-bombings” a range of preventative strategies are encouraged for Zoom organisers including “unique meeting links for each participant, although we acknowledge that this has usability implications and might not always be feasible” (Ling et al. 1). The alt-right exploit gaps, akin to co-opting the mainstreaming of trolling and shitposting, to put forward their agenda on white supremacy and assert their presence when not welcome. Therefore, utilising the pandemic to instil new forms of terror, it can be said that Zoom-bombing becomes a new means to shitpost, where the alt-right “exploits Zoom’s uniquely liminal space, a space of intimacy generated by users via the relationship between the digital screen and what it can depict, the device’s audio tools and how they can transmit and receive sound, the software that we can see, and the software that we can’t” (Nakamura et al. 29). Second, this definition of Zoom-bombing begs the question, is this a fair assessment to write that reiterates the blame of organisers? Rather, we can consider other gaps that have resulted in the misuse of Zoom co-opted by the alt-right: “two conditions have paved the way for Zoom-bombing: a resurgent fascist movement that has found its legs and best megaphone on the Internet and an often-unwitting public who have been suddenly required to spend many hours a day on this platform” (Nakamura et al. 29). In this way, it is interesting to note that recommendations to halt Zoom-bombing revolve around the energy, resources, and attention of the organisers to practically address possible threats, rather than the onus being placed on those who maintain these systems and those who Zoom-bomb. As Jessie Daniels states, “we should hold the platform accountable for this type of damage that it's facilitated. It's the platform's fault and it shouldn't be left to individual users who are making Zoom millions, if not billions, of dollars right now” (Ruf 8). Brian Friedberg, Gabrielle Lim, and Joan Donovan explore the organised efforts by the alt-right to impose on Zoom events and disturb schedules: “coordinated raids of Zoom meetings have become a social activity traversing the networked terrain of multiple platforms and web spaces. Raiders coordinate by sharing links to Zoom meetings targets and other operational and logistical details regarding the execution of an attack” (14). By encouraging a mass coordination of racist Zoom-bombing, in turn, social justice organisers are made to feel overwhelmed and that their efforts will be counteracted inevitably by a large and organised group, albeit appearing prankster-like. Aligning with the idea that “Zoombombing conceals and contains the terror and psychological harm that targets of active harassment face because it doesn’t leave a trace unless an alert user records the meeting”, it is useful to consider to what extent racist Zoom-bombing becomes a new weapon of the alt-right to entertain and affirm current members, and engage and influence new members (Nakamura et al. 34). I propose that we consider Zoom-bombing through shitposting, which is within “the location of matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)” to challenge the role of interface design and Internet infrastructure in enabling racial violence online (Costanza-Chock). Conclusion As Nakamura et al. have argued, Zoom-bombing is indeed “part of the lineage or ecosystem of trollish behavior”, yet these new forms of alt-right shitposting “[need] to be critiqued and understood as more than simply trolling because this term emerged during an earlier, less media-rich and interpersonally live Internet” (32). I recommend theorising the alt-right in a way that highlights the larger structures of white power, privilege, and supremacy that maintain their online and offline legacies beyond Zoom, “to view white supremacy not as a static ideology or condition, but to instead focus on its geographic and temporal contingency” that allows acts of hate crime by individuals on politicised bodies (Inwood and Bonds 722). This corresponds with Claire Renzetti’s argument that “criminologists theorise that committing a hate crime is a means of accomplishing a particular type of power, hegemonic masculinity, which is described as white, Christian, able-bodied and heterosexual” – an approach that can be applied to theorisations of the alt-right and online violence (136). This violent white masculinity occupies a hegemonic hold in the formation, reproduction, and extension of white supremacy that is then shared, affirmed, and idolised through a racialised Internet (Donaldson et al.). Therefore, I recommend that we situate Zoom-bombing as a means of shitposting, by reiterating the severity of shitposting with the same intentions and sinister goals of hate crimes and racial violence. References Back, Les, et al. “Racism on the Internet: Mapping Neo-Fascist Subcultures in Cyber-Space.” Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture. Eds. Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjørgo. 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Donaldson, Mike. “What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?” Theory and Society 22 (1993): 643-657. Feinburg, Ashley. “This Is The Daily Stormer’s Playbook.” Huffington Post 13 Dec. 2017. <http://www.huffpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-style-guide_n_5a2ece19e4b0ce3b344492f2>. Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Ed. A.M. Sheridan Smith. Pantheon, 1971. 215-237. Fraser, Vicki. “Online Bodies and Sexual Subjectivities: In Whose Image?” The Racial Politics of Bodies, Nations and Knowledges. Eds. Barbara Baird and Damien W. Riggs. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 116-132. Friedberg, Brian, Gabrielle Lim, and Joan Donovan. “Space Invaders: The Networked Terrain of Zoom Bombing.” Harvard Shorenstein Center, 2020. Graham, Roderick. “Race, Social Media and Deviance.” The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance. Eds. Thomas J. Holt and Adam M. Bossler, 2019. 67-90. Hawley, George. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. Columbia UP, 2017. Henry, Matthew G., and Lawrence D. Berg. “Geographers Performing Nationalism and Hetero-Masculinity.” Gender, Place & Culture 13 (2006): 629-645. Kruglanski, Arie W., et al. “Terrorism in Time of the Pandemic: Exploiting Mayhem.” Global Security: Health, Science and Policy 5 (2020): 121-132. Lankes, R. David. Forged in War: How a Century of War Created Today's Information Society. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Ling, Chen, et al. “A First Look at Zoombombing, 2021.” Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Oakland, 2021. McBain, Sophie. “The Alt-Right, and How the Paranoia of White Identity Politics Fuelled Trump’s Rise.” New Statesman 27 Nov. 2017. <http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/11/alt-right-and-how-paranoia-white-identity-politics-fuelled-trump-s-rise>. McEwan, Sean. “Nation of Shitposters: Ironic Engagement with the Facebook Posts of Shannon Noll as Reconfiguration of an Australian National Identity.” Journal of Media and Communication 8 (2017): 19-39. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction.” Settler Colonial Studies 2 (2012): 2-22. Moses, A Dirk. “‘White Genocide’ and the Ethics of Public Analysis.” Journal of Genocide Research 21 (2019): 1-13. Munn, Luke. “Algorithmic Hate: Brenton Tarrant and the Dark Social Web.” VoxPol, 3 Apr. 2019. <http://www.voxpol.eu/algorithmic-hate-brenton-tarrant-and-the-dark-social-web>. Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Zero Books, 2017. Nakamura, Lisa, et al. Racist Zoom-Bombing. Routledge, 2021. Newlands, Gemma, et al. “Innovation under Pressure: Implications for Data Privacy during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Big Data & Society July-December (2020): 1-14. Perry, Barbara, and Ryan Scrivens. “White Pride Worldwide: Constructing Global Identities Online.” The Globalisation of Hate: Internationalising Hate Crime. Eds. Jennifer Schweppe and Mark Austin Walters. Oxford UP, 2016. 65-78. Renzetti, Claire. Feminist Criminology. Routledge, 2013. Ruf, Jessica. “‘Spirit-Murdering' Comes to Zoom: Racist Attacks Plague Online Learning.” Issues in Higher Education 37 (2020): 8. Salazar, Philippe-Joseph. “The Alt-Right as a Community of Discourse.” Javnost – The Public 25 (2018): 135-143. Selfe, Cyntia L., and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones.” College Composition and Communication 45 (1994): 480-504. Southern Poverty Law Center. “Alt-Right.” <http://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right>. Wilson, Jason. “Do the Christchurch Shootings Expose the Murderous Nature of ‘Ironic’ Online Fascism?” The Guardian, 16 Mar. 2019. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2019/mar/15/do-the-christchurch-shootings-expose-the-murderous-nature-of-ironic-online-fascism>.

Abstract Objectives These 2 parallel studies (K031 and K032) aim to evaluate the safety of KB109 in addition to supportive self-care (SSC) compared with SSC alone in outpatients with mild to moderate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). KB109 is a novel synthetic glycan that was formulated to modulate the gut microbiome composition and metabolic output in order to increase beneficial short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) production in the gut. The K031 study is designed to evaluate the safety of KB109 and characterize its impact on the natural progression of COVID-19 in patients with mild to moderate disease. The K032 study is evaluating the effect of KB109 on the gut microbiota structure and function in this same patient population. Additionally, both studies are evaluating measures of health care utilization, quality of life (QOL), laboratory indices, biomarkers of inflammation, and serological measures of immunity in patients who received SSC alone or with KB109. Noteworthy aspects of these outpatient studies include study design measures aimed at limiting in-person interactions to minimize the risk of infection spread, such as use of online diaries, telemedicine, and at-home sample collection. Study design K031 and K032 are randomized, controlled, open-label, clinical food studies. Participants Inclusion Criteria: • Adults ≥18 years of age • Patients willing and able to give informed consent • Screening/randomization telemedicine visit within 2 days of testing positive test for COVID-19 In K031 study, symptomatic patients at COVID-19 testing must report new or worsening symptoms at baseline that have not been present for more than 5 days ▪ Cardinal COVID-19 symptoms include fever, chills/repeated shaking with chills, cough, shortness of breath, headache, muscle pain, anosmia/ageusia, and sore throat. The 5 additional symptoms include gastrointestinal (GI) disturbance/symptoms (other than diarrhea), diarrhea, fatigue, nasal congestion, and chest tightness In K031, at COVID-19 testing, pre-symptomatic patients must report new cardinal COVID-19 symptoms within 7 days of a positive test and they must be screened and randomized within 5 days of developing symptoms • Mild to moderate COVID-19 and self-reported outpatient management In K032, mild to moderate COVID-19 was defined as having the following symptoms for no more than 72 hours before COVID-19 testing: a self- reported fever or cough (new or exacerbated) or presence of at least 2 of the following: anosmia, sore throat, or nasal congestion • Ability to adhere to the study visit schedule and other protocol requirements • Consistent internet or cell phone access with a data plan and access to a smartphone, tablet, or computer • The K031 and K032 studies are currently being conducted at 17 clinical institutions throughout the United States. Exclusion Criteria: • In the primary investigator’s (PI) judgement, patients likely to require hospitalization for COVID-19 • Patients who are hospitalized for in-patient treatment or currently being evaluated for potential hospitalization at the time of informed consent for conditions other than COVID-19 • History of chronic lung disease with chronic hypoxia • History of documented cirrhosis or end-stage liver disease • Ongoing requirement for oxygen therapy • Shortness of breath in resting position • Diagnosis of sleep apnea requiring bilevel positive airway pressure (BIPAP)/continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) • Female patients who are pregnant, trying to become pregnant, or lactating • Concurrent use of immunomodulatory agent within 12 months; systemic antibiotics, antifungals, or antivirals for treatment of active infection within 28 days; systemic immunosuppressive therapy within 3 months; or drugs or other compounds that modulate GI motility (eg, stool softeners, laxatives, or fiber supplements) taken currently, or within 7 days. Antacid (histamine 2 blockers and proton pump inhibitors) and antidiarrheal agents are not prohibited • History of GI surgery (6 months prior to randomization), including but not limited to bariatric surgery and bowel resection, or history of, or active GI disease(s) that may affect assessment of tolerability, including but not limited to inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, autoimmune disease, or GI malignancy • Participation in an interventional clinical trial or use of any investigational agent within 30 days before randomization • Clinically significant or uncontrolled concomitant medical condition that would put the patient at risk or jeopardize the objectives of the study in the opinion of the PI • In the opinion of the PI, patient unlikely for any reason to be able to comply with study procedures • Contraindications, sensitivities, or known allergy to the use of the study product or its components Intervention and comparator Patients will be randomized (1,1) to receive either SSC and KB109 or SSC alone. During SSC, patients should follow the steps as instructed by their healthcare provider to care for themselves and protect other people in the home and community from potentially contracting COVID-19. Management of COVID-19-related symptoms with over-the-counter cough, cold, and anti-pyretic medications by patients is permitted in accordance with the medications’ respective drug facts label or as instructed by the patient’s healthcare provider. Following randomization, patients assigned to receive KB109 and SSC will receive a Kaleido Biosciences, Inc at-home study kit including a thermometer, pulse oximeter, and KB109. During the Intake Period (days 1–14), KB109 will be reconstituted in water by the patient and consumed by the patient twice daily (at least 8 hours apart), following an up-titration dosing schedule: Days 1 to 2: 9 g twice daily for a total daily dose of 18 g Days 3 to 4: 18 g twice daily for a total daily dose of 36 g Days 5 to 14: 36 g twice daily for a total daily dose of 72 g During the intake period, patients will record their daily COVID-19–related symptoms, selected COVID-19 signs (as self-measured using the provided thermometer and pulse oximeter), responses to questions related to QOL measures, health care use measures, and concomitant medications taken in the previous 24 hours. Wellness visits by telephone will be conducted between days 1 and 14 to follow up on patient’s health status and to ascertain compliance with KB109 and completion of questions. On day 14, all patients will undergo a telemedicine visit where the following will be conducted: abbreviated physical examination, assessment of safety and other protocol-specified measures of health, and an evaluation of whether follow-up treatment is recommended owing to a progression of COVID-19 symptoms. If feasible, blood samples for clinical chemistries, biomarkers and serological measure of immunity, and nasal/oropharyngeal swabs for quantitative viral load assessments will be collected. Beginning on day 15, patients in both groups will enter the follow-up period (days 15–35) where COVID-19 signs, symptoms, and health care use indices will be collected. Wellness visits by telephone will be conducted on days 21, 28, and 35 to follow-up on the patient’s health status. On day 35, all patients will undergo a telemedicine visit where the same information as the day 14 telemedicine visit will be collected, including any blood samples. Main outcomes The primary outcome for the K031 and K032 studies is to evaluate the safety of KB109 in addition to SSC compared with SSC alone in outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19 by assessing the number of patients experiencing KB109-related treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAEs) during the study. K031 will also evaluate duration of symptoms among outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19. This will be as an assessment made during the intake and/or follow-up periods of the following: • Time to resolution of the 13 overall and the 8 cardinal COVID-19–related symptoms from day 1 until the day at which the composite score of the 13 overall and 8 cardinal COVID-19–related symptoms becomes 0 or 1 and remains at 0 or 1 for the rest of the intake period and for the follow-up period • Proportion of patients with a reduction from baseline in each of the 13 overall COVID-19–related symptoms • Proportion of patients in whom symptoms (present at baseline) become absent for each of the 13 overall COVID-19–related symptoms • Change from baseline in the overall composite score of the 13 overall COVID-19–related symptoms and the 8 cardinal COVID-19–related symptoms • Time to resolution of fever (defined as from day 1 until the day at which a patient’s daily maximum temperature achieves and remains below 100.4°F without antipyretic medication) • Proportion of patients with oxygen saturation <95% and <98% on days 14 and 35 • Measures collected from the health care provider wellness visits • Proportion of patients experiencing hospital admissions (all cause and COVID-19–related) • Health care use K032 will evaluate the effect of KB109 in addition to SSC compared with SSC alone on the gut microbiota structure and function in outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19. Before days 1, 14, and 35, microbiota structure (eg, magnitude of change in gut microbiome structure, composition of gut microbiome) will be analysed by methods such as nucleic acid sequencing and gut microbiome function will be analysed via levels of stool inflammatory biomarkers (eg, lipocalin) and gut microbiome metabolites (eg, SCFA). The health of outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19 will be evaluated during the intake and follow- up periods by: measures of QOL; measures collected from the healthcare provider wellness visits; the proportion of patients experiencing hospital admissions; health care use, the proportions of patients with oxygen saturation <95% and <98%, and the proportion of patients with temperature below 100.4 °F without an anti-pyretic medication. Potential exploratory outcome measures may include: changes from baseline (day 1) in laboratory measures, specific biomarkers of infection, serology, inflammation (eg, D-dimer, lipocalin, cytokines, IgM/IgG sero-conversion, and neutralization assays), and viral load in outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19 in the presence and absence of KB109. Randomisation All patients deemed eligible for the studies will be randomized in a 1:1 ratio to KB109 in addition to SSC or SSC alone group using an interactive response technology system. Randomization will be stratified by study site/center, age groups (≥18–<45 years, ≥45–<65 years, ≥65 years), and comorbidity status (yes, no). Blinding (masking) These studies are open-label; therefore, no blinding is necessary. Numbers to be randomised (sample size) K031 will enroll approximately 350 to 400 (175–200 patients per group) whereas K032 will enroll approximately 50 patients (25 per group). Study status K031 protocol version 4, December 9, 2020; recruitment started in August, 2020, and the study is estimated to be completed in March 2021. This study is active and enrollment was completed in January, 2021. K032 protocol version 2, June 30, 2020; recruitment is estimated to start in July, 2020. This study is recruiting and the study is estimated to be completed in March 2021. Study registration K031 is registered with the US National Library of Medicine, Identifier NCT04414124 as of June 4, 2020. K032 is registered with the US National Library of Medicine, Identifier NCT04486482 as of July 24, 2020. Full protocol The full protocols are attached as additional files (Additional files 1 and 2), accessible from the ClinicalTrials.gov website. In the interest in expediting dissemination of this material, the familiar formatting has been eliminated; this letter serves as a summary of the key elements of the full protocols. The study protocols have been reported in accordance with the Standard Protocol Items: Recommendations for Clinical Interventional Trials (SPIRIT) guidelines (Additional files 3 and 4).

