Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Massachusetts Association of Ministers in and about Cambridge"

Marking the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, next year, we publish the article of Adrian Karmazyn, a member of the Ukrainian Association of American Studies, a historian and journalist, expert in American media and strategic communications, who worked for the Voice of America for more than 25 years and served as the Chief of the VOA Ukrainian Service (2005 – 2015). This is the third in a series of articles illustrating the type of reporting Adrian Karmazyn was engaged in as a radio journalist with the Voice of America’s (VOA) Ukrainian Service in the 1990s. Previously, he have written about his 1993 reporting assignment in then-newly independent Ukraine [2] and his 1996 reporting assignment at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago [4]. A collection of VOA Ukrainian Service recordings is preserved at the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland [5]. Adrian Karmazyn’s memoir about his career at VOA is included in a collection of articles, published in conjunction with the 70th anniversary of VOA’s Ukrainian Service [3]. The Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (HURI) is one of the most powerful and oldest centers of Ukrainian studies in America. It serves as a focal point for graduate and undergraduate students, fellows, and associates pursuing research in Ukrainian language, literature, and history as well as in anthropology, archaeology, art history, economics, political science, sociology, theology, and other disciplines. Most of the interviews for this story about HURI were conducted in English and then translated into Ukrainian for broadcast to Ukraine. For this article, the Ukrainian versions of interviewee comments were translated back into English.

Abstract Background: Annual screening breast MRIs are endorsed by current breast cancer screening guidelines as an adjunctive screening modality for high-risk patients (defined by more than 20% lifetime risk) in addition to a screening mammogram. Recent studies showed screening breast MRI remained underutilized despite the current recommendations. On the other hand, validated breast cancer risk models for identifying high-risk patients also remained under-recognized among primary care providers. This study aims to identify the potential barriers for primary care providers (PCPs) to using breast cancer risk models and referring high-risk patients to breast MRI for screening. Methods: An anonymous survey was distributed via email to the PCPs and OB/GYN providers in the network of Mount Auburn Hospital, a community teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The survey included questions regarding breast cancer screening in average-risk and high-risk patients, providers’ understanding of breast cancer risk models, and current referral status of breast MRIs and high-risk/genetic clinics. Results: The survey was sent to 104 providers, and 43 responses were received. When asked about performing breast cancer risk assessments, 58% reported “Always (91-100%)” and 33% said “Often (71-90%)”. For factors to consider when performing risk assessments, most of the providers considered personal medical history (98%), family history (100%), genetic syndrome history (86%), and previous breast biopsy results (90%). When asked about breast cancer risk models, 58% of the providers had not heard of or used one. 33% of the providers have used the Gail model, and 26% have used the Tyrer-Cuzick model. 51% of the providers correctly identified high-risk as lifetime risk >20%. 56% correctly answered annual mammograms with MRI for breast cancer screening for high-risk patients. The majority of the providers (84%) would prefer to refer patients to the high-risk clinic for risk assessment and screening management. For barriers to referring to MRI, the insurance approval process (49%) was reported to be the largest barrier. 72% of the providers prefer not ordering it and defer to the high-risk/genetic clinic for ordering the test. Conclusions: Our survey has shown different barriers to breast cancer screening in high-risk patients in the primary care setting, including knowledge and logistic barriers. Further education for PCPs is needed for correctly identifying high-risk patients, utilizing risk models, and referring high-risk patients for breast MRI screening. Citation Format: Yu Jen Jan, Prudence B. Lam. Barriers to optimal breast cancer screening modalities for high-risk patients in the primary care setting [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 3029.

'The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.' -- Thomas de Quincey (1849), "The English Mail-Coach" For Thomas de Quincey, the thrust of speed is intimately linked with the thrust of the body. Subjectivity is formed by and through a corporeal experience of acceleration. In this way, De Quincey has the jump on those other lovers of automated speed: the Italian Futurists. That heady clash of bodies, speed and information, or the technological sublime, we characteristically associate with the development of twentieth-century communication is already articulated some sixty years before Marinetti imagines the 'divine fusion' of body and machine. Thomas de Quincey's 1849 ode to the postal service -- "The English Mail Coach" -- functions as a significant text in modernity's velocity culture. Specifically, de Quincey allows us to historicise the critical terms of 'speed', 'body' and 'circulation'. This paper makes some preliminary historical observations about the acceleration of communication and transport systems and how this rapidity might give rise to new forms of subjectivity or the emergence of what Jeffrey T. Schnapp calls 'the kinematic subject'. The perceptual reconfiguration of time and space is central to an understanding of modernity's preoccupation with speed. Rapid data circulation through digital information systems means that distance appears to shrink and time seems to collapse. Manuel Castells calls this a 'new time regime' (429). Temporality now functions according to a double logic: a simultaneous binary of 'the eternal and of the ephemeral'. The contemporary 'manipulation of time' turns on 'instantaneity and eternity: me and the universe, the self and the net' (462-3). For David Harvey the defining feature of postmodernity is 'time-space compression'. Capitalism is 'characterised by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us' (241). Castells and Harvey are not, of course, the first to notice the degree to which the changing rhythms of a communication vehicle might impact upon perceptions of time and space. In 1909 Marinetti announces its demise: 'Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed'. Yet this death is prefigured some 120 years before by the 18th century author Hannah More in a letter where, quoting Alexander Pope, she illustrates her reaction to the introduction of the mail coach: I have just been thinking that if the amorous poet, who modestly wished to annihilate time and space had lived to see our fortunate days, he would have seen his prophetic visions realised... cards having well-nigh accomplished the first, and mail-coaches the last. (Qtd. in Lewis 264) This letter is dated 1788, only four years after the establishment of the mail coach system. Initially the service ran between London and Bristol so that Hannah More writing from Somerset would complain of being bypassed by this new mode of information circulation: Of the other blessing, the annihilation of space, I cannot partake; mail-coaches, which come to others, come not to me. Letters and newspapers, now that they travel in coaches like gentlemen and ladies, come not within ten miles of my hermitage. (265) More here identifies an important historical factor in the transformation of information networks. It concerns the coupling of transportation and communication: information travels 'in coaches like gentlemen and ladies'. In More's 18th century account the two remain connected while, as James Carey has noted, the significance of the 19th century's invention of the telegraph is that it splits the two processes. The telegraph 'allowed symbols to move independently of geography and independently of and faster than transport' (213). For de Quincey, a pivotal feature of the mail coach is the way in which communication and transportation function coextensively. Recounting his travels on the coach as it distributes news from the Napoleonic wars he notes that 'the grandest chapter of our experience, within the whole mail-coach service, was on those occasions when we went down from London with the news of victory' (290). For de Quincey, as for other commentators, the mail coach is a political instrument. Through the increasing efficiency of its communication infrastructure, it 'binds the nation together' (Austen 361). As de Quincey puts it 'the mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty events, thus diffusively influential, became itself a spiritualised and glorified object to an impassioned heart' (272). What impresses de Quincey most, however, is the speed of this vehicle. Or perhaps, more accurately, it is a particular relation between the self and speed, which confers on the mail coach a 'glory of motion' (270). By the time he publishes his essay, postal and newspaper circulation by mail-coach is nearly at an end. The last mail coach ceases action in London in 1846 (Daunton 123) and postal distribution begins to be carried out by rail. De Quincey clearly mourns the loss of this form of communication. And his regret depends on the self's perception of speed. That is, to qualify as an authentic act of transportation (of the body, of the post or of language), one must, to some degree, be aware of the systems of circulation, the modes of delivery and the vehicle of communication. One ought to be able to experience the speed at which one travels or the mail is delivered. The body must remain in contact with the message. In de Quincey's view the railway communication system fails for these sorts of reasons: The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, not however as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence; as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour though we are far from feeling it as a personal experience ... . Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I myself am little aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. (283, emphasis in the original) Perched atop the careening mail coach, the self needs no secondary evidence to confirm its propulsion: 'we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling'. But with the emergence of railway systems, the self somehow becomes cut off or distanced from the mode of transport: 'But now, on the new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion' (284). To be sure, rail is faster. But that fails to impress de Quincey for the rail cannot offer him the same sublime effect. The mail coach is drawn by 'royal horses like cheetahs' (282) while the train lacks the power to raise even 'an extra bubble in a steam-kettle' (284). The sublimity of speed is also aural. But once again the railroad fails to inspire awe: 'the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail; heartshaking, when heard screaming on the wind ... has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler' (284). In Burke's formulation of the sublime there is danger and terror but there must also be a certain distance from this threat. It is 'simply painful' when we are aroused by causes that 'immediately affect us' but it is sublime when 'we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances' (51) . For de Quincey sitting inside the carriage seems to offer too much safety and distance, the interior reserved as it is for the 'porcelain variety of the human race' (273). Instead, he travels aloft near the driver because of 'the air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity to the horses, the elevation of seat' (275). And he has the possibility of reining them in himself: 'the certain anticipation of purchasing occasional opportunities of driving' (275)1. The closer he is to the ministers of his locomotion, the better de Quincey likes it. The more he becomes the agent of his own speed, the more immediate, authentic and sublime seems his journey. For de Quincey, then, the superiority of the mail coach over the railroad lies not in terms of absolute speed but rather it concerns issues about the body's experience of and relation to that speed. As Matthew Schneider (1995) puts it 'the difference between the two with respect to their speed, privileges mail coaches by virtue of their violent immediacy, their ability to transmit the actual or living sensations rather than one that is intermediate or representational' (152)2. In a fascinating paper about the correlation between speed and subjectivity Jeffrey T. Schnapp identifies the mail coach in general and de Quincey in particular as emblematic of an 'inaugural moment' in the development of an 'anthropology of speed' (3). With a quick side swipe at the ahistorical and apocalyptic underpinning of Paul Virilio's Speed and Politics, Schnapp argues that although speed has always been 'an agent of individuation' it is with modernity that it begins to depend on the relation between self and vehicle: ... the mere experience of riding on horseback was not enough to establish a modern culture of velocity. Speed's rise as a cultural thematic, its move into an everyday realm of perceptibility, its adoption as sacrament of modern individualism, became possible only with the development of mechanical buffers between rider, horse, and roadway: buffers that enable new fantasies of attachment, first, between rider and engine, and, then, according to a more complex logic, between rider, engine, vehicle, and/or landscape. (10-1) What is particularly productive about Schnapp's account is that he schematises the history of transportation in terms of the relation between speed, body and vehicle. For Schnapp this is a pivotal dynamic. De Quincey's equestrian desire and his disdain for railroad travel, is part of a historical process where individuality comes to be 'identified with administration of one's own speed' (14). In Schnapp's model, there are 'two concurrent yet distinct experiences of velocity', one that he calls 'thrill-based' and the other 'commodity-based'. The first is experienced in modes such as on top of the mail-coach and later, cars, motorbikes and aeroplanes. 'Commodity-based' refers to train and bus travel. The difference between the two is that thrill-based transportation occurs when the passenger 'can envisage himself as the author of his velocity' while in 'commodity-based' forms the traveller is 'shielded from the natural environment and the engine, and passively submits himself to velocity' (18-9). De Quincey's essay is a valuable resource for communications historiography. Like Jacques Derrida, he recognises how the rhythms of the postal service function to construct identity. As a system of circulation and exchange, the post office institutionalises modes of correspondence, producing and regulating particular subjectivities. And like Postman Pat, de Quincey knows the corporeal pleasures of delivering the mail. Footnotes There are also issues of class at work here. Tickets were more expensive to sit inside the carriage which de Quincey, then a student at Oxford, could not afford. He attempts to reverse these class distinctions by arguing that 'inside which had been traditionally regarded as the only room tenantable by gentlemen, was, in fact, the coal-cellar in disguise' (187). The secondary material on de Quincey is quite extensive. In the last 15 years his work has been investigated from a number of different angles including poststructuralist approaches to language and his transitional status as a figure between Romanticism and Modernism. As well as Schneider, see Clej and Snyder. References Austen, Brian. British Mail-Coach Services 1784-1850. New York and London: Garland, 1986. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James T. Boulton. 2nd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Carey, James W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988. Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume 1: The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Clej, Alina. A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Daunton, M.J. Royal Mail: The Post Office since 1840. London: The Athlone Press, 1985. De Quincey, Thomas. "The English Mail-Coach." The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey. Ed. David Masson. Vol. 13. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1890. Derrida, Jacques. The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1990. Lewis, W.S., ed. Horace Walpole's Correspondence. Vol 31. New Haven: Yale UP, 1961. Marinetti, FT. "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism." First published 1909. Futurist Manifestos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. "Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)." Modernism/Modernity 6.1 (1999): 1-49. Schneider, Matthew. Original Ambivalence: Autobiography and Violence in Thomas De Quincey. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Snyder, Robert Lance, ed. Thomas De Quincey Bicentenary Studies. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1985. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotexte, 1986. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ester Milne. "'The Ministers of Locomotion': Some Historical Speculations on Velocity Culture." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/ministers.php>. Chicago style: Ester Milne, "'The Ministers of Locomotion': Some Historical Speculations on Velocity Culture," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/ministers.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Ester Milne. (2000) 'The ministers of locomotion': some historical speculations on velocity culture. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/ministers.php> ([your date of access]).

I have only ever owned one pig. It didn’t have a name, due as it was for the table. Just pu‘aka. But I liked feeding it; nothing from the household was wasted. I planned not to become attached. We were having a feast and a pig was the one essential requirement. The piglet came to us as a small creature with a curly tail. It would not even live an adult life, as the fully-grown local pig is a fatty beast with little meat. Pigs are mostly killed when partly grown, when the meat/fat ratio is at its optimum. The pig was one of the few animals to accompany Polynesians as they made the slow journey across the islands and oceans from Asia: pigs and chickens and dogs. The DNA of island pigs reveals details about the route taken that were previously hidden (Larsen et al.). Of these three animals, pigs assumed the most ceremonial importance. In Tonga, pigs often live an exalted life. They roam freely, finding food where they can. They wallow. Wherever there is a pool of mud, often alongside a road, there is a pig wallowing. Huge beasts emerge from their pools with dark mud lining their bellies as they waddle off, teats swinging, to another pleasure. Pig snouts are extraordinarily strong; with the strength of a pig behind them, they can dig holes, uproot crops, and generally wreak havoc. How many times have I chased them from my garden, despairing at the loss of precious vegetables I could get no other way? But they must forage. They are fed scraps, and coconut for protein, but often must fend for themselves. Despite the fact that many meet an early death, their lives seem so much more interesting than those lived by the anonymous residents of intensive piggeries in Australia, my homeland. When the time came for the pig to be sacrificed to the demands of the feast, two young Tongan men did the honours. They also cooked the pig on an open fire after skewering it on a pole. Their reward was the roasted sweetmeats. The ‘umu was filled with taro and cassava, yam and sweet potato, along with lū pulu and lū ika: tinned beef and fish cooked in taro leaves and coconut cream. In the first sitting, all those of high status—church ministers, college teachers, important villagers and pālangi like me—had the first pick of the food. Students from the college and lowly locals had the second. The few young men who remained knew it was their task to finish off all of the food. They set about this activity with intense dedication, paying particular attention to the carcass of the pig. By the end of the night, what was left of our little pig was a pile of bones, the skeleton taken apart at every joint. Not a scrap of anything edible remained. In the early 1980s, I went to live on a small island in the Kingdom of Tonga, where my partner was the Principal of an agricultural college, in the main training young men for working small hereditary mixed farms. Memories of that time and a recent visit inform this reflection on the contemporary Tongan diet and problems associated with it. The role of food in a culture is never a neutral issue. Neither is body size, and Tongans have traditionally favoured the large body as an indication of status (Pollock 58). Similarly the capacity to eat has been seen as positive. Many Tongans are larger than is healthy, with 84% of men and 93% of women “considered overweight or obese” (Kirk et al. 36). The rate of diabetes, 80% of it undiagnosed, has doubled since the 1970s to 15% of the adult population (Colagiuri et al. 1378). In the Tongan diaspora there are also high rates of so-called “metabolic syndrome,” leading to this tendency to diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In Auckland, for instance, Pacific Islanders are 2.5 times more likely to suffer from this condition (Gentles et al.). Its chief cause is not, however, genetic, but comes from “differences in obesity,” leading to a much higher incidence of cardiovascular disease and diabetes (Gentles et al.). Deaths from diabetes in Tonga are common. When a minister’s wife in the neighbouring village to mine died, everyone of status on the island attended the putu. Though her gangrenous foot could have been amputated, the family decided against this, and she soon died from the complications of her diabetes. On arrival at the putu, as well as offering gifts such as mats and tapa, participants lined up to pay very personal respects to the dead woman. This took the form of a kiss on her face. I had never touched a dead person before, let alone someone who had died of gangrene, but life in another culture requires many firsts. I bent down and kissed the dry, cold face of a woman who had suffered much before dying. Young men of the family pushed sand over the grave with their own hands as the rest of us stood around, waiting for the funeral food: pigs, yes, but also sweets made from flour and refined sugar. Diet and eating practices are informed by culture, but so are understandings of illness and its management. In a study conducted in New Zealand, sharp differences were seen between the Tongan diaspora and European patients with diabetes. Tongans were more likely “to perceive their diabetes as acute and cyclical in nature, uncontrollable, and caused by factors such as God’s will, pollution in the environment, and poor medical care in the past”, and this was associated “with poorer adherence to diet and medication taking” (Barnes et al. 1). This suggests that as well as being more likely to suffer from illnesses associated with diet and body size, Tongans may also be less likely to manage them, causing these diseases to be even more debilitating. When James Cook visited the Tongan group and naively named them the Friendly Islands, he was given the customary hospitality shown to one of obviously high status. He and his officers were fed regularly by their hosts, even though this must have put enormous pressure on the local food systems, in which later supply was often guaranteed by the imposition of tapu in order to preserve crops and animals. Further pressure was added by exchanges of hogs for nails (Beaglehole). Of course, while they were feeding him royally and entertaining his crew with wrestling matches and dances, the local chiefs of Ha‘apai were arguing about exactly when they were going to kill him. If it were by night, it would be hard to take the two ships. By day, it might be too obvious. They never could agree, and so he sailed off to meet his fate elsewhere (Martin 279-80). As a visitor of status, he was regularly fed pork, unlike most of the locals. Even now, in contemporary Tonga, pigs are killed to mark a special event, and are not eaten as everyday food by most people. That is one of the few things about the Tongan diet that has not changed since the Cook visits. Pigs are usually eaten on formal feasting occasions, such as after church on the Sabbath (which is rigorously kept by law), at weddings, funerals, state occasions or church conferences. During such conferences, village congregations compete with each other to provide the most lavish spreads, with feasting occurring three times a day for a week or more. Though each pola is spread with a range of local root crops, fish and seafood, and possibly beef or even horse, the pola is not complete unless there is at least one pig on it. Pigs are not commercially farmed in Tonga, so these pigs have been hand- and self-raised in and around villages, and are in short supply after these events. And, although feasts are a visible sign of tradition, they are the exception. Tongans are not suffering from metabolic syndrome because they consume too much pork; they are suffering because in everyday life traditional foods have been supplanted by imports. While a range of traditional foods is still eaten, they are not always the first choice. Some imported foods have become delicacies. Mutton flap is a case in point. Known as sipi (sheep), it is mostly fat and bone, and even when barbequed it retains most of its fat. It is even found on outer islands without refrigeration, because it can be transported frozen and eaten when it arrives, thawed. I remember once the local shopkeeper said she had something I might like. A leg of lamb was produced from under the counter, mistakenly packed in the flap box. The cut was so unfamiliar that nobody else had much use for it. The question of why it is possible to get sipi in Tonga and very difficult to get any other kind of fresh meat other than one’s own pigs or chickens raises the question of how Tonga’s big neighbours think of Pacific islands. Such islands are the recipients of Australian and New Zealand aid; they are also the recipients of their waste. It’s not uncommon to find out of date medications, banned agricultural chemicals, and food that is really unsuitable for human consumption. Often the only fresh and affordable meat is turkey tails, chicken backs, and mutton flap. From July 2006 to July 2007, New Zealand exported $73 million worth of sheep off-cuts to the Pacific (Edwardes & Frizelle). Australia and the US account for the supply of turkey tails. Not only are these products some of the few fresh meat sources available, they are also relatively inexpensive (Rosen et al.). These foods are so detrimental to the health of locals that importing them has been banned in Fiji and independent Samoa (Edwardes & Frizelle). The big nations around the Pacific have found a market for the meat by-products their own citizens will not eat. Local food sources have also been supplanted as a result of the high value placed on other foods, like rice, flour and sugar, which from the nineteenth century became associated with “civilisation and progress” (Pollock 233). To counter this, education programs have been undertaken in Tonga and elsewhere in the Pacific in order to promote traditional local foods. These have also sought to address the impact of high food imports on the trade balance (Pollock 232). Food choices are not just determined by preference, but also by cost and availability. Similarly, the Tonga Healthy Weight Loss Program ran during the late 1990s, but it was found that a lack of “availability of healthy low-cost food was a problem” to its success (Englberger et al. 147). In a recent study of Tongan food preferences, it was found that “in general, Tongans prefer healthier traditional, indigenously produced, foods”, but that they are not always available (Evans et al. 170). In the absence of a consistent supply of local protein sources, the often inferior but available imported sources become the default ingredient. Fish in particular are in short supply. Though many Tongans can still be seen harvesting the reef for seafood at low tide, there is no extensive fishing industry capable of providing for the population at large. Intensive farming of pigs has been considered—there was a model piggery on the college where I lived, complete with facilities for methane collection—but it has not been undertaken. Given the strongly ceremonial function of the pig, it would take a large shift in thinking for it to be considered an everyday food. The first cooked pig I encountered arrived at my house in a woven coconut leaf basket, surrounded by baked taro and yam. It was a small pig, given by a family too poor to hold the feast usually provided after church when it was their turn. Instead, they gave the food portion owed directly to the preacher. There’s a faded photo of me squatting on a cracked linoleum floor, examining the contents of the basket, and wondering what on earth I’m going to do with them. I soon learnt the first lesson of island life: food must be shared. With no refrigeration, no family of strapping youths, and no plans to eat the pig myself, it had to be given away to neighbours. It was that simple. Even watermelon went off within the day. In terms of eating, that small pig would have been better kept until a later day, when it reached optimum size, but each family’s obligation came around regularly, and had to be fulfilled. Feasting, and providing for feasting, was a duty, even a fatongia mamafa: a “heavy duty” among many duties, in which the pig was an object deeply “entangled” in all social relations (Thomas). A small pig was big enough to carry the weight of such obligations, even if it could not feed a crowd. Growing numbers of tourists to Tonga, often ignored benignly by their hosts, are keen to snap photos of grazing pigs. It is unusual enough for westerners to see pigs freely wandering, but what is more striking about some pigs on Tongatapu and ‘Eua is that they venture onto the reefs and mudflats at low tide, going after the rich marine pickings, just as their human counterparts do. The silhouette of a pig in the water as the tropical sun sinks behind, caught in a digital frame, it is a striking memory of a holiday in a place that remains largely uninterested in its tourist potential. While an influx of guests is seen by development consultants as the path to the nation’s economic future, Tongans bemusedly refuse to take this possibility seriously (Menzies). Despite a negative trade balance, partly caused by the importation of foreign food, Tonga survives on a combination of subsistence farming and remittances from Tongans living overseas; the tourist potential is largely unrealised. Dirk Spennemann’s work took a strange turn when, as an archaeologist working in Tonga, it became necessary for him to investigate whether these reef-grazing pigs were disturbing midden contents on Tongatapu. In order to establish this, he collected bags of both wet and dry “pig excreta” (107). Spenemann’s methodology involved soaking the contents of these bags for 48 hours, stirring them frequently; “they dissolved, producing considerable smell” (107). Spennemann concluded that pigs do appear to have been eating fish and shellfish, along with grass and “the occasional bit of paper” (107). They also feed on “seaweed and seagrass” (108). I wonder if these food groups have any noticeable impact on the taste of their flesh? Creatures fed particular diets in order to create a certain distinct taste are part of the culinary traditions of the world. The deli around the corner from where I live sells such gourmet items as part of its lunch fare: Saltbush lamb baguettes are one of their favourites. In the Orkneys, the rare and ancient North Ronaldsay Sheep are kept from inland foraging for most of the year by a high stone fence in order to conserve the grass for lambing time. This forces them to eat seaweed on the beach, producing a distinct marine taste, one that is highly valued in certain Parisian restaurants. As an economy largely cut out of the world economic loop, Tonga is unlikely to find select menus on which its reef pigs might appear. While living on ‘Eua, I regularly took a three hour ferry trip to Tongatapu in order to buy food I could not get on my home island. One of these items was wholemeal flour, from which I baked bread in a mud oven we had built outside. Bread was available on ‘Eua, but it was white, light and transported loose in the back of truck. I chose to make my own. The ferry trip usually involved a very rough crossing, though on calmer days, roof passengers would cook sipi on the diesel chimney, added flavour guaranteed. It usually only took about thirty minutes on the way out from Nafanua Harbour before the big waves struck. I could endure them for a while, but soon the waves, combined with a heavy smell of diesel, would have me heading for the rail. On one journey, I tried to hold off seasickness by focussing on an island off shore from Tongatapu. I went onto the front deck of the ferry and faced the full blast of the wind. With waves and wind, it was difficult to stand. I diligently stared at the island, which only occasionally disappeared beneath the swell, but I soon knew that this trip would be like the others; I’d be leaning over the rail as the ocean came up to meet me, not really caring if I went over. I could not bear to share the experience, so in many ways being alone on the foredeck was ideal for me, if I had to be on the boat at all. At least I thought I was alone, but I soon heard a grunt, and looked across to see an enormous sow, trotters tied front and back, lying across the opposite side of the boat. And like me, she too was succumbing to her nausea. Despite the almost complete self-absorption seasickness brings, we looked at each other. I may have imagined an acknowledgement, but I think not. While the status of pigs in Tongan life remains important, in many respects the imposition of European institutions and the availability of imported foods have had an enormous impact on the rest of the Tongan diet, with devastating effects on the health of Tongans. Instead of the customary two slow-cooked meals, one before noon and one in the evening (Pollock 56), consisting mostly of roots crops, plantains and breadfruit, with a relish of meat or fish, most Tongans eat three meals a day in order to fit in with school and work schedules. In current Tongan life, there is no time for an ‘umu every day; instead, quick and often cheaper imported foods are consumed, though local foods can also be cooked relatively quickly. While some still start the day by grabbing a piece of left over cassava, many more would sit down to the ubiquitous Pacific breakfast food: crackers, topped with a slab of butter. Food is a neo-colonial issue. If larger nations stopped dumping unwanted and nutritionally poor food products, health outcomes might improve. Similarly, the Tongan government could tip the food choice balance by actively supporting a local and traditional food supply in order to make it as cheap and accessible as the imported foods that are doing such harm to the health of Tongans References Barnes, Lucy, Rona Moss-Morris, and Mele Kaufusi. “Illness Beliefs and Adherence in Diabetes Mellitus: A Comparison between Tongan and European Patients.” The New Zealand Medical Journal 117.1188 (2004): 1-9. Beaglehole, J.C. Ed. