Literatura académica sobre el tema "Young Pope (Television programm)"

Abstract This paper examines hbo’s The Young Pope through a cultural approach and ritual view to communication first developed by James W. Carey (2009). After a discussion of mediatization of society and its impacts on culture, the essay explores the deeper meanings The Young Pope conveys about self-discovery and the power of love through a textual analysis of the mythic structure of the hero’s journey (Campbell, 1949/2008; Kluckhohn, 1959) in order to understand how religious belief systems and media content paired together can offer a particular view of the world to those who ascribe to them. Ultimately, this paper serves as a piece of media criticism that suggests that television series like The Young Pope can operate as “sites of interpretive struggle” (Peterson, 2008, p. 119) for viewers as they draw conclusions about and question the world around them.

This article summarizes the main results of an investigation that is part of a project regarding the construction of youth and gender identity in television fiction. The methodology integrates reception analysis (focus group) with data obtained through an anonymous questionnaire, designed to contextualize the results of the qualitative research. Television fiction is the favourite macro-genre of young people, especially women. Broadly speaking, participants appreciate the greater proximity of Spanish fiction, which favours the different mechanisms of identification/projection activated during the reception process, and they acknowledge that TV fiction has a certain didactic nature. The research highlights the more intimate nature of female reception compared to the detachment of the male viewer, who watches fiction less frequently and assimilates it as pure entertainment. Age influences the different modes of reception, while the social class and origin of participants hardly have any impact. Confident, rebellious and ambivalent characters are found to be more interesting than the rest. By contrast, the structure of the story and a major part of the topics addressed by the programme are usually consigned to oblivion, highlighting the importance of selective memory in the interpretative process, as well as suggesting the limited nature of the effects of television fiction. El artículo resume los principales resultados de una investigación integrada en un proyecto más amplio sobre la construcción de la identidad juvenil y de género en la ficción televisiva. La metodología combina el análisis de la recepción («focus group») con los datos obtenidos mediante un cuestionario anónimo, destinados a contextualizar los resultados del estudio cualitativo. La ficción televisiva es el macrogénero preferido por los jóvenes, sobre todo por las mujeres. En general, los participantes aprecian la mayor proximidad de la ficción española, propiciadora de los diferentes mecanismos de identificación/proyección activados en los procesos de recepción, y le reconocen un cierto carácter didáctico. La investigación pone de manifiesto el carácter más intimista de la recepción femenina, frente al mayor distanciamiento de un espectador masculino mucho más inconstante, que asimila la ficción con el puro entretenimiento. La edad influye principalmente en las diferentes modalidades de recepción, mientras que apenas se constata la incidencia de la clase social ni del origen de los participantes. Los personajes seguros de sí mismos, rebeldes y ambivalentes, interesan más que el resto. Por el contrario, la estructura del relato y una buena parte de los temas del programa visionado se relegan generalmente al olvido, lo que revela el peso de la memoria selectiva en los procesos de interpretación y sugiere el carácter limitado de los efectos de la ficción televisiva.

The classic problematic of divine absence and presence is a familiar theological trope (deus absconditus). It achieves new life, however, in the work of contemporary Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (b. 1970), who explores the theme in his recent television miniseries The Young Pope (2016). I “read” Sorrentino as part of a trajectory in contemporary Italian theory (Vattimo, Agamben, etc.) that deconstructs-as-a-way-of-receiving certain traditional (especially Catholic) problematics. However, Sorrentino is to be distinguished from these others by what we might call a postmodern sincerity, whereby he manages to twist without breaking an orthodox understanding of divine invisibility. Importantly, Sorrentino emphasizes the interpersonal and ongoing nature of revelation, and thus situates the absconditus problem in a broader account of dialogical divine love. “Reading” Sorrentino in this way suggests that deus absconditus and deus revelatus are not concepts in tension but rather dynamic parts of an integral, integrating dialectic. It also suggests that visual storytelling remains a powerful medium for raising and indeed enacting fundamental theological questions to do with belief and unbelief.

Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. “1363.0 Book Publishers, Australia, 2003–04.” 2005. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/1363.0>. Bair, Deirdre “Too Much S & M.” Sydney Morning Herald 10–11 Sept. 2005: 17. Basset, Troy J., and Christina M. Walter. “Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by The Bookman, 1891–1906.” Book History 4 (2001): 205–36. Brien, Donna Lee, Leonie Rutherford, and Rosemary Williamson. “Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace.” M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). 1 June 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/10-brien.php>. Carter, David, and Anne Galligan. “Introduction.” Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007. 1–14. Corporall, Glenda. Project Octopus: Report Commissioned by the Australian Society of Authors. Sydney: Australian Society of Authors, 1990. Dempsey, John “Biography Rewrite: A&E’s Signature Series Heads to Sib Net.” Variety 4 Jun. 2006. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117944601.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1>. Donaldson, Ian. “Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography.” Australian Book Review 286 (Nov. 2006): 23–29. Douglas, Kate. “‘Blurbing’ Biographical: Authorship and Autobiography.” Biography 24.4 (2001): 806–26. Eliot, Simon. “Very Necessary but not Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History.” Book History 5 (2002): 283–93. Feather, John, and Hazel Woodbridge. “Bestsellers in the British Book Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 23.3 (Sept. 2007): 210–23. Feather, JP, and M Reid. “Bestsellers and the British Book Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 11.1 (1995): 57–72. Galligan, Anne. “Living in the Marketplace: Publishing in the 1990s.” Publishing Studies 7 (1999): 36–44. Grossman, Lev. “Time’s Person of the Year: You.” Time 13 Dec. 2006. Online edition. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C1569514%2C00.html>. Gutjahr, Paul C. “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America.” Book History 5 (2002): 209–36. Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Kaplan, Justin. “A Culture of Biography.” The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. Ed. Dale Salwak. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 1–11. Korda, Michael. Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900–1999. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001. Miller, Laura J. “The Bestseller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction.” Book History 3 (2000): 286–304. Morreale, Joanne. “Revisiting The Osbournes: The Hybrid Reality-Sitcom.” Journal of Film and Video 55.1 (Spring 2003): 3–15. Rak, Julie. “Bio-Power: CBC Television’s Life & Times and A&E Network’s Biography on A&E.” LifeWriting 1.2 (2005): 1–18. Starck, Nigel. “Capturing Life—Not Death: A Case For Burying The Posthumous Parallax.” Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 5.2 (2001). 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct01/starck.htm>.

