Articles de revues sur le sujet « Marketing dei servizi »

In linea con le nuove strategie di intervento dei sistemi sanitari pubblici, orientate verso un approccio proattivo in grado di fornire servizi differenziati in base ai bisogni, lo studio propone un tentativo di segmentazione dell'utenza dei servizi distrettuali. Nella prima parte vengono presentate le motivazioni alla base della ricerca, la review della letteratura internazionale ed il contesto oggetto di analisi. Da un'indagine su 3461 utilizzatori, vengono successivamente individuati - tramite l'analisi fattoriale e l'analisi cluster - 4 segmenti: i "modesti", i "coscienti e sostenuti" gli "esperti" e gli "evoluti". Le caratteristiche dei segmenti vengono infine commentate, con l'esposizione delle possibili implicazioni gestionali.

- The theory of FOCJ (Functional, Overlapping, Competing Jurisdictions) introduces a notion of functional federalism in which each jurisdiction is responsible for the provision of a specific class of public goods. In other terms, in the model citizens can choose some local public goods without moving from one jurisdiction to another, as Buchanan's and Tiebout's theories would require. This theory appears especially suitable to explain and illustrate the evolution of the Italian case, in which the liberalisation of the energy sector has enabled the consumers to choose their own gas and electricity supplier. This could be achieved detaching the production and marketing of the service from the management of the related network. In this way, it is possible to introduce for the first time a real competition between suppliers of local public goods and to break off the monopolies of the local incumbent: citizens addressing the same seller, belong to the same «functional jurisdictions», while citizens living in the same area can belong to different jurisdictions. In the future, we can foresee the emergence of two kinds of jurisdiction: small jurisdictions, highly localized, where the supplied service is highly specialized and customised; and bigger jurisdictions, characterized by the exploitation of economies of scale, in which the supplied service is undifferentiated and cheaper. JEL D72, H410, H73

L'obiettivo del contributo č quello d'identificare il ruolo dei servizi nel marketing dell'auto elettrica, con particolare riguardo alle aspettative della domanda e ai fattori d'offerta. In particolare, partendo dal concetto di Product-Service System (PSS), dove il servizio assume un ruolo almeno paritario rispetto alla componente prodotto, e grazie anche all'analisi di alcuni casi aziendali, sono stati descritti i principali elementi che compongono l'attuale PSS dell'auto elettrica: il sistema legato all'auto e alla batteria, quello connesso all'energia e alla ricarica, quello relativo alle infrastrutture pubbliche e private e, infine, quello associato alla cosiddetta auto navigation e, in generale, all'esperienza di consumo. Infine, rispetto al PSS dell'auto elettrica, sono stati descritti i fattori che dovrebbero favorirne l'affermazione.

L'articolo si propone di analizzare l'impatto dell'offerta di prodotti/servizi tradizionalmente estranei alla proposta della GDO del largo consumo - cd "Extra" - sul rapporto insegna-cliente. A questo scopo vengono presentati i risultati emersi da un'indagine campionaria in-store condotta per comprendere il riscontro che questa tipologia di offerta ottiene presso la clientela ed il ritorno che ne puň derivare all'insegna, anche in termini di impatto sul livello complessivo di fedeltÀ comportamentale e conativa. Ne emergono interessanti implicazioni manageriali sia relativamente alla comprensione dei fattori/ leve di marketing su cui agire per raccogliere i principali benefici derivanti dalla nuova proposta, sia in termini di considerazioni competitive in ottica di rivalitÀ inter-type.

Il presente lavoro sviluppa un'analisi empirica delle mutate modalitŕ attraverso cui distretti affrontano la competizione nel nuovo contesto globale. In particolare, mentre in passato l'eccellenza produttiva si poneva come elemento fondante del successo della forma distrettuale, risulta sempre piů evidente come nei distretti moderni la componente "servizi" si sia affiancata - e talvolta abbia superato in valore - la componente materiale. L'analisi empirica č stata sviluppata con riferimento al distretto florovivaistico del Ponente Ligure, un contesto che bene evidenzia la crescente criticitŕ dei servizi, in particolare della logistica, e le forti difficoltŕ che incontrano gli operatori distrettuali nel fronteggiare il cambiamento richiesto. Il distretto, in effetti, ha visto erodersi negli anni la propria quota di mercato fino alla perdita del proprio ruolo di leadership guadagnato in passato mettendo in campo capacitŕ produttive uniche nello scenario internazionale. Mentre i livelli qualitativi della produzione sembrano rimasti elevati, collocando il prodotto ligure tra i migliori a livello mondiale, gli operatori evidenziano una forte contrazione della domanda dovuto alle difficoltŕ riscontrate in ambito logistico-commerciale. Alla luce dei dati raccolti č possibile sostenere, in effetti, che la competizione e talvolta, la sopravvivenza stessa dei distretti, debba passare attraverso una piů attenta pianificazione di elementi quali il marketing, la logistica, la commercializzazione e, piů in generale, della componente servizi. Tale pianificazione non puň essere portata avanti dal singolo operatore ma deve essere frutto dell'impegno congiunto ed organico delle imprese e delle istituzioni distrettuali.