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776-1780. Parts I & II. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1967. ­­­____. Ed. 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The variable incivility is an indicator used to describe violations of communication norms. These norms can be social norms established within a society, a culture or parts of a society (e.g. a social class, milieu or group) or democratic norms established within a democratic society. In this sense incivility is associated with behaviors that threaten a collective face or a democratic society, deny people their personal freedoms, and stereotype individuals or social groups. Furthermore, some scholars include impoliteness into the concept of incivility and argue that the two concepts have no clear boundaries (e.g. Seely, 2017). They therefore describe incivility as aggressive, offensive or derogatory communication expressed directly or indirectly to other individuals or parties. In many studies a message is classified as uncivil if the message contains at least one instance of incivility (e.g. one violent threat). The direction of an uncivil statement is coded as ‘interpersonal’/‘personal’ or ‘other-oriented’/‘impersonal’ or sometimes also as ‘neutral’, meaning it is not directed at any group or individual. Field of application/theoretical foundation: One unifying element to communication that is labelled as incivility is that it has to be a violation of an existing norm. Which norms are seen as violated depends on the theoretical tradition. Incivility research is related to theories on social norms of communication and conversation: conversational-maxims (Grice, 1975), face-saving concepts (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 1989) or conversational-contract theories (Fraser, 1990). Further, incivility research has ties to theories that view public communication as part of democratic opinion formation and decision-making processes, e.g. theories on deliberative democracy and deliberation (Dryzek, 2000; Gutmann & Thompson, 1996; Habermas, 1994). References/combination with other methods of data collection: Incivility is examined through content analysis and sometimes combined with comparative designs (e.g., Rowe, 2015) or experimental designs (Muddiman, 2017; Oz, Zheng, & Chen, 2017). In addition, content analyses can be accompanied by interviews or surveys, for example to validate the results of the content analysis (Erjavec & Kova?i?, 2012). Example studies: Research question/research interest: Previous studies have been interested in the extent, levels and direction of incivility in online communication (e.g. in one specific online discussion, in discussions on a specific topic, in discussions on a specific platform or on different platforms comparatively). Object of analysis: Previous studies have investigated incivility in user comments on political newsgroups, news websites, social media platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook), political blogs, science blogs or online consultation platforms. Timeframe of analysis: Many studies investigate incivility in user comments focusing on periods between 2 months and 1 year. It is common to use constructed weeks. Level of analysis: Most manual content analyses measure incivility on the level of a message, for example on the level of user comments. On a higher level of analysis, the level of incivility for a whole discussion thread or online platform can be measured or estimated. On a lower level of analysis incivility can be measured on the level of utterances, sentences or words which are the preferred levels of analysis in automated content analyses. Table 1. Previous manual content analysis studies and measures of incivility Example study Construct Dimensions/Variables Explanation/example Reliability Papacharissi (2004) incivility (separate from impoliteness) threat to democracy e.g. propose to overthrow a democratic government by force Ir = .89 stereotype e.g. association of a person with a group by using labels, whether those are mild – “liberal”, or more offensive – “faggot”)? Ir = .91 threat to other individuals’ rights e.g. personal freedom, freedom to speak Ir = .86 incivility Ir = .89 Coe, Kenski, and Rains (2014) incivility (impoliteness is included) name-calling mean-spirited or disparaging words directed at a person or group of people K-? = .67 aspersion mean-spirited or disparaging words directed at an idea, plan, policy, or behavior K-? = .61 reference to lying stating or implying that an idea, plan, or policy was disingenuous K-? = .73 vulgarity using profanity or language that would not be considered proper (e.g., “pissed”, “screw”) in professional discourse K-? = .91 pejorative for speech disparaging remark about the way in which a person communicates K-? = .74 incivility / impoliteness K-? = .73 Rowe (2015) incivility (separate from impoliteness) threat to democracy proposes to overthrow the government (e.g. proposes a revolution) or advocates an armed struggle in opposition to the government (e.g. threatens the use of violence against the government) ? = .66 threat to individual rights advocates restricting the rights or freedoms of certain members of society or certain individuals ? = .86 stereotype asserts a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person ? = .80 incivility ? = .77 Seely (2017) incivility(impoliteness is included) insulting language name calling and other derogatory remarks often seen in pejorative speech and aspersions K-? = .84 vulgarity e.g. “lazy f**kers”, “a**holes” K-? = 1 stereotyping of political party/ideology e.g. “typical lying lefties” K-? = .88 stereotyping using “isms”/discriminatory language e.g. “if we don’t get rid of idiotic Muslim theologies, we will have growing problems” K-? = 1 other stereotyping language e.g. “GENERALS LIKE TO HAVE A MALE SOLDIER ON THEIR LAP AT ALL TIMES.” K-? = .78 sarcasm e.g. “betrayed again by the Repub leadership . . . what a shock” K-? = .79 accusations of lying e.g. “typical lying lefties” K-? = .80 shouting excessive capitalization and/or exclamation points K-? = .83 incivility / impoliteness K-? = .81 Note: Previous studies used different inter-coder reliability statistics; Ir = reliability index by Perreault and Leigh (1989); K-? = Krippendorff’s-?; ? = Cohen’s Kappa Codebook used in the study Rowe (2015) is available under: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2014.940365 References Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coe, K., Kenski, K., & Rains, S. A. (2014). Online and Uncivil? Patterns and Determinants of Incivility in Newspaper Website Comments. Journal of Communication, 64(4), 658–679. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12104 Dryzek, J. S. (2000). Deliberative democracy and beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations. Oxford political theory. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Erjavec, K., & Kova?i?, M. P. (2012). “You Don't Understand, This is a New War! ” Analysis of Hate Speech in News Web Sites' Comments. Mass Communication and Society, 15(6), 899–920. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2011.619679 Fraser, B. (1990). Perspectives on politeness. Journal of Pragmatics, 14(2), 219–236. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(90)90081-n Goffman, E. (1989). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Pantheon Books. Grice, P. H. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole (Ed.), Syntax and Semantics: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press. Gutmann, A., & Thompson, D. F. (1996). Democracy and disagreement. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Habermas, J. (1994). Three Normative Models of Democracy. Constellations, 1(1), 1–10. Muddiman, A. (2017). : Personal and public levels of political incivility. International Journal of Communication, 11, 3182–3202. Oz, M., Zheng, P., & Chen, G. M. (2017). Twitter versus Facebook: Comparing incivility, impoliteness, and deliberative attributes. New Media & Society, 20(9), 3400–3419. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817749516 Papacharissi, Z. (2004). Democracy online: Civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. New Media & Society, 6(2), 259–283. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444804041444 Rowe, I. (2015). Civility 2.0: A comparative analysis of incivility in online political discussion. Information, Communication & Society, 18(2), 121–138. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.940365 Seely, N. (2017). Virtual Vitriol: A Comparative Analysis of Incivility Within Political News Discussion Forums. Electronic News, 12(1), 42–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1931243117739060

Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, taking in an English burlesque. The people around you have just found out that Alice Leamar will not be performing her famed turn in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay tonight, a high-kicking Can-Canesque number, very much the dance du jour. Your fellow audience members are none too pleased about this – they are shouting, and stamping the heels of their boots so loudly the whole theatre resounds with the noise. Most people in the expensive seats below look up in the direction of the gallery with a familiar blend of fear and loathing. The rough ‘gods’ up there are nearly always restless, more this time than usual. The uproar fulfils its purpose, though, because tomorrow night, Leamar’s act will be reinstated: the ‘gods’ will have their way (Bulletin, 1 October 1892). Another scene now, this time at the Newtown Bridge Theatre in Sydney, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. A comedian is trying a new routine for the crowd, but no one seems much impressed so far. A few discontented rumbles begin at first – ‘I want to go home’, says one wag, and then another – and soon these gain momentum, so that almost everyone is caught up in an ecstasy of roisterous abuse. A burly ‘chucker out’ appears, trying to eject some of the loudest hecklers, and a fully-fledged punch-up ensues (Djubal 19, 23; Cheshire 86). Eventually, one or two men are made to leave – but so too is the hapless comedian, evicted by derisive howls from the stage. The scenes I have just described show that audience interaction was a key feature in late-nineteenth century popular theatre, and in some cases even persisted into the following century. Obviously, there was no formal voting mechanism used during these performances à la contemporary shows like Idol. But rowdy practises amounted to a kind of audience ‘vote’ nonetheless, through which people decided those entertainers they wanted to see and those they emphatically did not. In this paper, I intend to use these bald parallels between Victorian audience practices and new-millennium viewer-voting to investigate claims about the links between democracy and plebiscitary entertainment. The rise of voting for pleasure in televised contests and online polls is widely attended by debate about democracy (e.g. Andrejevic; Coleman; Hartley, “Reality”). The most hyped commentary on this count evokes a teleological assumption – that western history is inexorably moving towards direct democracy. This view becomes hard to sustain when we consider the extent to which the direct expression of audience views was a feature of Victorian popular entertainment, and that these participatory practices were largely suppressed by the turn of the twentieth century. Old audience practices also allow us to question some of the uses of the term ‘direct democracy’ in new media commentary. Descriptions of voting for pleasure as part of a growth towards direct democracy are often made to celebrate rather than investigate plebiscitary forms. They elide the fact that direct democracy is a vexed political ideal. And they limit our discussion of voting for leisure and fun. Ultimately, arguing back and forth about whether viewer-voting is democratic stops us from more interesting explorations of this emerging cultural phenomenon. ‘To a degree that would be unimaginable to theatregoers today’, says historian Robert Allen, ‘early nineteenth-century audiences controlled what went on at the theatre’. The so-called ‘shirt-sleeve’ crowd in the cheapest seats of theatrical venues were habitually given to hissing, shouting, and even throwing objects in order to evict performers during the course of a show. The control exerted by the peanut-chomping gallery was certainly apparent in the mid-century burlesques Allen writes about (55). It was also apparent in minstrel, variety and music hall productions until around the turn of the century. Audience members in the galleries of variety theatres and music halls regularly engaged in the pleasure of voicing their aesthetic preferences. Sometimes comic interjectors from among them even drew more laughs than the performers on stage. ‘We went there not as spectators but as performers’, as an English music-hall habitué put it (Bailey 154). In more downmarket venues such as Sydney’s Newtown Bridge Theatre, these participatory practices continued into the early 1900s. Boisterous audience practices came under sustained attack in the late-Victorian era. A series of measures were taken by authorities, theatre managers and social commentators to wrest the control of popular performances from those in theatre pits and galleries. These included restricting the sale of alcohol in theatre venues, employing brawn in the form of ‘chuckers out’, and darkening auditoriums, so that only the stage was illuminated and the audience thus de-emphasised (Allen 51–61; Bailey 157–68; Waterhouse 127, 138–43). They also included a relentless public critique of those engaging in heckling behaviours, thus displaying their ‘littleness of mind’ (Age, 6 Sep. 1876). The intensity of attacks on rowdy audience participation suggests that symbolic factors were at play in late-Victorian attempts to enforce decorous conduct at the theatre. The last half of the century was, after all, an era of intense debate about the qualities necessary for democratic citizenship. The suffrage was being dramatically expanded during this time, so that it encompassed the vast majority of white men – and by the early twentieth century, many white women as well. In Australia, the prelude to federation also involved debate about the type of democracy to be adopted. Should it be republican? Should it enfranchise all men and women; all people, or only white ones? At stake in these debates were the characteristics and subjectivities one needed to possess before being deemed capable of enfranchisement. To be worthy of the vote, as of other democratic privileges, one needed to be what Toby Miller has called a ‘well-tempered’ subject at the turn of the twentieth century (Miller; Joyce 4). One needed to be carefully deliberative and self-watching, to avoid being ‘savage’, ‘uncivilised’, emotive – all qualities which riotous audience members (like black people and women) were thought not to possess (Lake). This is why the growing respectability of popular theatre is so often considered a key feature of the modernisation of popular culture. Civil and respectful audience behaviours went hand in hand with liberal-democratic concepts of the well-tempered citizen. Working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England has famously (and notoriously) been described as a ‘culture of consolation’: an escapist desire for fun based on a fatalistic acceptance of under-privilege and social discrimination (Jones). This idea does not do justice to the range of hopes and efforts to create a better society among workingpeople at the time. But it still captures the motivation behind most unruly audience behaviours: a gleeful kind of resistance or ‘culture jamming’ which viewed disruption and uproar as ends in themselves, without the hope that they would be productive of improved social conditions. Whether or not theatrical rowdiness served a solely consolatory purpose for the shirt-sleeve crowd, it certainly evoked a sharp fear of disorderly exuberance in mainstream society. Anxieties about violent working-class uprisings leading to the institution of mob rule were a characteristic of the late-nineteenth century, often making their way into fiction (Brantlinger). Roisterous behaviours in popular theatres resonated with the concerns expressed in works such as Caesar’s Column (Donnelly), feeding on a long association between the theatre and misrule. These fears obviously stand in stark contrast to the ebullient commentary surrounding interactive entertainment today. Over-oxygenated rhetoric about the democratic potential of cyberspace was of course a feature of new media commentary at the beginning of the 1990s (for a critique of such rhetoric see Meikle 33–42; Grossman). Current helium-giddy claims about digital technologies as ‘democratising’ reprise this cyberhype (Andrejevic 12–15, 23–8; Jenkins and Thornburn). One recent example of upbeat talk about plebiscitary formats as direct democracy is John Hartley’s contribution to the edited collection, Politicotainment (Hartley, “Reality”). There are now a range of TV shows and online formats, he says, which offer audiences the opportunity to directly express their views. The development of these entertainment forms are part of a movement towards a ‘direct open network’ in global media culture (3). They are also part of a macro historical shift: a movement ‘down the value chain of meaning’ which has taken place over the past few centuries (Hartley, “Value Chain”). Hartley’s notion of a ‘value chain of meaning’ is an application of business analysis to media and cultural studies. In business, a value chain is what links the producer/originator, via commodity/distribution, to the consumer. In the same way, Hartley says, one might speak of a symbolic value chain moving from an author/producer, via the text, to the audience/consumer. Much of western history may indeed be understood as a movement along this chain. In pre-modern times, meaning resided in the author. The Divine Author, God, was regarded as the source of all meaning. In the modern period, ‘after Milton and Johnson’, meaning was located in texts. Experts observed the properties of a text or other object, and by this means discovered its meaning. In ‘the contemporary period’, however – the period roughly following the Second World War – meaning has overwhelming come to be located with audiences or consumers (Hartley, “Value Chain” 131–35). It is in this context, Hartley tells us, that the plebiscite is coming to the fore. As a means of allowing audiences to directly represent their own choices, the plebiscite is part of a new paradigm taking shape, as global culture moves away from the modern epoch and its text-dominated paradigm (Hartley, “Reality” 1–3). Talk of a symbolic value chain is a self-conscious example of the logic of business/cultural partnership currently circulating in neo-liberal discourse. It is also an example of a teleological understanding of history, through which the past few centuries are presented as part of a linear progression towards direct democracy. This teleology works well with the up-tempo talk of television as ‘democratainment’ in Hartley’s earlier work (Hartley, Uses of Television). Western history is essentially a triumphant progression, he implies, from the Dark Ages, to representative democracy, to the enlightened and direct ‘consumer democracy’ unfolding around us today (Hartley, “Reality” 47). Teleological assumptions are always suspect from an historical point of view. For a start, casting the modern period as one in which meaning resided overwhelmingly in the text fails to consider the culture of popular performance flourishing before the twentieth century. Popular theatrical forms were far more significant to ordinary people of the nineteenth century than the notions of empirical or textual analysis cultivated in elite circles. Burlesques, minstrel-shows, music hall and variety productions all took a playful approach to their texts, altering their tone and content in line with audience expectations (Chevalier 40). Before the commercialisation of popular theatre in the late-nineteenth century, many theatricals also worked in a relatively open-ended way. At concert saloons or ‘free-and-easies’ (pubs where musical performances were offered), amateur singers volunteered their services, stepping out from the audience to perform an act or two and then disappearing into it again (Joyce 206). As a precursor to TV talent contests and ‘open mic’ comedy sessions today, many theatrical managers held amateur nights in which would-be professionals tried their luck before a restless crowd, with a contract awarded to performers drawing the loudest applause (Watson 5). Each of these considerations challenge the view that open participatory networks are the expression of an historical process through which meaning has only recently come to reside with audiences and consumers. Another reason for suspecting teleological notions about democracy is that it proceeds as if Foucauldian analysis did not exist. Characterising history as a process of democratisation tends to equate democracy with openness and freedom in an uncritical way. It glosses over the fact that representative democracy involved the repression of directly participatory practices and unruly social groups. More pertinently, it ignores critiques of direct democracy. Even if there are positive aspects to the re-emergence of participatory practices among audiences today, there are still real problems with direct democracy as a political ideal. It would be fairly easy to make the case that rowdy Victorian audiences engaged in ‘direct democratic’ practices during the course of a variety show or burlesque. The ‘gods’ in Victorian galleries exulted in expressing their preferences: evicting lack-lustre comics and demanding more of other performers. It would also be easy to valorise these practices as examples of the kind of culture-jamming I referred to earlier – as forms of resistance to the tyranny of well-tempered citizenship gaining sway at the time. Given the often hysterical attacks directed at unruly audiences, there is an obvious satisfaction to be had from observing the reinstatement of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay at Her Majesty’s Theatre, or in the pleasure that working-class audiences derived from ‘calling the tune’. The same kind of satisfaction is not to be had, however, when observing direct democracy in action on YouTube, or during a season of Dancing with the Stars, or some other kind of plebiscitary TV. The expression of audience preferences in this context hardly carries the subversive connotations of informal evictions during a late-Victorian music-hall show. Viewer-voting today is indeed dominated by a rhetoric of partnership which centres on audience participation, rather than a notion of opposition between producers and audiences (Jenkins). The terrain of plebiscitary entertainment is very different now from the terrain of popular culture described by Stuart Hall in the 1980s – let alone as it stood in the 1890s, during Alice Leamar’s tour. Most commentary on plebiscitary TV avoids talk of ‘cultural struggle’ (Hall 235) and instead adopts a language of collaboration and of people ‘having a ball’ (Neville; Hartley, “Reality” 3). The extent to which contemporary plebiscites are managed by what Hartley calls the ‘plebiscitary industries’ evokes one of the most powerful criticisms made against direct democracy. That is, it evokes the view that direct democracy allows commercial interests to set the terms of public participation in decision-making, and thus to influence its outcomes (Barber 36; Moore 55–56). There is obviously big money to be made from plebiscitary TV. The advertising blitz which takes place during viewer-voting programs, and the vote-rigging scandals so often surrounding them make this clear. These considerations highlight the fact that public involvement in a plebiscitary process is not something to make a song and dance about unless broad involvement first takes place in deciding the issues open for determination by plebiscite, and the way in which these issues are framed. In the absence of this kind of broad participation, engagement in plebiscitary forms serves a solely consolatory function, offering the pleasures of viewer-voting as a substitute for substantive involvement in cultural creation and political change. Another critique sometimes made against direct democracy is that it makes an easy vehicle for prejudice (Barber 36–7). This was certainly the case in Victorian theatres, where it was common for Anglo gallery-members to heckle female and non-white performers in an intimidatory way. A group of American vaudeville performers called the Cherry Sisters certainly experienced this phenomenon in the early 1900s. The Cherry Sisters were defiantly unglamorous middle-aged women in a period when female performers were increasingly expected to display scantily-clad youthful figures on stage. As a consequence, they were embroiled in a number of near-riots in which male audience members hurled abuse and heavy objects from the galleries, and in some cases chased them into the street to physically assault them there (Pittinger 76–77). Such incidents give us a glimpse of the dark face of direct democracy. In some cases, the direct expression of popular views becomes an attack on diversity, leading to the kind of violent mêlée experienced either by the Cherry Sisters or the Middle Eastern people attacked on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach at the end of 2005. ‘Democracy’ is always an obviously politically loaded term when used in debates about new media. It is frequently used to imply that particular cultural or technological forms are inherently liberatory and inclusive. As Graeme Turner points out, reality TV has been celebrated as ‘democratic’ in this way. Only rarely, however, is there an attempt to argue why this is the case – to show how viewer-voting formats actually serve a democratic agenda. It was for this reason that Turner argued that the inclusion of ordinary people on reality TV should be understood as demotic rather than democratic (Turner, Understanding Celebrity 82–5; Turner, “Mass Production”). Ultimately, however, it is immaterial whether one uses the term ‘demotic’ or ‘direct democratic’ to describe the growth of plebiscitary entertainment. What is important is that we avoid making inflated claims about the direct expression of audience views, using the term ‘democratic’ to give an unduly celebratory spin to the political complexities involved. People may indeed be having a ball as they take part in online polls or choose what they want to watch on YouTube or shout at the TV during an episode of Idol. The ‘participatory enthusiasm’ that fans feel watching a show like Big Brother may also have lessons for those interested in making parliamentary process more responsive to people’s interests and needs (Coleman 458). But the development of plebiscitary forms is not inherently democratic in the sense that Turner suggests the term should be used – that is, it does not of itself serve a liberatory or socially inclusive agenda. Nor does it lead to substantive participation in cultural and political processes. In the end, it seems to me that we need to move beyond the discussion of plebiscitary entertainment in terms of democracy. The whole concept of democracy as the yardstick against which new media should be measured is highly problematic. Not only is direct democracy a vexed political ideal to start off with – it also leads commentators to take predictable positions when debating its relationship to new technologies and cultural forms. Some turn to hype, others to critique, and the result often appears as a mere restatement of the commentators’ political inclinations rather than a useful investigation of the developments at hand. Some of the most intriguing aspects of plebiscitary entertainments are left unexplored if we remain preoccupied with democracy. One might well investigate the re-introduction of studio audiences and participatory audience practices, for example, as a nostalgia for the interactivity experienced in live theatres such as the Newtown Bridge in the early twentieth century. It certainly seems to me that a retro impulse informs some of the developments in televised stand-up comedy in recent years. This was obviously the case for Paul McDermott’s The Side Show on Australian television in 2007, with its nod to the late-Victorian or early twentieth-century fairground and its live-theatrical vibe. More relevantly here, it also seems to be the case for American viewer-voting programs such as Last Comic Standing and the Comedy Channel’s Open Mic Fight. Further, reviews of programs such as Idol sometimes emphasise the emotional engagement arising out of their combination of viewer-voting and live performance as a harking-back to the good old days when entertainment was about being real (Neville). One misses this nostalgia associated with plebiscitary entertainments if bound to a teleological assumption that they form part of an ineluctable progression towards the New and the Free. Perhaps, then, it is time to pay more attention to the historical roots of viewer-voting formats, to think about the way that new media is sometimes about a re-invention of the old, trying to escape the recurrent back-and-forthing of debate about their relationship to progress and democracy. References Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture .Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Barber, Benjamin R. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. “Which Technology and Which Democracy?” Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003. 33–48. Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Cheshire, D. F. Music Hall in Britain. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Chevalier, Albert. Before I Forget: The Autobiography of a Chevalier d’Industrie. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901. Coleman, Stephen. “How the Other Half Votes: Big Brother Viewers and the 2005 General Election”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (2006): 457–79. Djubal, Clay. “From Minstrel Tenor to Vaudeville Showman: Harry Clay, ‘A Friend of the Australian Performer’”. Australasian Drama Studies 34 (April 1999): 10–24. Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1891. Grossman, Lawrence. The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age. New York: Penguin, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’”. People’s History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 227–49. Hartley, John, The Uses of Television. London: Routledge, 1999. ———. “‘Reality’ and the Plebiscite”. Politoctainment: Television’s Take on the Real. Ed. Kristina Riegert. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. http://www.cci.edu.au/hartley/downloads/Plebiscite%20(Riegert%20chapter) %20revised%20FINAL%20%5BFeb%2014%5D.pdf. ———. “The ‘Value-Chain of Meaning’ and the New Economy”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 129–41. Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 33–43. ———, and David Thornburn. “Introduction: The Digital Revolution, the Informed Citizen, and the Culture of Democracy”. Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. 1–20. Jones, Gareth Stedman. ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 179–238. Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. Lake, Marilyn. “White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project”. Australian Historical Studies 122 ( 2003): 346–63. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. London: Routledge, 2002. Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. Moore, Richard K. “Democracy and Cyberspace”. Digital Democracy: Discourse and Decision Making in the Information Age. Eds. Barry Hague and Brian D. Loader. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 39–59. Neville, Richard. “Crass, Corny, But Still a Woodstock Moment for a New Generation”. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 November 2004. Pittinger, Peach R. “The Cherry Sisters in Early Vaudeville: Performing a Failed Femininity”. Theatre History Studies 24 (2004): 73–97. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. ———. “The Mass Production of Celebrity: ‘Celetoids’, Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn’”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.2 (2006): 153–165. Waterhouse, Richard. From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1990. Watson, Bobby. Fifty Years Behind the Scenes. Sydney: Slater, 1924. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bellanta, Melissa. "Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/02-bellanta.php>. APA Style Bellanta, M. (Apr. 2008) "Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/02-bellanta.php>.

Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, taking in an English burlesque. The people around you have just found out that Alice Leamar will not be performing her famed turn in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay tonight, a high-kicking Can-Canesque number, very much the dance du jour. Your fellow audience members are none too pleased about this – they are shouting, and stamping the heels of their boots so loudly the whole theatre resounds with the noise. Most people in the expensive seats below look up in the direction of the gallery with a familiar blend of fear and loathing. The rough ‘gods’ up there are nearly always restless, more this time than usual. The uproar fulfils its purpose, though, because tomorrow night, Leamar’s act will be reinstated: the ‘gods’ will have their way (Bulletin, 1 October 1892). Another scene now, this time at the Newtown Bridge Theatre in Sydney, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. A comedian is trying a new routine for the crowd, but no one seems much impressed so far. A few discontented rumbles begin at first – ‘I want to go home’, says one wag, and then another – and soon these gain momentum, so that almost everyone is caught up in an ecstasy of roisterous abuse. A burly ‘chucker out’ appears, trying to eject some of the loudest hecklers, and a fully-fledged punch-up ensues (Djubal 19, 23; Cheshire 86). Eventually, one or two men are made to leave – but so too is the hapless comedian, evicted by derisive howls from the stage. The scenes I have just described show that audience interaction was a key feature in late-nineteenth century popular theatre, and in some cases even persisted into the following century. Obviously, there was no formal voting mechanism used during these performances à la contemporary shows like Idol. But rowdy practises amounted to a kind of audience ‘vote’ nonetheless, through which people decided those entertainers they wanted to see and those they emphatically did not. In this paper, I intend to use these bald parallels between Victorian audience practices and new-millennium viewer-voting to investigate claims about the links between democracy and plebiscitary entertainment. The rise of voting for pleasure in televised contests and online polls is widely attended by debate about democracy (e.g. Andrejevic; Coleman; Hartley, “Reality”). The most hyped commentary on this count evokes a teleological assumption – that western history is inexorably moving towards direct democracy. This view becomes hard to sustain when we consider the extent to which the direct expression of audience views was a feature of Victorian popular entertainment, and that these participatory practices were largely suppressed by the turn of the twentieth century. Old audience practices also allow us to question some of the uses of the term ‘direct democracy’ in new media commentary. Descriptions of voting for pleasure as part of a growth towards direct democracy are often made to celebrate rather than investigate plebiscitary forms. They elide the fact that direct democracy is a vexed political ideal. And they limit our discussion of voting for leisure and fun. Ultimately, arguing back and forth about whether viewer-voting is democratic stops us from more interesting explorations of this emerging cultural phenomenon. ‘To a degree that would be unimaginable to theatregoers today’, says historian Robert Allen, ‘early nineteenth-century audiences controlled what went on at the theatre’. The so-called ‘shirt-sleeve’ crowd in the cheapest seats of theatrical venues were habitually given to hissing, shouting, and even throwing objects in order to evict performers during the course of a show. The control exerted by the peanut-chomping gallery was certainly apparent in the mid-century burlesques Allen writes about (55). It was also apparent in minstrel, variety and music hall productions until around the turn of the century. Audience members in the galleries of variety theatres and music halls regularly engaged in the pleasure of voicing their aesthetic preferences. Sometimes comic interjectors from among them even drew more laughs than the performers on stage. ‘We went there not as spectators but as performers’, as an English music-hall habitué put it (Bailey 154). In more downmarket venues such as Sydney’s Newtown Bridge Theatre, these participatory practices continued into the early 1900s. Boisterous audience practices came under sustained attack in the late-Victorian era. A series of measures were taken by authorities, theatre managers and social commentators to wrest the control of popular performances from those in theatre pits and galleries. These included restricting the sale of alcohol in theatre venues, employing brawn in the form of ‘chuckers out’, and darkening auditoriums, so that only the stage was illuminated and the audience thus de-emphasised (Allen 51–61; Bailey 157–68; Waterhouse 127, 138–43). They also included a relentless public critique of those engaging in heckling behaviours, thus displaying their ‘littleness of mind’ (Age, 6 Sep. 1876). The intensity of attacks on rowdy audience participation suggests that symbolic factors were at play in late-Victorian attempts to enforce decorous conduct at the theatre. The last half of the century was, after all, an era of intense debate about the qualities necessary for democratic citizenship. The suffrage was being dramatically expanded during this time, so that it encompassed the vast majority of white men – and by the early twentieth century, many white women as well. In Australia, the prelude to federation also involved debate about the type of democracy to be adopted. Should it be republican? Should it enfranchise all men and women; all people, or only white ones? At stake in these debates were the characteristics and subjectivities one needed to possess before being deemed capable of enfranchisement. To be worthy of the vote, as of other democratic privileges, one needed to be what Toby Miller has called a ‘well-tempered’ subject at the turn of the twentieth century (Miller; Joyce 4). One needed to be carefully deliberative and self-watching, to avoid being ‘savage’, ‘uncivilised’, emotive – all qualities which riotous audience members (like black people and women) were thought not to possess (Lake). This is why the growing respectability of popular theatre is so often considered a key feature of the modernisation of popular culture. Civil and respectful audience behaviours went hand in hand with liberal-democratic concepts of the well-tempered citizen. Working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England has famously (and notoriously) been described as a ‘culture of consolation’: an escapist desire for fun based on a fatalistic acceptance of under-privilege and social discrimination (Jones). This idea does not do justice to the range of hopes and efforts to create a better society among workingpeople at the time. But it still captures the motivation behind most unruly audience behaviours: a gleeful kind of resistance or ‘culture jamming’ which viewed disruption and uproar as ends in themselves, without the hope that they would be productive of improved social conditions. Whether or not theatrical rowdiness served a solely consolatory purpose for the shirt-sleeve crowd, it certainly evoked a sharp fear of disorderly exuberance in mainstream society. Anxieties about violent working-class uprisings leading to the institution of mob rule were a characteristic of the late-nineteenth century, often making their way into fiction (Brantlinger). Roisterous behaviours in popular theatres resonated with the concerns expressed in works such as Caesar’s Column (Donnelly), feeding on a long association between the theatre and misrule. These fears obviously stand in stark contrast to the ebullient commentary surrounding interactive entertainment today. Over-oxygenated rhetoric about the democratic potential of cyberspace was of course a feature of new media commentary at the beginning of the 1990s (for a critique of such rhetoric see Meikle 33–42; Grossman). Current helium-giddy claims about digital technologies as ‘democratising’ reprise this cyberhype (Andrejevic 12–15, 23–8; Jenkins and Thornburn). One recent example of upbeat talk about plebiscitary formats as direct democracy is John Hartley’s contribution to the edited collection, Politicotainment (Hartley, “Reality”). There are now a range of TV shows and online formats, he says, which offer audiences the opportunity to directly express their views. The development of these entertainment forms are part of a movement towards a ‘direct open network’ in global media culture (3). They are also part of a macro historical shift: a movement ‘down the value chain of meaning’ which has taken place over the past few centuries (Hartley, “Value Chain”). Hartley’s notion of a ‘value chain of meaning’ is an application of business analysis to media and cultural studies. In business, a value chain is what links the producer/originator, via commodity/distribution, to the consumer. In the same way, Hartley says, one might speak of a symbolic value chain moving from an author/producer, via the text, to the audience/consumer. Much of western history may indeed be understood as a movement along this chain. In pre-modern times, meaning resided in the author. The Divine Author, God, was regarded as the source of all meaning. In the modern period, ‘after Milton and Johnson’, meaning was located in texts. Experts observed the properties of a text or other object, and by this means discovered its meaning. In ‘the contemporary period’, however – the period roughly following the Second World War – meaning has overwhelming come to be located with audiences or consumers (Hartley, “Value Chain” 131–35). It is in this context, Hartley tells us, that the plebiscite is coming to the fore. As a means of allowing audiences to directly represent their own choices, the plebiscite is part of a new paradigm taking shape, as global culture moves away from the modern epoch and its text-dominated paradigm (Hartley, “Reality” 1–3). Talk of a symbolic value chain is a self-conscious example of the logic of business/cultural partnership currently circulating in neo-liberal discourse. It is also an example of a teleological understanding of history, through which the past few centuries are presented as part of a linear progression towards direct democracy. This teleology works well with the up-tempo talk of television as ‘democratainment’ in Hartley’s earlier work (Hartley, Uses of Television). Western history is essentially a triumphant progression, he implies, from the Dark Ages, to representative democracy, to the enlightened and direct ‘consumer democracy’ unfolding around us today (Hartley, “Reality” 47). Teleological assumptions are always suspect from an historical point of view. For a start, casting the modern period as one in which meaning resided overwhelmingly in the text fails to consider the culture of popular performance flourishing before the twentieth century. Popular theatrical forms were far more significant to ordinary people of the nineteenth century than the notions of empirical or textual analysis cultivated in elite circles. Burlesques, minstrel-shows, music hall and variety productions all took a playful approach to their texts, altering their tone and content in line with audience expectations (Chevalier 40). Before the commercialisation of popular theatre in the late-nineteenth century, many theatricals also worked in a relatively open-ended way. At concert saloons or ‘free-and-easies’ (pubs where musical performances were offered), amateur singers volunteered their services, stepping out from the audience to perform an act or two and then disappearing into it again (Joyce 206). As a precursor to TV talent contests and ‘open mic’ comedy sessions today, many theatrical managers held amateur nights in which would-be professionals tried their luck before a restless crowd, with a contract awarded to performers drawing the loudest applause (Watson 5). Each of these considerations challenge the view that open participatory networks are the expression of an historical process through which meaning has only recently come to reside with audiences and consumers. Another reason for suspecting teleological notions about democracy is that it proceeds as if Foucauldian analysis did not exist. Characterising history as a process of democratisation tends to equate democracy with openness and freedom in an uncritical way. It glosses over the fact that representative democracy involved the repression of directly participatory practices and unruly social groups. More pertinently, it ignores critiques of direct democracy. Even if there are positive aspects to the re-emergence of participatory practices among audiences today, there are still real problems with direct democracy as a political ideal. It would be fairly easy to make the case that rowdy Victorian audiences engaged in ‘direct democratic’ practices during the course of a variety show or burlesque. The ‘gods’ in Victorian galleries exulted in expressing their preferences: evicting lack-lustre comics and demanding more of other performers. It would also be easy to valorise these practices as examples of the kind of culture-jamming I referred to earlier – as forms of resistance to the tyranny of well-tempered citizenship gaining sway at the time. Given the often hysterical attacks directed at unruly audiences, there is an obvious satisfaction to be had from observing the reinstatement of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay at Her Majesty’s Theatre, or in the pleasure that working-class audiences derived from ‘calling the tune’. The same kind of satisfaction is not to be had, however, when observing direct democracy in action on YouTube, or during a season of Dancing with the Stars, or some other kind of plebiscitary TV. The expression of audience preferences in this context hardly carries the subversive connotations of informal evictions during a late-Victorian music-hall show. Viewer-voting today is indeed dominated by a rhetoric of partnership which centres on audience participation, rather than a notion of opposition between producers and audiences (Jenkins). The terrain of plebiscitary entertainment is very different now from the terrain of popular culture described by Stuart Hall in the 1980s – let alone as it stood in the 1890s, during Alice Leamar’s tour. Most commentary on plebiscitary TV avoids talk of ‘cultural struggle’ (Hall 235) and instead adopts a language of collaboration and of people ‘having a ball’ (Neville; Hartley, “Reality” 3). The extent to which contemporary plebiscites are managed by what Hartley calls the ‘plebiscitary industries’ evokes one of the most powerful criticisms made against direct democracy. That is, it evokes the view that direct democracy allows commercial interests to set the terms of public participation in decision-making, and thus to influence its outcomes (Barber 36; Moore 55–56). There is obviously big money to be made from plebiscitary TV. The advertising blitz which takes place during viewer-voting programs, and the vote-rigging scandals so often surrounding them make this clear. These considerations highlight the fact that public involvement in a plebiscitary process is not something to make a song and dance about unless broad involvement first takes place in deciding the issues open for determination by plebiscite, and the way in which these issues are framed. In the absence of this kind of broad participation, engagement in plebiscitary forms serves a solely consolatory function, offering the pleasures of viewer-voting as a substitute for substantive involvement in cultural creation and political change. Another critique sometimes made against direct democracy is that it makes an easy vehicle for prejudice (Barber 36–7). This was certainly the case in Victorian theatres, where it was common for Anglo gallery-members to heckle female and non-white performers in an intimidatory way. A group of American vaudeville performers called the Cherry Sisters certainly experienced this phenomenon in the early 1900s. The Cherry Sisters were defiantly unglamorous middle-aged women in a period when female performers were increasingly expected to display scantily-clad youthful figures on stage. As a consequence, they were embroiled in a number of near-riots in which male audience members hurled abuse and heavy objects from the galleries, and in some cases chased them into the street to physically assault them there (Pittinger 76–77). Such incidents give us a glimpse of the dark face of direct democracy. In some cases, the direct expression of popular views becomes an attack on diversity, leading to the kind of violent mêlée experienced either by the Cherry Sisters or the Middle Eastern people attacked on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach at the end of 2005. ‘Democracy’ is always an obviously politically loaded term when used in debates about new media. It is frequently used to imply that particular cultural or technological forms are inherently liberatory and inclusive. As Graeme Turner points out, reality TV has been celebrated as ‘democratic’ in this way. Only rarely, however, is there an attempt to argue why this is the case – to show how viewer-voting formats actually serve a democratic agenda. It was for this reason that Turner argued that the inclusion of ordinary people on reality TV should be understood as demotic rather than democratic (Turner, Understanding Celebrity 82–5; Turner, “Mass Production”). Ultimately, however, it is immaterial whether one uses the term ‘demotic’ or ‘direct democratic’ to describe the growth of plebiscitary entertainment. What is important is that we avoid making inflated claims about the direct expression of audience views, using the term ‘democratic’ to give an unduly celebratory spin to the political complexities involved. People may indeed be having a ball as they take part in online polls or choose what they want to watch on YouTube or shout at the TV during an episode of Idol. The ‘participatory enthusiasm’ that fans feel watching a show like Big Brother may also have lessons for those interested in making parliamentary process more responsive to people’s interests and needs (Coleman 458). But the development of plebiscitary forms is not inherently democratic in the sense that Turner suggests the term should be used – that is, it does not of itself serve a liberatory or socially inclusive agenda. Nor does it lead to substantive participation in cultural and political processes. In the end, it seems to me that we need to move beyond the discussion of plebiscitary entertainment in terms of democracy. The whole concept of democracy as the yardstick against which new media should be measured is highly problematic. Not only is direct democracy a vexed political ideal to start off with – it also leads commentators to take predictable positions when debating its relationship to new technologies and cultural forms. Some turn to hype, others to critique, and the result often appears as a mere restatement of the commentators’ political inclinations rather than a useful investigation of the developments at hand. Some of the most intriguing aspects of plebiscitary entertainments are left unexplored if we remain preoccupied with democracy. One might well investigate the re-introduction of studio audiences and participatory audience practices, for example, as a nostalgia for the interactivity experienced in live theatres such as the Newtown Bridge in the early twentieth century. It certainly seems to me that a retro impulse informs some of the developments in televised stand-up comedy in recent years. This was obviously the case for Paul McDermott’s The Side Show on Australian television in 2007, with its nod to the late-Victorian or early twentieth-century fairground and its live-theatrical vibe. More relevantly here, it also seems to be the case for American viewer-voting programs such as Last Comic Standing and the Comedy Channel’s Open Mic Fight. Further, reviews of programs such as Idol sometimes emphasise the emotional engagement arising out of their combination of viewer-voting and live performance as a harking-back to the good old days when entertainment was about being real (Neville). One misses this nostalgia associated with plebiscitary entertainments if bound to a teleological assumption that they form part of an ineluctable progression towards the New and the Free. Perhaps, then, it is time to pay more attention to the historical roots of viewer-voting formats, to think about the way that new media is sometimes about a re-invention of the old, trying to escape the recurrent back-and-forthing of debate about their relationship to progress and democracy. References Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture .Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Barber, Benjamin R. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. “Which Technology and Which Democracy?” Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003. 33–48. Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Cheshire, D. F. Music Hall in Britain. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Chevalier, Albert. Before I Forget: The Autobiography of a Chevalier d’Industrie. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901. Coleman, Stephen. “How the Other Half Votes: Big Brother Viewers and the 2005 General Election”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (2006): 457–79. Djubal, Clay. “From Minstrel Tenor to Vaudeville Showman: Harry Clay, ‘A Friend of the Australian Performer’”. Australasian Drama Studies 34 (April 1999): 10–24. Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1891. Grossman, Lawrence. The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age. New York: Penguin, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’”. People’s History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 227–49. Hartley, John, The Uses of Television. London: Routledge, 1999. ———. “‘Reality’ and the Plebiscite”. Politoctainment: Television’s Take on the Real. Ed. Kristina Riegert. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. http://www.cci.edu.au/hartley/downloads/Plebiscite%20(Riegert%20chapter) %20revised%20FINAL%20%5BFeb%2014%5D.pdf. ———. “The ‘Value-Chain of Meaning’ and the New Economy”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 129–41. Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 33–43. ———, and David Thornburn. “Introduction: The Digital Revolution, the Informed Citizen, and the Culture of Democracy”. Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. 1–20. Jones, Gareth Stedman. ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 179–238. Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. Lake, Marilyn. “White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project”. Australian Historical Studies 122 ( 2003): 346–63. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. London: Routledge, 2002. Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. Moore, Richard K. “Democracy and Cyberspace”. Digital Democracy: Discourse and Decision Making in the Information Age. Eds. Barry Hague and Brian D. Loader. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 39–59. Neville, Richard. “Crass, Corny, But Still a Woodstock Moment for a New Generation”. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 November 2004. Pittinger, Peach R. “The Cherry Sisters in Early Vaudeville: Performing a Failed Femininity”. Theatre History Studies 24 (2004): 73–97. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. ———. “The Mass Production of Celebrity: ‘Celetoids’, Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn’”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.2 (2006): 153–165. Waterhouse, Richard. From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1990. Watson, Bobby. Fifty Years Behind the Scenes. Sydney: Slater, 1924.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash ABSTRACT COVID-19 highlighted a disproportionate impact upon marginalized communities that needs to be addressed. Specifically, a focus on equity rather than equality would better address and prevent the disparities seen in COVID-19. A distributive justice framework can provide this great benefit but will succeed only if the medical community engages in outreach, anti-racism measures, and listens to communities in need. INTRODUCTION COVID-19 disproportionately impacted communities of color and lower socioeconomic status, sparking political discussion about existing inequities in the US.[1] Some states amended their guidelines for allocating resources, including vaccines, to provide care for marginalized communities experiencing these inequities, but there has been no clear consensus on which guidelines states should amend or how they should be ethically grounded. In part, this is because traditional justice theories do not acknowledge the deep-seated institutional and interpersonal discrimination embedded in our medical system. Therefore, a revamped distributive justice approach that accounts for these shortcomings is needed to guide healthcare decision-making now and into the post-COVID era. BACKGROUND Three terms – health disparity, health inequities, and health equity – help frame the issue. A health disparity is defined as any difference between populations in terms of disease incidence or adverse health events, such as morbidity or mortality. In contrast, health inequities are health disparities due to avoidable systematic structures rooted in racial, social, and economic injustice.[2] For example, current data demonstrate that Black, Latino, Indigenous Americans, and those living in poverty suffer higher morbidity and mortality rates from COVID-19.[3] Finally, health equity is the opportunity for anyone to attain his or her full health potential without interference from systematic structures and factors that generate health inequities, including race, socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or geography.[4] ANALYSIS Health inequities for people of color with COVID-19 have led to critiques of states that do not account for race in their resource allocation guidelines.[5] For example, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health revised its COVID-19 guidelines regarding resource allocation to patients with the best chance of short-term survival.[6] Critics have argued that this change addresses neither preexisting structural inequities nor provider bias that may have led to comorbidities and increased vulnerability to COVID-19. By failing to address race specifically, they argue the policy will perpetuate poorer outcomes in already marginalized groups. As the inequities in COVID-19 outcomes continue to be uncovered and the data continue to prove that marginalized communities suffered disproportionately, we, as healthcare providers, must reconsider our role in addressing the injustices. Our actions must be ethically grounded in the concept of justice. l. Primary Theories of Justice The principle of justice in medical ethics relates to how we ought to treat people and allocate resources. Multiple theories have emerged to explain how justice should be implemented, with three of the most prominent being egalitarianism, utilitarianism, and distributive. This paper argues that distributive justice is the best framework for remedying past actions and enacting systemic changes that may persistently prevent injustices. An egalitarian approach to justice states all individuals are equal and, therefore, should have identical access to resources. In the allocation of resources, an egalitarian approach would support a strict distribution of equal value regardless of one’s attributes or characteristics. Putting this theory into practice would place a premium on guidelines based upon first-come, first-served basis or random selection.[7] However, the egalitarian approach taken in the UK continues to worsen health inequities due to institutional and structural discrimination.[8] A utilitarian approach to justice emphasizes maximizing overall benefits and achieving the greatest good for the greatest number of people. When resources are limited, the utilitarian principle historically guides decision-making. In contrast to the egalitarian focus on equal distribution, utilitarianism focuses on managing distributions to maximize numerical outcomes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, guidelines for allocating resources had utilitarian goals like saving the most lives, which may prioritize the youthful and those deemed productive in society, followed by the elderly and the very ill. It is important to reconsider using utilitarian approaches as the default in the post-COVID healthcare community. These approaches fail to address past inequity, sacrificing the marginalized in their emphasis on the greatest amount of good rather than the type of good. Finally, a distributive approach to justice mandates resources should be allocated in a manner that does not infringe individual liberties to those with the greatest need. Proposed by John Rawls in a Theory of Justice, this approach requires accounting for societal inequality, a factor absent from egalitarianism and utilitarianism.[9] Naomi Zack elaborates how distributive justice can be applied to healthcare, outlining why racism is a social determinant of health that must be acknowledged and addressed.[10] Until there are parallel health opportunities and better alignment of outcomes among different social and racial groups, the underlying systemic social and economic variables that are driving the disparities must be fixed. As a society and as healthcare providers, we should be striving to address the factors that perpetuate health inequities. While genetics and other variables influence health, the data show proportionately more exposure, more cases, and more deaths in the Black American and Hispanic populations. Preexisting conditions and general health disparities are signs of health inequity that increased vulnerability. Distributive justice as a theoretical and applied framework can be applied to preventable conditions that increase vulnerability and can justify systemic changes to prevent further bias in the medical community. During a pandemic, egalitarian and utilitarian approaches to justice are prioritized by policymakers and health systems. Yet, as COVID-19 has demonstrated, they further perpetuate the death and morbidity of populations that face discrimination. These outcomes are due to policies and guidelines that overall benefit white communities over communities of color. Historically, US policy that looks to distribute resources equally (focusing on equal access instead of outcomes), in a color-blind manner, has further perpetuated poor outcomes for marginalized communities.[11] ll. Historical and Ongoing Disparities Across socio-demographic groups, the medical system exacerbates historical and current inequities. Members of marginalized races,[12] women,[13] LGBTQ people,[14] and poor people[15] experience trauma caused by discrimination, marginalization, and failure to access high-quality public and private goods. Through the unequal treatment of marginalized communities, these historic traumas continue. In the US, people of color do not receive equal and fair medical treatment. A meta-analysis found that Hispanics and Black Americans were significantly undertreated for pain compared to their white counterparts over the last 20 years.[16] This is partly due to provider bias. Through interviewing medical trainees, a study by the National Academy of Science found that half of medical students and residents harbored racist beliefs such as “Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than white people’s” or “Black people’s skin is thicker than white people’s skin.”[17] More than 3,000 Indigenous American women were coerced, threatened, and deliberately misinformed to ensure cooperation in forced sterilization.[18] Hispanic people have less support in seeking medical care, in receiving culturally appropriate care, and they suffer from the medical community’s lack of resources to address language barriers.[19] In the US, patients of different sexes do not receive the same quality of healthcare. Despite having greater health needs, middle-aged and older women are more likely to have fewer hospital stays and fewer physician visits compared to men of similar demographics and health risk profiles.[20] In the field of critical care, women are less likely to be admitted to the ICU, less likely to receive interventions such as mechanical ventilation, and more likely to die compared to their male ICU counterparts.[21] In the US, patients of different socioeconomic statuses do not receive the same quality of healthcare. Low-income patients are more likely to have higher rates of infant mortality, chronic disease, and a shorter life span.[22] This is partly due to the insurance-based discrimination in the medical community.[23] One in three deaths of those experiencing homelessness could have been prevented by timely and effective medical care. An individual experiencing homelessness has a life expectancy that is decades shorter than that of the average American.[24] lll. Action Needed: Policy Reform While steps need to be taken to provide equitable care in the current pandemic, including the allocation of vaccines, they may not address the historical failures of health policy, hospital policy, and clinical care to eliminate bias and ensure equal treatment of patients. According to an applied distributive justice framework, inequities must be corrected. Rather than focusing primarily on fair resource allocation, medicine must be actively anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-transphobic, and anti-discriminatory. Evidence has shown that the health inequities caused by COVID-19 are smaller in regions that have addressed racial wealth gaps through forms of reparations.[25] Distributive justice calls for making up for the past using tools of allocation as well as tools to remedy persistent problems. For example, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, began “Healing ARC,” a pilot initiative that involves acknowledgement, redress, and closure on an institutional level.[26] Acknowledgement entails informing patients about disparities at the hospital, claiming responsibility, and incorporating community ideas for redress. Redress involves a preferential admission option for Black and Hispanic patients to specialty services, especially cardiovascular services, rather than general medicine. Closure requires that community and patient stakeholders work together to ensure that a new system is in place that will continue to prioritize equity. Of note, redress could take the form of cash transfers, discounted or free care, taxes on nonprofit hospitals that exclude patients of color,[27] or race-explicit protocol changes (such as those being instituted by Brigham and Women’s Hospital that admit patients historically denied access to certain forms of medical care). In New York, for instance, the New York State Bar Association drafted the COVID-19 resolutions to ensure that emergency regulations and guidelines do not discriminate against communities of color, and even mandate that diverse patient populations be included in clinical trials.[28] Also, physicians must listen to individuals from marginalized communities to identify needs and ensure that community members take part in decision-making. The solution is not to simply build new health centers in communities of color, as this may lead to tiers of care. Rather, local communities should have a chance to impact existing hospital policy and should also use their political participation to further their healthcare interests. Distributive justice does not seek to disenfranchise groups that hold power in the system. It aims to transform the system so that those in power do not continue to obtain unfair benefits at the expense of others. The framework accounts for unjust historical oppression and current injustices in our system to provide equitable outcomes to all who access the system. In this vein, we can begin to address the flagrant disparities between communities that have always – and continue to – exist in healthcare today.[29] CONCLUSION As equality focuses on access, it currently fails to do justice. Instead of outcomes, it is time to focus on equity. A focus on equity rather than equality would better address and prevent the disparities seen in COVID-19. A distributive justice framework can gain traction in clinical decision-making guidelines and system-level reallocation of resources but will succeed only if the medical community engages in outreach, anti-racism measures, and listens to communities in need. There should be an emphasis on implementing a distributive justice framework that treats all patients equitably, accounts for historical harm, and focuses on transparency in allocation and public health decision-making. [1] APM Research Lab Staff. 2020. “The Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.” APM Research Lab. https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race. [2] Bharmal, N., K. P. Derose, M. Felician, and M. M. Weden. 