The following petition was circulated in Dubbo in May 2003: Mr Carr, We the undersigned are concerned citizens, tired of Government inaction in dealing with young children who are causing distress around our cities. Children 8, 9 & 10 year olds are roaming the streets day & night and Harassment of the elderly & Intimidation, Truancy, Enter & Steal, Vandalism and Shoplifting are causing major concern in our area. Young children, too young to deal with now, grow up bigger & stronger as they move into the adult world of crime. At present they seem to be untouchable with many people with good intentions making excuses. We need laws in place to help them toward a better future and a safer environment for us all. You have achieved much in relation to crime & punishment with Goals & we need to save this coming generation from a life of crime. Parents should be made responsible for their children’s actions. If parents can’t or won’t, the children should be placed in suitable accommodation where Self Esteem, Education, Health & Responsibilities are taught. Mr Carr, NSW has an opportunity to lead the country in what is a national problem. Anyone shopping in Dubbo’s main street in at that time would have found copies of this petition presented in neat stacks on sales counters and reception desks in the majority of retail stores and other small businesses. One month later, 11 000 people from a population of 36 000 had signed the petition. In examining why such a severe proposal arose, and why it garnered so much support, I am positioning the events in the lead up to and following the petition as part of continuing processes of domination and exclusion within race relations. The theoretical framework for this relies on Roxanne Lynn Doty’s notion of ‘statecraft’, which she draws from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The main street in Dubbo is a place for consumption and public display. People are welcome as long as they observe the rules ‘concerned citizens’ deem appropriate for that space. The main street is the image of the town, invested with symbolic capital. Those who threaten the construction of a particular image are literally out of place. The petition is a matter of ‘race relations’, or more accurately, domination and resistance, despite no specific indications in the document’s wording. In official and pseudo-official situations in Dubbo, in local newspapers and radio, ‘uncontrollable’ had become a substitute for Aboriginal. Warren Mundine, at the time Deputy Mayor and Dubbo’s only Indigenous Councillor, said, ‘people might say “we haven’t mentioned Aboriginal kids” but everyone knows what they are talking about’ (O’Malley 3). To understand why there were calls for widespread and systematic forcible removal of Aboriginal children – a proposed measure that resonated with the darkest periods of pre-1970s style of removal – we need to contextualise it with discussion of key events in the lead up to the petition’s appearance. A local radio announcer, Leo de Kroo, whose morning talk-back show emulated the programs of metropolitan ‘shock-jocks’ instigated the petition after some months of on-air attacks on young people in Dubbo. Like some metropolitan stations, 2DU aligned itself with conservative political parties. On his show, de Kroo directly and indirectly supported Coalition policies and initiatives such as lobbying for the Parental Responsibility Act to operate in Dubbo as it does in Orange, and to lower the age at which children could be charged with crimes. De Kroo’s individual motivations is partially explained by his political opportunism, but the wider processes his actions are a part of, and the large degree of support for petition from people in Dubbo, are more interesting. De Kroo’s claim that Dubbo was a town ‘out of control’ and in a ‘bad spot with youth on the streets’ (Roberts, “Voice of Youth” 2) came at a time when crime rates were falling. In February 2003 Local Area Commander Supt Ian Lovell said that crime had dropped to ‘unheard of [levels]. Dubbo hasn’t experienced such low levels of crime in years’ (Jacobson, “Viking Cuts” 11). In March the Orana Crime Management Unit declared assaults, car accidents, malicious damage, stealing and traffic offences were down from the previous month (Jacobson, “Burglaries Falling” 4). Again in May Supt Lovell declared a similar range of crimes were down from the previous month (Jacobson, “Crime Cools” 4). Typically, stories about crime statistics were published in the middle sections of the local paper, while complaints about crime were almost invariably on the front page, but this was still a time when one might expect the community to be feeling safer in their everyday lives. However, despite consecutive months of falling crime rates, some inhabitants clearly felt insecure. This is evidenced by the support for the petition one month later, and interviews by the local newspaper, such as one with main street retailers who said they believed crime was spiralling out of control, that children were ‘terrorising staff’, that it was no longer safe to go to work, and that it was a matter of time before a shop assistant would be ‘stuck’ with a drug user’s needle (Jacobson, “We’re Sick of It” 1). To examine this situation I am turning to Doty’s concept of ‘statecraft’, desire and exclusion, which she bases on the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Doty draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire to suggest ‘the state’ is always an unattainable desire for order. Desire for Deleuze and Guattari is ‘not a lack or fantasy or pleasure’ (Doty 1) but instead is a free flowing energy, a creative flow of production, that is coded and channelled by forces within the social body (Deleuze and Guattari). Social practices that channel and code desire create systems of meanings, values, hierarchies, inclusions and exclusions (Doty). So desire possesses the simultaneous potential for liberating, breaking down and deterritorialising, as well as for repression, segmentation and reterritorialisation. Deleuze and Guattari see this tension as existing in two poles of desire: ‘the schizophrenic pole deterritorialises and threatens to destroy the codes that inscribe meaning to social forms. The paranoiac pole presses for order and contains an inherent tendency toward despotism, repression, fascism’ (Doty 10). These poles, in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, are tied to economic systems. Doty, paraphrasing Karl Polaryi – a philosopher whose work critiques liberal economic systems – says that ‘the self-adjusting market of capitalism could not exist for any length of time without annihilating society’ (qtd. in Doty 7). The destabilising flows of liberal economies are always countered by some form of governmentality which reinforces society through welfare, regulation and other protections and interventions. Capitalism ‘liberates flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limits and its own dissolution’ (Deleuze and Guattari 139). Capitalism belongs to the fluid pole of desire, the schizophrenic pole, and the fixing, regulating forces of ‘the state’ belong to the paranoiac pole. The state, then, is a desire for order, a movement towards fixedness, rigidness. Doty calls the set of practices that enable these movements ‘statecraft’. It is Doty’s conception of ‘the state’ and statecraft that I have tried to apply to the events that took place in Dubbo. ‘We can speak of “the state” only in a very provisional sense. It is not