This issue of M/C Journal rejects the association of darkness with immorality. In digital communication, the possibilities of darkness are greater than simple fears of what is hidden in online networks. Instead, new work in an emerging field of “dark social” studies’ consider “dark” as holding the potential for autonomy away from the digital visibilities that pervade economic, political, and surveillance logics of the present age. We shall not be afraid of the dark. We start from a technical rather than moral definition of darkness (Gehl), a definition that conceives of dark spaces as having legitimacies and anonymities against structural surveillance. At the same time, breaking away from techno-centric critiques of the dark allows a humanisation of how dark is embodied and performed at individual and structural levels. Other readings of digitally mediated dark (Fisher and Bolter) suggest tensions between exploitative potentials and deep societal reflection, and the ability for a new dark age (Bridle) to allow us to explore unknown potentials. Together these perspectives allow our authors a way to use dark to question and upend the unresting pressure and acceptance of—and hierarchy given to—the light in aesthetics of power and social transformation. While we reject, however, the reduction of “dark” to “immoral” as we are not blind to “bad actors” lurking in hidden spaces (see Potter, forthcoming). Dark algorithms and their encoded biases shape our online lives. Not everyone has the ability to go off grid or create their own dark networks. Colonial settlerism often hides its brutal logics behind discourses of welfare. And some of us are forced to go dark against our will, as in the case of economies or nations being shut out of communication networks. But above all, the tensions produced in darkness, going dark, and acting dark show the normative powers beyond only focusing on the light. Taken as a whole, the articles in this issue explore the tensions between dark and connected, opting in and opting out, and exposure and retreat. They challenge binaries that reduce our vision to the monochromaticism of dark and light. They explain how the concept of “dark” expands opportunities for existence and persistence beyond datafication. They point to moral, ethical, and pragmatic responses of selves and communities seeking to be/belong in/of the dark. The issue starts with a high-stakes contest: what happens when an entire country is forced to go dark? While the articles in this issue were in review, Australian Facebook users were abruptly introduced to a unique form of darkness when, overnight, all news posts were removed from Facebook. Leaver’s feature article responds to tell the story of how Facebook and Google fought the Australian media law, and nobody won. Simply put, the platforms-cum-infrastructures did not want the government to mandate terms of their payments and business to traditional news organisations, so pulled the plug on Australia. As Leaver points out, Facebook’s cull not only made news media go dark, but in the midst of a pandemic and ongoing bushfires, prevented government agencies from posting and sharing government public health information, weather and wind patterns, and some State Emergency Services information. His article positions darkness on the spectrum from visibility to invisibility and focuses on the complex interplays of who is in control of, or has the power over, visibility. Facebook’s power to darken vital voices in society was unprecedented in Australia, a form of “de-platforming at scale” (Crawford). It seemed that Facebook (and as Leaver explains, Google, to a lesser extent) were using Australia to test platform power and legislative response. The results of this experiment, Leaver argues, was not a dawn of a new dark age—without the misinforming-glare of Facebook (see Cinque in this issue)—but confirmatory evidence of the political economy of national media: News Corp and other large traditional media companies received millions from Facebook and Google in exchange for the latter being exempt from the very law in question. Everyone won, except the Australians looking to experiment and explore alternatives in a new darkness. Scared of the dark, politicians accepted a mutually agreed transfer of ad-revenue from Google and Facebook to large and incumbent media organisations; and with that, hope of exploring a world mediated without the glare of digital incumbents was snuffed out. These agreements, of course, found user privacy, algorithmic biases, and other concerns of computational light out of scope. Playing off the themes of status quo of institutionalised social media companies, Cinque examines how social online spaces (SOS) which are governed by logics of surveillance and datafication embodied in the concept of the “gazing elite” (data aggregators including social media), can prompt anxieties for users regarding data privacy. Her work in the issue particularly observes that anxiety for many users is shaped by this manifestation of the “dark” as it relates to the hidden processes of data capture and processing by the mainstream platforms, surveillant digital objects that are incorporated into the Internet of Things, and “dark” or black boxed automated decisions which censor expression and self-representation. Against this way of conceptualising digital darkness, Cinque argues that dark SOS which use VPNs or the Tor browser to evade monitoring are valuable to users precisely because of their ability to evade the politics of visibility and resist the power of the gazing elite. Continuing away from the ubiquitous and all consuming blue glow of Facebook to more esoteric online communities, Maddox and Heemsbergen use their article to expand a critique on the normative computational logics which define the current information age (based on datafication, tracking, prediction, and surveillance of human socialities). They consider how “digging in the shadows” and “tinkering” with cryptocurrencies in the “dark” is shaping alternative futures based on social, equitable, and reciprocal relations. Their work traces cryptocurrencies—a “community generated technology” made by makers, miners and traders on darknets—from its emergence during a time of global economic upheaval, uncertainty and mistrust in centralised financial systems, through to new generations of cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin that, based on lessons from early cryptocurrencies, are mutating and becoming absorbed into larger economic structures. These themes are explored using an innovative analytical framework considering the “construction, disruption, contention, redirection, and finally absorption of emerging techno-potentials into larger structures”. The authors conclude by arguing that experiments in the dark don’t stay in the dark, but are radical potentials that impact and shape larger social forms. Bradfield and Fredericks take a step back from a focus on potentially arcane online cultures to position dark in an explicit provocation to settler politics’ fears and anxieties. They show how being dark in Australia is embodied and everyday. In doing so, they draw back the veil on the uncontested normality of fear of the dark-as-object. Their article’s examples offer a stark demonstration of how for Indigenous peoples, associations of “dark” fear and danger are built into the structural mechanisms that shape and maintain colonial understandings of Indigenous peoples and their bodies as part of larger power structures. They note activist practices that provoke settlers to confront individuals, communities, and politics that proclaim “I’m not afraid of the Dark” (see Cotes in Bradfield and Fredericks). Drawing on a related embodied refusal of poorly situated connotations of the dark, Hardley considers the embodied ways mobile media have been deployed in the urban night and observes that in darkness, and the night, while vision is obscured and other senses are heightened we also encounter enmeshed cultural relationships of darkness and danger. Drawing on the postphenomenological concept of multistability, Hardley frames engagement with mobile media as a particular kind of body-technology relation in which the same technology can be used by different people in multiple ways, as people assign different meanings to the technology. Presenting empirical research on participants’ night-time mobile media practices, Hardley analyses how users co-opt mobile media functionalities to manage their embodied experiences of the dark. The article highlights how mobile media practices of privacy and isolation in urban spaces can be impacted by geographical location and urban darkness, and are also distinctly gendered. Smith explores how conversations flow across social media platforms and messaging technologies and in and out of sight across the public domain. Darkness is the backstage where backchannel conversations take place outside of public view, in private and parochial spaces, and in the shadow spaces where communication crosses between platforms. This narrative threading view of conversation, which Smith frames as a multiplatform accomplishment, responds to the question held by so many researchers and people trying to interpret what people say in public on social media. Is what we see the tip of an iceberg or just a small blip in the ocean? From Smith’s work we can see that so much happens in the dark, beyond the gaze of the onlooker, where conversational practices move by their own logic. Smith argues that drawing on pre-digital conversational analysis techniques associated with ethnomethodology will illuminate the social logics that structure online interaction and increase our understanding of online sociality forces. Set in the context of merging platforms and the “rise of data”, Lee presents issues that undergird contemporary, globally connected media systems. In translating descriptions of complex systems, the article critically discusses the changing relational quality of “the shadow of hierarchy” and “Platform Power”. The governmental use of private platforms, and the influence it has on power and opportunity for government and civil society is prefigured. The “dark” in this work is lucidly presented as a relationality; an expression of differing values, logics, and (techno)socialities. The author finds and highlights the line between traditional notions of "infrastructure" and the workings of contemporary digital platforms which is becoming increasingly indistinct. Lee concludes by showing how the intersection of platforms with public institutions and infrastructures has moulded society’s light into an evolving and emergent shadow of hierarchy over many domains where there are, as always, those that will have the advantage—and those that do not. Finally, Jethani and Fordyce present an understanding of “data provenance” as a metaphor and method both for analysing data as a social and political artefact. The authors point to the term via an inter-disciplinary history as a way to explain a custodial history of objects. They adroitly argue that in our contemporary communication environment that data is more than just a transact-able commodity. Data is vital—being acquired, shared, interpreted and re-used with significant influence and socio-technical affects. As we see in this article, the key methods that rely on the materiality and subjectivity of data extraction and interpretation are not to be ignored. Not least because they come with ethical challenges as the authors make clear. As an illuminating methodology, “data provenance” offers a narrative for data assets themselves (asking what, when, who, how, and why). In the process, the kinds of valences unearthed as being private, secret, or exclusive reveal aspects of the ‘dark’ (and ‘light’) that is the focus of this issue. References Bridle, James. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London, UK: Verso Books, 2018. Crawford, Kate (katecrawford). “It happened: Facebook just went off the deep end in Australia. They are blocking *all* news content to Australians, and *no* Australian media can post news. This is what showdowns between states and platforms look like. It's deplatforming at scale.” 18 Feb. 2021. 22 Apr. 2021 <https://twitter.com/katecrawford/status/1362149306170368004>. Fisher, Joshua A., and Jay David Bolter. "Ethical Considerations for AR Experiences at Dark Tourism Sites." 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct) (2018): 365-69. Gehl, Robert. Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2p. The Information Society Series. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Potter, Martin. “Bad Actors Never Sleep: Content Manipulation on Reddit.” Eds. Toija Cinque, Robert W. Gehl, Luke Heemsbergen, and Alexia Maddox. Continuum Dark Social Special Issue (forthcoming).

Complex systems are an invention of the universe. It is not at all clear that science has an a priori primacy claim to the study of complex systems. (Galanter 5) Introduction In popular dialogues, describing a system as “complex” is often the point of resignation, inferring that the system cannot be sufficiently described, predicted nor managed. Transport networks, management infrastructure and supply chain logistics are all often described in this way. In socio-cultural terms “complex” is used to describe those humanistic systems that are “intricate, involved, complicated, dynamic, multi-dimensional, interconnected systems [such as] transnational citizenship, communities, identities, multiple belongings, overlapping geographies and competing histories” (Cahir & James). Academic dialogues have begun to explore the collective behaviors of complex systems to define a complex system specifically as an adaptive one; i.e. a system that demonstrates ‘self organising’ principles and ‘emergent’ properties. Based upon the key principles of interaction and emergence in relation to adaptive and self organising systems in cultural artifacts and processes, this paper will argue that complex systems are cultural systems. By introducing generic principles of complex systems, and looking at the exploration of such principles in art, design and media research, this paper argues that a science of cultural systems as part of complex systems theory is the post modern science for the digital age. Furthermore, that such a science was predicated by post structuralism and has been manifest in art, design and media practice since the late 1960s. Complex Systems Theory Complexity theory grew out of systems theory, an holistic approach to analysis that views whole systems based upon the links and interactions between the component parts and their relationship to each other and the environment within they exists. This stands in stark contrast to conventional science which is based upon Descartes’s reductionism, where the aim is to analyse systems by reducing something to its component parts (Wilson 3). As systems thinking is concerned with relationships more than elements, it proposes that in complex systems, small catalysts can cause large changes and that a change in one area of a system can adversely affect another area of the system. As is apparent, systems theory is a way of thinking rather than a specific set of rules, and similarly there is no single unified Theory of Complexity, but several different theories have arisen from the natural sciences, mathematics and computing. As such, the study of complex systems is very interdisciplinary and encompasses more than one theoretical framework. Whilst key ideas of complexity theory developed through artificial intelligence and robotics research, other important contributions came from thermodynamics, biology, sociology, physics, economics and law. In her volume for the Elsevier Advanced Management Series, “Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations”, Eve Mitleton-Kelly describes a comprehensive overview of this evolution as five main areas of research: complex adaptive systems dissipative structures autopoiesis (non-equilibrium) social systems chaos theory path dependence Here, Mitleton-Kelly points out that relatively little work has been done on developing a specific theory of complex social systems, despite much interest in complexity and its application to management (Mitleton-Kelly 4). To this end, she goes on to define the term “complex evolving system” as more appropriate to the field than ‘complex adaptive system’ and suggests that the term “complex behaviour” is thus more useful in social contexts (Mitleton-Kelly). For our purpose here, “complex systems” will be the general term used to describe those systems that are diverse and made up of multiple interdependent elements, that are often ‘adaptive’, in that they have the capacity to change and learn from events. This is in itself both ‘evolutionary’ and ‘behavioural’ and can be understood as emerging from the interaction of autonomous agents – especially people. Some generic principles of complex systems defined by Mitleton Kelly that are of concern here are: self-organisation emergence interdependence feedback space of possibilities co-evolving creation of new order Whilst the behaviours of complex systems clearly do not fall into our conventional top down perception of management and production, anticipating such behaviours is becoming more and more essential for products, processes and policies. For example, compare the traditional top down model of news generation, distribution and consumption to the “emerging media eco-system” (Bowman and Willis 14). Figure 1 (Bowman & Willis 10) Figure 2 (Bowman & Willis 12) To the traditional news organisations, such a “democratization of production” (McLuhan 230) has been a huge cause for concern. The agencies once solely responsible for the representation of reality are now lost in a global miasma of competing perspectives. Can we anticipate and account for complex behaviours? Eve Mitleton Kelly states that “if organisations are understood as complex evolving systems co-evolving as part of a social ‘ecosystem’, then that changed perspective changes ways of acting and relating which lead to a different way of working. Thus, management strategy changes, and our organizational design paradigms evolve as new types of relationships and ways of working provide the conditions for the emergence of new organisational forms” (Mitleton-Kelly 6). Complexity in Design It is thus through design practice and processes that discovering methods for anticipating complex systems behaviours seem most possible. The Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD) research programme, is a contemporary interdisciplinary research cluster consisting of academics and designers from architectural engineering, robotics, geography, digital media, sustainable design, and computing aiming to explore the possibility of trans disciplinary principles of complexity in design. Over arching this work is the conviction that design can be seen as model for complex systems researchers motivated by applying complexity science in particular domains. Key areas in which design and complexity interact have been established by this research cluster. Most immediately, many designed products and systems are inherently complex to design in the ordinary sense. For example, when designing vehicles, architecture, microchips designers need to understand complex dynamic processes used to fabricate and manufacture products and systems. The social and economic context of design is also complex, from market economics and legal regulation to social trends and mass culture. The process of designing can also involve complex social dynamics, with many people processing and exchanging complex heterogeneous information over complex human and communication networks, in the context of many changing constraints. Current key research questions are: how can the methods of complex systems science inform designers? how can design inform research into complex systems? Whilst ECiD acknowledges that to answer such questions effectively the theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design need further exploration and enquiry, there are no reliable precedents for such an activity across the sciences and the arts in general. Indeed, even in areas where a convergence of humanities methodology with scientific practice might seem to be most pertinent, most examples are few and far between. In his paper “Post Structuralism, Hypertext & the World Wide Web”, Luke Tredennick states that “despite the concentration of post-structuralism on text and texts, the study of information has largely failed to exploit post-structuralist theory” (Tredennick 5). Yet it is surely in the convergence of art and design with computation and the media that a search for practical trans-metadisciplinary methodologies might be most fruitful. It is in design for interactive media, where algorithms meet graphics, where the user can interact, adapt and amend, that self-organisation, emergence, interdependence, feedback, the space of possibilities, co-evolution and the creation of new order are embraced on a day to day basis by designers. A digitally interactive environment such as the World Wide Web, clearly demonstrates all the key aspects of a complex system. Indeed, it has already been described as a ‘complexity machine’ (Qvortup 9). It is important to remember that this ‘complexity machine’ has been designed. It is an intentional facility. It may display all the characteristics of complexity but, whilst some of its attributes are most demonstrative of self organisation and emergence, the Internet itself has not emerged spontaneously. For example, Tredinnick details the evolution of the World Wide Web through the Memex machine of Vannevar Bush, through Ted Nelsons hypertext system Xanadu to Tim Berners-Lee’s Enquire (Tredennick 3). The Internet was engineered. So, whilst we may not be able to entirely predict complex behavior, we can, and do, quite clearly design for it. When designing digitally interactive artifacts we design parameters or co ordinates to define the space within which a conceptual process will take place. We can never begin to predict precisely what those processes might become through interaction, emergence and self organisation, but we can establish conceptual parameters that guide and delineate the space of possibilities. Indeed this fact is so transparently obvious that many commentators in the humanities have been pushed to remark that interaction is merely interpretation, and so called new media is not new at all; that one interacts with a book in much the same way as a digital artifact. After all, post-structuralist theory had established the “death of the author” in the 1970s – the a priori that all cultural artifacts are open to interpretation, where all meanings must be completed by the reader. The concept of the “open work” (Eco 6) has been an established post modern concept for over 30 years and is commonly recognised as a feature of surrealist montage, poetry, the writings of James Joyce, even advertising design, where a purposive space for engagement and interpretation of a message is designated, without which the communication does not “work”. However, this concept is also most successfully employed in relation to installation art and, more recently, interactive art as a reflection of the artist’s conscious decision to leave part of a work open to interpretation and/or interaction. Art & Complex Systems One of the key projects of Embracing Complexity in Design has been to look at the relationship between art and complex systems. There is a relatively well established history of exploring art objects as complex systems in themselves that finds its origins in the systems art movement of the 1970s. In his paper “Observing ‘Systems Art’ from a Systems-Theroretical Perspective”, Francis Halsall defines systems art as “emerging in the 1960s and 1970s as a new paradigm in artistic practice … displaying an interest in the aesthetics of networks, the exploitation of new technology and New Media, unstable or de-materialised physicality, the prioritising of non-visual aspects, and an engagement (often politicised) with the institutional systems of support (such as the gallery, discourse, or the market) within which it occurs” (Halsall 7). More contemporarily, “Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970”, at Tate Modern, London, focuses upon systems artists “rejection of art’s traditional focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments al focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments with media that included dance, performance and…film & video” (De Salvo 3). Artists include Andy Warhol, Richard Long, Gilbert & George, Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. In 2002, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New York, held an international exhibition entitled “Complexity; Art & Complex Systems”, that was concerned with “art as a distinct discipline offer[ing] its own unique approache[s] and epistemic standards in the consideration of complexity” (Galanter and Levy 5), and the organisers go on to describe four ways in which artists engage the realm of complexity: presentations of natural complex phenomena that transcend conventional scientific visualisation descriptive systems which describe complex systems in an innovative and often idiosyncratic way commentary on complexity science itself technical applications of genetic algorithms, neural networks and a-life ECiD artist Julian Burton makes work that visualises how companies operate in specific relation to their approach to change and innovation. He is a strategic artist and facilitator who makes “pictures of problems to help people talk about them” (Burton). Clients include public and private sector organisations such as Barclays, Shell, Prudential, KPMG and the NHS. He is quoted as saying “Pictures are a powerful way to engage and focus a group’s attention on crucial issues and challenges, and enable them to grasp complex situations quickly. I try and create visual catalysts that capture the major themes of a workshop, meeting or strategy and re-present them in an engaging way to provoke lively conversations” (Burton). This is a simple and direct method of using art as a knowledge elicitation tool that falls into the first and second categories above. The third category is demonstrated by the ground breaking TechnoSphere, that was specifically inspired by complexity theory, landscape and artificial life. Launched in 1995 as an Arts Council funded online digital environment it was created by Jane Prophet and Gordon Selley. TechnoSphere is a virtual world, populated by artificial life forms created by users of the World Wide Web. The digital ecology of the 3D world, housed on a server, depends on the participation of an on-line public who accesses the world via the Internet. At the time of writing it has attracted over a 100,000 users who have created over a million creatures. The artistic exploration of technical applications is by default a key field for researching the convergence of trans-metadisciplinary methodologies. Troy Innocent’s lifeSigns evolves multiple digital media languages “expressed as a virtual world – through form, structure, colour, sound, motion, surface and behaviour” (Innocent). The work explores the idea of “emergent language through play – the idea that new meanings may be generated through interaction between human and digital agents”. Thus this artwork combines three areas of converging research – artificial life; computational semiotics and digital games. In his paper “What Is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory”, Philip Galanter describes all art as generative on the basis that it is created from the application of rules. Yet, as demonstrated above, what is significantly different and important about digital interactivity, as opposed to its predecessor, interpretation, is its provision of a graphical user interface (GUI) to component parts of a text such as symbol, metaphor, narrative, etc for the multiple “authors” and the multiple “readers” in a digitally interactive space of possibility. This offers us tangible, instantaneous reproduction and dissemination of interpretations of an artwork. Conclusion: Digital Interactivity – A Complex Medium Digital interaction of any sort is thus a graphic model of the complex process of communication. Here, complexity does not need deconstructing, representing nor modelling, as the aesthetics (as in apprehended by the senses) of the graphical user interface conveniently come first. Design for digital interactive media is thus design for complex adaptive systems. The theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design can clearly be expounded especially well through post-structuralism. The work of Barthes, Derrida & Foucault offers us the notion of all cultural artefacts as texts or systems of signs, whose meanings are not fixed but rather sustained by networks of relationships. Implemented in a digital environment post-structuralist theory is tangible complexity. Strangely, whilst Philip Galanter states that science has no necessary over reaching claim to the study of complexity, he then argues conversely that “contemporary art theory rooted in skeptical continental philosophy [reduces] art to social construction [as] postmodernism, deconstruction and critical theory [are] notoriously elusive, slippery, and overlapping terms and ideas…that in fact [are] in the business of destabilising apparently clear and universal propositions” (4). This seems to imply that for Galanter, post modern rejections of grand narratives necessarily will exclude the “new scientific paradigm” of complexity, a paradigm that he himself is looking to be universal. Whilst he cites Lyotard (6) describing both political and linguistic reasons why postmodern art celebrates plurality, denying any progress towards singular totalising views, he fails to appreciate what happens if that singular totalising view incorporates interactivity? Surely complexity is pluralistic by its very nature? In the same vein, if language for Derrida is “an unfixed system of traces and differences … regardless of the intent of the authored texts … with multiple equally legitimate meanings” (Galanter 7) then I have heard no better description of the signifiers, signifieds, connotations and denotations of digital culture. Complexity in its entirety can also be conversely understood as the impact of digital interactivity upon culture per se which has a complex causal relation in itself; Qvortups notion of a “communications event” (9) such as the Danish publication of the Mohammed cartoons falls into this category. Yet a complex causality could be traced further into cultural processes enlightening media theory; from the relationship between advertising campaigns and brand development; to the exposure and trajectory of the celebrity; describing the evolution of visual language in media cultures and informing the relationship between exposure to representation and behaviour. In digital interaction the terms art, design and media converge into a process driven, performative event that demonstrates emergence through autopoietic processes within a designated space of possibility. By insisting that all artwork is generative Galanter, like many other writers, negates the medium entirely which allows him to insist that generative art is “ideologically neutral” (Galanter 10). Generative art, like all digitally interactive artifacts are not neutral but rather ideologically plural. Thus, if one integrates Qvortups (8) delineation of medium theory and complexity theory we may have what we need; a first theory of a complex medium. Through interactive media complexity theory is the first post modern science; the first science of culture. References Bowman, Shane, and Chris Willis. We Media. 21 Sep. 2003. 9 March 2007 http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php>. Burton, Julian. “Hedron People.” 9 March 2007 http://www.hedron.com/network/assoc.php4?associate_id=14>. Cahir, Jayde, and Sarah James. “Complex: Call for Papers.” M/C Journal 9 Sep. 2006. 7 March 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/journal/upcoming.php>. De Salvo, Donna, ed. Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970. London: Tate Gallery Press, 2005. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. Galanter, Phillip, and Ellen K. Levy. Complexity: Art & Complex Systems. SDMA Gallery Guide, 2002. Galanter, Phillip. “Against Reductionism: Science, Complexity, Art & Complexity Studies.” 2003. 9 March 2007 http://isce.edu/ISCE_Group_Site/web-content/ISCE_Events/ Norwood_2002/Norwood_2002_Papers/Galanter.pdf>. Halsall, Francis. “Observing ‘Systems-Art’ from a Systems-Theoretical Perspective”. CHArt 2005. 9 March 2007 http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2005/abstracts/halsall.htm>. Innocent, Troy. “Life Signs.” 9 March 2007 http://www.iconica.org/main.htm>. Johnson, Jeffrey. “Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD).” 2007. 9 March 2007 http://www.complexityanddesign.net/>. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. Mitleton-Kelly, Eve, ed. Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations. Elsevier Advanced Management Series, 2003. Prophet, Jane. “Jane Prophet.” 9 March 2007 http://www.janeprophet.co.uk/>. Qvortup, Lars. “Understanding New Digital Media.” European Journal of Communication 21.3 (2006): 345-356. Tedinnick, Luke. “Post Structuralism, Hypertext & the World Wide Web.” Aslib 59.2 (2007): 169-186. Wilson, Edward Osborne. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: A.A. Knoff, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Cham, Karen, and Jeffrey Johnson. "Complexity Theory: A Science of Cultural Systems?." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/08-cham-johnson.php>. APA Style Cham, K., and J. Johnson. (Jun. 2007) "Complexity Theory: A Science of Cultural Systems?," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/08-cham-johnson.php>.