2015. “Understanding the Upstream Social Determinants of Health.” California: RAND Corporation 1-18. https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR1096.html. [3] Yancy, C. W. 2020. “COVID-19 and African Americans.” JAMA. 323 (19): 1891-2. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.6548; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2020. “COVID-19 in Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/racial-ethnic-disparities/index.html. [4] Braveman, P., E. Arkin, T. Orleans, D. Proctor, and A. Plough. 2017. “What is Health Equity?” Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2017/05/what-is-health-equity-.html. [5] Bedinger, M. 2020 Apr 22. “After Uproar, Mass. Revises Guidelines on Who Gets an ICU Bed or Ventilator Amid COVID-19 Surge.” Wbur. https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/04/20/mass-guidelines-ventilator-covid-coronavirus; Wigglesworth, A. 2020 May 11. “Institutional Racism, Inequity Fuel High Minority Death Toll from Coronavirus, L.A. Officials Say.” Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-11/institutional-racism-inequity-high-minority-death-toll-coronavirus. [6] Executive Office of Health and Human Services Department of Public Health. 2020 Oct 20. “Crises Standards of Care Planning and Guidance for the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Commonwealth of Massachusetts. https://www.mass.gov/doc/crisis-standards-of-care-planning-guidance-for-the-covid-19-pandemic. [7] Emanuel, E. J., G. Persad, R. Upshur, et al. 2020. “Fair Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in the Time of Covid-19. New England Journal of Medicine 382: 2049-55. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsb2005114. [8] Salway, S., G. Mir, D. Turner, G. T. Ellison, L. Carter, and K. Gerrish. 2016. “Obstacles to "Race Equality" in the English National Health Service: Insights from the Healthcare Commissioning Arena.” Social Science and Medicine 152: 102-110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.01.031. [9] Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice (Revised Edition) (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). [10] Zack, N. Applicative Justice: A Pragmatic Empirical Approach to Racial Injustice (New York: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2016). [11] Charatz-Litt, C. 1992. “A Chronicle of Racism: The Effects of the White Medical Community on Black Health.” Journal of the National Medical Association 84 (8): 717-25. http://hdl.handle.net/10822/857182. [12] Washington, H. A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006). [13] d'Oliveira, A. F., S. G. Diniz, and L. B. Schraiber. 2002. “Violence Against Women in Health-care Institutions: An Emerging Problem.” Lancet. 359 (9318): 1681-5. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(02)08592-6. [14] Hafeez, H., M. Zeshan, M. A. Tahir, N. Jahan, and S. Naveed. 2017. “Health Care Disparities Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth: A Literature Review. Cureus 9 (4): e1184. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.1184; Drescher, J., A. Schwartz, F. Casoy, et al. 2016. “The Growing Regulation of Conversion Therapy.” Journal of Medical Regulation 102 (2): 7-12. https://doi.org/10.30770/2572-1852-102.2.7; Stroumsa, D. 2014. “The State of Transgender Health Care: Policy, Law, and Medical Frameworks.” American Journal of Public Health. 104 (3): e31-8. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301789. [15] Stepanikova, I., and G. R. Oates. 2017. “Perceived Discrimination and Privilege in Health Care: The Role of Socioeconomic Status and Race.” American Journal of Preventative Medicine. 52 (1s1): S86-s94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2016.09.024; Swartz, K. “Health Care for the Poor: For Whom, What Care, and Whose Responsibility?” In Cancian, M., and S. Danziger (Eds.). Changing Poverty, Changing Policies (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2009), 69-74. [16] Meghani, S. H., E. Byun, and R. M. Gallagher. 2012. “Time to Take Stock: A Meta-analysis and Systematic Review of Analgesic Treatment Disparities for Pain in the United States.” Pain Medicine 13 (2): 150-74. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1526-4637.2011.01310.x; Williams, D. R., and T. D. Rucker. 2000. “Understanding and Addressing Racial Disparities in Health Care.” Health Care Financing Review 21 (4): 75-90. https://scholar.harvard.edu/davidrwilliams/dwilliam/publications/understanding-and-addressing-racial-disparities-health. [17] Hoffman, K. M., S. Trawalter, J. R. Axt, and M. N. Oliver. 2016. “Racial Bias in Pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological Differences Between Blacks and Whites.” PNAS 113 (16): 4296-4301. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1516047113. [18] Pacheco, C. M., S. M. Daley, T. Brown, M. Filipp, K. A. Greiner, and C. M. Daley. 2013. “Moving Forward: Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust Between American Indians and Researchers.” American Journal of Public Health. 103 (12): 2152-9. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301480. [19] Velasco-Mondragon, E., A. Jimenez, A. G. Palladino-Davis, D. Davis, and J. A. Escamilla-Cejudo. 2016. “Hispanic Health in the USA: A Scoping Review of the Literature.” Public Health Reviews 37:31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40985-016-0043-2. [20] Cameron, K. A., J. Song, L. M. Manheim, and D. D. Dunlop. 2010. “Gender Disparities in Health and Healthcare Use Among Older Adults.” Journal of Women’s Health (Larchmt) 19 (9): 1643-50. https://doi.org/10.1089/jwh.2009.1701. [21] Bierman, A. S. 2007. “Sex Matters: Gender Disparities in Quality and Outcomes of Care. Canadian Medical Association Journal 177 (12): 1520-1. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.071541; Fowler, R. A., S. Sabur, P. Li, et al. 2007. “Sex-and Age-based Differences in the Delivery and Outcomes of Critical Care. Canadian Medical Association Journal 177 (12): 1513-9. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.071112. [22] McLaughlin, D. K., and C. S. Stokes. 2002. “Income Inequality and Mortality in US Counties: Does Minority Racial Concentration Matter?” American Journal of Public Health 92 (1): 99-104. https://doi.org/.10.2105/ajph.92.1.99; Shea, S., J. Lima, A. Diez-Roux, N. W. Jorgensen, and R. L. 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IntroductionIn his now-seminal book, Pilgrim in the Microworld (1983), David Sudnow details his process of learning to play the game Breakout on the Atari 2600. Sudnow develops an account of his graduation from a novice (having never played a videogame prior, and middle-aged at time of writing) to being able to fluidly perform the various configurative processes involved in an acclimated Breakout player’s repertoire.Sudnow’s account of videogame skill-development is not at odds with common-sense views on the matter: people become competent at videogames by playing them—we get used to how controllers work and feel, and to the timings of the game and those required of our bodies, through exposure. We learn by playing, failing, repeating, and ultimately internalising the game’s rhythms—allowing us to perform requisite actions. While he does not put it in as many words, Sudnow’s account affords parity to various human and nonhuman stakeholders involved in videogame-play: technical, temporal, and corporeal. Essentially, his point is that intertwined technical systems like software and human-interface devices—with their respective temporal rhythms, which coalesce and conflict with those of the human player—require management to play skilfully.The perspective Sudnow develops here is no doubt important, but modes of building competency cannot be strictly fixed around a player-videogame relationship; a relatively noncontroversial view in game studies. Videogame scholars have shown that there is currency in understanding how competencies in gameplay arise from engaging with ancillary objects beyond the thresholds of player-game relations; the literature to date casting a long shadow across a broad spectrum of materials and practices. Pursuing this thread, this article addresses the enterprise (and conceptualisation) of ‘skill building’ in videogames (taken as the ability to ‘beat games’ or cultivate the various competencies to do so) via the invocation of peripheral objects or practices. More precisely, this article develops the perspective that we need to attend to the impacts of ancillary objects on play—positioned as hybrid assemblage, as described in the work of writers like Sudnow. In doing so, I first survey how the intervention of peripheral game material has been researched and theorised in game studies, suggesting that many accounts deal too simply with how players build skill through these means—eliding the fact that play works as an engine of many moving parts. We do not simply become ‘better’ at videogames by engaging peripheral material. Furthering this view, I visit recent literature broadly associated with disciplines like post-phenomenology, which handles the hybridity of play and its extension across bodies, game systems, and other gaming material—attending to how skill building occurs; that is, through the recalibration of perceptual faculties operating in the bodily and temporal dimensions of videogame play. We become ‘better’ at videogames by drawing on peripheral gaming material to augment how we negotiate the rhythms of play.Following on from this, I conclude by mobilising post-phenomenological thinking to further consider skill-building through peripheral material, showing how such approaches can generate insights into important and emerging areas of this practice. Following recent games research, such as the work of James Ash, I adopt Bernard Stiegler’s formulation of technicity—pointing toward the conditioning of play through ancillary gaming objects: focusing particularly on the relationship between game skill, game guides, and embodied processes of memory and perception.In short, this article considers videogame skill-building, through means beyond the game, as a significant recalibration of embodied, temporal, and technical entanglements involved in play. Building Skill: From Guides to BodiesThere is a handsome literature that has sought to conceptualise the influence of ancillary game material, which can be traced to earlier theories of media convergence (Jenkins). More incisive accounts (pointing directly at game-skill) have been developed since, through theoretical rubrics such as paratext and metagaming. A point of congruence is the theme of relation: the idea that the locus of understanding and meaning can be specified through things outside the game. For scholars like Mia Consalvo (who popularised the notion of paratext in game studies), paratexts are a central motor in play. As Consalvo suggests, paratexts are quite often primed to condition how we do things in and around videogames; there is a great instructive potential in material like walkthrough guides, gaming magazines and cheating devices. Subsequent work has since made productive use of the concept to investigate game-skill and peripheral material and practice. Worth noting is Chris Paul’s research on World of Warcraft (WoW). Paul suggests that players disseminate high-level strategies through a practice known as ‘Theorycraft’ in the game’s community: one involving the use of paratextual statistics applications to optimise play—the results then disseminated across Web-forums (see also: Nardi).Metagaming (Salen and Zimmerman 482) is another concept that is often used to position the various extrinsic objects or practices installed in play—a concept deployed by scholars to conceptualise skill building through both games and the things at their thresholds (Donaldson). Moreover, the ability to negotiate out-of-game material has been positioned as a form of skill in its own right (see also: Donaldson). Becoming familiar with paratextual resources and being able to parse this information could then constitute skill-building. Ancillary gaming objects are important, and as some have argued, central in gaming culture (Consalvo). However, critical areas are left unexamined with respect to skill-building, because scholars often fail to place paratexts or metagaming in the contexts in which they operate; that is, amongst the complex technical, embodied and temporal conjunctures of play—such as those described by Sudnow. Conceptually, much of what Sudnow says in Microworld undergirds the post-human, object-oriented, or post-phenomenological literature that has begun to populate game studies (and indeed media studies more broadly). This materially-inflected writing takes seriously the fact that technical objects (like videogames) and human subjects are caught up in the rhythms of each other; digital media exists “as a mode or cluster of operations in consort with matter”, as Anna Munster tells us (330).To return to videogames, Patrick Crogan and Helen Kennedy argue that gameplay is about a “technicity” between human and nonhuman things, irreducible to any sole actor. Play is a confluence of metastable forces and conditions, a network of distributed agencies (see also Taylor, Assemblage). Others like Brendan Keogh forward post-phenomenological approaches (operating under scholars like Don Ihde)—looking past the subject-centred nature of videogame research. Ultimately, these theorists situate play as an ‘exploded diagram’, challenging anthropocentric accounts.This position has proven productive in research on ‘skilled’ or ‘high-level’ play (fertile ground for considering competency-development). Emma Witkowski, T.L. Taylor (Raising), and Todd Harper have suggested that skilled play in games emerges from the management of complex embodied and technical rhythms (echoing the points raised prior by Sudnow).Placing Paratexts in PlayWhile we have these varying accounts of how skill develops within and beyond player-game relationships, these two perspectives are rarely consolidated. That said, I address some of the limited body of work that has sought to place the paratext in the complex and distributed conjunctures of play; building a vocabulary and framework via encounters with what could loosely be called post-phenomenological thinking (not dissimilar to the just surveyed accounts). The strength of this work lies in its development of a more precise view of the operational reality of playing ‘with’ paratexts. The recent work of Darshana Jayemanne, Bjorn Nansen, and Thomas Apperley theorises the outward expansion of games and play, into diverse material, social, and spatial dimensions (147), as an ‘aesthetics of recruitment’. Consideration is given to ‘paratextual’ play and skill. For instance, they provide the example of players invoking the expertise they have witnessed broadcast through Websites like Twitch.tv or YouTube—skill-building operating here across various fronts, and through various modalities (155). Players are ‘recruited’, in different capacities, through expanded interfaces, which ultimately contour phenomenological encounters with games.Ash provides a fine-grained account in research on spatiotemporal perception and videogames—one much more focused on game-skill. Ash examines how high-level communities of players cultivate ‘spatiotemporal sensitivity’ in the game Street Fighter IV through—in Stiegler’s terms—‘exteriorising’ (Fault) game information into various data sets—producing what he calls ‘technicity’. In this way, Ash suggests that these paratextual materials don’t merely ‘influence play’ (Technology 200), but rather direct how players perceive time, and habituate exteriorised temporal rhythms into their embodied facility (a translation of high-level play). By doing so, the game can be played more proficiently. Following the broadly post-phenomenological direction of these works, I develop a brief account of two paratextual practices. Like Ash, I deploy the work of Stiegler (drawing also on Ash’s usage). I utilise Stiegler’s theoretical schema of technicity to roughly sketch how some other areas of skill-building via peripheral material can be placed within the context of play—looking particularly at the conditioning of embodied faculties of player anticipation, memory and perception through play and paratext alike. A Technicity of ParatextThe general premise of Stiegler’s technicity is that the human cannot be thought of independent from their technical supplements—that is, ‘exterior’ technical objects which could include, but are not limited to, technologies (Fault). Stiegler argues that the human, and their fundamental memory structure is finite, and as such is reliant on technical prostheses, which register and transmit experience (Fault 17). This technical supplement is what Stiegler terms ‘tertiary retention’. In short, for Stiegler, technicity can be understood as the interweaving of ‘lived’ consciousness (Cinematic 21) with tertiary retentional apparatus—which is palpably felt in our orientations in and toward time (Fault) and space (including the ‘space’ of our bodies, see New Critique 11).To be more precise, tertiary retention conditions the relationship between perception, anticipation, and subjective memory (or what Stiegler—by way of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, whose work he renovates—calls primary retention, protention, and secondary retention respectively). As Ash demonstrates (Technology), Stiegler’s framework is rich with potential in investigating the relationship between videogames and their peripheral materials. Invoking technicity, we can rethink—and expand on—commonly encountered forms of paratexts, such as game guides or walkthroughs (an example Consalvo gives in Cheating). Stiegler’s framework provides a means to assess the technical organisation (through both games and paratexts) of embodied and temporal conditions of ‘skilled play’. Following Stiegler, Consalvo’s example of a game guide is a kind of ‘exteriorisation of play’ (to the guide) that adjusts the embodied and temporal conditions of anticipation and memory (which Sudnow would tell us are key in skill-development). To work through an example, if I was playing a hard game (such as Dark Souls [From Software]), the general idea is that I would be playing from memories of the just experienced, and with expectations of what’s to come based on everything that’s happened prior (following Stiegler). There is a technicity in the game’s design here, as Ash would tell us (Technology 190-91). By way of Stiegler (and his reading of Heidegger), Ash argues a popular trend in game design is to force a technologically-mediated interplay between memory, anticipation, and perception by making videogames ‘about’ a “a future outside of present experience” (Technology 191), but hinging this on past-memory. Players then, to be ‘skilful’, and move forward through the game environment without dying, need to manage cognitive and somatic memory (which, in Dark Souls, is conventionally accrued through trial-and-error play; learning through error incentivised through punitive game mechanics, such as item-loss). So, if I was playing against one of the game’s ‘bosses’ (powerful enemies), I would generally only be familiar with the way they manoeuvre, the speed with which they do so, and where and when to attack based on prior encounter. For instance, my past-experience (of having died numerous times) would generally inform me that using a two-handed sword allows me to get in two attacks on a boss before needing to retreat to avoid fatal damage. Following Stiegler, we can understand the inscription of videogame experience in objects like game guides as giving rise to anticipation and memory—albeit based on a “past that I have not lived but rather inherited as tertiary retentions” (Cinematic 60). Tertiary retentions trigger processes of selection in our anticipations, memories, and perceptions. Where videogame technologies are traditionally the tertiary retentions in play (Ash, Technologies), the use of game-guides refracts anticipation, memory, and perception through joint systems of tertiary retention—resulting in the outcome of more efficiently beating a game.To return to my previous example of navigating Dark Souls: where I might have died otherwise, via the guide, I’d be cognisant to the timings within which I can attack the boss without sustaining damage, and when to dodge its crushing blows—allowing me to eventually defeat it and move toward the stage’s end (prompting somatic and cognitive memory shifts, which influence my anticipation in-game). Through ‘neurological’ accounts of technology—such as Stiegler’s technicity—we can think more closely about how playing with a skill-building apparatus (like a game guide) works in practice; allowing us to identify how various situations ingame can be managed via deferring functions of the player (such as memory) to exteriorised objects—shifting conditions of skill building. The prism of technicity is also useful in conceptualising some of the new ways players are building skill beyond the game. In recent years, gaming paratexts have transformed in scope and scale. Gaming has shifted into an age of quantification—with analytics platforms which harvest, aggregate, and present player data gaining significant traction, particularly in competitive and multiplayer videogames. These platforms perform numerous operations that assist players in developing skill—and are marketed as tools for players to improve by reflecting on their own practices and the practices of others (functioning similarly to the previously noted practice of TheoryCraft, but operating at a wider scale). To focus on one example, the WarCraftLogs application in WoW (Image 1) is a highly-sophisticated form of videogame analytics; the perspective of technicity providing insights into its functionality as skill-building apparatus.Image 1: WarCraftLogs. Image credit: Ben Egliston. Following Ash’s use of Stiegler (Technology), quantifying the operations that go into playing WoW can be conceptualised as what Stiegler calls a system of traces (Technology 196). Because of his central thesis of ‘technical existence’, Stiegler maintains that ‘interiority’ is coincident with technical support. As such, there is no calculation, no mental phenomena, that does not arise from internal manipulation of exteriorised symbols (Cinematic 52-54). Following on with his discussion of videogames, Ash suggests that in the exteriorisation of gameplay there is “no opposition between gesture, calculation and the representation of symbols” (Technology 196); the symbols working as an ‘abbreviation’ of gameplay that can be read as such. Drawing influence from this view, I show that ‘Big Data’ analytics platforms like WarCraftLogs similarly allow users to ‘read’ play as a set of exteriorised symbols—with significant outcomes for skill-building; allowing users to exteriorise their own play, examine the exteriorised play of others, and compare exteriorisations of their own play with those of others. Image 2: WarCraftLogs Gameplay Breakdown. Image credit: Ben Egliston.Image 2 shows a screenshot of the WarCraftLogs interface. Here we can see the exteriorisation of gameplay, and how the platform breaks down player inputs and in-game occurrences (written and numeric, like Ash’s game data). The screenshot shows a ‘raid boss’ (where players team up to defeat powerful computer-controlled enemies)—atomising the sequence of inputs a player has made over the course of the encounter. This is an accurate ledger of play—a readout that can speak to mechanical performance (specific ingame events occurred at a specific time), as well as caching and providing parses of somatic inputs and execution (e.g. ability to trace the rates at which players expend in-game resources can provide insights into rapidity of button presses). If information falls outside what is presented, players can work with an Application Programming Interface to develop customised readouts (this is encouraged through other game-data platforms, like OpenDota in Dota 2). Through this system, players can exteriorise their own input and output or view the play of others—both useful in building skill. The first point here—of exteriorising one’s own experience—resonates with Stiegler’s renovation of Husserl's ‘temporal object’—that is, an object that exists in and is formed through time—through temporal fluxes of what appears, what happens and what manifests itself in disappearing (Cinematic 14). Stiegler suggests that tertiary retentional apparatus (e.g. a gramophone) allow us to re-experience a temporal object (e.g. a melody) which would otherwise not be possible due to the finitude of human memory.To elaborate, Stiegler argues that primary memories recede into secondary memory (which is selective reactivation of perception), but through technologies of recording, (such as game-data) we can re-experience these things verbatim. So ultimately, games analytics platforms—as exteriorised technologies of recording—facilitate this after-the-fact interplay between primary and secondary memory where players can ‘audit’ their past performance, reflecting on well-played encounters or revising error. These platforms allow the detailed examination of responses to game mechanics, and provide readouts of the technical and embodied rhythms of play (which can be incorporated into future play via reading the data). Beyond self-reflection, these platforms allow the examination of other’s play. The aggregation and sorting of game-data makes expertise both visible and legible. To elaborate, players are ranked on their performance based on all submitted log-data, offering a view of how expertise ‘works’.Image 3: Top-Ranking Players in WarCraftLogs. Image credit: Ben Egliston.Image 3 shows the top-ranked players on an encounter (the top 10 of over 100,000 logs), which means that these players have performed most competently out of all gameplay parses (the metric being most damage dealt per-second in defeating a boss). Users of the platform can look in detail at the actions performed by top players in that encounter—reading and mobilising data in a similar manner to game-guides; markedly different, however, in terms of the scope (i.e. there are many available logs to draw from) and richness of the data (more detailed and current—with log rankings recalibrated regularly). Conceptually, we can also draw parallels with previous work (see: Ash, Technology)—where the habituation of expert game data can produce new videogame technicities; ways of ‘experiencing’ play as ‘higher-level’ organisation of space and time (Ash, Technology). So, if a player wanted to ‘learn from the experts’ they would restructure their own rhythms of play around high-level logs which provide an ordered readout of various sequences of inputs involved in playing well. Moreover, the platform allows players to compare their logs to those of others—so these various introspective and outward-facing uses can work together, conditioning anticipations with inscriptions of past-play and ‘prosthetic’ memories through other’s log-data. In my experience as a WoW player, I often performed better (or built skill) by comparing and contrasting my own detailed readouts of play to the inputs and outputs of the best players in the world.To summarise, through technicity, I have briefly shown how exteriorising play shifts the conditions of skill-building from recalibrating msnesic and anticipatory processes through ‘firsthand’ play, to reworking these functions through engaging both games and extrinsic objects, like game guides and analytics platforms. Additionally, by reviewing and adopting various usages of technicity, I have pointed out how we might more holistically situate the gaming paratext in skill building. Conclusion There is little doubt—as exemplified through both scholarly and popular interest—that paratextual videogame material reframes modes of building game skill. Following recent work, and by providing a brief account of two paratextual practices (venturing the framework of technicity, via Stiegler and Ash—showing the complication of memory, perception, and anticipation in skill-building), I have contended that videogame-skill building—via paratextual material—can be rendered a process of operating outside of, but still caught up in, the complex assemblages of time, bodies, and technical architectures described by Sudnow at this article’s outset. Additionally, by reviewing and adopting ideas associated with technics and post-phenomenology, this article has aimed to contribute to the development of more ‘complete’ accounts of the processes and practices comprising skill building regimens of contemporary videogame players.References Ash, James. “Technology, Technicity and Emerging Practices of Temporal Sensitivity in Videogames.” Environment and Planning A 44.1 (2012): 187-201.———. “Technologies of Captivation: Videogames and the Attunement of Affect.” Body and Society 19.1 (2013): 27-51.Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 2007. Crogan, Patrick, and Helen Kennedy. “Technologies between Games and Culture.” Games and Culture 4.2 (2009): 107-14.Donaldson, Scott. “Mechanics and Metagame: Exploring Binary Expertise in League of Legends.” Games and Culture (2015). 4 Jun. 2015 <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1555412015590063>.From Software. 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This article investigates the prosthesis of identity through the process of branding. It examines cross-cultural manifestations of this phenomena from sixth millennium BCE Syria to twelfth century Japan and Britain. From the Neolithic Era, humanity has sort to extend their identities using pictorial signs that were characteristically simple. Designed to be distinctive and instantly recognisable, the totemic symbols served to signal the origin of the bearer. Subsequently, the development of branding coincided with periods of increased in mobility both in respect to geography and social strata. This includes fifth millennium Mesopotamia, nineteenth century Britain, and America during the 1920s.There are fewer articles of greater influence on contemporary culture than A Theory of Human Motivation written by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Nearly seventy-five years later, his theories about the societal need for “belongingness” and “esteem” remain a mainstay of advertising campaigns (Maslow). Although the principles are used to sell a broad range of products from shampoo to breakfast cereal they are epitomised by apparel. This is with refence to garments and accessories bearing corporation logos. Whereas other purchased items, imbued with abstract products, are intended for personal consumption the public display of these symbols may be interpreted as a form of signalling. The intention of the wearers is to literally seek the fulfilment of the aforementioned social needs. This article investigates the use of brands as prosthesis.Coats and Crests: Identity Garnered on Garments in the Middle Ages and the Muromachi PeriodA logo, at its most basic, is a pictorial sign. In his essay, The Visual Language, Ernest Gombrich described the principle as reducing images to “distinctive features” (Gombrich 46). They represent a “simplification of code,” the meaning of which we are conditioned to recognise (Gombrich 46). Logos may also be interpreted as a manifestation of totemism. According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the principle exists in all civilisations and reflects an effort to evoke the power of nature (71-127). Totemism is also a method of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166).This principle, in a form garnered on garments, is manifested in Mon Kiri. The practice of cutting out family crests evolved into a form of corporate branding in Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) (Christensen 14). During the Muromachi period (1336-1573) the crests provided an integral means of identification on the battlefield (Christensen 13). The adorning of crests on armour was also exercised in Europe during the twelfth century, when the faces of knights were similarly obscured by helmets (Family Crests of Japan 8). Both Mon Kiri and “Coat[s] of Arms” utilised totemic symbols (Family Crests of Japan 8; Elven 14; Christensen 13). The mon for the imperial family (figs. 1 & 2) during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia flowers (Goin’ Japaneque). “Coat[s] of Arms” in Britain featured a menagerie of animals including lions (fig. 3), horses and eagles (Elven).The prothesis of identity through garnering symbols on the battlefield provided “safety” through demonstrating “belongingness”. This constituted a conflation of two separate “needs” in the “hierarchy of prepotency” propositioned by Maslow. Fig. 1. The mon symbolising the Imperial Family during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia. "Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>.Fig. 2. An example of the crest being utilised on a garment can be found in this portrait of samurai Oda Nobunaga. "Japan's 12 Most Famous Samurai." All About Japan. 27 Aug. 2018. 27 July 2019 <https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/5818/>.Fig. 3. A detail from the “Index of Subjects of Crests.” Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. Henry Washbourne, 1847.The Pursuit of Prestige: Prosthetic Pedigree from the Late Georgian to the Victorian Eras In 1817, the seal engraver to Prince Regent, Alexander Deuchar, described the function of family crests in British Crests: Containing The Crest and Mottos of The Families of Great Britain and Ireland; Together with Those of The Principal Cities and Heraldic Terms as follows: The first approach to civilization is the distinction of ranks. So necessary is this to the welfare and existence of society, that, without it, anarchy and confusion must prevail… In an early stage, heraldic emblems were characteristic of the bearer… Certain ordinances were made, regulating the mode of bearing arms, and who were entitled to bear them. (i-v)The partitioning of social classes in Britain had deteriorated by the time this compendium was published, with displays of “conspicuous consumption” displacing “heraldic emblems” as a primary method of status signalling (Deuchar 2; Han et al. 18). A consumerism born of newfound affluence, and the desire to signify this wealth through luxury goods, was as integral to the Industrial Revolution as technological development. In Rebels against the Future, published in 1996, Kirkpatrick Sale described the phenomenon:A substantial part of the new population, though still a distinct minority, was made modestly affluent, in some places quite wealthy, by privatization of of the countryside and the industrialization of the cities, and by the sorts of commercial and other services that this called forth. The new money stimulated the consumer demand… that allowed a market economy of a scope not known before. (40)This also reflected improvements in the provision of “health, food [and] education” (Maslow; Snow 25-28). With their “physiological needs” accommodated, this ”substantial part” of the population were able to prioritised their “esteem needs” including the pursuit for prestige (Sale 40; Maslow).In Britain during the Middle Ages laws “specified in minute detail” what each class was permitted to wear (Han et al. 15). A groom, for example, was not able to wear clothing that exceeded two marks in value (Han et al. 15). In a distinct departure during the Industrial Era, it was common for the “middling and lower classes” to “ape” the “fashionable vices of their superiors” (Sale 41). Although mon-like labels that were “simplified so as to be conspicuous and instantly recognisable” emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century their application on garments remained discrete up until the early twentieth century (Christensen 13-14; Moore and Reid 24). During the 1920s, the French companies Hermes and Coco Chanel were amongst the clothing manufacturers to pioneer this principle (Chaney; Icon).During the 1860s, Lincolnshire-born Charles Frederick Worth affixed gold stamped labels to the insides of his garments (Polan et al. 9; Press). Operating from Paris, the innovation was consistent with the introduction of trademark laws in France in 1857 (Lopes et al.). He would become known as the “Father of Haute Couture”, creating dresses for royalty and celebrities including Empress Eugene from Constantinople, French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Australian Opera Singer Nellie Melba (Lopes et al.; Krick). The clothing labels proved and ineffective deterrent to counterfeit, and by the 1890s the House of Worth implemented other measures to authenticate their products (Press). The legitimisation of the origin of a product is, arguably, the primary function of branding. This principle is also applicable to subjects. The prothesis of brands, as totemic symbols, assisted consumers to relocate themselves within a new system of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166). It was one born of commerce as opposed to heraldry.Selling of Self: Conferring Identity from the Neolithic to Modern ErasIn his 1817 compendium on family crests, Deuchar elaborated on heraldry by writing:Ignoble birth was considered as a stain almost indelible… Illustrious parentage, on the other hand, constituted the very basis of honour: it communicated peculiar rights and privileges, to which the meaner born man might not aspire. (v-vi)The Twinings Logo (fig. 4) has remained unchanged since the design was commissioned by the grandson of the company founder Richard Twining in 1787 (Twining). In addition to reflecting the heritage of the family-owned company, the brand indicated the origin of the tea. This became pertinent during the nineteenth century. Plantations began to operate from Assam to Ceylon (Jones 267-269). Amidst the rampant diversification of tea sources in the Victorian era, concerns about the “unhygienic practices” of Chinese producers were proliferated (Wengrow 11). Subsequently, the brand also offered consumers assurance in quality. Fig. 4. The Twinings Logo reproduced from "History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>.The term ‘brand’, adapted from the Norse “brandr”, was introduced into the English language during the sixteenth century (Starcevic 179). At its most literal, it translates as to “burn down” (Starcevic 179). Using hot elements to singe markings onto animals been recorded as early as 2700 BCE in Egypt (Starcevic 182). However, archaeologists concur that the modern principle of branding predates this practice. The implementation of carved seals or stamps to make indelible impressions of handcrafted objects dates back to Prehistoric Mesopotamia (Starcevic 183; Wengrow 13). Similar traditions developed during the Bronze Age in both China and the Indus Valley (Starcevic 185). In all three civilisations branding facilitated both commerce and aspects of Totemism. In the sixth millennium BCE in “Prehistoric” Mesopotamia, referred to as the Halaf period, stone seals were carved to emulate organic form such as animal teeth (Wengrow 13-14). They were used to safeguard objects by “confer[ring] part of the bearer’s personality” (Wengrow 14). They were concurrently applied to secure the contents of vessels containing “exotic goods” used in transactions (Wengrow 15). Worn as amulets (figs. 5 & 6) the seals, and the symbols they produced, were a physical extension of their owners (Wengrow 14).Fig. 5. Recreation of stamp seal amulets from Neolithic Mesopotamia during the sixth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 14.Fig. 6. “Lot 25Y: Rare Syrian Steatite Amulet – Fertility God 5000 BCE.” The Salesroom. 