unitary. It is not an actor. It is not even a concrete “thing”… There is no such thing as “the state”, only a powerful desire that pervades the social realm’ (Doty 12). For Doty, the state is nothing but practices of statecraft that can originate in government bureaucracies, churches, corporations, theatres, newspapers, in our backyards, in our living rooms and bedrooms. They can come from the Federal or State Government, the local Council, the editor of the local newspaper, a journalist, a documentary maker, teenagers exchanging SMSes, the gossip mongers in the street and couples drinking tea in their kitchens. There were a number of key events in the lead up to the release of the petition in Dubbo that exacerbated the paranoiac pole of desire, the desire for order. At the start of 2003 the Federal Government was running an anti-terrorism campaign through television ads and later through a kit delivered to households across Australia. This was to generate fear to try to garner support for its involvement in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Also, election campaigns for the March State elections were run on Law and Order platforms. The NSW Government organised an Operation Viking which took place in Dubbo and was the largest police operation ever undertaken outside of Sydney (Jacobson, “Viking Cuts” 11). Hundreds of police officers were bussed in from Sydney and other cities and the ‘high visibility’ policing action included the use of a helicopter which shone a spotlight into people’s backyards. One local Councillor said the operation gave the impression there was ‘some national emergency’ (Jacobson, “Police” 1). Indicative of the tendency for these actions generate more fear are the comments of Supt Lovell, ‘I feel upset when people have to be briefed and calmed down after an operation that was designed to do just that’ (Roberts, “Operation” 1). Then in April there was an arson attack on Dubbo’s Council buildings. The offices were razed and this event is significant because the high public profile and uncommon nature of the incident, and because the accused perpetrators were the same ‘uncontrollable’ children said to be roaming the streets. These events contributed to an elevated sense of fear an anxiety around the same time the petition was circulated despite the fact that crime figures were falling. Indeed, the bulk of the complaints against ‘uncontrollable children’ were not that they were committing any particular crimes. The main street retailers quoted earlier felt intimidated by their presence. The complaints were of ‘antisocial behaviour’ and of minor annoyances incommensurable to the drastic and violent measures called for to deal with perceived problems. Their alleged swearing, spitting and talking in groups – in essence, their mere presence on the street – made people feel unsafe. This is due to a facet of statecraft – the exclusion of certain groups who are deemed antithetical to the social order. Doty notes the poor are often those rendered a threat to social order because of their lack of fixedness, their perceived lack of morals, the public display of behaviour the inside group consider private, and the different priorities relative to the inside group. Any threats to the social order are dealt with violently, as practices of statecraft inherently tend towards violence (Doty). In this case, the call for Government to forcibly remove children is violent, but it can also manifest in vigilante action, over zealous arrests, or casual assaults on the streets of Dubbo. Aboriginal people become an ‘excluded other that is itself constituted by the social order from which it is excluded’ (Doty 14). Practices of statecraft create excluded groups (Indigenous people’s claim to land is certainly antithetical to the social order of colonisers) and these outside groups in turn become feared by the inside group. The petition was never submitted to the Premier, nor tabled in parliament in its own right. Instead it was simply used by NSW National Party leader Andrew Stoner to strengthen his arguments for lowering the age at which children could be charged for crimes. The fact that it was not submitted to the Premier suggests the aim of the petition was to create a sense that all Aboriginal adults are criminals, and that Aboriginal culture is an inherently criminal one. ‘Young children, too young to deal with now, grow up bigger & stronger as they move into the adult world of crime’ (Petition). A local Aboriginal leader, after convening a meeting in response to the petition, said, ‘thinly-veiled comments made on radio and circulating within the community made it clear a lot of Dubbo residents believed Aboriginal people were to blame for all the city’s ills’ (Hodder, “Meeting” 2). The purpose of the petition is to justify exclusion of anyone deemed a threat to the stability of the social order. The Carr government dismissed calls for children to be removed from their parents, but responded to the petition by declaring there would be more Operation Vikings for Dubbo (Stone 1). The desire for order, an order always unattainable, intensified by generation of fear, has enabled vigilante action on the streets of Dubbo. The action targets those the petition constructed as ‘uncontrollable’. Retailers in the CBD have set up networks amongst themselves, with the help of cameras, mobile phones and sirens to assail anyone they suspect of being threatening, or of shoplifting or making a mess of their stores (Hodder, “Retailers” 10). Recently ‘I [heart] Dubbo’ T-shirts were manufactured in a campaign to counter the negative media coverage generated by the petition and subsequent racial tensions. It was a defiant display of localism that seemed specifically designed to shun criticisms of Dubbo-style race relations and separate those who say they want success for the town from those who are said to want to destroy it. After identifying practices of statecraft in this series of events, what is needed is an examination of methods and practices for evading or deterritorialising movements towards order. References Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Doty, Roxanne Lynn. Anti-Immigrantism in Western Democracies : Statecraft, Desire and the Politics of Exclusion. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2003. Hodder, S. “Meeting Declared a Success.” Daily Liberal 12 June 2003: 2. ———. “Retailers Call on Each Other to Fight Thieves.” Daily Liberal 10 November 2004: 2. Jacobson, B. “Viking Cuts City Crime: Police Chief.” Daily Liberal 6 February 2003: 11. ———. “Burglaries Falling.” Daily Liberal 5 March 2003: 4. ———. “Crime Cools Down.” Daily Liberal 6 May 2003: 4. ———. “Police ‘Picked on’ Youth in Blitz.” Daily Liberal 5 February 2003: 1. ———. “We’re Sick of It.” Daily Liberal 3 April 2003: 1. O’Malley, N. “Brogden Backs Dubbo Radio Host’s Hard Line on Child Crime.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 June 2003: 3. Roberts, N. “Operation ‘Was Not Perfect’.” Daily Liberal 7 February 2003: 1. ———. “Voice of Youth to Be Heard across Radio Airwaves.” Daily Liberal 9 May 2003: 2. Stone, K. “Carr Takes Control.” Daily Liberal 18 June 2003: 1. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Muir, Cameron. "Vigilant Citizens: Statecraft and Exclusion in Dubbo City." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/02-muir.php>. APA Style Muir, C. (Jul. 2006) "Vigilant Citizens: Statecraft and Exclusion in Dubbo City," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/02-muir.php>.