Introduction This article situates the dark as a liminal and creative space of experimentation where tensions are generative and people tinker with emerging technologies to create alternative futures. Darkness need not mean chaos and fear of violence – it can mean privacy and protection. We define dark as an experimental space based upon uncertainties rather than computational knowns (Bridle) and then demonstrate via a case study of cryptocurrencies the contribution of dark and liminal social spaces to future(s)-making. Cryptocurrencies are digital cash systems that use decentralised (peer-to-peer) networking to enable irreversible payments (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz). Cryptocurrencies are often clones or variations on the ‘original’ Bitcoin payment systems protocol (Trump et al.) that was shared with the cryptographic community through a pseudonymous and still unknown author(s) (Nakamoto), creating a founder mystery. Due to the open creation process, a new cryptocurrency is relatively easy to make. However, many of them are based on speculative bubbles that mirror Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ICOs’ wealth creation. Examples of cryptocurrencies now largely used for speculation due to their volatility in holding value are rampant, with online clearing houses competing to trade hundreds of different assets from AAVE to ZIL. Many of these altcoins have little to no following or trading volume, leading to their obsolescence. Others enjoy immense popularity among dedicated communities of backers and investors. Consequently, while many cryptocurrency experiments fail or lack adoption and drop from the purview of history, their constant variation also contributes to the undertow of the future that pulls against more visible surface waves of computational progress. The article is structured to first define how we understand and leverage ‘dark’ against computational cultures. We then apply thematic and analytical tactics to articulate future-making socio-technical experiments in the dark. Based on past empirical work of the authors (Maddox "Netnography") we focus on crypto-cultures’ complex emancipatory and normative tensions via themes of construction, disruption, contention, redirection, obsolescence, and iteration. Through these themes we illustrate the mutation and absorption of dark experimental spaces into larger social structures. The themes we identify are not meant as a complete or necessarily serial set of occurrences, but nonetheless contribute a new vocabulary for students of technology and media to see into and grapple with the dark. Embracing the Dark: Prework & Analytical Tactics for Outside the Known To frame discussion of the dark here as creative space for alternative futures, we focus on scholars who have deeply engaged with notions of socio-technical darkness. This allows us to explore outside the blinders of computational light and, with a nod to Sassen, dig in the shadows of known categories to evolve the analytical tactics required for the study of emerging socio-technical conditions. We understand the Dark Web to usher shifting and multiple definitions of darkness, from a moral darkness to a technical one (Gehl). From this work, we draw the observation of how technologies that obfuscate digital tracking create novel capacities for digital cultures in spaces defined by anonymity for both publisher and user. Darknets accomplish this by overlaying open internet protocols (e.g. TCP/IP) with non-standard protocols that encrypt and anonymise information (Pace). Pace traces concepts of darknets to networks in the 1970s that were 'insulated’ from the internet’s predecessor ARPANET by air gap, and then reemerged as software protocols similarly insulated from cultural norms around intellectual property. ‘Darknets’ can also be considered in ternary as opposed to binary terms (Gehl and McKelvey) that push to make private that which is supposed to be public infrastructure, and push private platforms (e.g. a Personal Computer) to make public networks via common bandwidth. In this way, darknets feed new possibilities of communication from both common infrastructures and individual’s platforms. Enabling new potentials of community online and out of sight serves to signal what the dark accomplishes for the social when measured against an otherwise unending light of computational society. To this point, a new dark age can be welcomed insofar it allows an undecided future outside of computational logics that continually define and refine the possible and probable (Bridle). This argument takes von Neumann’s 1945 declaration that “all stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control” (in Bridle 21) as a founding statement for computational thought and indicative of current society. The hope expressed by Bridle is not an absence of knowledge, but an absence of knowing the future. Past the computational prison of total information awareness within an accelerating information age (Castells) is the promise of new formations of as yet unknowable life. Thus, from Bridle’s perspective, and ours, darkness can be a place of freedom and possibility, where the equality of being in the dark, together, is not as threatening as current privileged ways of thinking would suggest (Bridle 15). The consequences of living in a constant glaring light lead to data hierarchies “leaching” (Bridle) into everything, including social relationships, where our data are relationalised while our relations are datafied (Maddox and Heemsbergen) by enforcing computational thinking upon them. Darkness becomes a refuge that acknowledges the power of unknowing, and a return to potential for social, equitable, and reciprocal relations. This is not to say that we envision a utopian life without the shadow of hierarchy, but rather an encouragement to dig into those shadows made visible only by the brightest of lights. The idea of digging in the shadows is borrowed from Saskia Sassen, who asks us to consider the ‘master categories’ that blind us to alternatives. According to Sassen (402), while master categories have the power to illuminate, their blinding power keeps us from seeing other presences in the landscape: “they produce, then, a vast penumbra around that center of light. It is in that penumbra that we need to go digging”. We see darkness in the age of digital ubiquity as rejecting the blinding ‘master category’ of computational thought. Computational thought defines social/economic/political life via what is static enough to predict or unstable enough to render a need to control. Otherwise, the observable, computable, knowable, and possible all follow in line. Our dig in the shadows posits a penumbra of protocols – both of computational code and human practice – that circle the blinding light of known digital communications. We use the remainder of this short article to describe these themes found in the dark that offer new ways to understand the movements and moments of potential futures that remain largely unseen. Thematic Resonances in the Dark This section considers cryptocultures of the dark. We build from a thematic vocabulary that has been previously introduced from empirical examples of the crypto-market communities which tinker with and through the darkness provided by encryption and privacy technologies (Maddox "Netnography"). Here we refine these future-making themes through their application to events surrounding community-generated technology aimed at disrupting centralised banking systems: cryptocurrencies (Maddox, Singh, et al.). Given the overlaps in collective values and technologies between crypto-communities, we find it useful to test the relevance of these themes to the experimental dynamics surrounding cryptocurrencies. We unpack these dynamics as construction, rupture and disruption, redirection, and the flip-sided relationship between obsolescence and iteration leading to mutation and absorption. This section provides a working example for how these themes adapt in application to a community dwelling at the edge of experimental technological possibilities. The theme of construction is both a beginning and a materialisation of a value field. It originates within the cyberlibertarians’ ideological stance towards using technological innovations to ‘create a new world in the shell of the old’ (van de Sande) which has been previously expressed through the concept of constructive activism (Maddox, Barratt, et al.). This libertarian ideology is also to be found in the early cultures that gave rise to cryptocurrencies. Through their interest in the potential of cryptography technologies related to social and political change, the Cypherpunks mailing list formed in 1992 (Swartz). The socio-cultural field surrounding cryptocurrencies, however, has always consisted of a diverse ecosystem of vested interests building collaborations from “goldbugs, hippies, anarchists, cyberpunks, cryptographers, payment systems experts, currency activists, commodity traders, and the curious” (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz 262). Through the theme of construction we can consider architectures of collaboration, cooperation, and coordination developed by technically savvy populations. Cryptocurrencies are often developed as code by teams who build in mechanisms for issuance (e.g. ‘mining’) and other controls (Conway). Thus, construction and making of cryptocurrencies tend to be collective yet decentralised. Cryptocurrencies arose during a time of increasing levels of distrust in governments and global financial instability from the Global Financial Crisis (2008-2013), whilst gaining traction through their usefulness in engaging in illicit trade (Saiedi, Broström, and Ruiz). It was through this rupture in the certainties of ‘the old system’ that this technology, and the community developing it, sought to disrupt the financial system (Maddox, Singh, et al.; Nelms et al.). Here we see the utility of the second theme of rupture and disruption to illustrate creative experimentation in the liminal and emergent spaces cryptocurrencies afford. While current crypto crazes (e.g. NFTs, ICOs) have their detractors, Cohen suggests, somewhat ironically, that the momentum for change of the crypto current was “driven by the grassroots, and technologically empowered, movement to confront the ills perceived to be powered and exacerbated by market-based capitalism, such as climate change and income inequality” (Cohen 739). Here we can start to envision how subterranean currents that emerge from creative experimentations in the dark impact global social forces in multifaceted ways – even as they are dragged into the light. Within a disrupted environment characterised by rupture, contention and redirection is rife (Maddox "Disrupting"). Contention and redirection illustrate how competing agendas bump and grind to create a generative tension around a deep collective desire for social change. Contention often emerges within an environment of hacks and scams, of which there are many stories in the cryptocurrency world (see Bartlett for an example of OneCoin, for instance; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis). Other aspects of contention emerge around how the technology works to produce (mint) cryptocurrencies, including concern over the environmental impact of producing cryptocurrencies (Goodkind, Jones, and Berrens) and the production of non-fungible tokens for the sale of digital assets (Howson). Contention also arises through the gendered social dynamics of brogramming culture skewing inclusive and diverse engagement (Bowles). Shifting from the ideal of inclusion to the actual practice of crypto-communities begs the question of whose futures are being made. Contention and redirections are also evidenced by ‘hard forks’ in cryptocurrency. The founder mystery resulted in the gifting of this technology to a decentralised and leaderless community, materialised through the distributed consensus processes to approve software updates to a cryptocurrency. This consensus system consequently holds within it the seeds for governance failures (Trump et al.), the first of which occurred with the ‘hard forking’ of Bitcoin into Bitcoin cash in 2017 (Webb). Hard forks occur when developers and miners no longer agree on a proposed change to the software: one group upgraded to the new software while the others operated on the old rules. The resulting two separate blockchains and digital currencies concretised the tensions and disagreements within the community. This forking resulted initially in a shock to the market value of, and trust in, the Bitcoin network, and the dilution of adoption networks across the two cryptocurrencies. The ongoing hard forks of Bitcoin Cash illustrate the continued contention occurring within the community as crypto-personalities pit against each other (Hankin; Li). As these examples show, not all experiments in cryptocurrencies are successful; some become obsolete through iteration (Arnold). Iteration engenders mutations in the cultural framing of socio-technical experiments. These mutations of meaning and signification then facilitate their absorption into novel futures, showing the ternary nature of how what happens in the dark works with what is known by the light. As a rhetorical device, cryptocurrencies have been referred to as a currency (a payment system) or a commodity (an investment or speculation vehicle; Nelms et al. 21). However, new potential applications for the underlying technologies continue emerge. For example, Ethereum, the second-most dominant cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, now offers smart contract technology (decentralised autonomous organisations, DAO; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis) and is iterating technology to dramatically reduce the energy consumption required to mine and mint the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) associated with crypto art (Wintermeyer). Here we can see how these rhetorical framings may represent iterative shifts and meaning-mutation that is as pragmatic as it is cultural. While we have considered here the themes of obsolescence and iteration threaded through the technological differentiations amongst cryptocurrencies, what should we make of these rhetorical or cultural mutations? This cultural mutation, we argue, can be seen most clearly in the resurgence of Dogecoin. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency launched in 2013 that takes its name and logo from a Shiba Inu meme that was popular several years ago (Potts and Berg). We can consider Dogecoin as a playful infrastructure (Rennie) and cultural product that was initially designed to provide a low bar for entry into the market. Its affordability is kept in place by the ability for miners to mint an unlimited number of coins. Dogecoin had a large resurgence of value and interest just after the meme-centric Reddit community Wallstreetbets managed to drive the share price of video game retailer GameStop to gain 1,500% (Potts and Berg). In this instance we see the mutation of a cryptocurrency into memecoin, or cultural product, for which the value is a prism to the wild fluctuations of internet culture itself, linking cultural bubbles to financial ones. In this case, technologies iterated in the dark mutated and surfaced as cultural bubbles through playful infrastructures that intersected with financial systems. The story of dogecoin articulates how cultural mutation articulates the absorption of emerging techno-potentials into larger structures. Conclusion From creative experiments digging in the dark shadows of global socio-economic forces, we can see how the future is formed beneath the surface of computational light. Yet as we write, cryptocurrencies are being absorbed by centralising and powerful entities to integrate them into global economies. Examples of large institutions hoarding Bitcoin include the crypto-counterbalancing between the Chinese state through its digital currency DCEP (Vincent) and Facebook through the Libra project. Vincent observes that the state-backed DCEP project is the antithesis of the decentralised community agenda for cryptocurrencies to enact the separation of state and money. Meanwhile, Facebook’s centralised computational control of platforms used by 2.8 billion humans provide a similarly perverse addition to cryptocurrency cultures. The penumbra fades as computational logic shifts its gaze. Our thematic exploration of cryptocurrencies highlights that it is only in their emergent forms that such radical creative experiments can dwell in the dark. They do not stay in the dark forever, as their absorption into larger systems becomes part of the future-making process. The cold, inextricable, and always impending computational logic of the current age suffocates creative experimentations that flourish in the dark. Therefore, it is crucial to tend to the uncertainties within the warm, damp, and dark liminal spaces of socio-technical experimentation. References Arnold, Michael. "On the Phenomenology of Technology: The 'Janus-Faces' of Mobile Phones." Information and Organization 13.4 (2003): 231-56. Bartlett, Jamie. 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IntroductionIn the contemporary West, experiences of time are shaped by—and inextricably linked to—the nature of media production and consumption. In Derrida and Steigler’s estimation, teletechnologies bring time “into play” and thus produce time as an “artifact”, that is, a knowable product (3). How and why time becomes “artifactually” produced, according to these thinkers, is a result of the various properties of media production; media ensure that “gestures” (which can be understood here as the cultural moments marked as significant in some way, especially public ones) are registered. Being so, time is constrained, “formatted, initialised” by the matrix of the media system (3). Subsequently, because the media apparatus undergirds the Western imaginary, so too, the media apparatus undergirds the Western concept of time. We can say, in the radically changing global mediascape then, digital culture performs and generates ontological shifts that rewrite the relationship between media, time, and experience. This point lends itself to the significance of the role of both new media platforms and new media texts in reconfiguring understandings between past, present, and future timescapes.There are various ways in which new media texts and platforms work upon experiences of time. In the following, I will focus on just one of these ways: narrativity. By examining a ‘new media’ text, I elucidate how new media narratives imagine timescapes that are constructed through metaphors of ‘confetti’ or ‘snow’, as opposed to more traditional lineal metaphors like ‘rivers’ or ‘streams’ (see Augustine Sedgewick’s “Against Flows” for more critical thinking on the relationship between history, narrative, and the ‘flows’ metaphor). I focus on the revisioning of narrative structure in the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House (2018) from its original form in the 1959 novel by Shirley Jackson. The narrative revisioning from the novel to the televisual both demonstrates and manifests emergent conceptualisations of time through the creative play of temporal multi-flows, which are contemporaneous yet fragmented.The first consideration is the shift in textual format. However, the translocation of the narrative from a novel to a televisual text is important, but not the focus here. Added to this, I deliberately move toward a “general narrative analysis” (Cobley 28), which has the advantage of focusing onmechanisms which may be integral to linguistically or visually-based genres without becoming embroiled in parochial questions to do with the ‘effectiveness’ of given modes, or the relative ‘value’ of different genres. This also allows narrative analysis to track the development of a specified process as well as its embodiment in a range of generic and technological forms. (Cobley 28)It should be also be noted from the outset that I am not suggesting that fragmented narrative constructions and representations were never imagined or explored prior to this new media age. Quite the contrary if we think of Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf (Lodwick; Haggland). Rather, it is to claim that this abstraction is emerging in the mainstream entertainment media in greater contest with the dominant and more historically entrenched version of ‘time as a construct’ that is characterised through Realist narratology as linear and flowing only one way. As I will explore below, the reasons for this are largely related to shifts in everyday media consumption brought about by digital culture. There are two reasons why I specifically utilise Netflix’s series The Haunting of Hill House as a fulcrum from which to lever arguments about new media and the contemporary experience of time. First, as a web series, it embodies some of the pertinent conventions of the digital media landscape, both diegetically and also through practices of production and consumption by way of new time-shifting paradigms (see Leaver). I focus on the former in this article, but the latter is fruitful ground for critical consideration. For example, Netflix itself, as a platform, has somewhat destabilised normative temporal routines, such as in the case of ‘binge-watching’ where audiences ‘lose’ time similarly to gamblers in the casino space. Second, the fact that there are two iterations of the same story—one a novel and one a televisual text—provide us with a comparative benchmark from which to make further assertions about the changing nature of media and time from the mid-century to a post-millennium digital mediascape. Though it should be noted, my discussion will focus on the nature and quality of the contemporary framework, and I use the 1959 novel as a frame of reference only rather than examining its rich tapestry in its own right (for critique on the novel itself, see Wilson; see Roberts).Media and the Production of Time-SenseThere is a remarkable canon of literature detailing the relationship between media and the production of time, which can help us place this discussion in a theoretical framework. I am limited by space, but I will engage with some of the most pertinent material to set out a conceptual map. Markedly, from here, I refer to the Western experience of time as a “time-sense” following E.P. Thompson’s work (80). Following Thompson’s language, I use the term “time-sense” to refer to “our inward notation of time”, characterised by the rhythms of our “technological conditioning” systems, whether those be the forces of labour, media, or otherwise (80). Through the textual analysis of Hill House to follow, I will offer ways in which the technological conditioning of the new media system both constructs and shapes time-sense in terms related to a constellation of moments, or, to use a metaphor from the Netflix series itself, like “confetti” or “snow” (“Silence Lay Steadily”).However, in discussing the production of time-sense through new media mechanisms, note that time-sense is not an abstraction but is still linked to our understandings of the literal nature of time-space. For example, Alvin Toffler explains that, in its most simple construction, “Time can be conceived as the intervals during which events occur” (21). However, we must be reminded that events must first occur within the paradigm of experience. That is to say that matters of ‘duration’ cannot be unhinged from the experiential or phenomenological accounts of those durations, or in Toffler’s words, in an echo of Thompson, “Man’s [sic] perception of time is closely linked with his internal rhythms” (71). In the 1970s, Toffler commented upon the radical expansion of global systems of communications that produces the “twin forces of acceleration and transience”, which “alter the texture of existence, hammering our lives and psyches into new and unfamiliar shapes” (18). This simultaneous ‘speeding up’ (which he calls acceleration) and sense of ‘skipping’ (which he calls transience) manifest in a range of modern experiences which disrupt temporal contingencies. Nearly two decades after Toffler, David Harvey commented upon the Postmodern’s “total acceptance of ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic” (44). Only a decade ago, Terry Smith emphasised that time-sense had become even more characterised by the “insistent presentness of multiple, often incompatible temporalities” (196). Netflix had not even launched in Australia and New Zealand until 2015, as well as a host of other time-shifting media technologies which have emerged in the past five years. As a result, it behooves us to revaluate time-sense with this emergent field of production.That being said, entertainment media have always impressed itself upon our understanding of temporal flows. Since the dawn of cinema in the late 19th century, entertainment media have been pivotal in constructing, manifesting, and illustrating time-sense. This has largely (but not exclusively) been in relation to the changing nature of narratology and the ways that narrative produces a sense of temporality. Helen Powell points out that the very earliest cinema, such as the Lumière Brothers’ short films screened in Paris, did not embed narrative, rather, “the Lumières’ actualities captured life as it happened with all its contingencies” (2). It is really only with the emergence of classical mainstream Hollywood that narrative became central, and with it new representations of “temporal flow” (2). Powell tells us that “the classical Hollywood narrative embodies a specific representation of temporal flow, rational and linear in its construction” reflecting “the standardised view of time introduced by the onset of industrialisation” (Powell 2). Of course, as media production and trends change, so does narrative structure. By the late 20th century, new approaches to narrative structure manifest in tropes such as ‘the puzzle film,’ as an example, which “play with audiences” expectations of conventional roles and storytelling through the use of the unreliable narrator and the fracturing of linearity. In doing so, they open up wider questions of belief, truth and reliability” (Powell 4). Puzzle films which might be familiar to the reader are Memento (2001) and Run Lola Run (1999), each playing with the relationship between time and memory, and thus experiences of contemporaneity. The issue of narrative in the construction of temporal flow is therefore critically linked to the ways that mediatic production of narrative, in various ways, reorganises time-sense more broadly. To examine this more closely, I now turn to Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House.Narratology and Temporal FlowNetflix’s revision of The Haunting of Hill House reveals critical insights into the ways in which media manifest the nature and quality of time-sense. Of course, the main difference between the 1959 novel and the Netflix web series is the change of the textual format from a print text to a televisual text distributed on an Internet streaming platform. This change performs what Marie-Laure Ryan calls “transfictionality across media” (385). There are several models through which transfictionality might occur and thus transmogrify textual and narratival parametres of a text. In the case of The Haunting of Hill House, the Netflix series follows the “displacement” model, which means it “constructs essentially different versions of the protoworld, redesigning its structure and reinventing its story” (Doležel 206). For example, in the 2018 television remake, the protoworld from the original novel retains integrity in that it conveys the story of a group of people who are brought to a mansion called Hill House. In both versions of the protoworld, the discombobulating effects of the mansion work upon the group dynamics until a final break down reveals the supernatural nature of the house. However, in ‘displacing’ the original narrative for adaptation to the web series, the nature of the group is radically reshaped (from a research contingent to a nuclear family unit) and the events follow radically different temporal contingencies.More specifically, the original 1959 novel utilises third-person limited narration and follows a conventional linear temporal flow through which events occur in chronological order. This style of storytelling is often thought about in metaphorical terms by way of ‘rivers’ or ‘streams,’ that is, flowing one-way and never repeating the same configuration (very much unlike the televisual text, in which some scenes are repeated to punctuate various time-streams). Sean Cubitt has examined the relationship between this conventional narrative structure and time sensibility, stating thatthe chronological narrative proposes to us a protagonist who always occupies a perpetual present … as a point moving along a line whose dimensions have however already been mapped: the protagonist of the chronological narrative is caught in a story whose beginning and end have already been determined, and which therefore constructs story time as the unfolding of destiny rather than the passage from past certainty into an uncertain future. (4)I would map Cubitt’s characterisation onto the original Hill House novel as representative of a mid-century textual artifact. Although Modernist literature (by way of Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and so forth) certainly ‘played’ with non-linear or multi-linear narrative structures, in relation to time-sense, Christina Chau reminds us that Modernity, as a general mood, was very much still caught up in the idea that “time that moves in a linear fashion with the future moving through the present and into the past” (26). Additionally, even though flashbacks are utilised in the original novel, they are revealed using the narrative convention of ‘memories’ through the inner dialogue of the central character, thus still occurring in the ‘present’ of the novel’s timescape and still in keeping with a ‘one-way’ trajectory. Most importantly, the original novel follows what I will call one ‘time-stream’, in that events unfold, and are conveyed through, one temporal flow.In the Netflix series, there are obvious (and even cardinal) changes which reorganise the entire cast of characters as well as the narrative structure. In fact, the very process of returning to the original novel in order to produce a televisual remake says something about the nature of time-sense in itself, which is further sophisticated by the recognition of Netflix as a ‘streaming service’. That is, Netflix encapsulates this notion of ‘rivers-on-demand’ which overlap with each other in the context of the contemporaneous and persistent ‘now’ of digital culture. Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that “the proliferation of rewrites … is easily explained by the sense of pastness that pervades Postmodern culture and by the fixation of contemporary thought with the textual nature of reality” (386). While the Netflix series remains loyal to the mood and basic premise (i.e., that there is a haunted house in which characters endure strange happenings and enter into psycho-drama), the series instead uses fractured narrative convention through which three time-streams are simultaneously at work (although one time-stream is embedded in another and therefore its significance is ‘hidden’ to the viewer until the final episode), which we will examine now.The Time-Streams of Hill HouseIn the Netflix series, the central time-stream is, at first, ostensibly located in the characters’ ‘present’. I will call this time-stream A. (As a note to the reader here, there are spoilers for those who have not watched the Netflix series.) The viewer assumes they are, from the very first scene, following the ‘present’ time-stream in which the characters are adults. This is the time-stream in which the series opens, however, only for the first minute of viewing. After around one minute of viewing time, we already enter into a second time-stream. Even though both the original novel and the TV series begin with the same dialogue, the original novel continues to follow one time-stream, while the TV series begins to play with contemporaneous action by manifesting a second time-stream (following a series of events from the characters past) running in parallel action to the first time-stream. This narrative revisioning resonates with Toffler’s estimation of shifting nature of time-sense in the later twentieth century, in which he cites thatindeed, not only do contemporary events radiate instantaneously—now we can be said to be feeling the impact of all past events in a new way. For the past is doubling back on us. We are caught in what might be called a ‘time skip’. (16)In its ‘displacement’ model, the Hill House televisual remake points to this ongoing fascination with, and re-actualisation of, the exaggerated temporal discrepancies in the experience of contemporary everyday life. The Netflix Hill House series constructs a dimensional timescape in which the timeline ‘skips’ back and forth (not only for the viewer but also the characters), and certain spaces (such as the Red Room) are only permeable to some characters at certain times.If we think about Toffler’s words here—a doubling back, or, a time-skip—we might be pulled toward ever more recent incarnations of this effect. In Helen Powell’s investigation of the relationship between narrative and time-sense, she insists that “new media’s temporalities offer up the potential to challenge the chronological mode of temporal experience” (152). Sean Cubitt proposes that with the intensification of new media “we enter a certain, as yet inchoate, mode of time. For all the boasts of instantaneity, our actual relations with one another are mediated and as such subject to delays: slow downloads, periodic crashes, cache clearances and software uploads” (10). Resultingly, we have myriad temporal contingencies running at any one time—some slow, frustrating, mundane, in ‘real-time’ and others rapid to the point of instantaneous, or even able to pull the past into the present (through the endless trove of archived media on the web) and again into other mediatic dimensions such as virtual reality. To wit, Powell writes that “narrative, in mirroring these new temporal relations must embody fragmentation, discontinuity and incomplete resolution” (153). Fragmentation, discontinuity, and incompleteness are appropriate ways to think through the Hill House’s narrative revision and the ways in which it manifests some of these time-sensibilities.The notion of a ‘time-skip’ is an appropriate way to describe the transitions between the three temporal flows occurring simultaneously in the Hill House televisual remake. Before being comfortably seated in any one time-stream, the viewer is translocated into a second time-stream that runs parallel to it (almost suggesting a kind of parallel dimension). So, we begin with the characters as adults and then almost immediately, we are also watching them as children with the rapid emergence of this second time-stream. This ‘second time-stream’ conveys the events of ‘the past’ in which the central characters are children, so I will call this time-stream B. While time-stream B conveys the scenes in which the characters are children, the scenes are not necessarily in chronological order.The third time-stream is the spectral-stream, or time-stream C. However, the viewer is not fully aware that there is a totally separate time stream at play (the audience is made to think that this time-stream is the product of mere ghost-sightings). This is until the final episode, which completes the narrative ‘puzzle’. That is, the third time-stream conveys the events which are occurring simultaneously in both of the two other time-streams. In a sense, time-stream C, the spectral stream, is used to collapse the ontological boundaries of the former two time-streams. Throughout the early episodes, this time-stream C weaves in and out of time-streams A and B, like an intrusive time-stream (intruding upon the two others until it manifests on its own in the final episode). Time-stream C is used to create a 'puzzle' for the viewer in that the viewer does not fully understand its total significance until the puzzle is completed in the final episode. This convention, too, says something about the nature of time-sense as it shifts and mutates with mediatic production. This echoes back to Powell’s discussion of the ‘puzzle’ trend, which, as I note earlier, plays with “audiences’ expectations of conventional roles and storytelling through the use of the unreliable narrator and the fracturing of linearity” which serves to “open up wider questions of belief, truth and reliability” (4). Similarly, the skipping between three time-streams to build the Hill House puzzle manifests the ever-complicating relationships of time-management experiences in everyday life, in which pasts, presents, and futures impinge upon one another and interfere with each other.Critically, in terms of plot, time-stream B (in which the characters are little children) opens with the character Nell as a small child of 5 or 6 years of age. She appears to have woken up from a nightmare about The Bent Neck Lady. This vision traumatises Nell, and she is duly comforted in this scene by the characters of the eldest son and the father. This provides crucial exposition for the viewer: We are told that these ‘visitations’ from The Bent Neck Lady are a recurring trauma for the child-Nell character. It is important to note that, while these scenes may be mistaken for simple memory flashbacks, it becomes clearer throughout the series that this time-stream is not tied to any one character’s memory but is a separate storyline, though critical to the functioning of the other two. Moreover, the Bent Neck Lady recurs as both (apparent) nightmares and waking visions throughout the course of Nell’s life. It is in Episode Five that we realise why.The reason why The Bent Neck Lady always appears to Nell is that she is Nell. We learn this at the end of Episode Five when the storyline finally conveys how Nell dies in the House, which is by hanging from a noose tied to the mezzanine in the Hill House foyer. As Nell drops from the mezzanine attached to this noose, her neck snaps—she is The Bent Neck Lady. However, Nell does not just drop to the end of the noose. She continues to drop five more times back into the other two time streams. Each time Nell drops, she drops into a different moment in time (and each time the neck snapping is emphasised). The first drop she appears to herself in a basement. The second drop she appears to herself on the road outside the car while she is with her brother. The third is during (what we have been told) is a kind of sleep paralysis. The fourth and fifth drops she appears to herself as the small child on two separate occasions—both of which we witness with her in the first episode. So not only is Nell journeying through time, the audience is too. The viewer follows Nell’s journey through her ‘time-skip’. The result of the staggered but now conjoined time-streams is that we come to realise that Nell is, in fact, haunting herself—and the audience now understands they have followed this throughout not as a ghost-sighting but as a ‘future’ time-stream impinging on another.In the final episode of season one, the siblings are confronted by Ghost-Nell in the Red Room. This is important because it is in this Red Room through which all time-streams coalesce. The Red Room exists dimensionally, cutting across disparate spaces and times—it is the spatial representation of the spectral time-stream C. It is in this final episode, and in this spectral dimension, that all the three time-streams collapse upon each other and complete the narrative ‘puzzle’ for the viewer. The temporal flow of the spectral dimension, time-stream C, interrupts and interferes with the temporal flow of the former two—for both the characters in the text and viewing audience.The collapse of time-streams is produced through a strategic dialogic structure. When Ghost-Nell appears to the siblings in the Red Room, her first line of dialogue is a non-sequitur. Luke emerges from his near-death experience and points to Nell, to which Nell replies: “I feel a little clearer just now. We have. All of us have” ("Silence Lay Steadily"). Nell’s dialogue continues but, eventually, she returns to the same statement, almost like she is running through a cyclic piece of text. She states again, “We have. All of us have.” However, this time around, the phrase is pre-punctuated by Shirley’s claim that she feels as though she had been in the Red Room before. Nell’s dialogue and the dialogue of the other characters suddenly align in synchronicity. The audience now understands that Nell’s very first statement, “We have. All of us have” is actually a response to the statement that Shirley had not yet made. This narrative convention emphasises the ‘confetti-like’ nature of the construction of time here. Confetti is, after all, sheets of paper that have been cut into pieces, thrown into the air, and then fallen out of place. Similarly, the narrative makes sense as a whole but feels cut into pieces and realigned, if only momentarily. When Nell then loops back through the same dialogue, it finally appears in synch and thus makes sense. This signifies that the time-streams are now merged.The Ghost of Nell has travelled through (and in and out of) each separate time-stream. As a result, Ghost-Nell understands the nature of the Red Room—it manifests a slippage of timespace that each of the siblings had entered during their stay at the Hill House mansion. It is with this realisation that Ghost-Nell explains:Everything’s been out of order. Time, I mean. I thought for so long that time was like a line, that ... our moments were laid out like dominoes, and that they ... fell, one into another and on it went, just days tipping, one into the next, into the next, in a long line between the beginning ... and the end.But I was wrong. It’s not like that at all. Our moments fall around us like rain. Or... snow. Or confetti. (“Silence Lay Steadily”)This brings me to the titular concern: The emerging abstraction of time as a mode of layering and fracturing, a mode performed through this analogy of ‘confetti’ or ‘snow’. The Netflix Hill House revision rearranges time constructs so that any one moment of time may be accessed, much like scrolling back and forth (and in and out) of social media feeds, Internet forums, virtual reality programs and so forth. Each moment, like a flake of ‘snow’ or ‘confetti’ litters the timespace matrix, making an infinite tapestry that exists dimensionally. In the Hill House narrative, all moments exist simultaneously and accessing each moment at any point in the time-stream is merely a process of perception.ConclusionNetflix is optimised as a ‘streaming platform’ which has all but ushered in the era of ‘time-shifting’ predicated on geospatial politics (see Leaver). The current media landscape offers instantaneity, contemporaneity, as well as, arbitrary boundedness on the basis of geopolitics, which Tama Leaver refers to as the “tyranny of digital distance”. Therefore, it is fitting that Netflix’s revision of the Hill House narrative is preoccupied with time as well as spectrality. Above, I have explored just some of the ways that the televisual remake plays with notions of time through a diegetic analysis.However, we should take note that even in its production and consumption, this series, to quote Graham Meikle and Sherman Young, is embedded within “the current phase of television [that] suggests contested continuities” (67). Powell problematises the time-sense of this media apparatus further by reminding us that “there are three layers of temporality contained within any film image: the time of registration (production); the time of narration (storytelling); and the time of its consumption (viewing)” (3-4). Each of these aspects produces what Althusser and Balibar have called a “peculiar time”, that is, “different levels of the whole as developing ‘in the same historical time’ … relatively autonomous and hence relatively independent, even in its dependence, of the ‘times’ of the other levels” (99). When we think of the layers upon layers of different time ‘signatures’ which converge in Hill House as a textual artifact—in its production, consumption, distribution, and diegesis—the nature of contemporary time reveals itself as complex but also fleeting—hard to hold onto—much like snow or confetti.ReferencesAlthusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London: NLB, 1970.Cobley, Paul. Narrative. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.Cubitt, S. “Spreadsheets, Sitemaps and Search Engines.” New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative. Eds. Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp. London: BFI, 2002. 3-13.Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2002.Doležel, Lubomir. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.Hägglund, Martin. Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012.Hartley, Lodwick. “Of Time and Mrs. Woolf.” The Sewanee Review 47.2 (1939): 235-241.Harvey, David. Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Viking, 1959.Laurie-Ryan Marie. “Transfictionality across Media.” Theorizing Narrativity. Eds. John Pier, García Landa, and José Angel. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. 385-418.Leaver, Tama. “Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance.” Media International Australia 126 (2008): 145-154.Meikle, George, and Sherman Young. “Beyond Broadcasting? TV For the Twenty-First Century.” Media International Australia 126 (2008): 67-70.Powell, Helen. Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.Roberts, Brittany. “Helping Eleanor Come Home: A Reassessment of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 16 (2017): 67-93.Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.The Haunting of Hill House. Mike Flanagan. Amblin Entertainment, 2018.Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38.1 (1967): 56-97.Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.Wilson, Michael T. “‘Absolute Reality’ and the Role of the Ineffable in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” Journal of Popular Culture 48.1 (2015): 114-123.

Engagement in any capacity with mainstream media since mid-2001 has meant immersion in the cross-platform, multimedia phenomenon of Harry Potter: Muggle outcast; boy wizard; corporate franchise. Consumers even casually perusing contemporary popular culture could be forgiven for suspecting they have entered a MÃbius loop in which Harry Potter-related media products and merchandise are ubiquitous: books; magazine cover stories; newspaper articles; websites; television specials; hastily assembled author biographies; advertisements on broadcast and pay television; children's merchandising; and theme park attractions. Each of these media commodities has been anchored in and cross-promoted by America Online-Time Warner's (AOL-TW) first instalment in a projected seven-film sequence—Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.1 The marketing campaign has gradually escalated in the three years elapsing between AOL-TW subsidiary Warner Bros' purchase from J.K. Rowling of the film and merchandising rights to the first two Harry Potter books, and the November 2001 world premiere of the film (Sherber 55). As current AOL-TW CEO Richard Parsons accurately forecast, "You're not going to be able to go anywhere without knowing about it. This could be a bigger franchise than Star Wars" (Auletta 50). Yet, AOL-TW's promotional strategy did not limit itself to creating mere awareness of the film's release. Rather, its tactic was to create an all-encompassing environment structured around the immense value of the Harry Potter brand—a "brand cocoon" which consumers do not so much enter and exit as choose to exist within (Klein 2002). In twenty-first-century mass marketing, the art is to target affluent consumers willing to direct their informational, entertainment, and consumption practices increasingly within the "walled garden" of a single conglomerate's content offerings (Auletta 55). Such an idealised modern consumer avidly samples the diversified product range of the parent conglomerate, but does so specifically by consuming multiple products derived from essentially the same content reservoir. Provided a match between consumer desire and brand can be achieved with sufficient accuracy and demographic breadth, the commercial returns are obvious: branded consumers pay multiple times for only marginally differentiated products. The Brand-Conglomerate Nexus Recyclable content has always been embraced by media industries, as cultural commodities such as early films of stage variety acts, Hollywood studio-era literary adaptations, and movie soundtrack LPs attest. For much of the twentieth century, the governing dynamic of content recycling was sequential, in that a content package (be it a novel, stage production or film) would succeed in its home medium and then, depending upon its success and potential for translation across formats, could be repackaged in a subsequent medium. Successful content repackaging may re-energise demand for earlier formatting of the same content (as film adaptations of literary bestsellers reliably increase sales of the originating novel). Yet the cultural industries providing risk capital to back content repackaging formerly required solid evidence that content had achieved immense success in its first medium before contemplating reformulations into new media. The cultural industries radically restructured in the last decades of the twentieth century to produce the multi-format phenomenon of which Harry Potter is the current apotheosis: multiple product lines in numerous corporate divisions are promoted simultaneously, the synchronicity of product release being crucial to the success of the franchise as a whole. The release of individual products may be staggered, but the goal is for products to be available simultaneously so that they work in aggregate to drive consumer awareness of the umbrella brand. Such streaming of content across parallel media formats is in many ways the logical culmination of broader late-twentieth-century developments. Digital technology has functionally integrated what were once discrete media operating platforms, and major media conglomerates have acquired subsidiaries in virtually all media formats on a global scale. Nevertheless, it remains true that the commercial risks inherent in producing, distributing and promoting a cross-format media phenomenon are vastly greater than the formerly dominant sequential approach, massively escalating financial losses should the elusive consumer-brand fit fail to materialise. A key to media corporations' seemingly quixotic willingness to expose themselves to such risk is perhaps best provided by Michael Harkavy, Warner Bros' vice-president of worldwide licensing, in his comments on Warner Music Group's soundtrack for the first Harry Potter film: It will be music for the child in us all, something we hope to take around the world that will take us to the next level of synergy between consumer products, the [AOL-TW cable channel] Cartoon Network, our music, film, and home video groups—building a longtime franchise for Harry as a team effort. (Traiman 51) The relationship between AOL-TW and the superbrand Harry Potter is essentially symbiotic. AOL-TW, as the world's largest media conglomerate, has the resources to exploit fully economies of scale in production and distribution of products in the vast Harry Potter franchise. Similarly, AOL-TW is pre-eminently placed to exploit the economies of scope afforded by its substantial holdings in every form of content delivery, allowing cross-subsidisation of the various divisions and, crucially, cross-promotion of the Harry Potter brand in an endless web of corporate self-referentiality. Yet it is less frequently acknowledged that AOL-TW needs the Harry Potter brand as much as the global commercialisation of Harry Potter requires AOL-TW. The conglomerate seeks a commercially protean megabrand capable of streaming across all its media formats to drive operating synergies between what have historically been distinct commercial divisions ("Welcome"; Pulley; Auletta 55). In light of AOL-TW's record US$54.2b losses in the first quarter of 2002, the long-term viability of the Harry Potter franchise is, if anything, still more crucial to the conglomerate's health than was envisaged at the time of its dot.com-fuelled January 2000 merger (Goldberg 23; "AOL" 35). AOL-TW's Richard Parsons conceptualises Harry Potter specifically as an asset "driving synergy both ways", neatly encapsulating the symbiotic interdependence between AOL-TW and its star franchise: "we use the different platforms to drive the movie, and the movie to drive business across the platforms" ("Harry Potter" 61). Characteristics of the Harry Potter Brand AOL-TW's enthusiasm to mesh its corporate identity with the Harry Potter brand stems in the first instance from demonstrated consumer loyalty to the Harry Potter character: J.K. Rowling's four books have sold in excess of 100m copies in 47 countries and have been translated into 47 languages.2 In addition, the brand has shown a promising tendency towards demographic bracket-creep, attracting loyal adult readers in sufficient numbers to prompt UK publisher Bloomsbury to diversify into adult-targeted editions. As alluring for AOL-TW as this synchronic brand growth is, the real goldmine inheres in the brand's potential for diachronic growth. From her first outlines of the concept, Rowling conceived of the Potter story as a seven-part series, which from a marketing perspective ensures the broadscale re-promotion of the Harry Potter brand on an almost annual basis throughout the current decade. This moreover assists re-release of the first film on an approximately five-year basis to new audiences previously too young to fall within its demographic catchment—the exact strategy of "classic" rebranding which has underwritten rival studio Disney's fortunes.3 Complementing this brand extension is the potential to grow child consumers through the brand as Harry Potter sequels are produced. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone director Chris Columbus spruiks enthusiastically that "the beauty of making these books into films is that with each one, Harry is a year older, so [child actor] Daniel [Radcliffe] can remain Harry as long as we keep making them" (Manelis 111). Such comments suggest the benefits of luring child consumers through the brand as they mature, harnessing their intense loyalty to the child cast and, through the cast, to the brand itself. The over-riding need to be everything to everyone—exciting to new consumers entering the brand for the first time, comfortingly familiar to already seasoned consumers returning for a repeat hit—helps explain the retro-futuristic feel of the first film's production design. Part 1950s suburban Hitchcock, Part Dickensian London, part Cluny-tapestry medievalism, part public school high-Victorianism, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone strives for a commercially serviceable timelessness, in so doing reinforcing just how very twenty-first-century its conception actually is. In franchise terms, this conscious drive towards retro-futurism fuels Harry Potter's "toyetic potential" (Siegel, "Toys" 19). The ease with which the books' complex plots and mise-en-scene lend themselves to subsidiary rights sales and licensed merchandising in part explains Harry Potter's appeal to commercial media. AOL-TW executives in their public comments have consistently stayed on-message in emphasising "magic" as the brand's key aspirational characteristic, and certainly scenes such as the arrival at Hogwarts, the Quidditch match, the hatching of Hagrid's dragon and the final hunt through the school's dungeons serve as brilliant advertisements for AOL-TW's visual effects divisions. Yet the film exploits many of these "magic" scenes to introduce key tropes of its merchandising programme—Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, chocolate frogs, Hogwarts house colours, the sorting hat, Scabbers the rat, Hedwig, the Remembrall—such that it resembles a series of home shopping advertisements with unusually high production values. It is this railroading of the film's narrative into opportunities for consumerist display which leads film critic Cynthia Fuchs to dub the Diagon Alley shopping scene "the film's cagiest moment, at once a familiar activity for school kid viewers and an apt metaphor for what this movie is all about—consumption, of everything in sight." More telling than the normalising of shopping as filmic activity in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the eclipse of the book's checks on commodity fetishism: its very British sensitivity to class snubs for the large and impecunious Weasley family; the puzzled contempt Hogwarts initiates display for Muggle money; the gentle ribbing at children's obsession with branded sports goods. The casual browser in the Warner Bros store confronted with a plastic, light-up version of the Nimbus 2000 Quidditch broomstick understands that even the most avid authorial commitment to delimiting spin-off merchandise can try the media conglomerate's hand only so far. Constructing the Harry Potter Franchise The film Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone constitutes the indispensable brand anchor for AOL-TW's intricate publicity and sales strategy around Harry Potter. Because content recycling within global media conglomerates is increasingly lead by film studio divisions, the opening weekend box office taking for a brand-anchoring film is crucial to the success of the broader franchise and, by extension, to the corporation as a whole. Critic Thomas Schatz's observation that the film's opening serves as "the "launch site" for its franchise development, establishing its value in all other media markets" (83) highlights the precariousness of such multi-party financial investment all hinging upon first weekend takings. The fact that Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone broke (then standing) box office records with its 16 November 2001 three-day weekend openings in the US and the UK, garnering US$93.2m and GBP16m respectively, constituted the crucial first stage in AOL-TW's brand strategy (Collins 9; Fierman and Jensen 26). But it formed only an initial phase, as subsequent content recycling and cross-promotion was then structured to radiate outwards from this commercial epicentre. Three categories of recycled AOL-TW Harry Potter content are discernible, although they are frequently overlapping and not necessarily sequential. The first category, most closely tied to the film itself, are instances of reused digital content, specifically in the advance publicity trailer viewable on the official website, and downloads of movie clips, film stills and music samples from the film and its soundtrack.4 Secondly, at one remove from the film itself, is AOL-TW's licensing of film "characters, names and related indicia" to secondary manufacturers, creating tie-in merchandise designed to cross-promote the Harry Potter brand and stoke consumer investment (both emotional and financial) in the phenomenon.5 This campaign phase was itself tactically designed with two waves of merchandising release: a September 2000 launch of book-related merchandise (with no use of film-related Harry Potter indicia permitted); and a second, better selling February 2001 release of ancillary products sporting Harry Potter film logos and visual branding which coincided with and reinforced the marketing push specifically around the film's forthcoming release (Sherber 55; Siegel, "From Hype" 24; Lyman and Barnes C1; Martin 5). Finally, and most crucial to the long-term strategy of the parent conglomerate, Harry Potter branding was used to drive consumer take up of AOL-TW products not generally associated with the Harry Potter brand, as a means of luring consumers out of their established technological or informational comfort zones. Hence, the official Harry Potter website is laced with far from accidental offers to trial Internet service provider AOL; TimeWarner magazines Entertainment Weekly, People, and Time ran extensive taster stories about the film and its loyal fan culture (Jensen 56-57; Fierman and Jensen 26-28; "Magic Kingdom" 132-36; Corliss 136; Dickinson 115); AOL-TW's Moviefone bookings service advertised pre-release Harry Potter tickets on its website; and Warner Bros Movie World theme park on the Gold Coast in Australia heavily promoted its Harry Potter Movie Magic Experience. Investment in a content brand on the scale of AOL-TW's outlay of US$1.4m for Harry Potter must not only drive substantial business across every platform of the converged media conglomerate by providing premium content (Grover 66). It must, crucially for the long run, also drive take up and on-going subscriptions to the delivery services owned by the parent corporation. Energising such all-encompassing strategising is the corporate nirvana of seamless synergy: between content and distribution; between the Harry Potter and AOL-TW brands; between conglomerate and consumer. Notes 1. The film, like the first of J.K. Rowling's books, is titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the "metaphysics-averse" US ("Harry Potter" 61). 2. Publishing statistics sourced from Horn and Jones (59), Manelis (110) and Bloomsbury Publishing's Harry Potter website: http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/harryp.... 3. Interestingly, Disney tangentially acknowledged the extent to which AOL-TW has appropriated Disney's own content recycling strategies. In a film trailer for the Pixar/Disney animated collaboration Monsters, Inc. which screened in Australia and the US before Harry Potter sessions, two monsters play a game of charades to which the answer is transparently "Harry Potter." In the way of such homages from one media giant to another, it nevertheless subtly directs the audience to the Disney product screening in an adjacent cinema. 4. The official Harry Potter film website is http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com. The official site for the soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone is: http://www.harrypottersoundtrack.com. 5. J.K. Rowling." A page and a half of non-negotiable "Harry Potter Terms of Use" further spells out prohibitions on use or modification of site content without the explicit (and unlikely) consent of AOL-TW (refer: http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/cmp/te...). References "AOL losses 'sort of a deep disappointment'." Weekend Australian 18-19 May 2002: 35. Auletta, Ken. "Leviathan." New Yorker 29 Oct. 2001: 50-56, 58-61. Collins, Luke. "Harry Potter's Magical $178m Opening." Australian Financial Review 20 Nov. 2001: 9. Corliss, Richard. "Wizardry without Magic." Time 19 Nov. 2001: 136. Dickinson, Amy. "Why Movies make Readers." Time 10 Dec. 2001: 115. Fierman, Daniel, and Jeff Jensen. "Potter of Gold: J.K. Rowling's Beloved Wiz Kid hits Screensand Breaks Records." Entertainment Weekly 30 Nov. 2001: 26-28. Fuchs, Cynthia. "The Harry Hype." PopPolitics.com 19 Nov. 2001: n.pag. Online. Internet. 8 Mar. 2002. Available <http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001-11-19-harry.shtml>. Goldberg, Andy. "Time Will Tell." Sydney Morning Herald 27-28 Apr. 2002: 23. Grover, Ronald. "Harry Potter and the Marketer's Millstone." Business Week 15 Oct. 2001: 66. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Dir. Chris Columbus. Screenplay by Steve Kloves. Warner Bros, 2001. "Harry Potter and the Synergy Test." Economist 10 Nov. 2001: 61-62. Herman, Edward S., and Robert W. McChesney. The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. London: Cassell, 1997. Horn, John, and Malcolm Jones. "The Bubble with Harry." The Bulletin/Newsweek 13 Nov. 2001: 58-59. Jensen, Jeff. "Holiday Movie Preview: Potter's Field." Entertainment Weekly 16 Nov. 2001: 56-57. Klein, Naomi. "Naomi KleinNo Logo." The Media Report. ABC Radio National webtranscript. Broadcast in Sydney, 17 Jan. 2002. Online. Internet. 19 Feb. 2002. Available <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8:30/mediarpt/stories/s445871.htm>. Lyman, Rick, and Julian E. Barnes. "The Toy War for Holiday Movies is a Battle Among 3 Heavyweights." New York Times 12 Nov. 2001: C1. "Magic Kingdom." People Weekly 14 Jan. 2002: 132-36. Manelis, Michele. "Potter Gold." Bulletin 27 Nov. 2001: 110-11. Martin, Peter. "Rowling Stock." Weekend Australian 24-25 Nov. 2001: Review, 1, 4-5. Pulley, Brett. "Morning After." Forbes 7 Feb. 2000: 54-56. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Schatz, Thomas. "The Return of the Hollywood Studio System." Conglomerates and the Media. Erik Barnouw et al. New York: New Press, 1997. 73-106. Sherber, Anne. "Licensing 2000 Showcases Harry Potter, Rudolph for Kids." Billboard 8 Jul. 2000: 55. Siegel, Seth M. "Toys & Movies: Always? Never? Sometimes!" Brandweek 12 Feb. 2001: 19. ---. "From Hype to Hope." Brandweek 11 Jun. 2001: 24. Traiman, Steve. "Harry Potter, Powerpuff Girls on A-list at Licensing 2000." Billboard 1 Jul. 2000: 51, 53. "Welcome to the 21st Century." Business Week 24 Jan. 2000: 32-34, 36-38. Links http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/harrypotter/muggles http://www.harrypottersoundtrack.com http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001-11-19-harry.shtml http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8:30/mediarpt/stories/s445871.htm http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/cmp/terms.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Murray, Simone. "Harry Potter, Inc." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php>. Chicago Style Murray, Simone, "Harry Potter, Inc." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Murray, Simone. (2002) Harry Potter, Inc.. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionIn 2013, Facebook introduced autoplay video into its newsfeed. In order not to produce sound disruptive to hearing users, videos were muted until a user clicked on them to enable audio. This move, recognised as a competitive response to the popularity of video-sharing sites like YouTube, has generated significant changes to the aesthetics, form, and modalities of online video. Many video producers have incorporated captions into their videos as a means of attracting and maintaining user attention. Of course, captions are not simply a replacement or translation of sound, but have instead added new layers of meaning and changed the way stories are told through video.In this paper, I ask how the use of captions has altered the communication of messages conveyed through online video. In particular, I consider the role captions have played in news reporting, as online platforms like Facebook become increasingly significant sites for the consumption of news. One of the most successful producers of online news video has been Al Jazeera Plus (AJ+). I examine two recent AJ+ news videos to consider how meaning is generated when captions are integrated into the already multimodal form of the video—their online reporting of Australian versus US healthcare systems, and the history of the Black Panther movement. I analyse interactions amongst image, sound, language, and typography and consider the role of captions in audience engagement, branding, and profit-making. Sean Zdenek notes that captions have yet to be recognised “as a significant variable in multimodal analysis, on par with image, sound and video” (xiii). Here, I attempt to pay close attention to the representational, cultural and economic shifts that occur when captions become a central component of online news reporting. I end by briefly enquiring into the implications of captions for our understanding of literacy in an age of constantly shifting media.Multimodality in Digital MediaJeff Bezemer and Gunther Kress define a mode as a “socially and culturally shaped resource for meaning making” (171). Modes include meaning communicated through writing, sound, image, gesture, oral language, and the use of space. Of course, all meanings are conveyed through multiple modes. A page of written text, for example, requires us to make sense through the simultaneous interpretation of words, space, colour, and font. Media such as television and film have long been understood as multimodal; however, with the appearance of digital technologies, media’s multimodality has become increasingly complex. Video games, for example, demonstrate an extraordinary interplay between image, sound, oral language, written text, and interactive gestures, while technologies such as the mobile phone combine the capacity to produce meaning through speaking, writing, and image creation.These multiple modes are not simply layered one on top of the other, but are instead “enmeshed through the complexity of interaction, representation and communication” (Jewitt 1). The rise of multimodal media—as well as the increasing interest in understanding multimodality—occurs against the backdrop of rapid technological, cultural, political, and economic change. These shifts include media convergence, political polarisation, and increased youth activism across the globe (Herrera), developments that are deeply intertwined with uses of digital media and technology. Indeed, theorists of multimodality like Jay Lemke challenge us to go beyond formalist readings of how multiple modes work together to create meaning, and to consider multimodality “within a political economy and a cultural ecology of identities, markets and values” (140).Video’s long history as an inexpensive and portable way to produce media has made it an especially dynamic form of multimodal media. In 1974, avant-garde video artist Nam June Paik predicted that “new forms of video … will stimulate the whole society to find more imaginative ways of telecommunication” (45). Fast forward more than 40 years, and we find that video has indeed become an imaginative and accessible form of communication. The cultural influence of video is evident in the proliferation of video genres, including remix videos, fan videos, Let’s Play videos, video blogs, live stream video, short form video, and video documentary, many of which combine semiotic resources in novel ways. The economic power of video is evident in the profitability of video sharing sites—YouTube in particular—as well as the recent appearance of video on other social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.These platforms constitute significant “sites of display.” As Rodney Jones notes, sites of display are not merely the material media through which information is displayed. Rather, they are complex spaces that organise social interactions—for example, between producers and users—and shape how meaning is made. Certainly we can see the influence of sites of display by considering Facebook’s 2013 introduction of autoplay into its newsfeed, a move that forced video producers to respond with new formats. As Edson Tandoc and Julian Maitra write, news organisations have had been forced to “play by Facebook’s frequently modified rules and change accordingly when the algorithms governing the social platform change” (2). AJ+ has been considered one of the media companies that has most successfully adapted to these changes, an adaptation I examine below. I begin by taking up Lemke’s challenge to consider multimodality contextually, reading AJ+ videos through the conceptual lens of the “attention economy,” a lens that highlights the profitability of attention within digital cultures. I then follow with analyses of two short AJ+ videos to show captions’ central role, not only in conveying meaning, but also in creating markets, and communicating branded identities and ideologies.AJ+, Facebook and the New Economies of AttentionThe Al Jazeera news network was founded in 1996 to cover news of the Arab world, with a declared commitment to give “voice to the voiceless.” Since that time, the network has gained global influence, yet many of its attempts to break into the American market have been unsuccessful (Youmans). In 2013, the network acquired Current TV in an effort to move into cable television. While that effort ultimately failed, Al Jazeera’s purchase of the youth-oriented Current TV nonetheless led to another, surprisingly fruitful enterprise, the development of the digital media channel Al Jazeera Plus (AJ+). AJ+ content, which is made up almost entirely of video, is directed at 18 to 35-year-olds. As William Youmans notes, AJ+ videos are informal and opinionated, and, while staying consistent with Al Jazeera’s mission to “give voice to the voiceless,” they also take an openly activist stance (114). Another distinctive feature of AJ+ videos is the way they are tailored for specific platforms. From the beginning, AJ+ has had particular success on Facebook, a success that has been recognised in popular and trade publications. A 2015 profile on AJ+ videos in Variety (Roettgers) noted that AJ+ was the ninth biggest video publisher on the social network, while a story on Journalism.co (Reid, “How AJ+ Reaches”) that same year commented on the remarkable extent to which Facebook audiences shared and interacted with AJ+ videos. These stories also note the distinctive video style that has become associated with the AJ+ brand—short, bold captions; striking images that include photos, maps, infographics, and animations; an effective opening hook; and a closing call to share the video.AJ+ video producers were developing this unique style just as Facebook’s autoplay was being introduced into newsfeeds. Autoplay—a mechanism through which videos are played automatically, without action from a user—predates Facebook’s introduction of the feature. However, autoplay on Internet sites had already begun to raise the ire of many users before its appearance on Facebook (Oremus, “In Defense of Autoplay”). By playing video automatically, autoplay wrests control away from users, and causes particular problems for users using assistive technologies. Reporting on Facebook’s decision to introduce autoplay, Josh Constine notes that the company was looking for a way to increase advertising revenues without increasing the number of actual ads. Encouraging users to upload and share video normalises the presence of video on Facebook, and opens up the door to the eventual addition of profitable video ads. Ensuring that video plays automatically gives video producers an opportunity to capture the attention of users without the need for them to actively click to start a video. Further, ensuring that the videos can be understood when played silently means that both deaf users and users who are situationally unable to hear the audio can also consume its content in any kind of setting.While Facebook has promoted its introduction of autoplay as a benefit to users (Oremus, “Facebook”), it is perhaps more clearly an illustration of the carefully-crafted production strategies used by digital platforms to capture, maintain, and control attention. Within digital capitalism, attention is a highly prized and scarce resource. Michael Goldhaber argues that once attention is given, it builds the potential for further attention in the future. He writes that “obtaining attention is obtaining a kind of enduring wealth, a form of wealth that puts you in a preferred position to get anything this new economy offers” (n.p.). In the case of Facebook, this offers video producers the opportunity to capture users’ attention quickly—in the time it takes them to scroll through their newsfeed. While this may equate to only a few seconds, those few seconds hold, as Goldhaber predicted, the potential to create further value and profit when videos are viewed, liked, shared, and commented on.Interviews with AJ+ producers reveal that an understanding of the value of this attention drives the organisation’s production decisions, and shapes content, aesthetics, and modalities. They also make it clear that it is captions that are central in their efforts to engage audiences. Jigar Mehta, former head of engagement at AJ+, explains that “those first three to five seconds have become vital in grabbing the audience’s attention” (quoted in Reid, “How AJ+ Reaches”). While early videos began with the AJ+ logo, that was soon dropped in favour of a bold image and text, a decision that dramatically increased views (Reid, “How AJ+ Reaches”). Captions and titles are not only central to grabbing attention, but also to maintaining it, particularly as many audience members consume video on mobile devices without sound. Mehta tells an editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab:we think a lot about whether a video works with the sound off. Do we have to subtitle it in order to keep the audience retention high? Do we need to use big fonts? Do we need to use color blocking in order to make words pop and make things stand out? (Mehta, qtd. in Ellis)An AJ+ designer similarly suggests that the most important aspects of AJ+ videos are brand, aesthetic style, consistency, clarity, and legibility (Zou). While questions of brand, style, and clarity are not surprising elements to associate with online video, the matter of legibility is. And yet, in contexts where video is viewed on small, hand-held screens and sound is not an option, legibility—as it relates to the arrangement, size and colour of type—does indeed take on new importance to storytelling and sense-making.While AJ+ producers frame the use of captions as an innovative response to Facebook’s modern algorithmic changes, it makes sense to also remember the significant histories of captioning that their videos ultimately draw upon. This lineage includes silent films of the early twentieth century, as well as the development of closed captions for deaf audiences later in that century. Just as he argues for the complexity, creativity, and transformative potential of captions themselves, Sean Zdenek also urges us to view the history of closed captioning not as a linear narrative moving inevitably towards progress, but as something far more complicated and marked by struggle, an important reminder of the fraught and human histories that are often overlooked in accounts of “new media.” Another important historical strand to consider is the centrality of the written word to digital media, and to the Internet in particular. As Carmen Lee writes, despite public anxieties and discussions over a perceived drop in time spent reading, digital media in fact “involve extensive use of the written word” (2). While this use takes myriad forms, many of these forms might be seen as connected to the production, consumption, and popularity of captions, including practices such as texting, tweeting, and adding titles and catchphrases to photos.Captions, Capture, and Contrast in Australian vs. US HealthcareOn May 4, 2017, US President Donald Trump was scheduled to meet with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in New York City. Trump delayed the meeting, however, in order to await the results of a vote in the US House of Representatives to repeal the Affordable Care Act—commonly known as Obama Care. When he finally sat down with the Prime Minister later that day, Trump told him that Australia has “better health care” than the US, a statement that, in the words of a Guardian report, “triggered astonishment and glee” amongst Trump’s critics (Smith). In response to Trump’s surprising pronouncement, AJ+ produced a 1-minute video extending Trump’s initial comparison with a series of contrasts between Australian government-funded health care and American privatised health care (Facebook, “President Trump Says…”). The video provides an excellent example of the role captions play in both generating attention and creating the unique aesthetic that is crucial to the AJ+ brand.The opening frame of the video begins with a shot of the two leaders seated in front of the US and Australian flags, a diplomatic scene familiar to anyone who follows politics. The colours of the picture are predominantly red, white and blue. Superimposed on top of the image is a textbox containing the words “How does Australia’s healthcare compare to the US?” The question appears in white capital letters on a black background, and the box itself is heavily outlined in yellow. The white and yellow AJ+ logo appears in the upper right corner of the frame. This opening frame poses a question to the viewer, encouraging a kind of rhetorical interactivity. Through the use of colour in and around the caption, it also quickly establishes the AJ+ brand. This opening scene also draws on the Internet’s history of humorous “image macros”—exemplified by the early LOL cat memes—that create comedy through the superimposition of captions on photographic images (Shifman).Captions continue to play a central role in meaning-making once the video plays. In the next frame, Trump is shown speaking to Turnbull. As he speaks, his words—“We have a failing healthcare”—drop onto the screen (Image 1). The captions are an exact transcription of Trump’s awkward phrase and appear centred in caps, with the words “failing healthcare” emphasised in larger, yellow font. With or without sound, these bold captions are concise, easily read on a small screen, and visually dominate the frame. The next few seconds of the video complete the sequence, as Trump tells Turnbull, “I shouldn’t say this to our great gentleman, my friend from Australia, ‘cause you have better healthcare than we do.” These words continue to appear over the image of the two men, still filling the screen. In essence, Trump’s verbal gaffe, transcribed word for word and appearing in AJ+’s characteristic white and yellow lettering, becomes the video’s hook, designed to visually call out to the Facebook user scrolling silently through their newsfeed.Image 1: “We have a failing healthcare.”The middle portion of the video answers the opening question, “How does Australia’s healthcare compare to the US?”