27 July 2019 <https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/artemis-gallery-ancient-art/catalogue-id-srartem10006/lot-a850d229-a303-4bae-b68c-a6130005c48a>. Fig. 7. Recreation of stamp seal designs from Mesopotamia from the late fifth to fourth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49. 1 (2008): 16.In the following millennia, the seals would increase exponentially in application and aesthetic complexity (fig. 7) to support the development of household cum cottage industries (Wengrow 15). In addition to handcrafts, sealed vessels would transport consumables such as wine, aromatic oils and animal fats (Wengrow 18). The illustrations on the seals included depictions of rituals undertaken by human figures and/or allegories using animals. It can be ascertained that the transition in the Victorian Era from heraldry to commerce, from family to corporation, had precedence. By extension, consumers were able to participate in this process of value attribution using brands as signifiers. The principle remained prevalent during the modern and post-modern eras and can be respectively interpreted using structuralist and post-structuralist theory.Totemism to Simulacrum: The Evolution of Advertising from the Modern to Post-Modern Eras In 2011, Lisa Chaney wrote of the inception of the Coco Chanel logo (fig. 8) in her biography Chanel: An Intimate Life: A crucial element in the signature design of the Chanel No.5 bottle is the small black ‘C’ within a black circle set as the seal at the neck. On the top of the lid are two more ‘C’s, intertwined back to back… from at least 1924, the No5 bottles sported the unmistakable logo… these two ‘C’s referred to Gabrielle, – in other words Coco Chanel herself, and would become the logo for the House of Chanel. Chaney continued by describing Chanel’s fascination of totemic symbols as expressed through her use of tarot cards. She also “surrounded herself with objects ripe with meaning” such as representations of wheat and lions in reference prosperity and to her zodiac symbol ‘Leo’ respectively. Fig. 8. No5 Chanel Perfume, released in 1924, featured a seal-like logo attached to the bottle neck. “No5.” Chanel. 25 July 2019 <https://www.chanel.com/us/fragrance/p/120450/n5-parfum-grand-extrait/>.Fig. 9. This illustration of the bottle by Georges Goursat was published in a women’s magazine circa 1920s. “1921 Chanel No5.” Inside Chanel. 26 July 2019 <http://inside.chanel.com/en/timeline/1921_no5>; “La 4éme Fête de l’Histoire Samedi 16 et dimache 17 juin.” Ville de Perigueux. Musée d’art et d’archéologie du Périgord. 28 Mar. 2018. 26 July 2019 <https://www.perigueux-maap.fr/category/archives/page/5/>. This product was considered the “financial basis” of the Chanel “empire” which emerged during the second and third decades of the twentieth century (Tikkanen). Chanel is credited for revolutionising Haute Couture by introducing chic modern designs that emphasised “simplicity and comfort.” This was as opposed to the corseted highly embellished fashion that characterised the Victorian Era (Tikkanen). The lavish designs released by the House of Worth were, in and of themselves, “conspicuous” displays of “consumption” (Veblen 17). In contrast, the prestige and status associated with the “poor girl” look introduced by Chanel was invested in the story of the designer (Tikkanen). A primary example is her marinière or sailor’s blouse with a Breton stripe that epitomised her ascension from café singer to couturier (Tikkanen; Burstein 8). This signifier might have gone unobserved by less discerning consumers of fashion if it were not for branding. Not unlike the Prehistoric Mesopotamians, this iteration of branding is a process which “confer[s]” the “personality” of the designer into the garment (Wengrow 13 -14). The wearer of the garment is, in turn, is imbued by extension. Advertisers in the post-structuralist era embraced Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropological theories (Williamson 50). This is with particular reference to “bricolage” or the “preconditioning” of totemic symbols (Williamson 173; Pool 50). Subsequently, advertising creatives cum “bricoleur” employed his principles to imbue the brands with symbolic power. This symbolic capital was, arguably, transferable to the product and, ultimately, to its consumer (Williamson 173).Post-structuralist and semiotician Jean Baudrillard “exhaustively” critiqued brands and the advertising, or simulacrum, that embellished them between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Wengrow 10-11). In Simulacra and Simulation he wrote,it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)The symbolic power of the Chanel brand resonates in the ‘profound reality’ of her story. It is efficiently ‘denatured’ through becoming simplified, conspicuous and instantly recognisable. It is, as a logo, physically juxtaposed as simulacra onto apparel. This simulacrum, in turn, effects the ‘profound reality’ of the consumer. In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class:Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods it the means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure… costly entertainments, such as potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end… he consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to the consumption… he is also made to witness his host’s facility in etiquette. (47)Therefore, according to Veblen, it was the witnessing of “wasteful” consumption that “confers status” as opposed the primary conspicuous act (Han et al. 18). Despite television being in its experimental infancy advertising was at “the height of its powers” during the 1920s (Clark et al. 18; Hill 30). Post-World War I consumers, in America, experienced an unaccustomed level of prosperity and were unsuspecting of the motives of the newly formed advertising agencies (Clark et al. 18). Subsequently, the ‘witnessing’ of consumption could be constructed across a plethora of media from the newly emerged commercial radio to billboards (Hill viii–25). The resulting ‘status’ was ‘conferred’ onto brand logos. Women’s magazines, with a legacy dating back to 1828, were a primary locus (Hill 10).Belonging in a Post-Structuralist WorldIt is significant to note that, in a post-structuralist world, consumers do not exclusively seek upward mobility in their selection of brands. The establishment of counter-culture icon Levi-Strauss and Co. was concurrent to the emergence of both The House of Worth and Coco Chanel. The Bavarian-born Levi Strauss commenced selling apparel in San Francisco in 1853 (Levi’s). Two decades later, in partnership with Nevada born tailor Jacob Davis, he patented the “riveted-for-strength” workwear using blue denim (Levi’s). Although the ontology of ‘jeans’ is contested, references to “Jene Fustyan” date back the sixteenth century (Snyder 139). It involved the combining cotton, wool and linen to create “vestments” for Geonese sailors (Snyder 138). The Two Horse Logo (fig. 10), depicting them unable to pull apart a pair of jeans to symbolise strength, has been in continuous use by Levi Strauss & Co. company since its design in 1886 (Levi’s). Fig. 10. The Two Horse Logo by Levi Strauss & Co. has been in continuous use since 1886. Staff Unzipped. "Two Horses. One Message." Heritage. Levi Strauss & Co. 1 July 2011. 25 July 2019 <https://www.levistrauss.com/2011/07/01/two-horses-many-versions-one-message/>.The “rugged wear” would become the favoured apparel amongst miners at American Gold Rush (Muthu 6). Subsequently, between the 1930s – 1960s Hollywood films cultivated jeans as a symbol of “defiance” from Stage Coach staring John Wayne in 1939 to Rebel without A Cause staring James Dean in 1955 (Muthu 6; Edgar). Consequently, during the 1960s college students protesting in America (fig. 11) against the draft chose the attire to symbolise their solidarity with the working class (Hedarty). Notwithstanding a 1990s fashion revision of denim into a diversity of garments ranging from jackets to skirts, jeans have remained a wardrobe mainstay for the past half century (Hedarty; Muthu 10). Fig. 11. Although the brand label is not visible, jeans as initially introduced to the American Goldfields in the nineteenth century by Levi Strauss & Co. were cultivated as a symbol of defiance from the 1930s – 1960s. It documents an anti-war protest that occurred at the Pentagon in 1967. Cox, Savannah. "The Anti-Vietnam War Movement." ATI. 14 Dec. 2016. 16 July 2019 <https://allthatsinteresting.com/vietnam-war-protests#7>.In 2003, the journal Science published an article “Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion” (Eisenberger et al.). The cross-institutional study demonstrated that the neurological reaction to rejection is indistinguishable to physical pain. Whereas during the 1940s Maslow classified the desire for “belonging” as secondary to “physiological needs,” early twenty-first century psychologists would suggest “[social] acceptance is a mechanism for survival” (Weir 50). In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard wrote: Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… (1)In the intervening thirty-eight years since this document was published the artifice of our interactions has increased exponentially. In order to locate ‘belongness’ in this hyperreality, the identities of the seekers require a level of encoding. Brands, as signifiers, provide a vehicle.Whereas in Prehistoric Mesopotamia carved seals, worn as amulets, were used to extend the identity of a person, in post-digital China WeChat QR codes (fig. 12), stored in mobile phones, are used to facilitate transactions from exchanging contact details to commerce. Like other totems, they provide access to information such as locations, preferences, beliefs, marital status and financial circumstances. These individualised brands are the most recent incarnation of a technology that has developed over the past eight thousand years. The intermediary iteration, emblems affixed to garments, has remained prevalent since the twelfth century. Their continued salience is due to their visibility and, subsequent, accessibility as signifiers. Fig. 12. It may be posited that Wechat QR codes are a form individualised branding. Like other totems, they store information pertaining to the owner’s location, beliefs, preferences, marital status and financial circumstances. “Join Wechat groups using QR code on 2019.” Techwebsites. 26 July 2019 <https://techwebsites.net/join-wechat-group-qr-code/>.Fig. 13. Brands function effectively as signifiers is due to the international distribution of multinational corporations. This is the shopfront of Chanel in Dubai, which offers customers apparel bearing consistent insignia as the Parisian outlet at on Rue Cambon. Customers of Chanel can signify to each other with the confidence that their products will be recognised. “Chanel.” The Dubai Mall. 26 July 2019 <https://thedubaimall.com/en/shop/chanel>.Navigating a post-structuralist world of increasing mobility necessitates a rudimental understanding of these symbols. Whereas in the nineteenth century status was conveyed through consumption and witnessing consumption, from the twentieth century onwards the garnering of brands made this transaction immediate (Veblen 47; Han et al. 18). The bricolage of the brands is constructed by bricoleurs working in any number of contemporary creative fields such as advertising, filmmaking or song writing. They provide a system by which individuals can convey and recognise identities at prima facie. They enable the prosthesis of identity.ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. United States: University of Michigan Press, 1994.Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. United States: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.Chaney, Lisa. Chanel: An Intimate Life. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2011.Christensen, J.A. Cut-Art: An Introduction to Chung-Hua and Kiri-E. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1989. Clark, Eddie M., Timothy C. Brock, David E. Stewart, David W. Stewart. Attention, Attitude, and Affect in Response to Advertising. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis Group, 1994.Deuchar, Alexander. British Crests: Containing the Crests and Mottos of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland Together with Those of the Principal Cities – Primary So. London: Kirkwood & Sons, 1817.Ebert, Robert. “Great Movie: Stage Coach.” Robert Ebert.com. 1 Aug. 2011. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-stagecoach-1939>.Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. London: Henry Washbourne, 1847.Eisenberger, Naomi I., Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams. "Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion." Science 302.5643 (2003): 290-92.Family Crests of Japan. California: Stone Bridge Press, 2007.Gombrich, Ernst. "The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication." Scientific American 272 (1972): 82-96.Hedarty, Stephanie. "How Jeans Conquered the World." BBC World Service. 28 Feb. 2012. 26 July 2019 <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17101768>. Han, Young Jee, Joseph C. Nunes, and Xavier Drèze. "Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence." Journal of Marketing 74.4 (2010): 15-30.Hill, Daniel Delis. Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999. United States of Ame: Ohio State University Press, 2002."History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>. icon-icon: Telling You More about Icons. 18 Dec. 2016. 26 July 2019 <http://www.icon-icon.com/en/hermes-logo-the-horse-drawn-carriage/>. Jones, Geoffrey. Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>. Krick, Jessa. "Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895) and the House of Worth." Heilburnn Timeline of Art History. The Met. Oct. 2004. 23 July 2019 <https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrth/hd_wrth.htm>. Levi’s. "About Levis Strauss & Co." 25 July 2019 <https://www.levis.com.au/about-us.html>. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. London: Penguin, 1969.Lopes, Teresa de Silva, and Paul Duguid. Trademarks, Brands, and Competitiveness. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.Maslow, Abraham. "A Theory of Human Motivation." British Journal of Psychiatry 208.4 (1942): 313-13.Moore, Karl, and Susan Reid. "The Birth of Brand: 4000 Years of Branding History." Business History 4.4 (2008).Muthu, Subramanian Senthikannan. Sustainability in Denim. Cambridge Woodhead Publishing, 2017.Polan, Brenda, and Roger Tredre. The Great Fashion Designers. Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.Pool, Roger C. Introduction. Totemism. New ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Press, Claire. Wardrobe Crisis: How We Went from Sunday Best to Fast Fashion. Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2016.Sale, K. Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1996.Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Snyder, Rachel Louise. Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.Starcevic, Sladjana. "The Origin and Historical Development of Branding and Advertising in the Old Civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe." Marketing 46.3 (2015): 179-96.Tikkanen, Amy. "Coco Chanel." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 19 Apr. 2019. 25 July 2019 <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Coco-Chanel>.Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. London: Macmillan, 1975.Weir, Kirsten. "The Pain of Social Rejection." American Psychological Association 43.4 (2012): 50.Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Ideas in Progress. London: Boyars, 1978.

Introduction In The World Is Not a Desktop, Marc Weisner, the principal scientist and manager of the computer science laboratory at Xerox PARC, stated that, “a good tool is an invisible tool.” Weisner cited eyeglasses as an ideal technology because with spectacles, he argued, “you look at the world, not the eyeglasses.” Although Weisner’s work at PARC played an important role in the creation of the field of “ubiquitous computing”, his ideal is widespread in many areas of technology design. Through repetition, and by design, technologies blend into our lives. While technologies, and communications technologies in particular, have a powerful mediating impact, many of the most pervasive effects are taken for granted by most users. When technology works smoothly, its nature and effects are invisible. But technologies do not always work smoothly. A tiny fracture or a smudge on a lens renders glasses quite visible to the wearer. The Microsoft Windows “Blue Screen of Death” on subway in Seoul (Photo credit Wikimedia Commons). Anyone who has seen a famous “Blue Screen of Death”—the iconic signal of a Microsoft Windows crash—on a public screen or terminal knows how errors can thrust the technical details of previously invisible systems into view. Nobody knows that their ATM runs Windows until the system crashes. Of course, the operating system chosen for a sign or bank machine has important implications for its users. Windows, or an alternative operating system, creates affordances and imposes limitations. Faced with a crashed ATM, a consumer might ask herself if, with its rampant viruses and security holes, she should really trust an ATM running Windows? Technologies make previously impossible actions possible and many actions easier. In the process, they frame and constrain possible actions. They mediate. Communication technologies allow users to communicate in new ways but constrain communication in the process. In a very fundamental way, communication technologies define what their users can say, to whom they say it, and how they can say it—and what, to whom, and how they cannot. Humanities scholars understand the power, importance, and limitations of technology and technological mediation. Weisner hypothesised that, “to understand invisibility the humanities and social sciences are especially valuable, because they specialise in exposing the otherwise invisible.” However, technology activists, like those at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), understand this power of technology as well. Largely constituted by technical members, both organisations, like humanists studying technology, have struggled to communicate their messages to a less-technical public. Before one can argue for the importance of individual control over who owns technology, as both FSF and EFF do, an audience must first appreciate the power and effect that their technology and its designers have. To understand the power that technology has on its users, users must first see the technology in question. Most users do not. Errors are under-appreciated and under-utilised in their ability to reveal technology around us. By painting a picture of how certain technologies facilitate certain mistakes, one can better show how technology mediates. By revealing errors, scholars and activists can reveal previously invisible technologies and their effects more generally. Errors can reveal technology—and its power and can do so in ways that users of technologies confront daily and understand intimately. The Misprinted Word Catalysed by Elizabeth Eisenstein, the last 35 years of print history scholarship provides both a richly described example of technological change and an analysis of its effects. Unemphasised in discussions of the revolutionary social, economic, and political impact of printing technologies is the fact that, especially in the early days of a major technological change, the artifacts of print are often quite similar to those produced by a new printing technology’s predecessors. From a reader’s purely material perspective, books are books; the press that created the book is invisible or irrelevant. Yet, while the specifics of print technologies are often hidden, they are often exposed by errors. While the shift from a scribal to print culture revolutionised culture, politics, and economics in early modern Europe, it was near-invisible to early readers (Eisenstein). Early printed books were the same books printed in the same way; the early press was conceived as a “mechanical scriptorium.” Shown below, Gutenberg’s black-letter Gothic typeface closely reproduced a scribal hand. Of course, handwriting and type were easily distinguishable; errors and irregularities were inherent in relatively unsteady human hands. Side-by-side comparisons of the hand-copied Malmesbury Bible (left) and the black letter typeface in the Gutenberg Bible (right) (Photo credits Wikimedia Commons & Wikimedia Commons). Printing, of course, introduced its own errors. As pages were produced en masse from a single block of type, so were mistakes. While a scribe would re-read and correct errors as they transcribed a second copy, no printing press would. More revealingly, print opened the door to whole new categories of errors. For example, printers setting type might confuse an inverted n with a u—and many did. Of course, no scribe made this mistake. An inverted u is only confused with an n due to the technological possibility of letter flipping in movable type. As print moved from Monotype and Linotype machines, to computerised typesetting, and eventually to desktop publishing, an accidentally flipped u retreated back into the realm of impossibility (Mergenthaler, Swank). Most readers do not know how their books are printed. The output of letterpresses, Monotypes, and laser printers are carefully designed to produce near-uniform output. To the degree that they succeed, the technologies themselves, and the specific nature of the mediation, becomes invisible to readers. But each technology is revealed in errors like the upside-down u, the output of a mispoured slug of Monotype, or streaks of toner from a laser printer. Changes in printing technologies after the press have also had profound effects. The creation of hot-metal Monotype and Linotype, for example, affected decisions to print and reprint and changed how and when it is done. New mass printing technologies allowed for the printing of works that, for economic reasons, would not have been published before. While personal computers, desktop publishing software, and laser printers make publishing accessible in new ways, it also places real limits on what can be printed. Print runs of a single copy—unheard of before the invention of the type-writer—are commonplace. But computers, like Linotypes, render certain formatting and presentation difficult and impossible. Errors provide a space where the particulars of printing make technologies visible in their products. An inverted u exposes a human typesetter, a letterpress, and a hasty error in judgment. Encoding errors and botched smart quotation marks—a ? in place of a “—are only possible with a computer. Streaks of toner are only produced by malfunctioning laser printers. Dust can reveal the photocopied provenance of a document. Few readers reflect on the power or importance of the particulars of the technologies that produced their books. In part, this is because the technologies are so hidden behind their products. Through errors, these technologies and the power they have on the “what” and “how” of printing are exposed. For scholars and activists attempting to expose exactly this, errors are an under-exploited opportunity. Typing Mistyping While errors have a profound effect on media consumption, their effect is equally important, and perhaps more strongly felt, when they occur during media creation. Like all mediating technologies, input technologies make it easier or more difficult to create certain messages. It is, for example, much easier to write a letter with a keyboard than it is to type a picture. It is much more difficult to write in languages with frequent use of accents on an English language keyboard than it is on a European keyboard. But while input systems like keyboards have a powerful effect on the nature of the messages they produce, they are invisible to recipients of messages. Except when the messages contains errors. Typists are much more likely to confuse letters in close proximity on a keyboard than people writing by hand or setting type. As keyboard layouts switch between countries and languages, new errors appear. The following is from a personal email: hez, if there’s not a subversion server handz, can i at least have the root password for one of our machines? I read through the instructions for setting one up and i think i could do it. [emphasis added] The email was quickly typed and, in two places, confuses the character y with z. Separated by five characters on QWERTY keyboards, these two letters are not easily mistaken or mistyped. However, their positions are swapped on German and English keyboards. In fact, the author was an American typing in a Viennese Internet cafe. The source of his repeated error was his false expectations—his familiarity with one keyboard layout in the context of another. The error revealed the context, both keyboard layouts, and his dependence on a particular keyboard. With the error, the keyboard, previously invisible, was exposed as an inter-mediator with its own particularities and effects. This effect does not change in mobile devices where new input methods have introduced powerful new ways of communicating. SMS messages on mobile phones are constrained in length to 160 characters. The result has been new styles of communication using SMS that some have gone so far as to call a new language or dialect called TXTSPK (Thurlow). Yet while they are obvious to social scientists, the profound effects of text message technologies on communication is unfelt by most users who simply see the messages themselves. More visible is the fact that input from a phone keypad has opened the door to errors which reveal input technology and its effects. In the standard method of SMS input, users press or hold buttons to cycle through the letters associated with numbers on a numeric keyboard (e.g., 2 represents A, B, and C; to produce a single C, a user presses 2 three times). This system makes it easy to confuse characters based on a shared association with a single number. Tegic’s popular T9 software allows users to type in words by pressing the number associated with each letter of each word in quick succession. T9 uses a database to pick the most likely word that maps to that sequence of numbers. While the system allows for quick input of words and phrases on a phone keypad, it also allows for the creation of new types of errors. A user trying to type me might accidentally write of because both words are mapped to the combination of 6 and 3 and because of is a more common word in English. T9 might confuse snow and pony while no human, and no other input method, would. Users composing SMS’s are constrained by its technology and its design. The fact that text messages must be short and the difficult nature of phone-based input methods has led to unique and highly constrained forms of communication like TXTSPK (Sutherland). Yet, while the influence of these input technologies is profound, users are rarely aware of it. Errors provide a situation where the particularities of a technology become visible and an opportunity for users to connect with scholars exposing the effect of technology and activists arguing for increased user control. Google News Denuded As technologies become more complex, they often become more mysterious to their users. While not invisible, users know little about the way that complex technologies work both because they become accustomed to them and because the technological specifics are hidden inside companies, behind web interfaces, within compiled software, and in “black boxes” (Latour). Errors can help reveal these technologies and expose their nature and effects. One such system, Google’s News, aggregates news stories and is designed to make it easy to read multiple stories on the same topic. The system works with “topic clusters” that attempt to group articles covering the same news event. The more items in a news cluster (especially from popular sources) and the closer together they appear in time, the higher confidence Google’s algorithms have in the “importance” of a story and the higher the likelihood that the cluster of stories will be listed on the Google News page. While the decision to include or remove individual sources is made by humans, the act of clustering is left to Google’s software. Because computers cannot “understand” the text of the articles being aggregated, clustering happens less intelligently. We know that clustering is primarily based on comparison of shared text and keywords—especially proper nouns. This process is aided by the widespread use of wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters which provide article text used, at least in part, by large numbers of news sources. Google has been reticent to divulge the implementation details of its clustering engine but users have been able to deduce the description above, and much more, by watching how Google News works and, more importantly, how it fails. For example, we know that Google News looks for shared text and keywords because text that deviates heavily from other articles is not “clustered” appropriately—even if it is extremely similar semantically. In this vein, blogger Philipp Lenssen gives advice to news sites who want to stand out in Google News: Of course, stories don’t have to be exactly the same to be matched—but if they are too different, they’ll also not appear in the same group. If you want to stand out in Google News search results, make your article be original, or else you’ll be collapsed into a cluster where you may or may not appear on the first results page. While a human editor has no trouble understanding that an article using different terms (and different, but equally appropriate, proper nouns) is discussing the same issue, the software behind Google News is more fragile. As a result, Google News fails to connect linked stories that no human editor would miss. A section of a screenshot of Google News clustering aggregation showcasing what appears to be an error. But just as importantly, Google News can connect stories that most human editors will not. Google News’s clustering of two stories by Al Jazeera on how “Iran offers to share nuclear technology,” and by the Guardian on how “Iran threatens to hide nuclear program,” seem at first glance to be a mistake. Hiding and sharing are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. But while it is true that most human editors would not cluster these stories, it is less clear that it is, in fact, an error. Investigation shows that the two articles are about the release of a single statement by the government of Iran on the same day. The spin is significant enough, and significantly different, that it could be argued that the aggregation of those stories was incorrect—or not. The error reveals details about the way that Google News works and about its limitations. It reminds readers of Google News of the technological nature of their news’ meditation and gives them a taste of the type of selection—and mis-selection—that goes on out of view. Users of Google News might be prompted to compare the system to other, more human methods. Ultimately it can remind them of the power that Google News (and humans in similar roles) have over our understanding of news and the world around us. These are all familiar arguments to social scientists of technology and echo the arguments of technology activists. By focusing on similar errors, both groups can connect to users less used to thinking in these terms. Conclusion Reflecting on the role of the humanities in a world of increasingly invisible technology for the blog, “Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory,” Duke English professor Cathy Davidson writes: When technology is accepted, when it becomes invisible, [humanists] really need to be paying attention. This is one reason why the humanities are more important than ever. Analysis—qualitative, deep, interpretive analysis—of social relations, social conditions, in a historical and philosophical perspective is what we do so well. The more technology is part of our lives, the less we think about it, the more we need rigorous humanistic thinking that reminds us that our behaviours are not natural but social, cultural, economic, and with consequences for us all. Davidson concisely points out the strength and importance of the humanities in evaluating technology. She is correct; users of technologies do not frequently analyse the social relations, conditions, and effects of the technology they use. Activists at the EFF and FSF argue that this lack of critical perspective leads to exploitation of users (Stallman). But users, and the technology they use, are only susceptible to this type of analysis when they understand the applicability of these analyses to their technologies. Davidson leaves open the more fundamental question: How will humanists first reveal technology so that they can reveal its effects? Scholars and activists must do more than contextualise and describe technology. They must first render invisible technologies visible. As the revealing nature of errors in printing systems, input systems, and “black box” software systems like Google News show, errors represent a point where invisible technology is already visible to users. As such, these errors, and countless others like them, can be treated as the tip of an iceberg. They represent an important opportunity for humanists and activists to further expose technologies and the beginning of a process that aims to reveal much more. References Davidson, Cathy. “When Technology Is Invisible, Humanists Better Get Busy.” HASTAC. (2007). 1 September 2007 http://www.hastac.org/node/779>. Eisenstein, Elisabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard UP, 1999. Lenssen, Philipp. “How Google News Indexes.” Google Blogscoped. 2006. 1 September 2007 http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-07-28-n49.html>. Mergenthaler, Ottmar. The Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler, Inventor of the Linotype. New ed. New Castle, Deleware: Oak Knoll Books, 1989. Monotype: A Journal of Composing Room Efficiency. Philadelphia: Lanston Monotype Machine Co, 1913. Stallman, Richard M. Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston, Massachusetts: Free Software Foundation, 2002. Sutherland, John. “Cn u txt?” Guardian Unlimited. London, UK. 2002. Swank, Alvin Garfield, and United Typothetae America. Linotype Mechanism. Chicago, Illinois: Dept. of Education, United Typothetae America, 1926. Thurlow, C. “Generation Txt? The Sociolinguistics of Young People’s Text-Messaging.” Discourse Analysis Online 1.1 (2003). Weiser, Marc. “The World Is Not a Desktop.” ACM Interactions. 1.1 (1994): 7-8. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hill, Benjamin Mako. "Revealing Errors." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/01-hill.php>. APA Style Hill, B. (Oct. 2007) "Revealing Errors," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/01-hill.php>.