Mobilities We live in a world of mobilised social life, as John Urry describes it. This is a world made out of constant flows of items, ideas, and actors travelling materially and/or immaterially from one location to another, non-stop. The movement of things and people goes back and forth; it changes direction and passes around various locations, both physical and virtual. No discussion of mobility today can be complete without consideration of the role of communication in reshaping mobilised social life. In many respects, our social life and a sense of community may be thought of as displaced and imaginary (Taylor). This is to say that, in today’s world, “belonging” as a constitutive element of community is acted out, in many cases, at a distance, without physical contact (Delanty 119-49). Furthermore, our sense of belonging is shaped by cultural and social communication networks and the media logic of the latest communication technology (Castells 54-136). It is in these de-territorialised communities (Dayan 166) that we communicate from one to one, or from one to many, without physical restriction; and by doing this, we form, transmit, and modify our self-understanding (or mis/understanding!) of the world in which we live and in which our lives are formed, transmitted, and modified by others. To understand the deeper dynamics of our newly mobilised social life, we need to elaborate on yet another dimension of communication: that is, the idea of circulation (Latour 36). The simplest way of defining circulation is to say that it is about “going the round” and/or “passing on” something—whether it is material or immaterial items, goods, artefacts, ideas, or beliefs that are being distributed and disseminated (Sumiala 44-55). However, as Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma (192) argue, if circulation is to serve as a useful analytic construct for the analysis of contemporary social life, “it needs be conceived as more than simply the movement of people, ideas, and commodities from one culture to another.” It is necessary to analyse circulation as a cultural process with its “own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint” (192). It is, indeed, the dynamic structures of circulation that we have to look for. In this article, I shall attempt to illuminate the workings of circulation by discussing how images of violence travel in different types of mobile media environments and how that movement contributes to the formation and reformation of various social imaginaries. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s, Arjun Appadurai’s and Dilip Gaonkar’s work, I define social imaginaries as a symbolic matrix within which people imagine their collective social life. As Gaonkar (1-19) argues, it is within the folds of a social imaginary that we see ourselves as agents who traverse a social space and inhabit a temporal horizon. In everyday life, social imaginaries are carried in stories, symbols and images and in today’s world they rely heavily on stranger sociability—that is, sociability based on media-related relations among strangers (Gaonkar 4-5, 10). Images In Kauhajoki, Finland, on 23 September 2008, a 22-year-old male student went on the rampage at the Seinäjoki University of Applied Science (located in Kauhajoki, the province of Western Finland: a town with a population of some 14,000 inhabitants). The killer shot a teacher, nine of his classmates and, finally, himself. This was a second school shooting tragedy in Finland in less than a year, the first major incident being in Jokela in 2007. Before committing his crimes, the killer had distributed several self-images on the Internet (namely on IRC-gallery and YouTube) in which he broadcast his fascination for guns and shooting. Altogether, he had posted some 15 images on the IRC-gallery site. Some of the images were video clips, but these were later converted into still images. The images that started to circulate in the media after the tragedy included ones of the shooter pointing at the camera with his gun or of him shooting in a shooting range, as well as a number of self-portraits. Following Bruno Latour (159-64), I shall attempt to track the circulation of the killer’s images across different media landscapes: social and mainstream media. This short media ethnography covers excerpts from the Finnish online papers, television news, social media, and newspapers from the day of the tragedy (23 September 2008). Only print newspapers are collected from the next day, 24 September. More specifically, I trace the killer’s images from the largest broadsheet Helsingin Sanomat (print and online versions), the two tabloids Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti (print and online versions), and the national public broadcasting company, YLE (TV1 and TV2), as well as the two largest national commercial TV channels, MTV3 and TV4 (I will look especially at the main broadcast newscasts from the channels for the first day). En Route The Kauhajoki rampage shooter launched the process of circulation only about 15 minutes before he left home and started shooting. He logged in, downloaded the images on the social media website, IRC-gallery, and made a link to a server called Rapidshare to accelerate dissemination of his visual material. But this was only the tip of the iceberg in the shooter’s case. In the past, he had been an active circulator of violent material on the Web. By tracing his online history, we can confirm that the killer was a competent user of the digital communication technology (Hakala 99-118). The shooter registered with IRC-gallery in December 2004 and with YouTube in mid-March 2008. He took, for example, the username Wumpscut86 as his online identification. In the course of 2008, the images of the young man smiling at the camera changed into profile photos taken at a shooting range and eventually into a video where the man shoots at the camera. The shooter posted the first photos, hinting at the impending massacre, in the IRC-gallery in August 2008. Ten days after the first posting, the shooter downloaded a picture of his weapon onto the IRC-gallery, titled “Pity for majority”. At the end of August, pictures appeared on the IRC-gallery featuring the man firing his weapon at a shooting range and posing for the camera with his weapon. On Wednesday, 17 September 2008, he again added two more gunman photos of himself to his gallery (Sumiala and Tikka 17-29). During September, the killer downloaded four shooting videos onto YouTube, the last ones on 18 September 2008 (the Thursday of the week before the shooting). The videos feature the man firing his weapon at a location that appears to be a shooting range. On the day of the shooting, Tuesday 23 September 2008, he included a link to his Massacre in Kauhajoki file package, which contained the videos “You will die next”, “Goodbye”, and “Me and my Walther,” as well as an aerial shot of the school centre and photos of him aiming the weapon at the camera (Sumiala and Tikka 17-29).It is therefore clear that the shooter had planned his media strategy carefully before he committed his crime: he left plenty of visual traces, easy to find and distribute, after the catastrophe. In this respect, he also followed the pattern of his predecessors in Virginia Tech and in Jokela: these shooters had also activated social media sites to circulate violent material before taking any action (Kellner 39-43; Sumiala and Tikka 17-29). The killer started shooting in the school centre at around 10:46. The emergency response centre was notified of a fire and of the shooting at 10:47. Altogether, he shot ten people: nine students and one teacher. Around noon, the killer shot himself, but didn’t die immediately. His death, from gunshot wounds, was reported at Tampere University Hospital at 17:40 that evening. The first pieces of information about the shooting appeared on the social media site MuroBBS (a chat room) about half an hour after the shooting had started. About five minutes later, people chatting on the MuroBBS site made a connection between the shooter and his YouTube videos and IRC-gallery material. The IRC-gallery server removed his videos