In Italia esistono situazioni di segregazione abitativa che rimandano ad un passato che sembrava definitivamente superato. L'articolo propone una analisi delle conformazioni spaziali, sia spontanee che risultato di interventi pubblici, legate alla presenza di lavoratori agricoli, stagionali e stanziali, di origine straniera nella provincia di Foggia. Il saggio descrive i caratteri spaziali di questi insediamenti, conosciuti come ghetti, la mancanza di servizi e le fragilità sociali dei loro abitanti e propone una analisi delle soluzioni che sono state avanzate in ambito pubblico. Lo studio diventa occasione per proporre delle riflessioni sulle responsabilità e sulle sfide della disciplina urbanistica verso un superamento delle situazioni estreme di segregazione spaziale e sfruttamento che interessano le campagne del Sud Italia e non solo.

Le concezioni e le prassi di responsabilitŕ sociale d'impresa (CSR, corporate social responsibility) che si sono affermate sino a tempi molto recenti riflettono prevalentemente una logica reattiva, incentrata sulla necessitŕ delle aziende di rilegittimarsi nei confronti dei loro stakeholder corrispondendo alla richiesta di riduzione e prevenzione dei costi sociali legati all'attivitŕ d'impresa (degrado ecologico, disoccupazione conseguente a ristrutturazioni, ecc.). Tuttavia l'attuale periodo, anche per le incertezze e questioni poste dalla crisi economica, rappresenta una fase singolarmente feconda per andare oltre questo approccio adattivo e raccogliere la sfida di una visione piů avanzata della dimensione sociale dell'agire d'impresa come innovazione sostenibile. Tale modello si basa sulla valorizzazione di beni, risorse ed esigenze di significato sociale ed č indirizzato alla creazione di valore integrato - economico, umano-sociale e ambientale - nel lungo termine. La caratteristica centrale di questo profilo d'impresa č la tendenza a operare in maniera socialmente proattiva, sviluppando un'attitudine a cogliere o persino anticipare le direzioni del cambiamento sociale con i suoi bisogni e problemi emergenti e facendo sě che l'integrazione di obiettivi economici e socio-ambientali nei processi strategico-produttivi si traduca in fattore di differenziazione dell'offerta di mercato e in una reale fonte di vantaggio competitivo. Nel presente lavoro si indica la praticabilitŕ di un simile modello riferendosi ai risultati di una recente indagine condotta su un campione di dieci imprese italiane, eterogenee per dimensioni, collocazione geografica, fase del ciclo di vita e settori di attivitŕ, che si estendono da comparti tradizionali (come quelli alimentare, edilizio, sanitario, dell'arredamento e della finanza) a campi di piů recente definizione e a piů elevato tasso di cambiamento tecnologico (quali l'ingegneria informatica, la comunicazione multimediale, il controllo dei processi industriali e il risanamento ambientale). La logica di azione di queste organizzazioni sembra ruotare intorno a una duplice dinamica di "valorizzazione del contesto": da un lato, l'internalizzazione nella strategia d'impresa di richieste e al contempo di risorse sociali orientate a una maggiore attenzione per l'ambiente naturale, per la qualitŕ della vita collettiva nei territori, per i diritti e lo sviluppo delle persone dentro e fuori gli ambienti di lavoro; dall'altro lato, la capacitŕ, a valle dell'attivitŕ di mercato, di produrre valore economico e profitti generando anche valore per la societŕ. Nei casi analizzati č presente la valorizzazione delle risorse ambientali, che si esprime mediante la riprogettazione di prodotti e processi e politiche di efficienza energetica di rifornimento da fonti di energia rinnovabile, raccordandosi con nuove aspettative sociali rispetto alla questione ecologica. Č coltivato il valore umano nel rapporto spesso personalizzato con i clienti e i partner di business ma anche nella vita interna d'impresa, attraverso dinamiche di ascolto e coinvolgimento che creano spazi per la soddisfazione di svariati bisogni e aspirazioni che gli individui riversano nella sfera lavorativa, aldilŕ di quelli retributivi. C'č empowerment del "capitale