Introduction Since December 2010 the dramatic spectacle of the spread of mass uprisings, civil unrest, and protest across North Africa and the Middle East have been chronicled daily on mainstream media and new media. Broadly speaking, the Arab Spring—as it came to be known—is challenging repressive, corrupt governments and calling for democracy and human rights. The convulsive events linked with these debates have been striking not only because of the rapid spread of historically momentous mass protests but also because of the ways in which the media “have become inextricably infused inside them” enabling the global media ecology to perform “an integral part in building and mobilizing support, co-ordinating and defining the protests within different Arab societies as well as trans-nationalizing them” (Cottle 295). Images of mass protests have been juxtaposed against those of individuals prepared to self-destruct for political ends. Video clips and photographs of the individual suffering of Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation and the Bahraini Abdulhad al-Khawaja’s emaciated body foreground, in very graphic ways, political struggles that larger events would mask or render invisible. Highlighting broad commonalties does not assume uniformity in patterns of protest and media coverage across the region. There has been considerable variation in the global media coverage and nature of the protests in North Africa and the Middle East (Cottle). In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen uprisings overthrew regimes and leaders. In Syria it has led the country to the brink of civil war. In Bahrain, the regime and its militia violently suppressed peaceful protests. As a wave of protests spread across the Middle East and one government after another toppled in front of 24/7 global media coverage, Bahrain became the “Arab revolution that was abandoned by the Arabs, forsaken by the West … forgotten by the world,” and largely ignored by the global media (Al-Jazeera English). Per capita the protests have been among the largest of the Arab Spring (Human Rights First) and the crackdown as brutal as elsewhere. International organizations have condemned the use of military courts to trial protestors, the detaining of medical staff who had treated the injured, and the use of torture, including the torture of children (Fisher). Bahraini and international human rights organizations have been systematically chronicling these violations of human rights, and posting on Websites distressing images of tortured bodies often with warnings about the graphic depictions viewers are about to see. It was in this context of brutal suppression, global media silence, and the reluctance of the international community to intervene, that the Bahraini-Danish human rights activist Abdulhad al-Khawaja launched his “death or freedom” hunger strike. Even this radical action initially failed to interest international editors who were more focused on Egypt, Libya, and Syria, but media attention rose in response to the Bahrain Formula 1 race in April 2012. Pro-democracy activists pledged “days of rage” to coincide with the race in order to highlight continuing human rights abuses in the kingdom (Turner). As Al Khawaja’s health deteriorated the Bahraini government resisted calls for his release (Article 19) from the Danish government who requested that Al Khawaja be extradited there on “humanitarian grounds” for hospital treatment (Fisk). This article does not explore the geo-politics of the Bahraini struggle or the possible reasons why the international community—in contrast to Syria and Egypt—has been largely silent and reluctant to debate the issues. Important as they are, those remain questions for Middle Eastern specialists to address. In this article I am concerned with the overlapping and interpenetration of two ecologies. The first ecology is the ethical framing of a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction intended to achieve political ends. The second ecology is the operation of global media where international inaction inadvertently foregrounds the political struggles that larger events and discourses surrounding Egypt, Libya, and Syria overshadow. What connects these two ecologies is the body of the hunger striker, turned into a spectacle and mediated via a politics of affect that invites a global public to empathise and so enter into his suffering. The connection between the two lies in the emaciated body of the hunger striker. An Ecological Humanities Approach This exploration of two ecologies draws on the ecological humanities and its central premise of connectivity. The ecological humanities critique the traditional binaries in Western thinking between nature and culture; the political and social; them and us; the collective and the individual; mind, body and emotion (Rose & Robin, Rieber). Such binaries create artificial hierarchies, divisions, and conflicts that ultimately impede the ability to respond to crises. Crises are major changes that are “out of control” driven—primarily but not exclusively—by social, political, and cultural forces that unleash “runaway systems with their own dynamics” (Rose & Robin 1). The ecological humanities response to crises is premised on the recognition of the all-inclusive connectivity of organisms, systems, and environments and an ethical commitment to action from within this entanglement. A founding premise of connectivity, first articulated by anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson, is that the “unit of survival is not the individual or the species, but the organism-and-its-environment” (Rose & Robin 2). This highlights a dialectic in which an organism is shaped by and shapes the context in which it finds itself. Or, as Harries-Jones puts it, relations are recursive as “events continually enter into, become entangled with, and then re-enter the universe they describe” (3). This ensures constantly evolving ecosystems but it also means any organism that “deteriorates its environment commits suicide” (Rose & Robin 2) with implications for the others in the eco-system. Bateson’s central premise is that organisms are simultaneously independent, as separate beings, but also interdependent. Interactions are not seen purely as exchanges but as dynamic, dialectical, dialogical, and mutually constitutive. Thus, it is presumed that the destruction or protection of others has consequences for oneself. Another dimension of interactions is multi-modality, which implies that human communication cannot be reduced to a single mode such as words, actions, or images but needs to be understood in the complexity of inter-relations between these (see Rieber 16). Nor can dissemination be reduced to a single technological platform whether this is print, television, Internet, or other media (see Cottle). The final point is that interactions are “biologically grounded but not determined” in that the “cognitive, emotional and volitional processes” underpinning face-to-face or mediated communication are “essentially indivisible” and any attempt to separate them by privileging emotion at the expense of thought, or vice versa, is likely to be unhealthy (Rieber 17). This is most graphically demonstrated in a politically-motivated hunger strike where emotion and volition over-rides the survivalist instinct. The Ecology of a Prison Hunger Strike The radical nature of a hunger strike inevitably gives rise to medico-ethical debates. Hunger strikes entail the voluntary refusal of sustenance by an individual and, when prolonged, such deprivation sets off a chain reaction as the less important components in the internal body systems shut down to protect the brain until even that can no longer be protected (see Basoglu et al). This extreme form of protest—essentially an act of self-destruction—raises ethical issues over whether or not doctors or the state should intervene to save a life for humanitarian or political reasons. In 1975 and 1991, the World Medical Association (WMA) sought to negotiate this by distinguishing between, on the one hand, the mentally/psychological impaired individual who chooses a “voluntary fast” and, on the other hand, the hunger striker who chooses a form of protest action to secure an explicit political goal fully aware of fatal consequences of prolonged action (see Annas, Reyes). This binary enables the WMA to label the action of the mentally impaired suicide while claiming that to do so for political protesters would be a “misconception” because the “striker … does not want to die” but to “live better” by obtaining certain political goals for himself, his group or his country. “If necessary he is willing to sacrifice his life for his case, but the aim is certainly not suicide” (Reyes 11). In practice, the boundaries between suicide and political protest are likely to be much more blurred than this but the medico-ethical binary is important because it informs discourses about what form of intervention is ethically appropriate. In the case of the “suicidal” the WMA legitimises force-feeding by a doctor as a life-saving act. In the case of the political protestor, it is de-legitimised in discourses of an infringement of freedom of expression and an act of torture because of the pain involved (see Annas, Reyes). Philosopher Michel Foucault argued that prison is a key site where the embodied subject is explicitly governed and where the exercising of state power in the act of incarceration means the body of the imprisoned no longer solely belongs to the individual. It is also where the “body’s range of significations” is curtailed, “shaped and invested by the very forces that detain and imprison it” (Pugliese 2). Thus, prison creates the circumstances in which the incarcerated is denied the “usual forms of protest and judicial safeguards” available outside its confines. The consequence is that when presented with conditions that violate core beliefs he/she may view acts of self-destruction—such as hunger strikes or lip sewing—as one of the few “means of protesting against, or demanding attention” or achieving political ends still available to them (Reyes 11; Pugliese). The hunger strike implicates the state, which, in the act of imprisoning, has assumed a measure of power and responsibility for the body of the individual. If a protest action is labelled suicidal by medical professionals—for instance at Guantanamo—then the force-feeding of prisoners can be legitimised within the WMA guidelines (Annas). There is considerable political temptation to do so particularly when the hunger striker has become an icon of resistance to the state, the knowledge of his/her action has transcended prison confines, and the alienating conditions that prompted the action are being widely debated in the media. This poses a two-fold danger for the state. On the one hand, there is the possibility that the slow emaciation and death while imprisoned, if covered by the media, may become a spectacle able to mobilise further resistance that can destabilise the polity. On the other hand, there is the fear that in the act of dying, and the spectacle surrounding death, the hunger striker would have secured the public attention to the very cause they are championing. Central to this is whether or not the act of self-destruction is mediated. It is far from inevitable that the media will cover a hunger strike or do so in ways that enable the hunger striker’s appeal to the emotions of others. However, when it does, the international scrutiny and condemnation that follows may undermine the credibility of the state—as happened with the death of the IRA member Bobby Sands in Northern Ireland (Russell). The Media Ecology and the Bahrain Arab Spring The IRA’s use of an “ancient tactic ... to make a blunt appeal to sympathy and emotion” in the form of the Sands hunger strike was seen as “spectacularly successful in gaining worldwide publicity” (Willis 1). Media ecology has evolved dramatically since then. Over the past 20 years communication flows between the local and the global, traditional media formations (broadcast and print), and new communication media (Internet and mobile phones) have escalated. The interactions of the traditional media have historically shaped and been shaped by more “top-down” “politics of representation” in which the primary relationship is between journalists and competing public relations professionals servicing rival politicians, business or NGOs desire for media attention and framing issues in a way that is favourable or sympathetic to their cause. However, rapidly evolving new media platforms offer bottom up, user-generated content, a politics of connectivity, and mobilization of ordinary people (Cottle 31). However, this distinction has increasingly been seen as offering too rigid a binary to capture the complexity of the interactions between traditional and new media as well as the events they capture. The evolution of both meant their content increasingly overlaps and interpenetrates (see Bennett). New media technologies “add new communicative ingredients into the media ecology mix” (Cottle 31) as well as new forms of political protests and new ways of mobilizing dispersed networks of activists (Juris). Despite their pervasiveness, new media technologies are “unlikely to displace the necessity for coverage in mainstream media”; a feature noted by activist groups who have evolved their own “carnivalesque” tactics (Cottle 32) capable of creating the spectacle that meets television demands for action-driven visuals (Juris). New media provide these groups with the tools to publicise their actions pre- and post-event thereby increasing the possibility that mainstream media might cover their protests. However there is no guarantee that traditional and new media content will overlap and interpenetrate as initial coverage of the Bahrain Arab Spring highlights. Peaceful protests began in February 2011 but were violently quelled often by Saudi, Qatari and UAE militia on behalf of the Bahraini government. Mass arrests were made including that of children and medical personnel who had treated those wounded during the suppression of the protests. What followed were a long series of detentions without trial, military court rulings on civilians, and frequent use of torture in prisons (Human Rights Watch 2012). By the end of 2011, the country had the highest number of political prisoners per capita of any country in the world (Amiri) but received little coverage in the US. The Libyan uprising was afforded the most broadcast time (700 minutes) followed by Egypt (500 minutes), Syria (143), and Bahrain (34) (Lobe). Year-end round-ups of the Arab Spring on the American Broadcasting Corporation ignored Bahrain altogether or mentioned it once in a 21-page feature (Cavell). This was not due to a lack of information because a steady stream has flowed from mobile phones, Internet sites and Twitter as NGOs—Bahraini and international—chronicled in images and first-hand accounts the abuses. However, little of this coverage was picked up by the US-dominated global media. It was in this context that the Bahraini-Danish human rights activist Abdulhad Al Khawaja launched his “freedom or death” hunger strike in protest against the violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations, the treatment of prisoners, and the conduct of the trials. Even this radical action failed to persuade international editors to cover the Bahrain Arab Spring or Al Khawaja’s deteriorating health despite being “one of the most important stories to emerge over the Arab Spring” (Nallu). This began to change in April 2012 as a number of things converged. Formula 1 pressed ahead with the Bahrain Grand Prix, and pro-democracy activists pledged “days of rage” over human rights abuses. As these were violently suppressed, editors on global news desks increasingly questioned the government and Formula 1 “spin” that all was well in the kingdom (see BBC; Turner). Claims by the drivers—many of who were sponsored by the Bahraini government—that this was a sports event, not a political one, were met with derision and journalists more familiar with interviewing superstars were diverted into covering protests because their political counterparts had been denied entry to the country (Fisk). This combination of media events and responses created the attention, interest, and space in which Al Khawaja’s deteriorating condition could become a media spectacle. The Mediated Spectacle of Al Khawaja’s Hunger Strike Journalists who had previously struggled to interest editors in Bahrain and Al Khawaja’s plight found that in the weeks leading up to the Grand Prix and since “his condition rapidly deteriorated”’ and there were “daily updates with stories from CNN to the Hindustan Times” (Nulla). Much of this mainstream news was derived from interviews and tweets from Al Khawaja’s family after each visit or phone call. What emerged was an unprecedented composite—a diary of witnesses to a hunger strike interspersed with the family’s struggles with the authorities to get access to him and their almost tangible fear that the Bahraini government would not relent and he would die. As these fears intensified 48 human rights NGOs called for his release from prison (Article 19) and the Danish government formally requested his extradition for hospital treatment on “humanitarian grounds”. Both were rejected. As if to provide evidence of Al Khawaja’s tenuous hold on life, his family released an image of his emaciated body onto Twitter. This graphic depiction of the corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction was re-tweeted and posted on countless NGO and news Websites (see Al-Jazeera). It was also juxtaposed against images of multi-million dollar cars circling a race-track, funded by similarly large advertising deals and watched by millions of people around the world on satellite channels. Spectator sport had become a grotesque parody of one man’s struggle to speak of what was going on in Bahrain. In an attempt to silence the criticism the Bahraini government imposed a de facto news blackout denying all access to Al Khawaja in hospital where he had been sent after collapsing. The family’s tweets while he was held incommunicado speak of their raw pain, their desperation to find out if he was still alive, and their grief. They also provided a new source of information, and the refrain “where is alkhawaja,” reverberated on Twitter and in global news outlets (see for instance Der Spiegel, Al-Jazeera). In the days immediately after the race the Danish prime minister called for the release of Al Khawaja, saying he is in a “very critical condition” (Guardian), as did the UN’s Ban-Ki Moon (UN News and Media). The silencing of Al Khawaja had become a discourse of callousness and as global media pressure built Bahraini ministers felt compelled to challenge this on non-Arabic media, claiming Al Khawaja was “eating” and “well”. The Bahraini Prime Minister gave one of his first interviews to the Western media in years in which he denied “AlKhawaja’s health is ‘as bad’ as you say. According to the doctors attending to him on a daily basis, he takes liquids” (Der Spiegel Online). Then, after six days of silence, the family was allowed to visit. They tweeted that while incommunicado he had been restrained and force-fed against his will (Almousawi), a statement almost immediately denied by the military hospital (Lebanon Now). The discourses of silence and callousness were replaced with discourses of “torture” through force-feeding. A month later Al Khawaja’s wife announced he was ending his hunger strike because he was being force-fed by two doctors at the prison, family and friends had urged him to eat again, and he felt the strike had achieved its goal of drawing the world’s attention to Bahrain government’s response to pro-democracy protests (Ahlul Bayt News Agency). Conclusion This article has sought to explore two ecologies. The first is of medico-ethical discourses which construct a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction to achieve particular political ends. 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Introduction How do we measure intimacy? What are its impacts on our social, political and personal lives? Can we claim a politics to our intimate lives that escapes the normative confines of archaic institutions, while making social justice claims for relationship recognition? Negotiating some of these disparate questions requires us to think more broadly in contemporary public debates on equality and relationship recognition. Specifically, by outlining the impacts of the popular "gay marriage" debate, this paper examines the impacts of queer theory in association with public policy and community lobbying for relationship equality. Much of the debate remains polarised: eliminating discrimination is counterposed to religious or reproductive narratives that suggest such recognition undermines the value of the "natural" heterosexual family. Introducing queer theory into advocacy that oscillates between rights and reproduction problematises indexing intimacy against normative ideas of monogamy and family. While the arguments circulated by academics, lawyers, politicians and activists have disparate political and ethical impacts, when taken together, they continue to define marriage as a public regulation of intimacy and citizenship. Citizenship, measured in democratic participation and choice, however, can only be realised through reflexive politics that value difference. Encouraging critical dialogue across disparate areas of the marriage equality debate will have a significant impact on how we make ethical claims for recognising intimacy. (Re)defining Marriage In legislative terms, marriage remains the most fundamental means through which the relationship between citizenship and intimacy is crystallised in Australia. For example, in 2004 the Federal Liberal Government in Australia passed a legislative amendment to the Marriage Act 1961 and expressly defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. By issuing a public legislative amendment, the Government intended to privilege monogamous (in this case understood as heterosexual) intimacy by precluding same-sex or polygamous marriage. Such an exercise had rhetorical rather than legal significance, as common law principles had previously defined the scope of marriage in gender specific terms for decades (Graycar and Millbank 41). Marriage as an institution, however, is not a universal or a-historical discourse limited to legal or political constructs. Socialist feminist critiques of marriage in the 1950s conceptualised the legal and gender specific constructs in marriage as a patriarchal contract designed to regulate female bodies (Hannam 146). However, Angela McRobbie notes that within a post-feminist context, these historical realities of gendered subjugation, reproduction or domesticity have been "disarticulated" (26). Marriage has become a more democratic and self-reflexive expression of intimacy for women. David Shumway elaborates this idea and argues that this shift has emerged in a context of "social solidarity" within a consumer environment of social fragmentation (23). What this implies is that marriage now evokes a range of cultural choices, consumer practices and affective trends that are incommensurable to a singular legal or historical term of reference. Debating the Politics of Intimacy and Citizenship In order to reflect on this shifting relationship between choice, citizenship and marriage as a concept, it is necessary to highlight that marriage extends beyond private articulations of love. It is a ritualised performance of heterosexual individual (or coupled) citizenship as it entrenches economic and civil rights and responsibilities. The private becomes public. Current neo-liberal approaches to same-sex marriage focus on these symbolic and economic questions of how recognising intimacy is tied to equality. In a legal and political context, marriage is defined in s5 Marriage Act as "the union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life." While the Act does not imbue marriage with religious or procreative significance, such a gender dichotomous definition prevents same-sex and gender diverse partners from entering into marriage. For Morris Kaplan, this is a problem because "full equality for lesbian and gay citizens requires access to the legal and social recognition of our intimate associations" (201). Advocates and activists define the quest for equal citizenship by engaging with current religious dogma that situates marriage within a field of reproduction, whereby same-sex marriage is seen to rupture the traditional rubric of monogamous kinship and the biological processes of "gender complementarity" (Australian Christian Lobby 1). Liberal equality arguments reject such conservative assertions on the basis that desire, sexuality and intimacy are innate features of human existence and hence always already implicated in public spheres (Kaplan 202). Thus, legal visibility or state recognition becomes crucial to sustaining practices of intimacy. Problematising the broader social impact of a civil rights approach through the perspective of queer theory, the private/public distinctions that delineate citizenship and intimacy become more difficult to negotiate. Equality and queer theory arguments on same-sex marriage are difficult to reconcile, primarily because they signify the different psychic and cultural investments in the monogamous couple. Butler asserts that idealisations of the couple in legal discourse relates to norms surrounding community, family and nationhood (Undoing 116). This structured circulation of sexual norms reifies the hetero-normative forms of relationships that ought to be recognised (and are desired) by the state. Butler also interrogates this logic of marriage, as a heterosexual norm, and suggests it has the capacity to confine rather than liberate subjects (Undoing 118-20). The author's argument relies upon Michel Foucault's notion of power and subjection, where the subject is not an autonomous individual (as conceived in neo liberal discourses) but a site of disciplined discursive production (Trouble 63). Butler positions the heterosexuality of marriage as a "cultural and symbolic foundation" that renders forms of kinship, monogamy, parenting and community intelligible (Undoing 118). In this sense, marriage can be a problematic articulation of state interests, particularly in terms of perpetuating domesticity, economic mobility and the heterosexual family. As former Australian Prime Minister John Howard opines: Marriage is … one of the bedrock institutions of our society … marriage, as we understand it in our society, is about children … providing for the survival of the species. (qtd. in Wade) Howard's politicisation of marriage suggests that it remains crucial to the preservation of the nuclear family. In doing so, the statement also exemplifies homophobic anxieties towards non-normative kinship relations "outside the family". The Prime Ministers' words characterise marriage as a framework which privileges hegemonic ideas of monogamy, biological reproduction and gender dichotomy. Butler responds to these homophobic terms by alluding to the discursive function of a "heterosexual matrix" which codes and produces dichotomous sexes, genders and (hetero)sexual desires (Trouble 36). By refusing to accept the binary neo-liberal discourse in which one is either for or against gay marriage, Butler asserts that by prioritising marriage, the individual accepts the discursive terms of recognition and legitimacy in subjectifying what counts as love (Undoing 115). What this author's argument implies is that by recuperating marital norms, the individual is not liberated, but rather participates in the discursive "trap" and succumbs to the terms of a heterosexual matrix (Trouble 56). In contradistinction to Howard's political rhetoric, engaging with Foucault's broader theoretical work on sexuality and friendship can influence how we frame the possibilities of intimacy beyond parochial narratives of conjugal relationships. Foucault emphasises that countercultural intimacies rely on desires that are relegated to the margins of mainstream (hetero)sexual culture. For example, the transformational aesthetics in practices such as sadomasochism or queer polyamorous relationships exist due to certain prohibitions in respect to sex (Foucault, History (1) 38, and "Sex" 169). Foucault notes how forms of resistance that transgress mainstream norms produce new experiences of pleasure. Being "queer" (though Foucault does not use this word) becomes identified with new modes of living, rather than a static identity (Essential 138). Extending Foucault, Butler argues that positioning queer intimacies within a field of state recognition risks normalising relationships in terms of heterosexual norms whilst foreclosing the possibilities of new modes of affection. Jasbir Puar argues that queer subjects continue to feature on the peripheries of moral and legal citizenship when their practices of intimacy fail to conform to the socio-political dyadic ideal of matrimony, fidelity and reproduction (22-28). Puar and Butler's reluctance to embrace marriage becomes clearer through an examination of the obiter dicta in the recent American jurisprudence where the proscription on same-sex marriage was overturned in California: To the extent proponents seek to encourage a norm that sexual activity occur within marriage to ensure that reproduction occur within stable households, Proposition 8 discourages that norm because it requires some sexual activity and child-bearing and child-rearing to occur outside marriage. (Perry vs Schwarzenegger 128) By connecting the discourse of matrimony and sex with citizenship, the court reifies the value of marriage as an institution of the family, which should be extended to same-sex couples. Therefore, by locating the family in reproductive heterosexual terms, the court forecloses other modes of recognition or rights for those who are in non-monogamous relationships or choose not to reproduce. The legal reasoning in the case evinces the ways in which intimate citizenship or legitimate kinship is understood in highly parochial terms. As Kane Race elaborates, the suturing of domesticity and nationhood, with the rhetoric that "reproduction occur within stable households", frames heterosexual nuclear bonds as the means to legitimate sexual relations (98). By privileging a familial kinship aesthetic to marriage, the state implicitly disregards recognising the value of intimacy in non-nuclear communities or families (Race 100). Australia, however, unlike most foreign nations, has a dual model of relationship recognition. De facto relationships are virtually indistinguishable from marriage in terms of the rights and entitlements couples are able to access. Very recently, the amendments made by the Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws - General Reform) Act 2008 (Cth) has ensured same-sex couples have been included under Federal definitions of de facto relationships, thereby granting same-sex couples the same material rights and entitlements as heterosexual married couples. While comprehensive de facto recognition operates uniquely in Australia, it is still necessary to question the impact of jurisprudence that considers only marriage provides the legitimate structure for raising children. As Laurent Berlant suggests, those who seek alternative "love plots" are denied the legal and cultural spaces to realise them ("Love" 479). Berlant's critique emphasises how current "progressive" legal approaches to same-sex relationships rely on a monogamous (heterosexual) trajectory of the "love plot" which marginalises those who are in divorced, single, polyamorous or multi-parent situations. For example, in the National Year of Action, a series of marriage equality rallies held across Australia over 2010, non-conjugal forms of intimacy were inadvertently sidelined in order to make a claim for relationship recognition. In a letter to the Sydney Star Observer, a reader laments: As a gay man, I cannot understand why gay people would want to engage in a heterosexual ritual called marriage … Why do gay couples want to buy into this ridiculous notion is beyond belief. The laws need to be changed so that gays are treated equal under the law, but this is not to be confused with marriage as these are two separate issues... (Michael 2) Marriage marks a privileged position of citizenship and consumption, to which all other gay and lesbian rights claims are tangential. Moreover, as this letter to the Sydney Star Observer implies, by claiming sexual citizenship through the rubric of marriage, discussions about other campaigns for legislative equality are effectively foreclosed. Melissa Gregg expands on such a problematic, noting that the legal responses to equality reiterate a normative relationship between sexuality and power, where only couples that subscribe to dyadic, marriage-like relationships are offered entitlements by the state (4). Correspondingly, much of the public activism around marriage equality in Australia seeks to achieve its impact for equality (reforming the Marriage Act) by positioning intimacy in terms of state legitimacy. Butler and Warner argue that when speaking of legitimacy a relation to what is legitimate is implied. Lisa Bower corroborates this, asserting "legal discourse creates norms which universalise particular modes of living…while suppressing other practices and identities" (267). What Butler's and Bower's arguments reveal is that legitimacy is obtained through the extension of marriage to homosexual couples. For example, Andrew Barr, the current Labor Party Education Minister in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), noted that "saying no to civil unions is to say that some relationships are more legitimate than others" (quoted in "Legal Ceremonies"). Ironically, such a statement privileges civil unions by rendering them as the normative basis on which to grant legal recognition. Elizabeth Povinelli argues the performance of dyadic intimacy becomes the means to assert legal and social sovereignty (112). Therefore, as Jenni Millbank warns, marriage, or even distinctive forms of civil unions, if taken alone, can entrench inequalities for those who choose not to participate in these forms of recognition (8). Grassroots mobilisation and political lobbying strategies around marriage equality activism can have the unintentional impact, however, of obscuring peripheral forms of intimacy and subsequently repudiating those who contest the movement towards marriage. Warner argues that those who choose to marry derive pride from their monogamous commitment and "family" oriented practice, a privilege afforded through marital citizenship (82). Conversely, individuals and couples who deviate from the "normal" (read: socially palatable) intimate citizen, such as promiscuous or polyamorous subjects, are rendered shameful or pitiful. This political discourse illustrates that there is a strong impetus in the marriage equality movement to legitimate "homosexual love" because it mimics the norms of monogamy, stability, continuity and family by only seeking to substitute the sex of the "other" partner. Thus, civil rights discourse maintains the privileged political economy of marriage as it involves reproduction (even if it is not biological), mainstream social roles and monogamous sex. By defining social membership and future life in terms of a heterosexual life-narrative, same-sex couples become wedded to the idea of matrimony as the basis for sustainable intimacy and citizenship (Berlant and Warner 557). Warner is critical of recuperating discourses that privilege marriage as the ideal form of intimacy. This is particularly concerning when diverse erotic and intimate communities, which are irreducible to normative forms of citizenship, are subject to erasure. Que(e)rying the Future of Ethics and Politics By connecting liberal equality arguments with Butler and Warner's work on queer ethics, there is hesitation towards privileging marriage as the ultimate form of intimacy. Moreover, Butler stresses the importance of a transformative practice of queer intimacy: It is crucial…that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will not count as intelligible and recognisable alliance and kinship. (Undoing 117) Here the author attempts to negotiate the complex terrain of queer citizenship and ethics. On one hand, it is necessary to be made visible in order to engage in political activism and be afforded rights within a state discourse. Simultaneously, on the other hand, there is a need to transform the prevailing hetero-normative rhetoric of romantic love in order to prevent pathologising bodies or rendering certain forms of intimacy as aberrant or deviant because, as Warner notes, they do not conform to our perception of what we understand to be normal or morally desirable. Foucault's work on the aesthetics of the self offers a possible transformational practice which avoids the risks Warner and Butler mention because it eludes the "normative determinations" of moralities and publics, whilst engaging in an "ethical stylization" (qtd. in Race 144). Whilst Foucault's work does not explicitly address the question of marriage, his work on friendship gestures to the significance of affective bonds. Queer kinship has the potential to produce new ethics, where bodies do not become subjects of desires, but rather act as agents of pleasure. Negotiating the intersection between active citizenship and transformative intimacy requires rethinking the politics of recognition and normalisation. Warner is quite ambivalent as to the potential of appropriating marriage for gays and lesbians, despite the historical dynamism of marriage. Rather than acting as a progressive mechanism for rights, it is an institution that operates by refusing to recognise other relations (Warner 129). However, as Alexander Duttmann notes, recognition is more complex and a paradoxical means of relation and identification. It involves a process in which the majority neutralises the difference of the (minority) Other in order to assimilate it (27). However, in the process of recognition, the Other which is validated, then transforms the position of the majority, by altering the terms by which recognition is granted. Marriage no longer simply confers recognition for heterosexual couples to engage in reproduction (Secomb 133). While some queer couples may subscribe to a monogamous relationship structure, these relationships necessarily trouble conservative politics. The lamentations of the Australian Christian Lobby regarding the "fundamental (anatomical) gender complementarity" of same-sex marriage reflect this by recognising the broader social transformation that will occur (and already does with many heterosexual marriages) by displacing the association between marriage, procreation and parenting (5). Correspondingly, Foucault's work assists in broadening the debate on relationship recognition by transforming our understanding of choice and ethics in terms of "queer friendship." He describes it as a practice that resists the normative public distinction between romantic and platonic affection and produces new aesthetics for sexual and non-sexual intimacy (Foucault, Essential 170). Linnell Secomb argues that this "double potential" alluded to in Foucault and Duttman's work, has the capacity to neutralise difference as Warner fears (133). However, it can also transform dominant narratives of sexual citizenship, as enabling marriage equality will impact on how we imagine traditional heterosexual or patriarchal "plots" to intimacy (Berlant, "Intimacy" 286). Conclusion Making an informed impact into public debates on marriage equality requires charting the locus of sexuality, intimacy and citizenship. Negotiating academic discourses, social and community activism, with broader institutions and norms presents political and social challenges when thinking about the sorts of intimacy that should be recognised by the state. The civil right to marriage, irrespective of the sex or gender of one's partner, reflects a crucial shift towards important democratic participation of non-heterosexual citizens. However, it is important to note that the value of such intimacy cannot be indexed against a single measure of legal reform. While Butler and Warner present considered indictments on the normalisation of queer intimacy through marriage, such arguments do not account for the impacts of que(e)rying cultural norms and practices through social and political change. Marriage is not a singular or a-historical construction reducible to state recognition. Moreover, in a secular democracy, marriage should be one of many forms of diverse relationship recognition open to same-sex and gender diverse couples. In order to expand the impact of social and legal claims for recognition, it is productive to rethink the complex nature of recognition, ritual and aesthetics within marriage. In doing so, we can begin to transform the possibilities for articulating intimate citizenship in plural democracies. References Australian Christian Lobby. "Submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry into the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009." Deakin: ACL, 2009. Australian Government. "Sec. 5." Marriage Act of 1961 (Cth). 