at 11:29 and the YouTube server an hour later, but they had already been uploaded by other users of social media and thus could not be totally destroyed by the server (Hakala 100-18). The online tabloid Iltalehti, published the first of the shooter’s images about 45 minutes after he had shot himself but was still alive. At this point, his face was not recognisable in the images because it was obscured by a black box. The tabloid headline said (in English translation) “Is he the shooter?” Later in the afternoon, all three online papers, Helsingin Sanomat, Iltalehti, and Ilta-Sanomat, published online images of the killer shooting and pointing his gun at the camera, and of his face (as originally published in IRC-gallery). With regard to issues of mobility, the online images travelled much faster than people with cameras. Kauhajoki, the town where the massacre took place, is situated far away from Helsinki, the capital of Finland, and centre of the country’s largest media and news organisations. Only the most well-resourced news organisations were able to send journalists and photographers to the scene of the crime with helicopters and planes; other journalists and broadcasters had to sit in a car or in a train for hours to get to Kauhajoki. Consequently, the critical moment had passed by the time they finally arrived (Hakala 99-118). By contrast, the images posted by the killer himself were available on the Web as soon the shooting started. And it was the social media sites that were the first to make the connection between the shooter and his images. This early annexing of images by the social media users was thus crucial in putting the massacre into circulation in its virtual form (Sumiala and Tikka 17-29). As noted above, social media operators in IRC-gallery and YouTube started to remove the shooter’s material less than an hour after the tragedy started at Kauhajoki. But, when searching YouTube or googling “Kauhajoki” at around 14:00 on the same day, one could still find at least 15 (and probably many more) of his videos (or at least, clips) on YouTube. The titles of these videos included: “School Massacre in Finland (Kauhajoki) 9/23/2008”, “The Shooter at the Massacre in Kauhajoki”, “Kauhajoki Killer Shooting his Deadly Weapon”. One of the crucial aspects of circulation is the issue of which material gets into circulation and what value is attached to it. In the case of the Kauhajoki school shootings, one needs to ask which were the texts or images that started to circulate in the national media, as it is the national media (in particular, television) that play a crucial role in transforming a local news event it into a national media catastrophe (see e.g. Liebes 71-84). The newscasts analysed for this research included evening news from every national news channel: YLE: channel 1 (20:30); channel 2 (21:50); MTV3 (19:00); and TV4 (23.00). All of them showed the shooter’s own images as part of their broadcasts. YLE channels 1 and 2 were more cautious about showing visual material, whereas the commercial channels MTV3 and TV4 used more airtime (and a larger number of images, both still and moving) to profile the killer. By the end of the day, the “Kauhajoki Killer” had become “the star” of the shootings (both nationwide and internationally), largely on account of the visual material he had left behind on the Web and which was so easy to circulate from one medium to another (Hakala 48-98). Needless to day, the “victims” of the shooting (nine students and a teacher) all but faded from view. Events the next day only increased this emphasis. The two tabloids Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat brought out extra issues featuring the killer’s own visual material on several double-page spreads. Especially interesting was Iltalehti’s double page (24-25), covered with images from the international online papers: Spiegel Online, Mail Online, CNN.com, BBC news, El Pais.com, Expressen and Aftonbladet, all but one of which had chosen to display the killer’s face on the front page. Helsingin Sanomat also chose to give the killer’s face extraordinary visibility; in Finland, the front page of the daily is usually always sold for advertisements and there are only very few instances in its history that have been an exception to this rule. The Kauhajoki massacre was one of these rare moments in history. Community Through this short media ethnography, I hope to have illustrated some of the ways in which circulation features in a contemporary media context through the example of the “Kauhajoki School Shooter”. The direction of this “circulation” was clearly from the social media to the mainstream media: from online to offline. As a media event, it was diachronic (i.e. “historical”—it evolved “across time”), but also synchronic inasmuch as the images multiplied on the Web in an instant (Sumiala and Tikka 17-29). In the circulation of the Kauhajoki shooter’s images, digital communication technology clearly played an absolutely central role. The images were easily accessible on social media sites and they were in a digital format that was simple to convert from one medium to another. This enabled instant and sensational “remediation”, to use Bolter and Grusin’s formulation. Not only were the images transformed from one medium to another; they became remediated, especially in commercial electronic and print media, as they all (MTV3, TV4, Helsingin Sanomat, Iltalehti, and Ilta-Sanomat) circulated images from the killer’s own online sites. Yet I do not wish to give the impression that the media circulation of the Kauhajoki killer images is an “innocent” or inconsequential cultural phenomenon in the context of mobilised social life. Circulation, as a means of communication, has the power to influence social imaginaries: how belonging is imagined and acted out in the age of mobility. In his book Fear of Small Numbers, Arjun Appadurai has argued that, in the contemporary era, communities are not only organised around communications that nurture positive imaginaries, but also circulate violence, fear, destruction, and uncertainty. By copying, repeating, and “recycling” violent material—by keeping circulation on the move, in other words—social imaginaries of violence are spread, not only on a national scale but globally. In this sense, it is arguable that they become distinctly glocal phenomena. Some of the circulation of the violent material is condensed on Web-based “hate groups”: this refers to those global communities that share a common hatred or anger regarding a given phenomenon or issue. The cause of hatred is often race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender, but it can also be misanthropy of a more general kind (Duffy 292). The attitudes towards the objects of hatred that are revealed may vary in both nature and degree, but the “national” exporting of violence from one country to another arguably follows a similar trajectory to the migrant flow of human subjects (Sumiala and Tikka 17-29) and therefore adds to the impression that circulatory “flows” have become the dominant trope of contemporary life the world over. Imaginary communities, as de-territorialised forms of belonging, can, in fact, be regarded as the communities of the era of mobility (see also Pikner in this issue). They cannot be physically perceived, but they do have social momentum. The shooter in Kauhajoki was a member of a large number of global virtual communities himself and arguably succeeded in exporting both himself, and “Finland”, to the rest of the world. He had, as we’ve seen, registered with YouTube, IRC-gallery, Suomi24 (Finland’s largest online community), and Battlefield 2 long before the massacre took place. It is also worth noting that, in these virtual communities, the killer took up his place as a resident rather than a visitor. Having established his online profile, he sought out contact with like-minded users, and engaged in social relationships in global online communities that were, quite literally, a world away from his home in Finland. In the virtual “hate communities” to which the Kauhajoki shooter belonged, dispersed people from around the world came together through a discourse of violence, hate, and destruction; I call these ephemeral encounters of stranger sociability networked communities of destruction. These are virtual global communities held together by a social imaginary constructed around the visualisation of texts of death and violence that emanate from a specific nation (in this case, Finland) but almost instantly transcend it. These communities cancel the distance between centre and periphery and cohere around the discourses of hate and destruction (Coman and Rothenbuhler 6). By remaking and circulating the Kauhajoki shooter’s photos and videos, these communities render a figure like the Kauhajoki killer immortal in an unprecedented way. The promise of post-mortem fame for a potential school shooter is thus kept vividly alive in today’s networked communities through the endless circulation of imaginaries of violence and destruction, raising issues of ethics and digital/media responsibility that have only just begun to be addressed. References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Appadurai, Arjun. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. London: Duke University Press, 2006. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Castells, Manuel. Communication Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Coman, Mihai, and Eric Rothenbuhler. “The Promise of Media Anthropology.” Media Anthropology. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005. 1-11. Dayan, Daniel. “The Pope at Reunion: Hagiography, Casting, and Imagination.” Media Anthropology. Ed. Eric Rothenbuhler and Mihai Coman. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 2005. 165-75. Delanty, Gerard. Community. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2010. Duffy, Margaret. “Web of Hate: A Fantasy Theme Analysis of the Rhetorical Vision of Hate Groups Online.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 27 (2003): 291-312. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction.” Public Culture 14 (2002): 1-19. Hakala, Salli. Koulusurmat verkostoyhteiskunnassa. Analyysi Jokelan ja Kauhajoen kriisien viestinnästä. Helsingin yliopisto: CRC/Viestinnän laitos, 2009. ‹http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/blogs/crc/koulusurmat.htm›. Kellner, Douglas. Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lee, Benjamin, and Edward LiPuma. “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity.” Public Culture 14 (2002): 191-214. Liebes, Tamar. “Television’s Disaster Marathons: A Danger for Democratic Processes?” Media, Ritual and Identity. Eds. Tamar Liebes and James Curran. London : Routledge, 1998. 71-84. Sumiala, Johanna. “Circulation.” Keywords in Religion, Media, and Culture. Ed. David Morgan. London: Routledge, 2008. 44-55. Sumiala, Johanna, and Minttu Tikka. “‘Web First’ to Death: The Media Logic of the School Shootings in the Era of Uncertainty. Nordicom Review 31 (2010): 17-29. ‹http://www.nordicom.gu.se/eng.php?portal=publ&main=info_publ2.php&ex=325&me=2%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank›. Taylor, Charles. “Modern Social Imaginaries.” Public Culture 14 (2002): 91-124. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity, 2008.

Introduction This paper highlights the efforts of cultural intermediaries operating social networks for pets, known as petworking. Petworking aligns with the ever-increasing use of social media platforms where “one in ten pet owners have a social media account especially for their pet” (Schroeder). Petworking represents the increased affect of connectivity between pets and their owners within the broader pet community. Although it is true that “no one knows you are a dog on the Internet” (Steiner), it is fair to say that petworking is not the work of the animals directly, but the cultural intermediaries who construct the environment for pets to interact with others. Boo the Pomeranian is one example of a highly networked, cute and celebrity pet, whose antics are broadcast across a plethora of online networks including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, to contradict the rhetoric that cats rule the Internet, it is instead the strategic efforts of cultural intermediaries that take the banal activities of Boo and his “petworked individualism” to his global fan base. The research within this paper, through the lens of animal celebrity, extends recent work undertaken in the celebrity studies field that seeks to understand the connection between celebrities and ‘ordinary folk’, or rather ordinary folk as celebrities. In that regard, the connection between ordinary and celebrity animals is explored through the work of the cultural intermediary who capitalises on the authenticity and cute characteristics of animals. This paper also seeks to understand the role of the petworking cultural intermediary by exploring the cyclic process of disintermediation/remediation/intermediation of Internet communication. Celebrity Studies, Cute Culture and Petworking It is appropriate to first outline the connection of cute with celebrity, and how they relate to petworking. In the first instance, the notion of celebrity is primarily a phenomenon associated with humans. Historically, one of the earliest studies on celebrity focused on the “the person who is known for his well-knownness” (Boorstin 57). Further, celebrity has been noted as a construct by the media industries that has developed “entertainment figures as transmitted via the 20th century mass media” (Feeley 468). Celebrity has a history with the 19th and 20th century literature on the Hollywood star system and its transmission of fame to the mass audiences. As media and cultural studies adopted celebrity as a focus, celebrity studies became fascinated with “how the star image was produced and consumed and how it both shaped and reflected social and cultural identity” (Feeley 470). A more contemporary study into the exploration of celebrity is, as Turner suggests, a demotic turn that sees the media create ‘celebrities’ from ordinary folk. Dyer has argued that one of the core characteristics of celebrity is the ability for one to identify and imitate the star. In each of these examples of celebrity studies, it is assumed that the celebrity is indeed a human being. The humanistic value of celebrity then is problematic when considering how it relates to animals, specifically one’s pet. One way of approaching the study of celebrity and pets is through the lens of animal celebrity. There have been numerous cases of famous animals, with one of the earliest records in Hanno, a famous elephant who was a gift for Pope Leo X on his coronation from King Manuel I of Portugal, 1514. More recent animal celebrity has been demonstrated in cases of Paul the octopus whose celebrity status was reached through his ability to predict the winning teams during the 2010 World Cup, or Dolly the sheep who is infamous as being not only the first cloned sheep but also the first cloned being. Other famous pets are struck by celebrity status for non-favourable acts, for example Tilikum, or Tilly as he is known. TIlly is a bull orca that has been responsible for the deaths of three people during his time in captivity. His story, which also represents his association with celebrity, is documented in the 2013 documentary, Blackfish. Each of these cases of famous animals demonstrates that animal celebrity is not a new issue, but highlights the significance between ‘ordinary’ animals and ‘celebrity’ animals. It could be argued it is the impact of the mass media’s depiction of these animals that defines them as celebrity animals beyond their ordinary counterparts. Yet, in attempting to understand the appeal of animal celebrity, Blewitt notes that pets “wear the badge of authenticity that is held to be so important for credible image-management; there is never any question as to whether or not they are ‘being themselves’” (117). The appeal of animal celebrity for humans is represented through the animal’s authenticity because they are incapable of misrepresenting facts. Often the authentic animal characteristic is combined with ‘cute’ characteristics to increase their appeal, or their relational value with