sociale" dentro e intorno all'organizzazione, ravvisabile specialmente quando le condotte d'impresa fanno leva su risorse relazionali e culturali del territorio e si legano a meccanismi di valorizzazione dello sviluppo locale. Troviamo inoltre il riconoscimento e la produzione di "valore etico" per il modo in cui una serie di principi morali (quali la trasparenza, il mantenimento degli impegni, il rispetto di diritti delle persone) costituiscono criteri ispiratori dell'attivitŕ di business e ne escono rafforzati come ingredienti primari del fare impresa. E c'č, naturalmente, produzione di valore competitivo, una capacitŕ di stare e avere successo nel mercato che si sostiene sull'intreccio di vari elementi. Uno di essi coincide con l'uso della leva economico-finanziaria come risorsa irrinunciabile per l'investimento in innovazione, piuttosto che in un'ottica di contenimento dei costi relativi a fattori di gestione - come la formazione - che possono anche rivelarsi non immediatamente produttivi. Altrettanto cruciali risultano una serie di componenti intangibili che, oltre alla gestione delle risorse umane, sono essenzialmente riconducibili a due aspetti. Il primo č lo sviluppo di know-how, in cui la conoscenza che confluisce nelle soluzioni di business č insieme tecnica e socio-culturale perché derivante dalla combinazione di cognizioni specializzate di settore, acquisite in virtů di una costante apertura alla sperimentazione, e insieme di mappe di riferimento e criteri di valutazione collegati alla cultura aziendale. L'altro fattore immateriale alla base del valore competitivo consiste nell'accentuato posizionamento di marchio, con la capacitŕ di fornire un'offerta di mercato caratterizzata da: a) forte specificitŕ rispetto ai concorrenti (distintivi contenuti tecnici di qualitŕ e professionalitŕ e soprattutto la corrispondenza alle esigenze dei clienti/consumatori e al loro cambiamento); b) bassa replicabilitŕ da parte di altri operatori, dovuta al fatto che le peculiaritŕ dell'offerta sono strettamente legate alla particolare "miscela" degli altri valori appena considerati (valore umano, risorse relazionali, know-how, ecc.). Ed č significativo notare come nelle imprese osservate questi tratti di marcata differenziazione siano stati prevalentemente costruiti attraverso pratiche di attenzione sociale non modellate su forme di CSR convenzionali o facilmente accessibili ad altri (p.es. quelle che si esauriscono nell'adozione di strumenti pur importanti quali il bilancio sociale e il codice etico); ciň che si tratti - per fare qualche esempio tratto dal campione - di offrire servizi sanitari di qualitŕ a tariffe accessibili, di supportare gli ex-dipendenti che avviano un'attivitŕ autonoma inserendoli nel proprio circuito di business o di promuovere politiche di sostenibilitŕ nel territorio offrendo alle aziende affiliate servizi tecnologici ad alta prestazione ambientale per l'edilizia. Le esperienze indagate confermano il ruolo di alcune condizioni dell'innovazione sostenibile d'impresa in vario modo giŕ indicate dalla ricerca piů recente: la precocitŕ e l'orientamento di lungo periodo degli investimenti in strategie di sostenibilitŕ, entrambi favoriti dal ruolo centrale ricoperto da istanze socio-ambientali nelle fasi iniziali dell'attivitŕ d'impresa; l'anticipazione, ovvero la possibilitŕ di collocarsi in una posizione di avanguardia e spesso di "conformitŕ preventiva" nei confronti di successive regolamentazioni pubbliche in grado di incidere seriamente sulle pratiche di settore; la disseminazione di consapevolezza interna, a partire dai livelli decisionali dell'organizzazione, intorno al significato per le strategie d'impresa di obiettivi e condotte operative riconducibili alla sostenibilitŕ; l'incorporamento strutturale degli strumenti e delle soluzioni di azione sostenibile nei core-processes organizzativi, dalla ricerca e sviluppo di prodotti/ servizi all'approvvigionamento, dall'infrastruttura produttiva al marketing. Inoltre, l'articolo individua e discute tre meccanismi che sembrano determinanti nei percorsi di innovazione sostenibile osservati e che presentano, per certi