. There is no verbal language in this segment—the only sound is a simple synthesised soundtrack. Instead, captions, images, and spatial design, working in close cooperation, are used to draw five comparisons. Each of these comparisons uses the same format. A title appears at the top of the screen, with the remainder of the screen divided in two. The left side is labelled Australia, the right U.S. Underneath these headings, a representative image appears, followed by two statistics, one for each country. For example, the third comparison contrasts Australian and American infant mortality rates (Image 2). The left side of the screen shows a close-up of a mother kissing a baby, with the superimposed caption “3 per 1,000 births.” On the other side of the yellow border, the American infant mortality rate is illustrated with an image of a sleeping baby superimposed with a corresponding caption, “6 per 1,000 births.” Without voiceover, captions do much of the work of communicating the national differences. They are, however, complemented and made more quickly comprehensible through the video’s spatial design and its subtly contrasting images, which help to visually organise the written content.Image 2: “Infant mortality rate”The final 10 seconds of the video bring sound back into the picture. We once again see and hear Trump tell Turnbull, “You have better healthcare than we do.” This image transforms into another pair of male faces—liberal American commentator Chris Hayes and US Senator Bernie Sanders—taken from a MSNBC cable television broadcast. On one side, Hayes says “They do have, they have universal healthcare.” On the other, Sanders laughs uproariously in response. The only added caption for this segment is “Hahahaha!”, the simplicity of which suggests that the video’s target audience is assumed to have a context for understanding Sander’s laughter. Here and throughout the video, autoplay leads to a far more visual style of relating information, one in which captions—working alongside images and layout—become, in Zdenek’s words, a sort of “textual performance” (6).The Black Panther Party and the Textual Performance of Progressive PoliticsReports on police brutality and Black Lives Matters protests have been amongst AJ+’s most widely viewed and shared videos (Reid, “Beyond Websites”). Their 2-minute video (Facebook, Black Panther) commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, viewed 9.5 million times, provides background to these contemporary events. Like the comparison of American and Australian healthcare, captions shape the video’s structure. But here, rather than using contrast as means of quick visual communication, the video is structured as a list of five significant points about the Black Panther Party. Captions are used not only to itemise and simplify—and ultimately to reduce—the party’s complex history, but also, somewhat paradoxically, to promote the news organisation’s own progressive values.After announcing the intent and structure of the video—“5 things you should know about the Black Panther Party”—in its first 3 seconds, the video quickly sets in to describe each item in turn. The themes themselves correspond with AJ+’s own interests in policing, community, and protest, while the language used to announce each theme is characteristically concise and colloquial:They wanted to end police brutality.They were all about the community.They made enemies in high places.Women were vocal and active panthers.The Black Panthers’ legacy is still alive today.Each of these themes is represented using a combination of archival black and white news footage and photographs depicting Black Panther members, marches, and events. These still and moving images are accompanied by audio recordings from party members, explaining its origins, purposes, and influences. Captions are used throughout the video both to indicate the five themes and to transcribe the recordings. As the video moves from one theme to another, the corresponding number appears in the centre of the screen to indicate the transition, and then shrinks and moves to the upper left corner of the screen as a reminder for viewers. A musical soundtrack of strings and percussion, communicating a sense of urgency, underscores the full video.While typographic features like font size, colour, and placement were significant in communicating meaning in AJ+’s healthcare video, there is an even broader range of experimentation here. The numbers 1 to 5 that appear in the centre of the screen to announce each new theme blink and flicker like the countdown at the beginning of bygone film reels, gesturing towards the historical topic and complementing the black and white footage. For those many viewers watching the video without sound, an audio waveform above the transcribed interviews provides a visual clue that the captions are transcriptions of recorded voices. Finally, the colour green, used infrequently in AJ+ videos, is chosen to emphasise a select number of key words and phrases within the short video. Significantly, all of these words are spoken by Black Panther members. For example, captions transcribing former Panther leader Ericka Huggins speaking about the party’s slogan—“All power to the people”—highlight the words “power” and “people” with large, lime green letters that stand out against the grainy black and white photos (Image 3). The captions quite literally highlight ideas about oppression, justice, and social change that are central to an understanding of the history of the Black Panther Party, but also to the communication of the AJ+ brand.Image 3: “All power to the people”ConclusionEmploying distinctive combinations of word and image, AJ+ videos are produced to call out to users through the crowded semiotic spaces of social media. But they also call out to scholars to think carefully about the new kinds of literacies associated with rapidly changing digital media formats. Captioned video makes clear the need to recognise how meaning is constructed through sophisticated interpretive strategies that draw together multiple modes. While captions are certainly not new, an analysis of AJ+ videos suggests the use of novel typographical experiments that sit “midway between language and image” (Stöckl 289). Discussions of literacy need to expand to recognise this experimentation and to account for the complex interactions between the verbal and visual that get lost when written text is understood to function similarly across multiple platforms. In his interpretation of closed captioning, Zdenek provides an insightful list of the ways that captions transform meaning, including their capacity to contextualise, clarify, formalise, linearise and distill (8–9). His list signals not only the need for a deeper understanding of the role of captions, but also for a broader and more vivid vocabulary to describe multimodal meaning-making. Indeed, as Allan Luke suggests, within the complex multimodal and multilingual contexts of contemporary global societies, literacy requires that we develop and nurture “languages to talk about language” (459).Just as importantly, an analysis of captioned video that takes into account the economic reasons for captioning also reminds us of the need for critical media literacies. AJ+ videos reveal how the commercial goals of branding, promotion, and profit-making influence the shape and presentation of news. As meaning-makers and as citizens, we require the capacity to assess how we are being addressed by news organisations that are themselves responding to the interests of economic and cultural juggernauts such as Facebook. In schools, universities, and informal learning spaces, as well as through discourses circulated by research, media, and public policy, we might begin to generate more explicit and critical discussions of the ways that digital media—including texts that inform us and even those that exhort us towards more active forms of citizenship—simultaneously seek to manage, direct, and profit from our attention.ReferencesBezemer, Jeff, and Gunther Kress. “Writing in Multimodal Texts: A Social Semiotic Account of Designs for Learning.” Written Communication 25.2 (2008): 166–195.Constine, Josh. “Facebook Adds Automatic Subtitling for Page Videos.” TechCrunch 4 Jan. 2017. 1 May 2017 <https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/04/facebook-video-captions/>.Ellis, Justin. “How AJ+ Embraces Facebook, Autoplay, and Comments to Make Its Videos Stand Out.” Nieman Labs 3 Aug. 2015. 28 Apr. 2017 <http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/08/how-aj-embraces-facebook-autoplay-and-comments-to-make-its-videos-stand-out/>.Facebook. “President Trump Says…” Facebook, 2017. <https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/954884227986418/>.Facebook. “Black Panther.” Facebook, 2017. <https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/820822028059306/>.Goldhaber, Michael. “The Attention Economy and the Net.” First Monday 2.4 (1997). 9 June 2013 <http://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440>.Herrera, Linda. “Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Age: A View from Egypt.” Harvard Educational Review 82.3 (2012): 333–352.Jewitt, Carey.”Introduction.” Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. Ed. Carey Jewitt. New York: Routledge, 2009. 1–8.Jones, Rodney. “Technology and Sites of Display.” Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. Ed. Carey Jewitt. New York: Routledge, 2009. 114–126.Lee, Carmen. “Micro-Blogging and Status Updates on Facebook: Texts and Practices.” Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media. Eds. Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199795437.001.0001.Lemke, Jay. “Multimodality, Identity, and Time.” Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. Ed. Carey Jewitt. New York: Routledge, 2009. 140–150.Luke, Allan. “Critical Literacy in Australia: A Matter of Context and Standpoint.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 43.5 (200): 448–461.Oremus, Will. “Facebook Is Eating the Media.” National Post 14 Jan. 2015. 15 June 2017 <http://news.nationalpost.com/news/facebook-is-eating-the-media-how-auto-play-videos-could-put-news-websites-out-of-business>.———. “In Defense of Autoplay.” Slate 16 June 2015. 14 June 2017 <http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/06/autoplay_videos_facebook_twitter_are_making_them_less_annoying.html>.Paik, Nam June. “The Video Synthesizer and Beyond.” The New Television: A Public/Private Art. Eds. Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977. 45.Reid, Alistair. “Beyond Websites: How AJ+ Is Innovating in Digital Storytelling.” Journalism.co 17 Apr. 2015. 13 Feb. 2017 <https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/beyond-websites-how-aj-is-innovating-in-digital-storytelling/s2/a564811/>.———. “How AJ+ Reaches 600% of Its Audience on Facebook.” Journalism.co. 5 Aug. 2015. 13 Feb. 2017 <https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-aj-reaches-600-of-its-audience-on-facebook/s2/a566014/>.Roettgers, Jank. “How Al Jazeera’s AJ+ Became One of the Biggest Video Publishers on Facebook.” Variety 30 July 2015. 1 May 2017 <http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/how-al-jazeeras-aj-became-one-of-the-biggest-video-publishers-on-facebook-1201553333/>.Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.Smith, David. “Trump Says ‘Everybody’, Not Just Australia, Has Better Healthcare than US.” The Guardian 5 May 2017. 5 May 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/05/trump-healthcare-australia-better-malcolm-turnbull>.Stöckl, Hartmut. “Typography: Visual Language and Multimodality.” Interactions, Images and Texts. Eds. Sigrid Norris and Carmen Daniela Maier. Amsterdam: De Gruyter, 2014. 283–293.Tandoc, Edson, and Maitra, Julian. “New Organizations’ Use of Native Videos on Facebook: Tweaking the Journalistic Field One Algorithm Change at a Time. New Media & Society (2017). DOI: 10.1177/1461444817702398.Youmans, William. An Unlikely Audience: Al Jazeera’s Struggle in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.Zdenek, Sean. Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Zou, Yanni. “How AJ+ Applies User-Centered Design to Win Millennials.” Medium 16 Apr. 2016. 7 May 2017 <https://medium.com/aj-platforms/how-aj-applies-user-centered-design-to-win-millennials-3be803a4192c>.

IntroductionThis essay considers three design projects as microprotests. Reflecting on the ways design practice can generate spaces, sites and methods of protest, we use the concept of microprotest to consider how we, as designers ourselves, can protest by scaling down, focussing, slowing down and paying attention to the edges of our practice. Design microprotest is a form of design activism that is always collaborative, takes place within a community, and involves careful translation of a political conversation. While microprotest can manifest in any design discipline, in this essay we focus on visual communication design. In particular we consider the deep, reflexive practice of listening as the foundation of microprotests in visual communication design.While small in scale and fleeting in duration, these projects express rich and deep political engagements through conversations that create and maintain safe spaces. While many design theorists (Julier; Fuad-Luke; Clarke; Irwin et al.) have done important work to contextualise activist design as a broad movement with overlapping branches (social design, community design, eco-design, participatory design, critical design, and transition design etc.), the scope of our study takes ‘micro’ as a starting point. We focus on the kind of activism that takes shape in moments of careful design; these are moments when designers move politically, rather than necessarily within political movements. These microprotests respond to community needs through design more than they articulate a broad activist design movement. As such, the impacts of these microprotests often go unnoticed outside of the communities within which they take place. We propose, and test in this essay, a mode of analysis for design microprotests that takes design activism as a starting point but pays more attention to community and translation than designers and their global reach.In his analysis of design activism, Julier proposes “four possible conceptual tactics for the activist designer that are also to be found in particular qualities in the mainstream design culture and economy” (Julier, Introduction 149). We use two of these tactics to begin exploring a selection of attributes common to design microprotests: temporality – which describes the way that speed, slowness, progress and incompletion are dealt with; and territorialisation – which describes the scale at which responsibility and impact is conceived (227). In each of three projects to which we apply these tactics, one of us had a role as a visual communicator. As such, the research is framed by the knowledge creating paradigm described by Jonas as “research through design”.We also draw on other conceptualisations of design activism, and the rich design literature that has emerged in recent times to challenge the colonial legacies of design studies (Schultz; Tristan et al.; Escobar). Some analyses of design activism already focus on the micro or the minor. For example, in their design of social change within organisations as an experimental and iterative process, Lensjkold, Olander and Hasse refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian: “minor design activism is ‘a position in co-design engagements that strives to continuously maintain experimentation” (67). Like minor activism, design microprotests are linked to the continuous mobilisation of actors and networks in processes of collective experimentation. However microprotests do not necessarily focus on organisational change. Rather, they create new (and often tiny) spaces of protest within which new voices can be heard and different kinds of listening can be done.In the first of our three cases, we discuss a representation of transdisciplinary listening. This piece of visual communication is a design microprotest in itself. This section helps to frame what we mean by a safe space by paying attention to the listening mode of communication. In the next sections we explore temporality and territorialisation through the design microprotests Just Spaces which documents the collective imagining of safe places for LBPQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Pansexual, and Queer) women and non-binary identities through a series of graphic objects and Conversation Piece, a book written, designed and published over three days as a proposition for a collective future. A Representation of Transdisciplinary ListeningThe design artefact we present in this section is a representation of listening and can be understood as a microprotest emerging from a collective experiment that materialises firstly as a visual document asking questions of the visual communication discipline and its role in a research collaboration and also as a mirror for the interdisciplinary team to reflexively develop transdisciplinary perspectives on the risks associated with the release of environmental flows in the upper reaches of Hawkesbury Nepean River in NSW, Australia. This research project was funded through a Challenge Grant Scheme to encourage transdisciplinarity within the University. The project team worked with the Hawkesbury Nepean Catchment Management Authority in response to the question: What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows? Listening and visual communication design practice are inescapably linked. Renown American graphic designer and activist Sheila de Bretteville describes a consciousness and a commitment to listening as an openness, rather than antagonism and argument. Fiumara describes listening as nascent or an emerging skill and points to listening as the antithesis of the Western culture of saying and expression.For a visual communication designer there is a very specific listening that can be described as visual hearing. This practice materialises the act of hearing through a visualisation of the information or knowledge that is shared. This act of visual hearing is a performative process tracing the actors’ perspectives. This tracing is used as content, which is then translated into a transcultural representation constituted by the designerly act of perceiving multiple perspectives. The interpretation contributes to a shared project of transdisciplinary understanding.This transrepresentation (Fig. 1) is a manifestation of a small interaction among a research team comprised of a water engineer, sustainable governance researcher, water resource management researcher, environmental economist and a designer. This visualisation is a materialisation of a structured conversation in response to the question What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows? It represents a small contribution that provides an opportunity for reflexivity and documents a moment in time in response to a significant challenge. In this translation of a conversation as a visual representation, a design microprotest is made against reduction, simplification, antagonism and argument. This may seem intangible, but as a protest through design, “it involves the development of artifacts that exist in real time and space, it is situated within everyday contexts and processes of social and economic life” (Julier 226). This representation locates conversation in a visual order that responds to particular categorisations of the political, the institutional, the socio-economic and the physical in a transdisciplinary process that focusses on multiple perspectives.Figure 1: Transrepresentation of responses by an interdisciplinary research team to the question: What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows in the Upper Hawkesbury Nepean River? (2006) Just Spaces: Translating Safe SpacesListening is the foundation of design microprotest. Just Spaces emerged out of a collaborative listening project It’s OK! An Anthology of LBPQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Pansexual and Queer) Women’s and Non-Binary Identities’ Stories and Advice. By visually communicating the way a community practices supportive listening (both in a physical form as a book and as an online resource), It’s OK! opens conversations about how LBPQ women and non-binary identities can imagine and help facilitate safe spaces. These conversations led to thinking about the effects of breaches of safe spaces on young LBPQ women and non-binary identities. In her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed presents Queer Feelings as a new way of thinking about Queer bodies and the way they use and impress upon space. She makes an argument for creating and imagining new ways of creating and navigating public and private spaces. As a design microprotest, Just Spaces opens up Queer ways of navigating space through a process Ahmed describes as “the ‘non-fitting’ or discomfort .... an opening up which can be difficult and exciting” (Ahmed 154). Just Spaces is a series of workshops, translated into a graphic design object, and presented at an exhibition in the stairwell of the library at the University of Technology Sydney. It protests the requirement of navigating heteronormative environments by suggesting ‘Queer’ ways of being in and designing in space. The work offers solutions, suggestions, and new ways of doing and making by offering design methods as tools of microprotest to its participants. For instance, Just Spaces provides a framework for sensitive translation, through the introduction of a structure that helps build personas based on the game Dungeons and Dragons (a game popular among certain LGBTQIA+ communities in Sydney). Figure 2: Exhibition: Just Spaces, held at UTS Library from 5 to 27 April 2018. By focussing the design process on deep listening and rendering voices into visual translations, these workshops responded to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s idea of the “outsider within”, articulating the way research should be navigated in vulnerable groups that have a history of being exploited as part of research. Through reciprocity and generosity, trust was generated in the design process which included a shared dinner; opening up participant-controlled safe spaces.To open up and explore ideas of discomfort and safety, two workshops were designed to provide safe and sensitive spaces for the group of seven LBPQ participants and collaborators. Design methods such as drawing, group imagining and futuring using a central prototype as a prompt drew out discussions of safe spaces. The prototype itself was a small folded house (representative of shelter) printed with a number of questions, such as:Our spaces are often unsafe. We take that as a given. But where do these breaches of safety take place? How was your safe space breached in those spaces?The workshops resulted in tangible objects, made by the participants, but these could not be made public because of privacy implications. So the next step was to use visual communication design to create sensitive and honest visual translations of the conversations. The translations trace images from the participants’ words, sketches and notes. For example, handwritten notes are transcribed and reproduced with a font chosen by the designer based on the tone of the comment and by considering how design can retain the essence of person as well as their anonymity. The translations focus on the micro: the micro breaches of safety; the interactions that take place between participants and their environment; and the everyday denigrating experiences that LBPQ women and non-binary identities go through on an ongoing basis. This translation process requires precise skills, sensitivity, care and deep knowledge of context. These skills operate at the smallest of scales through minute observation and detailed work. This micro-ness translates to the potential for truthfulness and care within the community, as it establishes a precedent through the translations for others to use and adapt for their own communities.The production of the work for exhibition also occurred on a micro level, using a Risograph, a screenprinting photocopier often found in schools, community groups and activist spaces. The machine (ME9350) used for this project is collectively owned by a co-op of Sydney creatives called Rizzeria. Each translation was printed only five times on butter paper. Butter paper is a sensitive surface but difficult to work with making the process slow and painstaking and with a lot of care.All aspects of this process and project are small: the pieced-together translations made by assembling segments of conversations; zines that can be kept in a pocket and read intimately; the group of participants; and the workshop and exhibition spaces. These small spaces of safety and their translations make possible conversations but also enable other safe spaces that move and intervene as design microprotests. Figure 3: Piecing the translations together. Figure 4: Pulling the translation off the drum; this was done every print making the process slow and requiring gentleness. This project was and is about slowing down, listening and visually translating in order to generate and imagine safe spaces. In this slowness, as Julier describes “...the activist is working in a more open-ended way that goes beyond the materialization of the design” (229). It creates methods for listening and collaboratively generating ways to navigate spaces that are fraught with micro conflict. As an act of territorialisation, it created tiny and important spaces as a design microprotest. Conversation Piece: A Fast and Slow BookConversation Piece is an experiment in collective self-publishing. It was made over three days by Frontyard, an activist space in Marrickville, NSW, involved in community “futuring”. Futuring for Frontyard is intended to empower people with tools to imagine and enact preferred futures, in contrast to what design theorist Tony Fry describes as “defuturing”, the systematic destruction of possible futures by design. Materialised as a book, Conversation Piece is also an act of collective futuring. It is a carefully designed process for producing dialogues between unlikely parties using an image archive as a starting point. Conversation Piece was designed with the book sprint format as a starting point. Founded by software designer Adam Hyde, book sprints are a method of collectively generating a book in just a few days then publishing it. Book sprints are related to the programming sprints common in agile software development or Scrum, which are often used to make FLOSS (Free and Open Source Software) manuals. Frontyard had used these techniques in a previous project to develop the Non Cash Arts Asset Platform.Conversation Piece was also modeled on two participatory books made during sprints that focussed on articulating alternative futures. Collaborative Futures was made during Transmediale in 2009, and Futurish: Thinking Out Loud about Futures (2015).The design for Conversation Piece began when Frontyard was invited to participate in the Hobiennale in 2017, a free festival emerging from the “national climate of uncertainty within the arts, influenced by changes to the structure of major arts organisations and diminishing funding opportunities.” The Hobiennale was the first Biennale held in Hobart, Tasmania, but rather than producing a standard large art survey, it focussed on artist-run spaces and initiatives, emergant practices, and marginalised voices in the arts. Frontyard is not an artist collective and does not work for commissions. Rather, the response to the invitation was based on how much energy there was in the group to contribute to Hobiennale. At Frontyard one of the ways collective and individual energy is accounted for is using spoon theory, a disability metaphor used to describe the planning that many people have to do to conserve and ration energy reserves in their daily lives (Miserandino). As outlined in the glossary of Conversation Piece, spoon theory is:A way of accounting for our emotional or physical energy and therefore our ability to participate in activities. Spoon theory can be used to collaborate with care and avoid guilt and burn out. Usually spoon theory is applied at an individual level, but it can also be used by organisations. For example, Hobiennale had enough spoons to participate in the Hobiennale so we decided to give it a go. (180)To make to book, Frontyard invited visitors to Hobiennale to participate in a series of open conversations that began with the photographic archive of the organisation over the two years of its existence. During a prototyping session, Frontyard designed nine diagrams that propositioned ways to begin conversations by combining images in different ways. Figure 5: Diagram 9. Conversation Piece: p.32-33One of the purposes of the diagrams, and the book itself, was to bring attention to the micro dynamics of conversation over time, and to create a safe space to explore the implications of these. While the production process and the book itself is micro (ten copies were printed and immediately given away), the decisions made in regards to licensing (a creative commons license is used), distribution (via the Internet Archive) and content generation (through participatory design processes) the project’s commitment to open design processes (Van Abel, Evers, Klaassen and Troxler) mean its impact is unpredictable. Counter-logical to the conventional copyright of books, open design borrows its definition - and at times its technologies and here its methods - from open source software design, to advocate the production of design objects based on fluid and shared circulation of design information. The tension between the abundance produced by an open approach to making, and the attention to the detail of relationships produced by slowing down and scaling down communication processes is made apparent in Conversation Piece:We challenge ourselves at Frontyard to keep bureaucratic processes as minimal an open as possible. We don’t have an application or acquittal process: we prefer to meet people over a cup of tea. A conversation is a way to work through questions. (7)As well as focussing on the micro dynamics of conversations, this projects protests the authority of archives. It works to dismantle the hierarchies of art and publishing through the design of an open, transparent, participatory publishing process. It offers a range of propositions about alternative economies, the agency of people working together at small scales, and the many possible futures in the collective imaginaries of people rethinking time, outcomes, results and progress.The contributors to the book are those in conversation – a complex networks of actors that are relationally configured and themselves in constant change, so as Julier explains “the object is subject to constant transformations, either literally or in its meaning. The designer is working within this instability.” (230) This is true of all design, but in this design microprotest, Frontyard works within this instability in order to redirect it. The book functions as a series of propositions about temporality and territorialisation, and focussing on micro interventions rather than radical political movements. In one section, two Frontyard residents offer a story of migration that also serves as a recipe for purslane soup, a traditional Portuguese dish (Rodriguez and Brison). Another lifts all the images of hand gestures from the Frontyard digital image archive and represents them in a photo essay. Figure 6: Talking to Rocks. Conversation Piece: p.143ConclusionThis article is an invitation to momentarily suspend the framing of design activism as a global movement in order to slow down the analysis of design protests and start paying attention to the brief moments and small spaces of protest that energise social change in design practice. We offered three examples of design microprotests, opening with a representation of transdisciplinary listening in order to frame design as a way if interpreting and listening as well as generating and producing. The two following projects we describe are collective acts of translation: small, momentary conversations designed into graphic forms that can be shared, reproduced, analysed, and remixed. Such protests have their limitations. Beyond the artefacts, the outcomes generated by design microprotests are difficult to identify. While they push and pull at the temporality and territorialisation of design, they operate at a small scale. How design microprotests connect to global networks of protest is an important question yet to be explored. The design practices of transdisciplinary listening, Queer Feelings and translations, and collaborative book sprinting, identified in these design microprotests change the thoughts and feelings of those who participate in ways that are impossible to measure in real time, and sometimes cannot be measured at all. Yet these practices are important now, as they shift the way designers design, and the way others understand what is designed. By identifying the common attributes of design microprotests, we can begin to understand the way necessary political conversations emerge in design practice, for instance about safe spaces, transdisciplinarity, and archives. Taking a research through design approach these can be understood over time, rather than just in the moment, and in specific territories that belong to community. They can be reconfigured into different conversations that change our world for the better. References Ahmed, Sara. “Queer Feelings.” The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. 