humans, and thereby their popularity. This is certainly the case with giant pandas where they “have the credibility of being an endangered species, look cuddly, have big moony eyes and so have automatic non-human conservation charisma” (Blewitt 326). In this scenario, the giant panda represents the popular qualities of animal cuteness which increases their relational value with humans. McVeigh suggests cute is a symbol of daily aesthetic equaling a “standard attribute” (230) to facilitate high reading of cultural texts and goods. Kinsella argues that cute builds on cutie, which “takes cuteness as its starting point, but on top of the basic ingredient of childlikeness, Cutie style is also chic, eccentric, androgynous and humorous” (Fetishism 229). Cute can shift from pop culture signifiers, to high cultural symbols that represent young, amusing and helpless representations. When cute is in dialogue with celebrity, specifically animal celebrity, it is the cute appeal, or the “silent desperation of the lost puppy dog” (Harris 179) that propels humans to increasingly construct and consume celebrity through animals. Distributing the appeal of cute animal celebrities across digital communication technologies provides the opportunity to explore and understand the petworking phenomenon. The authentic representation of cute animals outlined above has demonstrated the increased relational value of animal celebrity in a non-networked environment. However, when contextualised in a digitally connected environment that engages the affordances of social media platforms, the exploration of petworking can answer some animal celebrity questions raised by Giles. In his taxonomy of animal celebrity, Giles defines four categories that distinguish famous pets: “(a) public figures; (b) the meritocratically famous; (c) show business ‘stars’; and (d) the accidentally famous” (118). He suggests the first two categories are exemplified by the pets of politicians, or the biggest or smallest of a species. However he notes “it is impossible to distinguish between the remaining categories since ‘accidental fame’ presupposes that the other famous animals have engineered their own celebrity to some extent” (ibid.). This is precisely the space that petworking occupies. Pets do not engineer their own celebrity; rather, it is the strategic and coordinated efforts of their owners that create “accidentally famous” animals. The example of petworking demonstrates the role of the intermediary who constructs the identity of the non-ordinary pet with high relational value. A pet with high relational value does not occur serendipitously nor is it the work of a famous animal engineering his or her own celebrity. Rather, it is the work of human intermediaries who strategically utilise authenticity and cute as animal characteristics that increase the animal’s appeal, and thereby its popularity. To successfully engage in petworking, intermediaries use social media platforms to disseminate or broadcast the celebrity animal’s characteristics. The following case study of Boo the Pomeranian demonstrates the connection of celebrity studies with cute culture that is disseminated through social media platforms – a petworking example. The Case of BooThe conceptual framework for this research draws from the media’s coverage of petworking. In that environment, petworking is referenced wherever journalists refer to the practice of “cute” animals engaging in social networking activities. Warr suggests petworking represents “people who want to set up personal social profiles on behalf of their pets”. Ortiz suggests petworking aims to “employ a network marketing strategy for social, political or commercial gain using animals, pets, and goods and services related to animals and pets”. Interestingly, much of the discussion of petworking relates to the act of networking through pets to break the ice with other pet owners to engage in more complex interactions. To move the existing work beyond pets to break the ice, Williams notes that “one in 10 of all UK pets have their own Facebook page, Twitter account or YouTube channel” and “14 per cent of dog owners maintain a Facebook page for their pet, whereas 6 per cent boast Twitter accounts”. Regardless of the motivation of pet owners to engage in petworking, there is an increasing presence of pets in an online environment. Boo the Pomeranian, rose to fame as the world’s cutest dog during 2009. His Facebook page has 10,435,458 likes at the time of writing, making him the most popular dog on Facebook and aligning him with the Public Figure page category, a key celebrity indicator. His tagline reads, “My name is Boo. I am a dog. Life is good.” His connection to popularity came on 26 October 2010, when celebrity blogger Khloé Kardashian wrote “OMG, I just found this dog named Boo on facebook and I am seriously in LOVE […] If you are in facebook, go like this page because it’s beyond cute!” Boo’s popularity gained momentum across the Internet and since then he has featured on television shows, has produced a line of plush toys and has a book for sale on Amazon, “Boo: The life of the World’s Cutest Dog”. This example of Kardashian’s public call to action is a clear celebrity endorsement which trades on both cute and celebrity. Boo’s rise to fame also aligns with Giles’ fourth category of animal celebrity, accidentally famous. If it were not for Khloé Kardashian’s celebrity endorsement, the distinction between Boo as an ordinary pet and a celebrity pet would be very clear. Boo’s rise to a celebrity status is a clear example of how a human intermediary can create and develop a high relational value of a pet through the endorsement of cute. The connection between cute and popularity also suggests cute creates strong Internet connections between individuals with a compulsion to belong to the larger fan group. Although Boo’s owner remains anonymous under the moniker of J.H. Lee, it would appear the motivation behind Boo, although started as a joke Facebook page (Lee), is to commodify the pet. The popularity of Boo’s cuteness has bolstered the dog as a cultural product with production of countless novelty items, indicative of the creative vernacular of the pet’s owner. In this example, the soft power that accompanies Boo is persuasive and invisible. Soft power in this context is a “concept of strategic narrative […] especially in regard to how influence works in a new media environment” (Roselle et al. 70). In the context of globalisation, Boo is the ideal transnational cultural icon that embodies an ideology, disseminated through the instrument of cute. When cute is used as an ideological construct, it is rarely the object that generates soft power but rather the intermediary constructing the cultural artefact. The following section explores the cultural intermediary as the individual responsible for the mediation of ideology through cultural production and consumption. The cultural intermediary determines how cute shapes and redefines social and cultural identity. Petworking as Cultural Intermediation Much of the existing literature on cute culture has focussed on the impact of cute upon culture, negating the process of their cultural construction. Their construction is, like other creative discourses, the result of mediation by multiple roles between the production and consumption of cultural artefacts. The cultural intermediary plays a crucial role in aligning the construction of meaning that aligns the perspectives of both cultural artefact producers and consumers. For example, cute is constructed by designers and stylists, whereas celebrity is the work of the public relations agent. Cultural intermediation was first used by Pierre Bourdieu as a way of describing the individual who mediates between and connects different cultural fields. Negus reappropriated the idea by contextualising the cultural intermediary within the creative industries as a means of bridging the gap between cultural production and consumption. Negus focuses on roles such as accountants, A&R agents and senior executives within the creative industries, and concluded that instead of bridging the gap, these roles increase the distance