1961. ———. Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws - General Reform) Act 2008 (Cth). 2008. Bell, David, and John Binnie. The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond. Oxford: Polity P, 2000. Berlant, Lauren. "Intimacy: A Special Issue." Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 281-88. ———. "Love, a Queer Feeling." Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. Eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001:432-52. Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. "Sex in Public." Ed. Lauren Berlant. Intimacy. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2000: 311-30. Bower, Lisa. "Queer Problems/Straight Solutions: The Limits of a Politics of 'Official Recognition'" Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories. Ed. Shane Phelan. London and New York: Routledge, 1997: 267-91. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. ———. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Duttmann, Alexander. Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition. London: Verso, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality (1): The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin Books, 1977. ———. "Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity." Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. London: Allen Lange/Penguin, 1984. 163-74. ———. Essential Works of Foucault: 1954-1984: Ethics, Vol. 1. London: Penguin, 2000. Graycar, Reg, and Jenni Millbank. "From Functional Families to Spinster Sisters: Australia's Distinctive Path to Relationship Recognition." Journal of Law and Policy 24. 2007: 1-44. Gregg, Melissa. "Normal Homes." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). 27 Aug. 2007 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php›. Hannam, Jane. Feminism. London and New York: Pearson Education, 2007. Kaplan, Morris. "Intimacy and Equality: The Question of Lesbian and Gay Marriage." Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories. Ed. Shane Phelan. London and New York: Routledge, 1997: 201-30. "Legal Ceremonies for Same-Sex Couples." ABC Online 11 Nov. 2009. 13 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/11/2739661.htm›. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London and New York: Sage, 2008. Michael. "Why Marriage?" Letter to the Editor. Sydney Star Observer 1031 (20 July 2010): 2. Millbank, Jenni. "Recognition of Lesbian and Gay Families in Australian Law - Part One: Couples." Federal Law Review 34 (2008): 1-44. Perry v. Schwarzenegger. 3: 09 CV 02292. United States District Court for the Northern District of California. 2010. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Race, Kane. Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2009. Secomb, Linnell. Philosophy and Love. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Shumway, David. Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy and the Marriage Crisis. New York: New York UP, 2003. Wade, Matt. "PM Joins Opposition against Gay Marriage as Cleric's Election Stalls." The Sydney Morning Herald 6 Aug. 2003. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

While the term “visual literacy” has grown in popularity in the last 50 years, its meaning remains nebulous. It is described variously as: a vehicle for aesthetic appreciation, a means of defence against visual manipulation, a sorting mechanism for an increasingly data-saturated age, and a prerequisite to civic inclusion (Fransecky 23; Messaris 181; McTigue and Flowers 580). Scholars have written extensively about the first three subjects but there has been less research on how visual literacy frames civic life and how it might help the public as a tool to address disadvantage and assist in removing social and cultural barriers. This article examines a forerunner to visual literacy in the push to create an international symbol language born out of popular education movements, a project that fell short of its goals but still left a considerable impression on graphic media. This article, then, presents an analysis of visual literacy campaigns in the early postwar era. These campaigns did not attempt to invent a symbolic language but posited that images themselves served as a universal language in which students could receive training. Of particular interest is how the concept of visual literacy has been mobilised as a pedagogical tool in design, digital humanities and in broader civic education initiatives promoted by Third Space institutions. Behind the creation of new visual literacy curricula is the idea that images can help anchor a world community, supplementing textual communication. Figure 1: Visual Literacy Yearbook. Montebello Unified School District, USA, 1973. Shedding Light: Origins of the Visual Literacy Frame The term “visual literacy” came to the fore in the early 1970s on the heels of mass literacy campaigns. The educators, creatives and media theorists who first advocated for visual learning linked this aim to literacy, an unassailable goal, to promote a more radical curricular overhaul. They challenged a system that had hitherto only acknowledged a very limited pathway towards academic success; pushing “language and mathematics”, courses “referred to as solids (something substantial) as contrasted with liquids or gases (courses with little or no substance)” (Eisner 92). This was deemed “a parochial view of both human ability and the possibilities of education” that did not acknowledge multiple forms of intelligence (Gardner). This change not only integrated elements of mass culture that had been rejected in education, notably film and graphic arts, but also encouraged the critique of images as a form of good citizenship, assuming that visually literate arbiters could call out media misrepresentations and manipulative political advertising (Messaris, “Visual Test”). This movement was, in many ways, reactive to new forms of mass media that began to replace newspapers as key forms of civic participation. Unlike simple literacy (being able to decipher letters as a mnemonic system), visual literacy involves imputing meanings to images where meanings are less fixed, yet still with embedded cultural signifiers. Visual literacy promised to extend enlightenment metaphors of sight (as in the German Aufklärung) and illumination (as in the French Lumières) to help citizens understand an increasingly complex marketplace of images. The move towards visual literacy was not so much a shift towards images (and away from books and oration) but an affirmation of the need to critically investigate the visual sphere. It introduced doubt to previously upheld hierarchies of perception. Sight, to Kant the “noblest of the senses” (158), was no longer the sense “least affected” by the surrounding world but an input centre that was equally manipulable. In Kant’s view of societal development, the “cosmopolitan” held the key to pacifying bellicose states and ensuring global prosperity and tranquillity. The process of developing a cosmopolitan ideology rests, according to Kant, on the gradual elimination of war and “the education of young people in intellectual and moral culture” (188-89). Transforming disparate societies into “a universal cosmopolitan existence” that would “at last be realised as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop” and would take well-funded educational institutions and, potentially, a new framework for imparting knowledge (Kant 51). To some, the world of the visual presented a baseline for shared experience. Figure 2: Exhibition by the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna, photograph c. 1927. An International Picture Language The quest to find a mutually intelligible language that could “bridge worlds” and solder together all of humankind goes back to the late nineteenth century and the Esperanto movement of Ludwig Zamenhof (Schor 59). The expression of this ideal in the world of the visual picked up steam in the interwar years with designers and editors like Fritz Kahn, Gerd Arntz, and Otto and Marie Neurath. Their work transposing complex ideas into graphic form has been rediscovered as an antecedent to modern infographics, but the symbols they deployed were not to merely explain, but also help education and build international fellowship unbounded by spoken language. The Neuraths in particular are celebrated for their international picture language or Isotypes. These pictograms (sometimes viewed as proto-emojis) can be used to represent data without text. Taken together they are an “intemporal, hieroglyphic language” that Neutrath hoped would unite working-class people the world over (Lee 159). The Neuraths’ work was done in the explicit service of visual education with a popular socialist agenda and incubated in the social sphere of Red Vienna at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social and Economic Museum) where Otto served as Director. The Wirtschaftsmuseum was an experiment in popular education, with multiple branches and late opening hours to accommodate the “the working man [who] has time to see a museum only at night” (Neurath 72-73). The Isotype contained universalist aspirations for the “making of a world language, or a helping picture language—[that] will give support to international developments generally” and “educate by the eye” (Neurath 13). Figure 3: Gerd Arntz Isotype Images. (Source: University of Reading.) The Isotype was widely adopted in the postwar era in pre-packaged sets of symbols used in graphic design and wayfinding systems for buildings and transportation networks, but with the socialism of the Neuraths’ peeled away, leaving only the system of logos that we are familiar with from airport washrooms, charts, and public transport maps. Much of the uptake in this symbol language could be traced to increased mobility and tourism, particularly in countries that did not make use of a Roman alphabet. The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo helped pave the way when organisers, fearful of jumbling too many scripts together, opted instead for black and white icons to represent the program of sports that summer. The new focus on the visual was both technologically mediated—cheaper printing and broadcast technologies made the diffusion of image increasingly possible—but also ideologically supported by a growing emphasis on projects that transcended linguistic, ethnic, and national borders. The Olympic symbols gradually morphed into Letraset icons, and, later, symbols in the Unicode Standard, which are the basis for today’s emojis. Wordless signs helped facilitate interconnectedness, but only in the most literal sense; their application was limited primarily to sports mega-events, highway maps, and “brand building”, and they never fulfilled their role as an educational language “to give the different nations a common outlook” (Neurath 18). Universally understood icons, particularly in the form of emojis, point to a rise in visual communication but they have fallen short as a cosmopolitan project, supporting neither the globalisation of Kantian ethics nor the transnational socialism of the Neuraths. Figure 4: Symbols in use. Women's bathroom. 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Source: The official report of the Organizing Committee.) Counter Education By mid-century, the optimism of a universal symbol language seemed dated, and focus shifted from distillation to discernment. New educational programs presented ways to study images, increasingly reproducible with new technologies, as a language in and of themselves. These methods had their roots in the fin-de-siècle educational reforms of John Dewey, Helen Parkhurst, and Maria Montessori. As early as the 1920s, progressive educators were using highly visual magazines, like National Geographic, as the basis for lesson planning, with the hopes that they would “expose students to edifying and culturally enriching reading” and “develop a more catholic taste or sensibility, representing an important cosmopolitan value” (Hawkins 45). The rise in imagery from previously inaccessible regions helped pupils to see themselves in relation to the larger world (although this connection always came with the presumed superiority of the reader). “Pictorial education in public schools” taught readers—through images—to accept a broader world but, too often, they saw photographs as a “straightforward transcription of the real world” (Hawkins 57). The images of cultures and events presented in Life and National Geographic for the purposes of education and enrichment were now the subject of greater analysis in the classroom, not just as “windows into new worlds” but as cultural products in and of themselves. The emerging visual curriculum aimed to do more than just teach with previously excluded modes (photography, film and comics); it would investigate how images presented and mediated the world. This gained wider appeal with new analytical writing on film, like Raymond Spottiswoode's Grammar of the Film (1950) which sought to formulate the grammatical rules of visual communication (Messaris 181), influenced by semiotics and structural linguistics; the emphasis on grammar can also be seen in far earlier writings on design systems such as Owen Jones’s 1856 The Grammar of Ornament, which also advocated for new, universalising methods in design education (Sloboda 228). The inventorying impulse is on display in books like Donis A. Dondis’s A Primer of Visual Literacy (1973), a text that meditates on visual perception but also functions as an introduction to line and form in the applied arts, picking up where the Bauhaus left off. Dondis enumerates the “syntactical guidelines” of the applied arts with illustrations that are in keeping with 1920s books by Kandinsky and Klee and analyse pictorial elements. However, at the end of the book she shifts focus with two chapters that examine “messaging” and visual literacy explicitly. Dondis predicts that “an intellectual, trained ability to make and understand visual messages is becoming a vital necessity to involvement with communication. It is quite likely that visual literacy will be one of the fundamental measures of education in the last third of our century” (33) and she presses for more programs that incorporate the exploration and analysis of images in tertiary education. Figure 5: Ideal spatial environment for the Blueprint charts, 1970. (Image: Inventory Press.) Visual literacy in education arrived in earnest with a wave of publications in the mid-1970s. They offered ways for students to understand media processes and for teachers to use visual culture as an entry point into complex social and scientific subject matter, tapping into the “visual consciousness of the ‘television generation’” (Fransecky 5). Visual culture was often seen as inherently democratising, a break from stuffiness, the “artificialities of civilisation”, and the “archaic structures” that set sensorial perception apart from scholarship (Dworkin 131-132). Many radical university projects and community education initiatives of the 1960s made use of new media in novel ways: from Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s fold-out posters accompanying Blueprint for Counter Education (1970) to Emory Douglas’s graphics for The Black Panther newspaper. Blueprint’s text- and image-dense wall charts were made via assemblage and they were imagined less as charts and more as a “matrix of resources” that could be used—and added to—by youth to undertake their own counter education (Cronin 53). These experiments in visual learning helped to break down old hierarchies in education, but their aim was influenced more by countercultural notions of disruption than the universal ideals of cosmopolitanism. From Image as Text to City as Text For a brief period in the 1970s, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan et al., Massage) and artists like Bruno Munari (Tanchis and Munari) collaborated fruitfully with graphic designers to create books that mixed text and image in novel ways. Using new compositional methods, they broke apart traditional printing lock-ups to superimpose photographs, twist text, and bend narrative frames. The most famous work from this era is, undoubtedly, The Medium Is the Massage (1967), McLuhan’s team-up with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, but it was followed by dozens of other books intended to communicate theory and scientific ideas with popularising graphics. Following in the footsteps of McLuhan, many of these texts sought not just to explain an issue but to self-consciously reference their own method of information delivery. These works set the precedent for visual aids (and, to a lesser extent, audio) that launched a diverse, non-hierarchical discourse that was nonetheless bound to tactile artefacts. In 1977, McLuhan helped develop a media textbook for secondary school students called City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. It is notable for its direct address style and its focus on investigating spaces outside of the classroom (provocatively, a section on the third page begins with “Should all schools be closed?”). The book follows with a fine-grained analysis of advertising forms in which students are asked to first bring advertisements into class for analysis and later to go out into the city to explore “a man-made environment, a huge warehouse of information, a vast resource to be mined free of charge” (McLuhan et al., City 149). As a document City as Classroom is critical of existing teaching methods, in line with the radical “in the streets” pedagogy of its day. McLuhan’s theories proved particularly salient for the counter education movement, in part because they tapped into a healthy scepticism of advertisers and other image-makers. They also dovetailed with growing discontent with the ad-strew visual environment of cities in the 1970s. Budgets for advertising had mushroomed in the1960s and outdoor advertising “cluttered” cities with billboards and neon, generating “fierce intensities and new hybrid energies” that threatened to throw off the visual equilibrium (McLuhan 74). Visual literacy curricula brought in experiential learning focussed on the legibility of the cities, mapping, and the visualisation of urban issues with social justice implications. The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), a “collective endeavour of community research and education” that arose in the aftermath of the 1967 uprisings, is the most storied of the groups that suffused the collection of spatial data with community engagement and organising (Warren et al. 61). The following decades would see a tamed approach to visual literacy that, while still pressing for critical reading, did not upend traditional methods of educational delivery. Figure 6: Beginning a College Program-Assisting Teachers to Develop Visual Literacy Approaches in Public School Classrooms. 1977. ERIC. Searching for Civic Education The visual literacy initiatives formed in the early 1970s both affirmed existing civil society institutions while also asserting the need to better inform the public. Most of the campaigns were sponsored by universities, major libraries, and international groups such as UNESCO, which published its “Declaration on Media Education” in 1982. They noted that “participation” was “essential to the working of a pluralistic and representative democracy” and the “public—users, citizens, individuals, groups ... were too systematically overlooked”. Here, the public is conceived as both “targets of the information and communication process” and users who “should have the last word”. To that end their “continuing education” should be ensured (Study 18). Programs consisted primarily of cognitive “see-scan-analyse” techniques (Little et al.) for younger students but some also sought to bring visual analysis to adult learners via continuing education (often through museums eager to engage more diverse audiences) and more radical popular education programs sponsored by community groups. By the mid-80s, scores of modules had been built around the comprehension of visual media and had become standard educational fare across North America, Australasia, and to a lesser extent, Europe. There was an increasing awareness of the role of data and image presentation in decision-making, as evidenced by the surprising commercial success of Edward Tufte’s 1982 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Visual literacy—or at least image analysis—was now enmeshed in teaching practice and needed little active advocacy. Scholarly interest in the subject went into a brief period of hibernation in the 1980s and early 1990s, only to be reborn with the arrival of new media distribution technologies (CD-ROMs and then the internet) in classrooms and the widespread availability of digital imaging technology starting in the late 1990s; companies like Adobe distributed free and reduced-fee licences to schools and launched extensive teacher training programs. Visual literacy was reanimated but primarily within a circumscribed academic field of education and data visualisation. Figure 7: Visual Literacy; What Research Says to the Teacher, 1975. National Education Association. USA. Part of the shifting frame of visual literacy has to do with institutional imperatives, particularly in places where austerity measures forced strange alliances between disciplines. What had been a project in alternative education morphed into an uncontested part of the curriculum and a dependable budget line. This shift was already forecasted in 1972 by Harun Farocki who, writing in Filmkritik, noted that funding for new film schools would be difficult to obtain but money might be found for “training in media education … a discipline that could persuade ministers of education, that would at the same time turn the budget restrictions into an advantage, and that would match the functions of art schools” (98). Nearly 50 years later educators are still using media education (rebranded as visual or media literacy) to make the case for fine arts and humanities education. While earlier iterations of visual literacy education were often too reliant on the idea of cracking the “code” of images, they did promote ways of learning that were a deep departure from the rote methods of previous generations. Next-gen curricula frame visual literacy as largely supplemental—a resource, but not a program. By the end of the 20th century, visual literacy had changed from a scholarly interest to a standard resource in the “teacher’s toolkit”, entering into school programs and influencing museum education, corporate training, and the development of public-oriented media (Literacy). An appreciation of image culture was seen as key to creating empathetic global citizens, but its scope was increasingly limited. With rising austerity in the education sector (a shift that preceded the 2008 recession by decades in some countries), art educators, museum enrichment staff, and design researchers need to make a case for why their disciplines were relevant in pedagogical models that are increasingly aimed at “skills-based” and “job ready” teaching. Arts educators worked hard to insert their fields into learning goals for secondary students as visual literacy, with the hope that “literacy” would carry the weight of an educational imperative and not a supplementary field of study. Conclusion For nearly a century, educational initiatives have sought to inculcate a cosmopolitan perspective with a variety of teaching materials and pedagogical reference points. Symbolic languages, like the Isotype, looked to unite disparate people with shared visual forms; while educational initiatives aimed to train the eyes of students to make them more discerning citizens. The term ‘visual literacy’ emerged in the 1960s and has since been deployed in programs with a wide variety of goals. Countercultural initiatives saw it as a prerequisite for popular education from the ground up, but, in the years since, it has been formalised and brought into more staid curricula, often as a sort of shorthand for learning from media and pictures. The grand cosmopolitan vision of a complete ‘visual language’ has been scaled back considerably, but still exists in trace amounts. Processes of globalisation require images to universalise experiences, commodities, and more for people without shared languages. Emoji alphabets and globalese (brands and consumer messaging that are “visual-linguistic” amalgams “increasingly detached from any specific ethnolinguistic group or locality”) are a testament to a mediatised banal cosmopolitanism (Jaworski 231). In this sense, becoming “fluent” in global design vernacular means familiarity with firms and products, an understanding that is aesthetic, not critical. It is very much the beneficiaries of globalisation—both state and commercial actors—who have been able to harness increasingly image-based technologies for their benefit. To take a humorous but nonetheless consequential example, Spanish culinary boosters were able to successfully lobby for a paella emoji (Miller) rather than having a food symbol from a less wealthy country such as a Senegalese jollof or a Morrocan tagine. This trend has gone even further as new forms of visual communication are increasingly streamlined and managed by for-profit media platforms. The ubiquity of these forms of communication and their global reach has made visual literacy more important than ever but it has also fundamentally shifted the endeavour from a graphic sorting practice to a critical piece of social infrastructure that has tremendous political ramifications. Visual literacy campaigns hold out the promise of educating students in an image-based system with the potential to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. This cosmopolitan political project has not yet been realised, as the visual literacy frame has drifted into specialised silos of art, design, and digital humanities education. It can help bridge the “incomplete connections” of an increasingly globalised world (Calhoun 112), but it does not have a program in and of itself. Rather, an evolving visual literacy curriculum might be seen as a litmus test for how we imagine the role of images in the world. 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Hawkins, Stephanie L. “Training the ‘I’ to See: Progressive Education, Visual Literacy, and National Geographic Membership.” American Iconographic. U of Virginia P, 2010. 28–61. Jaworski, Adam. “Globalese: A New Visual-Linguistic Register.” Social Semiotics 25.2 (2015): 217-35. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Cambridge UP, 2006. Kant, Immanuel. “Perpetual Peace.” Political Writings. Ed. H. Reiss. Cambridge UP, 1991 [1795]. 116–130. Kress, G., and T. van Leeuwen. Reading images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge, 1996. Literacy Teaching Toolkit: Visual Literacy. Department of Education and Training (DET), State of Victoria. 29 Aug. 2018. 30 Sep. 2020 <https://www.education.vic.gov.au:443/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/english/literacy/ readingviewing/Pages/litfocusvisual.aspx>. Lee, Jae Young. “Otto Neurath's Isotype and the Rhetoric of Neutrality.” Visible Language 42.2: 159-180. Little, D., et al. 