143-167.Clarke, Alison J. "'Actions Speak Louder': Victor Papanek and the Legacy of Design Activism." Design and Culture 5.2 (2013): 151-168.De Bretteville, Sheila L. Design beyond Design: Critical Reflection and the Practice of Visual Communication. Ed. Jan van Toorn. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Akademie Editions, 1998. 115-127.Evers, L., et al. Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. 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The discursive co-construction of knowledge, identity, and difference: An ethnography of communication in the high school mainstream. Applied Linguistics (Oxford, UK), 23, 3 (2002), 289—322.03—245 Egbert, Joy (Washington State U., USA; Email: egbert@wsunix.wsu.edu), Paulus, Trena M. and Nakamichi, Yoko. The impact of CALL instruction on classroom computer use: A foundation for rethinking technology in teacher education. Language Learning and Technology (http://llt.msu.edu/), 6, 3 (2002), 108—26.03—246 Einbeck, Kandace (U. of Colorado at Boulder, USA). Using literature to promote cultural fluency in study abroad programs. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German (Cherry Hill, NJ, USA), 35, 1 (2002), 59—67.03—247 Fallon, Jean M. (Hollins U., Virginia, USA). On foreign ground: One attempt at attracting non-French majors to a French Studies course. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 35, 4 (2002), 405—13.03—248 Furuhata, Hamako (Mount Union Coll., Ohio, USA; Email: furuhah@muc.edu). Learning Japanese in America: A survey of preferred teaching methods. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 15, 2 (2002), 134—42.03—249 Goldstein, Tara (Ontario Inst. for Studies in Ed., U. of Toronto, Canada). No Pain, No Gain: Student playwriting as critical ethnographic language research. The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue canadienne des langues vivantes (Toronto, Ont.), 59, 1 (2002), 53—76.03—250 Hu, Guangwei (Nanyang Technological U., Singapore; Email: gwhu@nie.edu.sg). Potential cultural resistance to pedagogical imports: The case of communicative language teaching in China. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 15, 2 (2002), 93—105.03—251 Huang, Jingzi (Monmouth U., New Jersey, USA; Email: jhuang@monmouth.edu). Activities as a vehicle for linguistic and sociocultural knowledge at the elementary level. Language Teaching Research (London, UK), 7, 1 (2003), 3—33.03—252 Hyland, Ken (City U. of Hong Kong; Email: ken.hyland@cityu.edu.hk). 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If I find out that you have bought a $90 red light sabre, Tara, well there's going to be trouble. -- Kevin Brabazon A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year old father tried to convince me of imminent responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bank fees and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person. The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation Xers like myself, it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any future history of the present. Revelling in the aura of the Australian release for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this paper investigates popular memory, an undertheorised affiliation between popular culture and cultural studies.1 The excitement encircling the Star Wars prequel has been justified in terms of 'hype' or marketing. Such judgements frame the men and women cuing for tickets, talking Yodas and light sabres as fools or duped souls who need to get out more. My analysis explores why Star Wars has generated this enthusiasm, and how cultural studies can mobilise this passionate commitment to consider notions of popularity, preservation and ephemerality. We'll always have Tattooine. Star Wars has been a primary popular cultural social formation for a generation. The stories of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO and R2D2 offer an alternative narrative for the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a comfort to have the Royal Shakespearian tones of Alec Guinness confirming that the Force would be with us, through economic rationalism, unemployment, Pauline Hanson and Madonna discovering yoga. The Star Wars Trilogy, encompassing A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was released between 1977 and 1983. These films have rarely slipped from public attention, being periodically 'brought back' through new cinematic and video releases. The currency of Star Wars is matched with the other great popular cultural formations of the post-war period: the James Bond series and Star Trek. One reason for the continued success of these programmes is that other writers, film makers and producers cannot leave these texts alone. Bond survives not only through Pierce Brosnan's good looks, but the 'Hey Baby' antics of Austin Powers. Star Trek, through four distinct series, has become an industry that will last longer than Voyager's passage back from the Delta Quadrant. Star Wars, perhaps even more effectively than the other popular cultural heavyweights, has enmeshed itself into other filmic and televisual programming. Films like Spaceballs and television quizzes on Good News Week keep the knowledge system and language current and pertinent.2 Like Umberto Eco realised of Casablanca, Star Wars is "a living example of living textuality" (199). Both films are popular because of imperfections and intertextual archetypes, forming a filmic quilt of sensations and affectivities. Viewers are aware that "the cliches are talking among themselves" (Eco 209). As these cinematic texts move through time, the depth and commitment of these (con)textual dialogues are repeated and reinscribed. To hold on to a memory is to isolate a moment or an image and encircle it with meaning. Each day we experience millions of texts: some are remembered, but most are lost. Some popular cultural texts move from ephemera to popular memory to history. In moving beyond individual reminiscences -- the personal experiences of our lifetime -- we enter the sphere of popular culture. Collective or popular memory is a group or community experience of a textualised reality. For example, during the Second World War, there were many private experiences, but certain moments arch beyond the individual. Songs by Vera Lynn are fully textualised experiences that become the fodder for collective memory. Similarly, Star Wars provides a sense-making mechanism for the 1980s. Like all popular culture, these texts allow myriad readership strategies, but there is collective recognition of relevance and importance. Popular memory is such an important site because it provides us, as cultural critics, with a map of emotionally resonant sites of the past, moments that are linked with specific subjectivities and a commonality of expression. While Star Wars, like all popular cultural formations, has a wide audience, there are specific readings that are pertinent for particular groups. To unify a generation around cultural texts is an act of collective memory. As Harris has suggested, "sometimes, youth does interesting things with its legacy and creatively adapts its problematic into seemingly autonomous cultural forms" (79). Generation X refers to an age cohort born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally cultural studies theorists have found a Grail subculture. Being depthless, ambivalent, sexually repressed and social failures, Xers are a cultural studies dream come true. They were the children of the media revolution. Star Wars is integral to this textualised database. A fan on the night of the first screening corrected a journalist: "we aren't Generation X, we are the Star Wars generation" (Brendon, in Miller 9). An infatuation and reflexivity with the media is the single framework of knowledge in which Xers operate. This shared understanding is the basis for comedy, and particularly revealed (in Australia) in programmes like The Panel and Good News Week. Television themes, lines of film dialogue and contemporary news broadcasts are the basis of the game show. The aesthetics of life transforms television into a real. Or, put another way, "individual lives may be fragmented and confused but McDonald's is universal" (Hopkins 17). A group of textual readers share a literacy, a new way of reading the word and world of texts. Nostalgia is a weapon. The 1990s has been a decade of revivals: from Abba to skateboards, an era of retro reinscription has challenged linear theories of history and popular culture. As Timothy Carter reveals, "we all loved the Star Wars movies when we were younger, and so we naturally look forward to a continuation of those films" (9). The 1980s has often been portrayed as a bad time, of Thatcher and Reagan, cold war brinkmanship, youth unemployment and HIV. For those who were children and (amorphously phrased) 'young adults' of this era, the popular memory is of fluorescent fingerless gloves, Ray Bans, 'Choose Life' t-shirts and bubble skirts. It was an era of styling mousse, big hair, the Wham tan, Kylie and Jason and Rick Astley's dancing. Star Wars action figures gave the films a tangibility, holding the future of the rebellion in our hands (literally). These memories clumsily slop into the cup of the present. The problem with 'youth' is that it is semiotically too rich: the expression is understood, but not explained, by discourses as varied as the educational system, family structures, leisure industries and legal, medical and psychological institutions. It is a term of saturation, where normality is taught, and deviance is monitored. All cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history of youth culture. The taken-for-granted 'youth as resistance' mantra, embodied in Resistance through Rituals and Subculture: The Meaning of Style, transformed young people into the ventriloquist's puppet of cultural studies. The strings of the dancing, smoking, swearing and drinking puppet took many years to cut. The feminist blade of Angela McRobbie did some damage to the fraying filaments, as did Dick Hebdige's reflexive corrections in Hiding in the Light. However, the publications, promotion and pedagogy of Gen X ended the theoretical charade. Gen X, the media sophisticates, played with popular culture, rather than 'proper politics.' In Coupland's Generation X, Claire, one of the main characters believed that "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." ... We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert -- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process. (8) Television and film are part of this story telling process. This intense connection generated an ironic and reflexive literacy in the media. Television became the basis for personal pleasures and local resistances, resulting in a disciplined mobilisation of popular cultural surfaces. Even better than the real thing. As the youngest of Generation Xers are now in their late twenties, they have moved from McJobs to careers. Robert Kizlik, a teacher trainer at an American community college expressed horror as the lack of 'commonsensical knowledge' from his new students. He conducted a survey for teachers training in the social sciences, assessing their grasp of history. There was one hundred percent recognition of such names as Madonna, Mike Tyson, and Sharon Stone, but they hardly qualify as important social studies content ... . I wondered silently just what it is that these students are going to teach when they become employed ... . The deeper question is not that we have so many high school graduates and third and fourth year college students who are devoid of basic information about American history and culture, but rather, how, in the first place, these students came to have the expectations that they could become teachers. (n. pag.) Kizlik's fear is that the students, regardless of their enthusiasm, had poor recognition of knowledge he deemed significant and worthy. His teaching task, to convince students of the need for non-popular cultural knowledges, has resulted in his course being termed 'boring' or 'hard'. He has been unable to reconcile the convoluted connections between personal stories and televisual narratives. I am reminded (perhaps unhelpfully) of one of the most famous filmic teachers, Mr Holland. Upon being attacked by his superiors for using rock and roll in his classes, he replied that he would use anything to instil in his students a love of music. Working with, rather than against, popular culture is an obvious pedagogical imperative. George Lucas has, for example, confirmed the Oprahfied spirituality of the current age. Obviously Star Wars utilises fables, myths3 and fairy tales to summon the beautiful Princess, the gallant hero and the evil Empire, but has become something more. Star Wars slots cleanly into an era of Body Shop Feminism, John Gray's gender politics and Rikki Lake's relationship management. Brian Johnson and Susan Oh argued that the film is actually a new religion. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away -- late 1970s California -- the known universe of George Lucas came into being. In the beginning, George created Star Wars. And the screen was without form, and void. And George said, 'Let there be light', and there was Industrial Light and Magic. And George divided the light from the darkness, with light sabres, and called the darkness the Evil Empire.... And George saw that it was good. (14) The writers underestimate the profound emotional investment placed in the trilogy by millions of people. Genesis narratives describe the Star Wars phenomenon, but do not analyse it. The reason why the films are important is not only because they are a replacement for religion. Instead, they are an integrated component of popular memory. Johnson and Oh have underestimated the influence of pop culture as "the new religion" (14). It is not a form of cheap grace. The history of ideas is neither linear nor traceable. There is no clear path from Plato to Prozac or Moses to Mogadon. Obi-Wan Kenobi is not a personal trainer for the ailing spirituality of our age. It was Ewan McGregor who fulfilled the Xer dream to be the young Obi Wan. As he has stated, "there is nothing cooler than being a Jedi knight" (qtd. in Grant 15). Having survived feet sawing in Shallow Grave and a painfully large enema in Trainspotting, there are few actors who are better prepared to carry the iconographic burden of a Star Wars prequel. Born in 1971, he is the Molly Ringwall of the 1990s. There is something delicious about the new Obi Wan, that hails what Hicks described as "a sense of awareness and self- awareness, of detached observation, of not taking things seriously, and a use of subtle dry humour" (79). The metaphoric light sabre was passed to McGregor. The pull of the dark side. When fans attend The Phantom Menace, they tend to the past, as to a loved garden. Whether this memory is a monument or a ruin depends on the preservation of the analogue world in the digital realm. The most significant theoretical and discursive task in the present is to disrupt the dual ideologies punctuating the contemporary era: inevitable technological change and progress.4 Only then may theorists ponder the future of a digitised past. Disempowered groups, who were denied a voice and role in the analogue history of the twentieth century, will have inequalities reified and reinforced through the digital archiving of contemporary life. The Web has been pivotal to the new Star Wars film. Lucasfilm has an Internet division and an official Website. Between mid November and May, this site has been accessed twenty million times (Gallott 15). Other sites, such as TheForce.net and Countdown to Star Wars, are a record of the enthusiasm and passion of fans. As Daniel Fallon and Matthew Buchanan have realised, "these sites represent the ultimate in film fandom -- virtual communities where like-minded enthusiasts can bathe in the aura generated by their favourite masterpiece" (27). Screensavers, games, desktop wallpaper, interviews and photo galleries have been downloaded and customised. Some ephemeral responses to The Phantom Menace have been digitally recorded. Yet this moment of audience affectivity will be lost without a consideration of digital memory. The potentials and problems of the digital and analogue environments need to be oriented into critical theories of information, knowledge, entertainment and pleasure. The binary language of computer-mediated communication allows a smooth transference of data. Knowledge and meaning systems are not exchanged as easily. Classifying, organising and preserving information make it useful. Archival procedures have been both late and irregular in their application.5 Bocher and Ihlenfeldt assert that 2500 new web sites are coming on-line every day ("A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio"). The difficulties and problems confronting librarians and archivists who wish to preserve digital information is revealed in the Australian government's PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) Site. Compared with an object in a museum which may lie undisturbed for years in a storeroom, or a book on a shelf, or even Egyptian hieroglyd on the wall of a tomb, digital information requires much more active maintenance. If we want access to digital information in the future, we must plan and act now. (PADI, "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?") phics carve The speed of digitisation means that responsibility for preserving cultural texts, and the skills necessary to enact this process, is increasing the pressure facing information professionals. An even greater difficulty when preserving digital information is what to keep, and what to release to the ephemeral winds of cyberspace. 'Qualitative criteria' construct an historical record that restates the ideologies of the powerful. Concerns with quality undermine the voices of the disempowered, displaced and decentred. The media's instability through technological obsolescence adds a time imperative that is absent from other archival discussions.6 While these problems have always taken place in the analogue world, there was a myriad of alternative sites where ephemeral material was stored, such as the family home. Popular cultural information will suffer most from the 'blind spots' of digital archivists. While libraries rarely preserve the ephemera of a time, many homes (including mine) preserve the 'trash' of a culture. A red light sabre, toy dalek, Duran Duran posters and a talking Undertaker are all traces of past obsessions and fandoms. Passion evaporates, and interests morph into new trends. These objects remain in attics, under beds, in boxes and sheds throughout the world. Digital documents necessitate a larger project of preservation, with great financial (and spatial) commitments of technology, software and maintenance. Libraries rarely preserve the ephemera -- the texture and light -- of the analogue world. The digital era reduces the number of fan-based archivists. Subsequently forfeited is the spectrum of interests and ideologies that construct the popular memory of a culture. Once bits replace atoms, the recorded world becomes structured by digital codes. Only particular texts will be significant enough to store digitally. Samuel Florman stated that "in the digital age nothing need be lost; do we face the prospect of drowning in trivia as the generations succeed each other?" (n. pag.) The trivia of academics may be the fodder (and pleasures) of everyday life. Digitised preservation, like analogue preservation, can never 'represent' plural paths through the past. There is always a limit and boundary to what is acceptable obsolescence. The Star Wars films suggests that "the whole palette of digital technology is much more subtle and supple; if you can dream it, you can see it" (Corliss 65). This film will also record how many of the dreams survive and are archived. Films, throughout the century, have changed the way in which we construct and remember the past. They convey an expressive memory, rather than an accurate history. Certainly, Star Wars is only a movie. Yet, as Rushkoff has suggested, "we have developed a new language of references and self-references that identify media as a real thing and media history as an actual social history" (32). The build up in Australia to The Phantom Menace has been wilfully joyful. This is a history of the present, a time which I know will, in retrospect, be remembered with great fondness. It is a collective event for a generation, but it speaks to us all in different ways. At ten, it is easy to be amazed and enthralled at popular culture. By thirty, it is more difficult. When we see Star Wars, we go back to visit our memories. With red light sabre in hand, we splice through time, as much as space. Footnotes The United States release of the film occurred on 19 May 1999. In Australia, the film's first screenings were on 3 June. Many cinemas showed The Phantom Menace at 12:01 am, (very) early Thursday morning. The three main players of the GNW team, Paul McDermott, Mikey Robbins and Julie McCrossin, were featured on the cover of Australia's Juice magazine in costumes from The Phantom Menace, being Obi-Wan, Yoda and Queen Amidala respectively. Actually, the National Air and Space Museum had a Star Wars exhibition in 1997, titled "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth". For example, Janet Collins, Michael Hammond and Jerry Wellington, in Teaching and Learning with the Media, stated that "the message is simple: we now have the technology to inform, entertain and educate. Miss it and you, your family and your school will be left behind" (3). Herb Brody described the Net as "an overstuffed, underorganised attic full of pictures and documents that vary wildly in value", in "Wired Science". The interesting question is, whose values will predominate when the attic is being cleared and sorted? This problem is extended because the statutory provision of legal deposit, which obliges publishers to place copies of publications in the national library of the country in which the item is published, does not include CD-ROMs or software. References Bocher, Bob, and Kay Ihlenfeldt. "A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio: Effective Use of WebSearch Engines." State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Website. 13 Mar. 1998. 15 June 1999 <http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dlcl/lbstat/search2.php>. Brody, Herb. "Wired Science." Technology Review Oct. 1996. 15 June 1999 <http://www.techreview.com/articles/oct96/brody.php>. Carter, Timothy. "Wars Weary." Cinescape 39 (Mar./Apr. 1999): 9. Collins, Janet, Michael Hammond, and Jerry Wellington. Teaching and Learning with Multimedia. London: Routledge, 1997. Corliss, Richard. "Ready, Set, Glow!" Time 18 (3 May 1999): 65. Count Down to Star Wars. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://starwars.countingdown.com/>. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X. London: Abacus, 1991. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper-Reality. London: Picador, 1987. Fallon, Daniel, and Matthew Buchanan. "Now Screening." Australian Net Guide 4.5 (June 1999): 27. Florman, Samuel. "From Here to Eternity." MIT's Technology Review 100.3 (Apr. 1997). Gallott, Kirsten. "May the Web Be with you." Who Weekly 24 May 1999: 15. Grant, Fiona. "Ewan's Star Soars!" TV Week 29 May - 4 June 1999: 15. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Harris, David. From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: the Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992. Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light. London: Routledge, 1988. Hopkins, Susan. "Generation Pulp." Youth Studies Australia Spring 1995. Johnson, Brian, and Susan Oh. "The Second Coming: as the Newest Star Wars Film Illustrates, Pop Culture Has Become a New Religion." Maclean's 24 May 1999: 14-8. Juice 78 (June 1999). Kizlik, Robert. "Generation X Wants to Teach." International Journal of Instructional Media 26.2 (Spring 1999). Lucasfilm Ltd. Star Wars: Welcome to the Official Site. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.starwars.com/>. Miller, Nick. "Generation X-Wing Fighter." The West Australian 4 June 1999: 9. PADI. "What Digital Information Should be Preserved? Appraisal and Selection." Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. 11 March 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/what.php>. PADI. "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?" Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/why.php>. Rushkoff, Douglas. Media Virus. Sydney: Random House, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Tara Brabazon. "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php>. Chicago style: Tara Brabazon, "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Tara Brabazon. (1999) A red light sabre to go, and other histories of the present. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]).