between production and consumption. Disintermediation – a process that involves a direct connection between producer and consumer, or artist and audience – would be more appropriate. I have previously argued for a combined producer/consumer production model (Hutchinson) that is facilitated by cultural intermediation within the context of media institutions. The cultural intermediary plays a crucial role in aligning the perspective of the contributing authors with the regulatory frameworks of the hosting institutions. Cultural intermediaries may be community managers, program producers, legal teams, or archivists that interface between the contributors and the institutional regulatory framework. For example, an artist might contribute work to a participatory project with little understanding of the regulatory constraints of the project. It is the role of the cultural intermediary to ensure the work maintains its creative and thematic aspiration while aligning with the governing rules of the institution. To turn cultural intermediation to the practice of petworking, there are two distinct stakeholders: the pets and pet fans. Within petworking, the cultural intermediary is responsible for understanding the interests of pet fans and an understanding of how to represent pets to align with those interests: a process Blewitt described as increasing high relational value. As described earlier, cute is a powerful instrument to promote the popularity of pets and increase their prominence across online spaces. It is therefore not the cuteness of the pets that determine their popularity and virality, but rather the strategic efforts of the cultural intermediary who engages in cute as a useful communication tool. Boo is a clear example of how cultural intermediaries engage in cute as an apparatus to increase the high relational value of animals for their human counterparts. It is not necessarily the animal themselves as they are not, as Giles suggests, within the first two categories of public figures or the meritocratically famous. They are ordinary pets that have been aligned with the authentic and cute characteristics of animal celebrity by their cultural intermediaries which increases their relational value, thereby creating celebrity pets. In this example, Boo the Pomeranian demonstrates how a cultural icon has been created, or mediated, by his owner, the cultural intermediary, by embracing authentic and cute characteristics and distributing the cultural artefact across social media platforms. In these instances, the agency of the cultural intermediary becomes increasingly important. Conclusion If constructed correctly, cute can be used as a powerful instrument to create a cultural artefact. This paper has highlighted the similarities between animal celebrity and cute culture through authenticity and popularity, or “knownness”, of animals. The cute/celebrity framework aligns with petworking to highlight how cute pets are created, mediated and distributed across social media platforms. In this context, it is the role of the cultural intermediary to mediate these celebrity animals by identifying the stakeholder groups associated with petworking, understanding their interests and producing cultural artefacts that address those interests. In the case study of Boo the Pomeranian, it has been demonstrated that the authenticity and cute characteristics are directly connected to popularity. In this situation, the role of the cultural intermediary is to promote those characteristics for the stakeholder groups interested in the cultural artefact, to increase its popularity. The role of the cultural intermediary also demonstrates the significance of intermediation within the production and distribution of cultural goods. Acknowledgements Andrew Whelan, Grace O’Neil, Mikaela Griffith, Elizabeth Arnold, Greta Mayr. References Blewitt, John. “What’s New Pussycat? A Genealogy of Animal Celebrity.” Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 325-338. Boorstin, D.J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Bourdieu, Pierre. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 1984. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: British Film Institute, 1979. Feeley, Kathleen. "Gossip as News: On Modern U.S. Celebrity Culture and Journalism." History Compass 10.6 (2012): 467-82. Giles, David. “Animal Celebrities.” Celebrity Studies 4.2 (2013): 115-128. Harris, Daniel. “Cuteness.” Salmagundi 96 (1992): 177-186. Hutchinson, Jonathon. “Communication Models of Institutional Online Communities: The Role of the ABC Cultural Intermediary.” Platform: Journal of Media and Communication 5.1 (2013). 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://journals.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/platform/v5i1_hutchinson.html›. Kardashian, Khloé. "Introducing the Cutest Dog on the Planet… Boo!!!!!!". Khloé Kardashian Blog, 2010. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://khloekardashian.celebuzz.com/introducing_the_cutest_dog_on_the_planetboo-10-2010›. Kinsella, Sharon. "What's behind the Fetishism of Japanese School Uniforms?" Fashion Theory 6.2 (2000): 215-38. McVeigh, Brian J. “How Hello Kitty Commodifies the Cute, Cool and Camp: ‘Consumutopia’ versus ‘Control’ in Japan.” Journal of Material Culture 5.2 (2000): 225-245. Negus, Keith. "The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance between Production and Consumption." Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 501-15. Ortiz, Robert. "Petworking — Defined by Robert Ortiz." The GOD BOLT, 23 Jan. 2009. ‹http://thegodbolt.blogspot.com.au/2009/01/petworking-defined-by-robert-ortiz.html›. Roselle, Laura, Alister Miskimmon, and Ben O’Loughlin. “Strategic Narrative: A New Means to Understanding Soft Power.” Media, War & Conflict 7.1 (2014): 70-84. Schroeder, Stan. “1 in 10 Pets Have a Social Networking Profile.” Mashable 13 July 2011. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://mashable.com/2011/07/13/pets-social-networking›. Steiner, Peter. “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog.” Cartoon. The New Yorker, 5 July 1993. Turner, Graeme. “Surrendering the Space.” Cultural Studies 25.4-5 (2011): 685-99. Warr, Philippa. “My Social Petwork: Facebook for Your Pets.” Wired.co.uk 12 Apr. 2013. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/12/my-social-petwork›. Williams, Rhiannon. “Dogs Dominate Social 'Petworking'.” The Telegraph 15 Feb. 2014.

Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop shows how the vocal performances of girl singers in 1960s Britain defined—and sometimes defied—ideas about what it meant to be a young woman in the 1960s British pop music scene. The singing and expressive voices of Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, Millie Small, Dusty Springfield, Lulu, Marianne Faithfull, and P. P. Arnold reveal how vocal sound shapes access to social mobility and, consequently, access to power and musical authority. The book examines how Sandie Shaw and Cilla Black’s ordinary girl personas were tied to whiteness, and in Black’s case to her Liverpool origins. It shows how Dusty Springfield and Jamaican singer Millie Small engaged with the transatlantic sounds of soul and ska, respectively, transforming ideas about musical genre, race, and gender. It reveals how attitudes about sexuality and youth in rock culture shaped the vocal performances of Lulu and Marianne Faithfull, and how P. P. Arnold has re-narrated rock history to center Black women’s vocality. Freedom Girls draws on a broad array of archival sources, including music magazines, fashion and entertainment magazines produced for young women, biographies and interviews, audience research reports, and others to inform analysis of musical recordings (including such songs as “As Tears Go By,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” and others) and performances on television programs such as Ready Steady Go!, Shindig, and other 1960s music shows. These performances reveal the historical and contemporary connections between voice, social mobility, and musical authority and demonstrate how singers used voice to navigate the boundaries of race, class, and gender.