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Cultural Studies has tended to prioritise the domain of leisure and consumption over work as an area for meaning making, in many ways defining everyday life in opposition to work. Greg Noble, a cultural researcher who examined work in the context of the early computerisation of Australian universities made the point that "discussions of everyday life often make the mistake of assuming that everyday life equates with home and family life, or leisure" (87). This article argues for the need within Cultural Studies to focus on work and media as a research area of everyday life. With the growth of flexible and creative labour and the widespread uptake of an array of new media technologies used for work, traditional ways to identify and measure the space and time of work have become increasingly flawed, with implications for how we account for work and negotiate its boundaries. New approaches are needed to address the complex media environments and technological practices that are an increasing part of contemporary working life. Cultural Studies can make a significant impact towards this research agenda by offering new ways to analyse the complex interrelations of space, time and technology in everyday work practice. To further this goal, a new material practices account of work termed Officing is introduced, developed through my doctoral research on professionals' daily use of information and communication technology (ICT). This approach builds on the key cultural concepts of "bricolage" and "appropriation" combined with the idea of "articulation work" proposed by Anselm Strauss, to support the analysis of the office workplace as a contingent and provisional arrangement or process. Officing has a number of benefits as a framework for analysing the nature of work in a highly mediated world. Highlighting the labour that goes into stabilising work platforms makes it possible to assess the claims of productivity and improved work-life balance brought about by new mobile media technologies; to identify previously unidentified sources of time pressure, overwork and intensification and ultimately, to contribute to the design of more sustainable work environments. The Turn Away from Work Work held a central position in social and cultural analysis in the first half of the twentieth century but as Strangleman observed, there was a marked shift away from the study of work from the mid 1970s (3.1). Much of the impulse for this shift came from critiques of the over-emphasis on relations of production and the workplace as the main source of meaning and value (5.1). In line with this position, feminist researchers challenged the traditional division of labour into paid and unpaid work, arguing that this division sustained the false perception of domestic work as non-productive (cf. Delphy; Folbre). Accompanying these critiques were significant changes in work itself, as traditional jobs literally began to disappear with the decline of manufacturing in industrialised countries (6.1). With the turn away from work in academia and the changes in the nature of work, attention shifted to the realm of the market and consumption. One of the important contributions of Cultural Studies has been the focus on the role of the consumer in driving social and technological change and processes of identity formation. Yet, it is a major problem that work is largely marginalised in cultural research of everyday life, especially since, in most industrialised nations, we are working in new ways, in rapidly changing conditions and more than ever before. Research shows that in Australia there has been a steady increase in the average hours of paid work and Australians are working harder (cf. Watson, Buchanan, Campbell and Briggs; Edwards and Wajcman). In the 2008 Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI) Skinner and Pocock found around 55 per cent of employees frequently felt rushed or pressed for time and this was associated with long working hours, work overload and an overall poor work–life interaction (8). These trends have coincided with long-term changes in the type and location of work. In Australia, like many other developed countries, information-based occupations have taken over manufacturing jobs and there has been an increase in part-time and casual work (cf. Watson et al.). Many employees now conduct work outside of the traditional workplace, with the ABS reporting that in 2008, 24 per cent of employees worked at least some hours at home. Many social analysts have explained the rise of casual and flexible labour as related to the transition to global capitalism driven by the expansion of networked information processes (cf. Castells; Van Dijk). This shift is not simply that more workers are producing ideas and information but that the previously separated spheres of production and consumption have blurred (cf. Ritzer and Jurgenson). With this, entirely new industries have sprung up, predicated on the often unpaid for creative labour of individuals, including users of media technologies. A growing chorus of writers are now pointing out that a fragmented, polarised and complex picture is emerging of this so-called "new economy", with significant implications for the quality of work (cf. Edwards and Wajcman; Fudge and Owens; Huws). Indeed, some claim that new conditions of insecure and poor quality employment or "precarious work" are fast becoming the norm. Moreover, this longer-term pattern runs parallel to the production of a multitude of new mobile media technologies, first taken up by professionals and then by the mainstream, challenging the notion that activities are bound to any particular place or time. Reinvigorating Work in Social and Cultural Analysis There are moves to reposition social and cultural analysis to respond to these various trends. Work-life balance is an example of a research and policy area that has emerged since the 1990s. The boundary between the household and the outside world has also been subject to scrutiny by cultural researchers, and these critically examine the intersection between work and consumption, gender and care (cf. Nippert-Eng; Sorenson and Lie; Noble and Lupton, "Consuming" and "Mine"; Lally). These responses are examples of a shift away from what Urry has dubbed "structures and stable organisations" to a concern with flows, movements and the blurring of boundaries between life spheres (5). In a similar vein, researchers recently have proposed alternative ways to describe the changing times and places of employment. In their study of UK professionals, Felstead, Jewson and Walters proposed a model of "plural workscapes" to explain a major shift in the spatial organisation of work (23). Mobility theorists Sheller and Urry have called for the need to "develop a more dynamic conceptualisation of the fluidities and mobilities that have increasingly hybridised the public and private" (113). All of this literature has reinforced a growing concern that in the face of new patterns of production and consumption and with the rise of complex media environments, traditional models and measures of space and time are inadequate to account for contemporary work. Analyses that rely on conventional measures of work based on hourly units clearly point to an increase in the volume of work, the speed of work and to the collision (cf. Pocock) of work and life but fall down in accounting for the complex and often contradictory role of technology. Media technologies are "Janus-faced" as Michael Arnold has suggested, referring to the two-faced Roman god to foreground the contradictory effects at the centre of all technologies (232). Wajcman notes this paradox in her research on mobile media and time, pointing out that mobile phones are just as likely to "save" time as to "consume" it (15). It was precisely this problematic of the complex interactions of the space, time and technology of work that was at stake in my research on the daily use of ICT by professional workers. In the context of changes to the location, activity and meaning of work, and with the multiplying array of old and new media technologies used by workers, how can the boundary and scope of work be determined? What are the implications of these shifting grounds for the experience and quality of work? Officing: A Material Practices Account of Office Work In the remaining article I introduce some of the key ideas and principles of a material practices account developed in my PhD, Officing: Professionals' Daily ICT Use and the Changing Space and Time of Work. This research took place between 2006 and 2007 focusing in-depth on the daily technology practices of twenty professional workers in a municipal council in Sydney and a unit of a global telecommunication company taking part in a trial of a new smart phone. Officing builds on efforts to develop a more accurate account of the space and time of work bringing into play the complex and highly mediated environment in which work takes place. It extends more recent practice-based, actor-network and cultural approaches that have, for some time, been moving towards a more co-constitutive and process-oriented approach to media and technology in society. Turning first to "bricolage" from the French bricole meaning something small and handmade, bricolage refers to the ways that individuals and groups borrow from existing cultural forms and meanings to create new uses, meanings and identities. Initially proposed by Levi-Strauss and then taken up by de Certeau, bricolage has been a useful concept within subculture and lifestyle studies to reveal the creative work performed on signs and meaning systems in forming cultural identities (cf. O'Sullivan et al.). Bricolage is also an important concept for understanding how meanings and uses are inscribed into forms in use rather than being read or activated off their design. This is the process of appropriation, through which both the object and the person are mutually shaped and users gain a sense of control and ownership (cf. Noble and Lupton; Lally; Silverstone and Haddon). The concept of bricolage highlights the improvisational qualities of appropriation and its status as work. A bricoleur is thus a person who constructs new meanings and forms by drawing on and assembling a wide range of resources at hand, sourced from multiple spheres of life. One of the problems with how bricolage and appropriation has been applied to date, notwithstanding the priority given to the domestic sphere, is the tendency to grant individuals and collectives too much control to stabilise the meanings and purposes of technologies. This problem is evident in the research drawing on the framework of "domestication" (cf. Silverstone and Haddon). In practice, the sheer volume of technologically-related issues encountered on a daily basis and the accompanying sense of frustration indicates there is no inevitable drift towards stability, nor are problems merely aberrational or trivial. Instead, daily limits to agency and attempts to overcome these are points at which meanings as well as uses are re-articulated and potentially re-invented. This is where "articulation work" comes in. Initially put forward by Anselm Strauss in 1985, articulation work has become an established analytical tool for informing technology design processes in such fields as Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Workplace Studies. In these, articulation work is narrowly defined to refer to the real time activities of cooperative work. It includes dealing with contingencies, keeping technologies and systems working and making adjustments to accommodate for problems (Suchman "Supporting", 407). In combination with naturalistic investigations, this concept has facilitated engagement with the increasingly complex technological and media environments of work. It has been a powerful tool for highlighting practices deemed unimportant but which are nevertheless crucial for getting work done. Articulation work, however, has the potential to be applied in a broader sense to explain the significance of the instability of technologies and the efforts to overcome these as transformative in themselves, part of the ongoing process of appropriation that goes well beyond individual tasks or technologies. With clear correspondences to actor-network theory, this expanded definition provides the basis for a new understanding of the office as a temporary and provisional condition of stability achieved through the daily creative and improvisational activities of workers. The office, then, is dependent on and inextricably bound up in its ongoing articulation and crucially, is not bound to a particular place or time. In the context of the large-scale transformations in work already discussed, this expanded definition of articulation work helps to; firstly, address how work is re-organised and re-rationalised through changes to the material conditions of work; secondly, identify the ongoing articulations that this entails and thirdly; understand the role of these articulations in the construction of the space and time of work. This expanded definition is achieved in the newly developed concept of officing. Officing describes a form of labour directed towards the production of a stable office platform. Significantly, one of the main characteristics of this work is that it often goes undetected by organisations as well as by the workers that perform it. As explained later, its "invisibility" is in part a function of its embodiment but also relates to the boundless nature of officing, taking place both inside and outside the workplace, in or out of work time. Officing is made up of a set of interwoven activities of three main types: connecting, synchronising and configuring. Connecting can be understood as aligning technical and social relations for the performance of work at a set time. Synchronising brings together and coordinates different times and temporal demands, for example, the time of "work" with "life" or the time "out in the field" with time "in the workplace". Configuring prepares the space of work, making a single technology or media environment work to some planned action or existing pattern of activity. To give an example of connecting: in the Citizens' Service Centre of the Council, Danielle's morning rituals involved a series of connections even before her work of advising customers begins: My day: get in, sit down, turn on the computer and then slowly open each software program that I will need to use…turn on the phone, key in my password, turn on the headphones and sit there and wait for the calls! (Humphry Officing, 123) These connections not only set up and initiate the performance of work but also mark Danielle's presence in her office. Through these activities, which in practice overlap and blur, the space and time of the office comes to appear as a somewhat separate and mostly invisible structure or infrastructure. The work that goes into making the office stable takes place around the boundary of work with implications for how this boundary is constituted. These efforts do not cluster around boundaries in any simple sense but become part of the process of boundary making, contributing to the construction of categories such as "work" and "life". So, for example, for staff in the smart phone trial, the phone had become their main source of information and communication. Turning their smart phone off, or losing connectivity had ramifications that cascaded throughout their lifeworld. On the one hand, this lead to the breakdown of the distinction between "work" and "life" and a sense of "ever-presence", requiring constant and vigilant "boundary work" (cf. Nippert-Eng). On the other hand, this same state also enabled workers to respond to demands in their own time and across multiple boundaries, giving workers a sense of flexibility, control and of being "in sync". Connecting, configuring and synchronising are activities performed by bodies, producing an embodied transformation. In the tradition of phenomenology, most notably in the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and more recently Ihde, embodiment is used to explain the relationship between subjects and objects. This concept has since been developed to be understood as not residing in the body but as spread through social, material and discursive arrangements (cf. Haraway, "Situated" and Simians; Henke; Suchman, "Figuring"). Tracing efforts towards making the office stable is thus a way of uncovering how the body, as a constitutive part of a larger arrangement or network, is formed through embodiment, how it gains its competencies, social meanings and ultimately, how workers gain a sense of what it means to be a professional. So, in the smart phone trial, staff managed their connections by replying immediately to their voice, text and data messages. This immediacy not only acted as proof of their presence in the office. It also signalled their commitment to their office: their active participation and value to the organisation and their readiness to perform when called on. Importantly, this embodied transformation also helps to explain how officing becomes an example of "invisible work" (cf. Star and Strauss). Acts of connecting, synchronising and configuring become constituted and forgotten in and through bodies, spaces and times. Through their repeated performance these acts become habits, a transparent means through which the environment of work is navigated in the form of skills and techniques, configurations and routines. In conclusion, researching work in contemporary societies means confronting its marginalisation within cultural research and developing ways to comprehend and measure the interaction of space, time and the ever-multiplying array of media technologies. Officing provides a way to do this by shifting to an understanding of the workplace as a contingent product of work itself. The strength of this approach is that it highlights the creative and ongoing work of individuals on their media infrastructures. It also helps to identify and describe work activities that are not neatly contained in a workplace, thus adding to their invisibility. The invisibility of these practices can have significant impacts on workers: magnifying feelings of time pressure and a need to work faster, longer and harder even as discrete technologies are utilised to save time. In this way, officing exposes some of the additional contributions to the changing experience and quality of work as well as to the construction of everyday domains. Officing supports an evaluation of claims of productivity and work-life balance in relation to new media technologies. In the smart phone trial, contrary to an assumed increase in productivity, mobility of work was achieved at the expense of productivity. Making the mobile office stable—getting it up and running, keeping it working in changing environments and meeting expectations of speed and connectivity—took up time, resulting in an overall productivity loss and demanding more "boundary work". In spite of their adaptability and flexibility, staff tended to overwork to counteract this loss. This represented a major shift in the burden of effort in the production of office forms away from the organisation and towards the individual. Finally, though not addressed here in any detail, officing could conceivably have practical uses for designing more sustainable office environments that better support the work process and the balance of work and life. Thus, by accounting more accurately for the resource requirements of work, organisations can reduce the daily effort, space and time taken up by employees on their work environments. In any case, what is clear, is the ongoing need to continue a cultural research agenda on work—to address the connections between transformations in work and the myriad material practices that individuals perform in going about their daily work. References Arnold, Michael. "On the Phenomenology of Technology: The 'Janus-Faces' of Mobile Phones." Information and Organization 13.4 (2003): 231–56. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 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"Consuming Work: Computers, Subjectivity and Appropriation in the University Workplace." The Sociological Review 46.4 (1998): 803-27. –––. "Mine/Not Mine: Appropriating Personal Computers in the Academic Workplace." Journal of Sociology 38.1 (2002): 5-23. O'Sullivan, Tim, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery, and John Fiske. Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1994. Pocock, Barbara. The Work/Life Collision: What Work Is Doing to Australians and What to Do about It. Sydney: The Federation P, 2003. Ritzer, George, and Nathan Jurgenson. "Production, Consumption, Prosumption." Journal of Consumer Culture 10.1 (2010): 13-36. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. "Mobile Transformations of 'Public' and 'Private' Life." Theory, Culture & Society 20.3 (2003): 107-25. Silverstone, Roger, and Leslie Haddon. "Design and the Domestication of Information and Communication Technologies: Technical Change and Everyday Life." 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IntroductionThe Sydney Opera House is Australia’s, if not the world’s, most recognisable building. It is universally recognised as an architectural icon and as a masterpiece of the built environment, which has captured the imagination of many (Commonwealth of Australia 4). The construction of the Sydney Opera House, between 1959 and 1973, utilised many ground-breaking methods and materials which, together, pushed the boundaries of technical possibilities to the limits of human knowledge at the time (Commonwealth of Australia 36, 45). Typical investigations into the Sydney Opera House focus on its architects, the materials, construction, or the events that occur on its stages. The role of the illumination, in the perception and understanding of Australia’s most famous performing arts centre, is an under-investigated aspect of its construction and its use today (Dwyer Backstage Biography 1; Dwyer “Utzon’s Use” 131).This article examines the illumination of the Sydney Opera House from the perspective of light as a construction material, another element that is used to ‘build’ the structure on Bennelong Point. This article examines the illumination from an historical view as Jørn Utzon’s (1918-2008) concepts for the building, including the lighting design intentions, were not all realised as he did not complete the project. The task of finishing this structure was allocated to the architectural cooperative of Hall, Todd & Littlemore who replaced Utzon in 1966. The Danish-born Utzon was appointed in January 1957 having won an international competition, from a field of over 230 entries, to design a national opera house for Sydney. He quickly began the task of resolving his design, transforming the roughly-sketched concepts presented in his competition entry, into detailed drawings that articulated how the opera house would be realised. The iteration of these concepts can be most succinctly identified in Utzon’s formal design reports to the Opera House Committee which are often referred to based on the colour of their cover design. The first report, the ‘red book’ was issued in 1958 with further developments of the architectural and services designs outlined in the ‘yellow book’ which followed in 1962. The last of the original architects’ publications was the Utzon Design Principles (2002) which was created as part of the reengagement process—between the Government of New South Wales and the Sydney Opera House with the original architect—that commenced in 1999.As with many modern buildings (such as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center, Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church or Adrian D. Smith’ Burj Khalifa), concrete was selected to form the basic structural element of the Sydney Opera House. Working with the, now internationally-renowned, engineering firm Ove Arup and Partners, Utzon designed some of the most significant shapes and finishes that have become synonymous with the site. The concrete elements range from basic blade walls with lustrous finishes to the complex, shape-changing beams that rise from under the monumental stairs and climb to terminate in the southern foyers. Thus, demonstrating the use of concrete as both a structural element and a high quality architectural finish. Another product used throughout the Sydney Opera House is granite. As a hardwearing stone, it is used in a crushed form as part of the precast panels that line the walls and internal flooring and as setts on the forecourt. As with the concrete the use of the same material inside and out blurs the distinction between interior and exterior. The forecourt forms a wide-open plaza before the building rises like a headland as it meets the harbour. The final, and most recognisable element is that of the shell (or roof) tiles. After many years of research Utzon settled on a simple mix of gloss and matt tiles of approximately 120mm square that, carefully arranged, produced a chevron shaped ‘lid’ and results in an effect likened to snow and ice (Commonwealth of Australia 51).These construction elements would all remain invisible if not illuminated by light, natural or artificial. This paper posits that the illumination reinforces the architecture of the structure and extends the architectural and experiential narratives of the Sydney Opera House across time and space. That, light is—like concrete, granite and tiles—a critical component of the Opera House’s build.Building a Narrative with LightIn creating the Sydney Opera House, Utzon set about harnessing natural and artificial illumination that are intrinsic parts of the human condition. Light shapes every facet of our lives from defining working and leisure hours to providing the mechanism for high speed communications and is, therefore, an obvious choice to reinforce the structure of the building and to link the built environment with the natural world that enveloped his creation. Light was to play a major role in the narrative of the Sydney Opera House starting from a patron’s approach to the site.Utzon’s staged approach to a performance at the Sydney Opera House is well documented, from the opening passages of the Descriptive Narrative (Utzon 1-2) to the Lighting Master Plan (Steensen Varming). The role of artificial light in the preparation of the audience extends beyond the simple visibility necessary to navigate the site. Light provides a linking element that guides an audience member along their ‘journey’ through several phases of transformation from the physicality of the city on the forecourt to “another world–a make believe atmosphere, which will exclude all outside impressions and allow the patrons to be absorbed into the theatre mood, which the actors and the producers wish to create” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2) in the theatres. Utzon conceived of light as part of the storytelling process, expressing the building’s narrative in a way that allows illumination is to be so much more than signposts to points of activity such as cloaking areas, theatre entries and the like. The lighting was intended to delineate various stages on the ‘journey’ noted above, to reinforce the transition from one world to another such that the combination of light and architecture would provide a series of successive stimuli that would build until the crescendo of the performance itself. This supports the transition of the visitor from the world of the everyday into the narrative of the Sydney Opera House and a world of make believe. Yet, in providing a narrative between these two ‘worlds’ the lighting becomes an anchor—or an element held in suspension – a mediator in the tension between the city at the beginning of the ‘journey’ and the ‘other world’ of the performance at the end. There is a balance to be maintained between illuminating the Sydney Opera House so that it remains prominent in its harbour location, easily read as a distinct sculptural structure on the peninsular separate from, but still an essential part of, the city that lies beyond Circular Quay to the south. Utzon alludes to the challenges of crafting the illumination so that it meets these requirements, noting that the illumination of the broardwalks “must be compatible with the lighting on the approach roads” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 68) while maintaining that “the floodlit building will be the first and last impression for [… an audience] to receive” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1). These lighting requirements are also tempered by the desire that the “night time [...] view will be all lights and reflections, [that] stretch all along the harbour for many miles” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1) reinforcing the use of light as an anchor that provides both a point of reference and serves as a mediator of the Sydney Opera House’s place within the city.The narrative of the materials and elements that are combined to give the final, physical form its striking sensory presence is also told through light, in particular colour. Or, perhaps more precisely in an illumination sense, the accurate reproduction of colour and by extension accurate presentation of the construction materials used in the creation of the Sydney Opera House. Expression of the ‘truth’ in the materials he used was important for Utzon and the faithful representation of details such as the fine grains in timber and the smooth concrete finishes required careful lighting to enhance these features. When extended to the human occupants of the Sydney Opera House, there is a short, yet very descriptive instruction: the lighting is to give “life to the skin and hair on the human form in much the same way as the light from candles” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Thus, the narrative of the materials and their quality was as important as the final structure and those who would occupy it. It is the role of light to build upon the story of the materials to contribute to the overall narrative of the Sydney Opera House.Building an Experience through IlluminationUtzon envisaged that light would do much more than provide illumination or tell the narrative of the materials he had selected – light was also to build a unique architectural experience for a patron. The experience of light was to be subtle; the architecture was to retain a position of centre stage, reinforced by, rather than ever replaced by, the illumination. In this way, concealed lighting was proposed which would be “designed in close collaboration with the acoustical engineers as they will become an integral part of overall acoustic design” and “installed in carefully selected places based on knowledge gleaned from experimental work” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Through concealing the light source, the architecture did not become cluttered or over powered by a dazzling array of fixtures and fittings that detracted from the audience’s experiences. For instance, to illuminate the monumental steps, Utzon proposed that the fittings would be recessed into the handrails, while the bar and lounge areas would be lit from discreet fittings installed within the plywood ceiling panels (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 16) to create an experience of light that was unified across the site. In addition to the aesthetical improvements gained from the removal of the light sources from the field of view, unwanted glare is also reduced reinforcing the ‘whole’ of the architectural experience.During the time that Utzon was conceptualising the illumination of the Sydney Opera House, the Major Hall (what is now known as the Concert Hall) was envisaged as what might be considered as a modern multipurpose venue, one that could accommodate among other activities: symphonic concerts; opera; ballet and dance; choral concerts; pageants and mass meetings (NSW Department of Local Government 24). The Concert Hall was the terminus for the ‘journey’—where the actors and audience find themselves in the same space, the ‘other world’—“a make believe atmosphere, which will exclude all outside impressions and allow the patrons to be absorbed into the theatre mood, which the actors and the producers wish to create” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2). This other world was to sumptuously explode with rich colours “which uplift you in that festive mood, away from daily life, that you expect when you go to the theatre, a play, an opera or a concert” (Utzon Utzon Design Principles 34). These highly decorated and colourful finishes contrast with the white shells further highlighting the ‘journey’ that has taken place. Utzon proposed to use the illumination to reinforce this distance and provide the link between the natural colours of the raw materials used outside the theatre and highly decorated colours of the performance spaces.The lighting treatment of the theatres extended into the foyers and their public amenities to ensure that the lighting design contributed to the overall enhancement of a patron’s visit and delivered the experience of the ‘journey’ that was envisaged by Utzon (Dwyer “Utzon’s Use” 130-32). This standardised approach was in concert with Utzon’s architectural philosophy where repetitive systems of construction elements were utilised, for instance, in the construction of the shells. Utzon clearly articulated this approach in The Descriptive Narrative, noting that “standard light fittings will be chosen […] to suit each location” (67), however the standardisation would not compromise other considerations of the space such as the acoustical performance, with Utzon noting that the “fittings for auditoria and rehearsal rooms must be of necessity, designed in close collaboration with the acoustical engineers as they will become an integral part of over acoustic design” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Another parallel between the architectural development of the Sydney Opera House and Utzon’s approach to the lighting concepts was, uncommon at the time, his preference for prototyping and experimentation with lighting effects and various fittings (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). A sharp contrast to the usual practices of the day which relied upon more straightforward procurement processes with generic rather than tailored solutions. Peter Hall, of Hall, Todd & Littlemore, discussed the typical method of lighting design which was prevalent during the construction of the Sydney Opera House, as a method which “amounted to the electrical engineers laying out on a plan sufficient off-the-shelf light fittings to achieve the desired illumination levels […] the resulting effects were dull even if brightly lit” (Hall 180). Thus, Utzon’s careful approach to ensure that light and architecture were in harmony as “nothing is introduced into the scheme, before it has been carefully investigated and has proved to be the right solution to the problem” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2) was highly innovative for its time.The use of light to provide an experience was not necessarily new, for example RSL Clubs, theme parks and department stores all used light to attract attention to their products and services, however the scale and proposed execution of these concepts was pioneering for Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. Utzon’s concepts provided a highly experiential unified design to provide the patron with a unique architectural experience built through the careful use of light.Building the Scenery with LightArchitecture might be considered set design on a grand scale (for example see Raban, Rasmuseen and Read). Both architects and set designers are concerned with the relationship between the creative designs and the viewers and both set up opportunities for interactions between people (as actors or users) and structure. However, without light, the scene remains literally, in the dark, isolated from its surroundings and unperceetable to an audience.Utzon was acutely aware of the relationship between the Sydney Opera House and the city in which it stands. The positioning of the structure on the site is no accident and the interplay between the ‘sails’ and the sun is perhaps the most recognised lighting feature of the Sydney Opera House. By varying the angle of the shells, the reflections and the effects of the sunlight are constantly varying depending on the viewer’s position and focus. More importantly, these subtle variations in the light enhance the sculptural effect of the direct illumination and help create the effect of “matt snow and shining ice” (Commonwealth of Australia 51): the ‘shimmer of life’ so desired by Utzon as the sunlight strikes the ceramic tiles. This ‘shimmer’ is not the only natural lighting effect. The use of the different angles ensures variation in the light, clouds and resulting shadows to heighten interest and create an ever-changing scene that plays out on the shells as the sun moves across the sky, as Utzon notes, “something new goes on all the time and it is so important–this interplay is so important that together with the sun, the light and the clouds, it makes it a living thing” (Utzon Sydney Opera House 49). This scene is enhanced by the changing quality of the sunlight; the shells appear to be deep amber at first light their shadows long and faint before becoming shorter and stronger as the sun moves towards its midday position with the colour changing slowly to ‘pure’ white before the shadows change sides, the process reverses and they again disappear under the cover of darkness. Although the scene replays daily, the relative location of the sun and changing weather patterns ensure infinite variation in the effect.This changing scene, on a grand scale, with light as the central character is just as important as the theatrical performances taking place indoors on the stages. With a mobile audience, the detailing of the visual scene that is the structure becomes more important. The Sydney Opera House competes for attention with shipping movements in the harbour, the adjacent bridge with the ant-like procession of climbers and the activities of the city to the south. Utzon foresaw this noting that the “position on a peninsular, which is overlooked from all angles makes it important to maintain an all-round elevation. There can be no backsides to the building and nothing can be hidden from the view” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1). The use of natural light to enhance the sculptural form and reinforce isolation of the structure on the peninsular, centre stage on the harbour is therefore not a coincidence. Utzon has deliberately harnessed the natural light to ensure that the Sydney Opera House is just as vibrant a performer as its surroundings. In this way, Utzon has used light to anchor the Sydney Opera House both in the city it serves and for the performances it houses.It is not just the natural light that is used as such an anchor point. Utzon planned for artificial lighting of the sails and surrounding site to ensure that after dark the ‘shimmer’ of the white tiles would be maintained with an equivalent, if manufactured, effect. For Utzon, the sculptural qualities of structure were important and should be clearly ‘read’ at night, even against a dark harbour on one side and the brighter city on the other. Through the use of artificial lighting, Utzon set the scene on Bennelong Point with the structure clearly centred in the set that is the Sydney skyline. This reinforced the notion that a journey into the Sydney Opera House was something special, a transition from the everyday to the ‘other’ world.ConclusionFor Utzon light was just as essential as concrete and other building materials for the design of the Sydney Opera House. The traditional bright lights of the stage had no place in the architectural illumination, replaced instead by a much more subtle, understated use of light, and indeed its absence. Utzon planned for the lighting to envelope an audience but not to smother them. Unfortunately, he was unable to complete his project and in 1968 J.M. Waldram was eventually appointed to complete the lighting design. Waldram’s lighting solutions—many of which are still in place today—borrowed or significantly drew upon Utzon’s original illumination concepts, thus demonstrating their strength and timeless qualities. In this way light builds on the story of the structure, reinforcing the architecture of the building and extending the narratives of the construction elements used to build the Sydney Opera House.AcknowledgementsThe author acknowledges the assistance of Rachel Franks for her input on an early draft of this article and thanks the blind peer reviewers for their generous feedback and suggestions, of course any remain errors or omissions are my own. ReferencesCommonwealth of Australia. Sydney Opera House Nomination by the Government of Australia for Inscription on the World Heritage List. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2006.Cleaver, Jack. Surface and Textured Finishes for Concrete and Their Impact upon the Environment. 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