As a genre, science fiction deals with possible futures, imagining places and technologies that typically do not exist in audiences’ own lives. Science fiction film takes this directive a step further by creating visual representations of these futures and possibilities, presenting audiences with imagined ideas of what new technologies or unfamiliar places might look like. Thus, although any science fiction text can describe sociocultural and technological futures, science fiction film goes a step further by providing images that viewers do not have to envision for themselves. This difference can enable science fiction films to deliver even more incisive stories and commentaries on futuristic technologies as “sociotechnical assemblages” (Gillespie 18) – that is, as machines whose possibilities stem from humans’ interactions with them as much as from the technologies themselves.Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra maintain that today’s society is already interested in a real-world version of sociotechnologies: they call this interest the “prosthetic impulse” (4). For Smith and Morra, the prosthetic impulse can denote either “ways that the body and technology come into contact with one another” (4) or else any exploration of boundaries between technoculture and “the body, its histories, and its mutability” (6). However, Smith and Morra also warn that the prosthetic impulse often creates unreasonable expectations of what technology can accomplish: a prosthetic can “assume an epic status that is out of proportion with its abilities to fulfill our ambitions for it” (Smith and Morra 2), and the drive to “enhance” human bodies’ capabilities can signify beliefs that abled bodies are the standard, desirable norm (S. Smith).Science fiction films in turn often pick up on real-world ideas such as Smith and Morra’s prosthetic impulse as new ways of visualizing possible futures. Knowledgeable fans could undoubtedly list several examples of prosthetics in favorite sci-fi movies, including those donned by Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker, Star Trek’s Borg collective, Mad Max: Fury Road’s Imperator Furiosa, and many more. However, these films can also heighten the prosthetic’s immoderately “epic status” (Smith and Morra 2) and result in “our fantasies for technological possibility [being] played out across depictions of impairment” (Hung par. 10). In science fiction film, then, the prosthetic impulse can strongly reinforce problematic assumptions about what human beings “need” to have added, augmented, or replaced in order to function according to subjective norms.Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, though, expands the implications of the prosthetic impulse even further by broadening the types of bodies, losses, and functions that we imagine prosthetics can address. Set in a dystopian future where human-driven climate change has decimated the environment, world governments have instituted mandatory birth control, and socioeconomic stratification has skyrocketed, A.I. Artificial Intelligence speaks directly to Vivian Carol Sobchack’s 2006 concern that “theoretical use of the prosthetic metaphor tends to transfer agency [from] human actors to human artifacts” (23), though it does so in a novel way.The film’s human characters, or “human actors” to use Sobchack’s term, expend their creativity and resources not to address the issues of environmental catastrophe, starvation, and class warfare that humans themselves have created: instead, they turn to manufacturing advanced robots, or “mechas”, that are literally “human artifacts” (Sobchack 23) created to help humanity avoid the debilitating consequences of its own destructive actions. As a result, the film’s mecha characters, seen most clearly in the “child-substitute mecha” David and the mecha prostitute Gigolo Joe, are positioned as prosthetic humans intended to fill social roles and functions that human beings themselves are incapable of fully satisfying.The Prosthetic HumanEven though it offers a new angle to this concept, A.I. Artificial Intelligence is hardly the only science fiction film concerned with some configuration of the prosthetic impulse. In fact, several other science fiction films incorporate one of three other versions, each building up to more and more complex possibilities before we reach the prosthetic human as envisioned in A.I.The first – and arguably most common – treatment of the prosthetic impulse in science fiction film is found in the partial prosthetic, where technology is depicted as replacing or repairing one visible part of the perceptible bodily whole. Common versions of the partial prosthetic include replacements for limbs or even certain organs, with examples such as Luke Skywalker’s prosthetic hand in Star Wars, the techno-organic Borg collective in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Bucky Barnes’s metal arm in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and other Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films, and Furiosa’s metal arm in Mad Max: Fury Road. The partial prosthetic in science fiction film is the most analogous to real-world prosthetics, despite problematic conflations created by this comparison (S. Smith), and the partial prosthetic is also the one that Mailee Hung is describing when she maintains that in science fiction film “it is technological, or even technophilic, fantasy that is being explored rather than the spectrum of human ability” (par. 11).A second treatment of the prosthetic impulse in science fiction film is visible in the full-body prosthetic, which denotes a technology that completely encloses or envelops the human body. Anne McCaffrey offers an early example of this type with her “Ship Who Sang” series (1961–1969), where “brainships” are created when children with severe physical disabilities but above-average brains can be rescued from euthanasia by having their minds linked with spaceships. Thankfully, later science fiction narratives tend to avoid most of the eugenicist and ableist overtones plaguing McCaffrey’s work. Science fiction films also offer examples of full-body prosthetics that can be departed or disengaged from at will, and these prosthetics may be used to enhance an abled body rather than housing a disabled one. Examples of full-body prosthetics in science fiction film include the boxing robots of Real Steel (2011), the Jaegers of Pacific Rim (2013) and Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), the genetically-engineered alien bodies operated by remote human pilots in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), and the police robot MOOSE in Chappie (2015), among others. In these cases, the full-body prosthetic is a technological entity that must be interfaced with by a human consciousness – and sometimes the whole human body – in order to perform some function that the human body alone cannot accomplish.A third way of depicting the prosthetic impulse in science fiction film can be found in what Victor Grech calls Pinocchio Syndrome, or a “reverse prosthetic impulse” (265). Here technological, non-human characters “desire to become human” (Grech 263) and often attempt to gain humanity in the form of a human body, “its histories, and its mutability” (Smith and Morra 6) that will replace their own mechanical components. Examples of this third type include Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994 television, 1994–2002 films) and NDR-113/Andrew of the novelette “Bicentennial Man” (1967), the novel Positronic Man (1992), and the film Bicentennial Man (1999). Data is an android, and Andrew is a service robot, who both explore what it would mean to “be” human and actively pursue different means of achieving humanness – Data through human emotions and NDR-113/Andrew through a fully human body.All three of these science fiction versions – the partial prosthetic, the full prosthetic, and the reverse prosthetic impulse or Pinocchio Syndrome – tend to reinforce Smith and Morra’s warning that the prosthetic, both as an aid and as a technology, can “assume an epic status that is out of proportion with its abilities to fulfill our ambitions for it” (2). Put differently, just because these technologies exist within the films’ storyworlds does not mean that they can fix the characters’ or even the worlds’ problems, and the plots of many science fiction films actually stem from these assumptions.Of these three versions, Grech’s “reverse prosthetic impulse” (265) might initially seem the most applicable to A.I. Artificial Intelligence, particularly because most of the film follows David’s quest to find the Blue Fairy of the Pinocchio tale and petition her to make him “a real boy” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). However, even Grech’s term does not fully cover what Spielberg’s film is attempting through its characters and its setting. Unlike robot characters who embody Grech’s reverse prosthetic impulse, David is not attempting to “become” human: instead, he articulates his struggle as the desire to “become real”, which prioritizes not humanness via a human body but instead David’s self-perceived ability to better fulfill a particular role within a nuclear family. Moreover, unlike the ways in which Data and NDR-113/Andrew fulfill primarily career-adjacent roles in their respective storyworlds – Data as a ship’s officer, NDR-113/Andrew initially as a caretaker and butler – A.I. Artificial Intelligence depicts a world in which mechas are both an “essential” form of labor in a decimated global economy, but can also be constructed to fill specifically social roles such as child or lover. Where robots like Data and NDR-113/Andrew enact a reverse prosthetic impulse in their yearning to “become” human (Grech 263), thus treating humanness and the human body as prosthetics to technology, David as a “child-substitute mecha” and Gigolo Joe as a “lover robot” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) are more like prosthetic humans.In A.I. Artificial Intelligence, humans attempt to replace, enhance, or augment specific interpersonal relationships using “human artifacts” that function like Sobchack’s “human actors” – only, better than those human actors ever could be. David is continually described as a child who demonstrates unconditional love but never loses his temper, catches ill, or grows older; Gigolo Joe describes mecha prostitutes like himself as “the guiltless pleasures of the lonely human being” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) and promises that they will never get pregnant, clingy, or tired of sex. Because David is a “toy boy” and Gigolo Joe is a “boy toy” (Sobchack 2) – both meant to enhance different types of human relationships without the inconveniences that a human actor would bring into the picture – A.I. Artificial Intelligence is also imagining sociocultural structures like the nuclear family or the heterosexual romantic relationship as the wholes, the social bodies, that the prosthetic human will supposedly repair. Here the prosthetic impulse becomes human beings’ drive to use reparative technologies to replace other human beings entirely, rather than simply parts or functions of the human body.David as Prosthetic HumanDavid’s role as a prosthetic human meant to repair or augment human relationships is made clear even before the character himself first appears onscreen. Instead, the film’s initial scene follows Professor Allen Hobby, the scientist who leads the team that later creates David, as he pitches a new mecha of “a qualitatively different order” to a skeptical audience (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). Hobby contends that his new robot will be capable of love “like a child for its parents” instead of the “sensuality simulators” already available (A.I. Artificial Intelligence), and moreover, that this kind of love “will be the key by which they [mechas] acquire a kind of sub-consciousness never before achieved. An inner world of metaphor, of intuition, of self-motivated reasoning, of dreams” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). However, these plans are quickly challenged by a female scientist who poses a moral question: “Isn’t the real conundrum [whether] you can get a human to love them back?” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). Hobby then cycles through three responses to his peer’s question, all of which point to the ways in which David is positioned as a prosthetic human.First, Hobby stresses that this new mecha will be “a perfect child caught in a freeze-frame: always loving, never ill, never changing” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). His claim implies that families want or need a perfect child, and also that childhood perfection entails unwavering physical health, a permanently positive attitude, and unshakeable devotion to the parent(s) – all features that a real human child, as Sobchack’s “human actor”, cannot provide. Then too, Hobby’s claim that David is a child caught in “freeze-frame” perfection also hints that, as a form of technology, a prosthetic human supersedes many of a biological human’s limitations: just moments later, for example, the film’s audience learns that David’s adoptive family the Swintons have a young son, Martin, who has been placed in a cryogenic chamber until his terminal illness can be treated. For David, being “caught in a freeze-frame” of eternal and “perfect” childhood is beneficial to the Swintons, who will then experience his love and participation in their family unit forever – unlike Martin, who when similarly “frozen” cannot express or reciprocate familial affection at all, and so has been superseded by David.Hobby’s second response to the female scientist’s moral question is to assert that David, as a “child-substitute mecha” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence), will answer both a market need and a human one: because world governments issue a limited number of pregnancy licenses, Hobby argues, mechas like David may become many families’ only way of having children. Here, the family unit is imagined as incomplete without offspring, to the extent that there is a species-wide “human need” for children (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) even though global catastrophes such as climate change and mass starvation are unavoidable threats to real children’s future welfare. To this end, Hobby positions a “child-substitute mecha” like David as a prosthetic for the family unit, filling in for children without taking up any of the resources needed to raise an actual member of the population who will then face and inherit unfixable global issues. Moreover, toward the end of A.I. audiences also learn that David was created to look like Hobby’s own dead son, meaning that this entire line of child-substitute mechas has stemmed from Hobby’s own grief – and perhaps his need of a prosthetic to repair it.Finally, Hobby’s last response to his peer’s challenge is to ask: “In the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). This rhetorical question reiterates how Hobby built David, reminding Hobby’s challenger – and by extension the film’s audience – that human actors are technology’s creators. The question’s rhetorical nature also implies that a creator’s status translates to their right to use such created technologies however they choose – regardless of the potential harm to either the prosthetic human or the "real" humans around them.Thus, although most of A.I. Artificial Intelligence does follow David’s journey to become “real”, it is important to realize that this quest actually stems from his being a prosthetic human rather than just Pinocchio Syndrome or a “reverse prosthetic impulse” (Grech 265). The very features of unconditional love, eternal innocence, and unchanging health that initially made David so attractive to the grieving Swintons are the same attributes that later lead to the family’s hostility when Martin does recover, and David is eventually abandoned in the woods – the prosthetic human child ousted for the “real” human child he was intended to replace. David’s longing to become “a real boy” so that Monica Swinton will return his love and welcome him home stems from his realization that he was always just a “technological substitution” (Hung par. 9) for Martin, and because of this, David’s desire to “become real” is better understood as him seeking to become a true part of the whole nuclear family instead of remaining a replacement or attachment to it. Rather than just “desire to become human” (Grech 263), David seeks to move from being a “human artifact” to becoming a “human actor” (Sobchack 23).Gigolo Joe as Prosthetic HumanWhile Gigolo Joe also serves as a prosthetic human in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, he does so in different ways than David. As a “child-substitute mecha”, David was created for intentionally prosthetic ends: even though he “can never be anything more than an approximate substitute” (Rosenbaum 74), he was still made specifically to repair or complete family units like the Swintons, rendering them “whole” by taking the place of an unavailable human child. As a mecha prostitute, though, Gigolo Joe was not created with prosthetic ends in mind: he was made to augment or supplement sexual experiences on a temporary basis, not to replace a long-term human partner or to make a sexual or romantic relationship whole by his presence within it. Also in obvious contrast to David, Gigolo Joe addresses sexual appetite rather than a need for filial love, provides short-term pleasure instead of a long-term connection, and is never intended to be seen by the film’s human characters as a human man instead of a male-shaped mecha. These are crucial differences between the two mechas’ purposes, functions, and target audiences, and Sobchack sums up this disparity by describing David and Gigolo Joe as two different types of “love machines” that remain “[s]uspended between an ironic Kubrickian critique of technological man and his Spielbergian redemption” (12–13).However, these differences between David and Gigolo Joe also translate into their being different kinds of prosthetic human. Where David was created to be a prosthetic human in the context of a childless family, replacing a needed member in order to make that family whole, Gigolo Joe takes the initiative to position himself as a prosthetic human, substituting the technology of his mecha body for the various physiological and/or emotional shortcomings of absent human sexual partners. Then too, where David rejects and attempts to outstrip his status as a “technological substitution” (Hung par. 9) for a human being, Gigolo Joe seems to exult in his part as substitute for human being.Audiences are shown this difference immediately. Where David is introduced through descriptions by Hobby, the scientist who created him and knows exactly what he wants David to accomplish, Gigolo Joe is introduced in person, alongside a nervous young woman who has apparently solicited him for sex. This unnamed woman admits that she has never had sex with a mecha before, and Gigolo Joe quickly discovers bruises from physical abuse by a human partner. In implied contrast to this unseen human partner, Gigolo Joe remains quiet, respectful, and gentle as he navigates the young woman’s communication of her fears and desires: he also assures her first that “once you’ve had a lover robot, you’ll never want a real man again” and then that “you are a goddess ... [and] you deserve much better in your life. You deserve me” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). Both implicitly and explicitly, then, Gigolo Joe promises to provide his client with sexual and pseudo-romantic fulfillment: Sobchack frames this appeal as Gigolo Joe's ability to "satisfy every female sexual need and desire (including the illusion of romance) without wearing out” (5). But Gigolo Joe can only accomplish all of this because he is a perceptible, self-aware substitution for a human man – and a substitution that does not replicate the intentions and behaviors of his clients' "real" human partners.Gigolo Joe returns frequently to this idea that substitution is positive. Later, for instance, he explains to several fascinated teenage boys that mecha prostitutes “are the guiltless pleasures of the lonely human being. You’re not going to get us pregnant or have us to supper with Mommy and Daddy” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence), emphasizing that humans do not need to fulfill any social obligations toward mechas precisely because they are not “real” lovers. Gigolo Joe also pitches mecha sex workers by reminding his listeners that “We work under you, we work on you, and we work for you. Man made us better at what we do than was ever humanly possible” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence), suggesting that a substitute sexual partner will offer technological advantages over their human counterparts.Through dialogues and exchanges such as these, Gigolo Joe positions himself as a prosthetic human, acknowledging that he and his sex worker peers were not really meant to “repair” or “complete” human relationships even as he also maintains that mechas do replace human partners in important ways, even if temporarily. However, Gigolo Joe also recognizes the realities of being a prosthetic human in ways that David seems incapable of. For instance, when one of his clients is murdered by her human partner for seeking a replacement lover, Gigolo Joe realizes immediately that the man won’t even be suspected while Gigolo Joe himself automatically takes the blame. Similarly, Gigolo Joe is the one who can tell David that Monica Swinton “loves what you do for her, as my customers love what it is I do for them. But she does not love you. . . You were designed and built specific like the rest of us” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). David rejects this warning, demonstrating that his creation as a prosthetic human has made him impervious to that same reality, but Gigolo Joe’s positioning himself as a prosthetic human has made him aware that being “designed and built specific” to meet humans’ needs does not negate the dangers that come along with a designed, perfected form of substitution.Prosthetic Humans and the End of HumanityThe ending of AI: Artificial Intelligence has baffled critics and audiences alike since its theatrical release. Are the alien-like Specialists real, or does David imagine these beings as a means of explaining away Hobby’s entire line of child-substitute mechas? Does David actually see Monica again, or is this the robotic equivalent of a comforting dream before he dies? Frances Flannery-Dailey outlines nine possible ways of understanding how the film ends before noting that its ambiguity and length often frustrate audiences, leaving them with a negative impression of the film.No matter which way we try to explain the ending of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, though, it is worth noting the presence of the Specialists, who claim that they are advanced beings that evolved from mechas following humanity’s extinction. Though Flannery-Daily correctly questions whether the Specialists actually exist or else are just dream-specters of David's “death”, their presence at the end of the film suggests at least the possibility of a distant future in which the prosthetic human has completely overtaken and supplanted the “real” humans that David so wanted to join. This potential ending, as well as David’s and Gigolo Joe’s poor treatment by "real" humans throughout the film, all demonstrate that the prosthetic humans in A.I. Artificial Intelligence suffer from more than the “epic status” that Smith and Morra assign to real-world prosthetics (2), or even the shortcomings visible in other versions of the prosthetic impulse as depicted in science fiction films. Instead, A.I. Artificial Intelligence becomes bleak when we realize that these prosthetic humans actually function very well, even when (wrongly) touted as miracle technologies (Smith and Morra 2), and that instead it is humans, their needs, and their visions that have fallen sadly short. Both David and Gigolo Joe do exactly what they were "designed and built specific” to do (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) and more, yet humanity has destroyed both them and itself by the end of the film regardless.ReferencesA.I. Artificial Intelligence. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2001. Flannery-Dailey, Frances. "Robot Heavens and Robot Dreams: Ultimate Reality in A.I. and Other Recent Films." Journal of Religion & Film 7.2 (2016). 1 July 2019 <https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol7/iss2/7>.Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.Grech, Victor. "The Pinocchio Syndrome and the Prosthetic Impulse." Intelligence Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds. Eds. Russel Blackford and Damien Broderick. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. 263–278.Hung, Mailee. “We Are More than Our Machines.” Bitch Media (24 Aug. 2017). 2 July 2019 <https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/more-our-machines/aesthetics-and-prosthetics-science-fiction>.Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "A Matter of Life and Death: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Directed by Steven Spielberg)." Film Quarterly 65.3 (2012): 74-78.Smith, Susan. "‘Limbitless Solutions’: The Prosthetic Arm, Iron Man and the Science Fiction of Technoscience." Medical Humanities 42.4 (2016): 259–264.Smith, Marquard, and Joanne Morra. “Introduction.” The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Eds. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. 1–15. Sobchack, Vivian. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality.” The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Eds. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 17–42.Sobchack, Vivian Carol. "Love Machines: Boy Toys, Toy Boys and the Oxymorons of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence." Science Fiction Film and Television 1.1 (2009): 1–13.