versi, alcuni aspetti di paradosso. Il primo č dato dalla coesistenza di una forte tradizione d'impresa, spesso orientata sin dall'inizio verso opzioni di significato sociale dai valori e dall'esperienza dell'imprenditore-fondatore, e di apertura alla novitŕ. Tale equilibrio č favorito da processi culturali di condivisione e di sviluppo interni della visione di business, da meccanismi di leadership dispersa, nonché da uno stile di apprendimento "incrementale" mediante cui le nuove esigenze e opportunitŕ proposte dalla concreta gestione d'impresa conducono all'adozione di valori e competenze integrabili con quelli tradizionali o addirittura in grado di potenziarli. In secondo luogo, si riscontra la tendenza a espandersi nel contesto, tipicamente tramite strategie di attraversamento di confini tra settori (p.es., alimentando sinergie pubblico-private) e forme di collaborazione "laterale" con gli interlocutori dell'ambiente di business e sociale; e al contempo la tendenza a includere il contesto, ricavandone stimoli e sollecitazioni, ma anche risorse e contributi, per la propria attivitŕ (p.es., nella co-progettazione dei servizi/prodotti). La terza dinamica, infine, tocca piů direttamente la gestione delle risorse umane. Le "persone dell'organizzazione" rappresentano non soltanto uno dei target destinatari delle azioni di sostenibilitŕ (nelle pratiche di selezione, formazione e sviluppo, welfare aziendale, ecc.) ma anche, piů profondamente, il veicolo fondamentale della realizzazione e del successo di tali azioni. Si tratta, cioč, di realtŕ organizzative in cui la valorizzazione delle persone muove dagli impatti sulle risorse umane, in sé cruciali in una prospettiva di sostenibilitŕ, agli impatti delle risorse umane attraverso il loro ruolo diretto e attivo nella gestione dei processi di business, nella costruzione di partnership con gli stakeholder e nei meccanismi di disseminazione interna di una cultura socialmente orientata. In tal senso, si distingue un rapporto circolare di rinforzo reciproco tra la "cittadinanza nell'impresa" e la "cittadinanza dell'impresa"; vale a dire, tra i processi interni di partecipazione/identificazione del personale nei riguardi delle prioritŕ dell'organizzazione e la capacitŕ di quest'ultima di generare valore molteplice e "condiviso" nel contesto (con i clienti, il tessuto imprenditoriale, le comunitŕ, gli interlocutori pubblici, ecc.). In conclusione, le imprese osservate appaiono innovative primariamente perché in grado di praticare la sostenibilitŕ in termini non solo di responsabilitŕ ma anche di opportunitŕ per la competitivitŕ organizzativa. Questa analisi suggerisce quindi uno sguardo piů ampio sulle implicazioni strategiche della CSR e invita a riflettere su come le questioni e i bisogni di rilievo sociale, a partire da quelli emergenti o acuiti dalla crisi economica (nel campo della salute, dei servizi alle famiglie, della salvaguardia ambientale, ecc.), possano e forse debbano oggi sempre piů situarsi al centro - e non alla periferia - del business e della prestazione di mercato delle imprese.

I policy maker sono costantemente alla ricerca delle forme e degli strumenti per contribuire ad aumentare la prosperitŕ economica e sociale del proprio territorio. Gli studi a livello internazionale ci dicono che la prosperitŕ di un territorio č direttamente riconducibile alla sua competitivitŕ, e quindi in primis al livello di produttivitŕ e innovazione del sistema delle imprese. Come verrŕ ampiamente illustrato in questo articolo, le reti inter-organizzative - nella varietŕ di forme che l'evidenza empirica ci suggerisce - attraverso una flessibilitŕ senza precedenti, una piů veloce circolazione delle informazioni, la condivisione di visioni, saperi e conoscenza, l'efficiente e rapido scambio di risorse e competenze per competere, assicurano al tempo stesso specializzazione, efficienza e alti livelli di produttivitŕ. La configurazione e la natura di tali reti č in via di continua ridefinizione ed espansione e l'uso del termine rete č spesso generico o inappropriato. Anche i confini delle reti vanno continuamente ridefiniti, in un continuum che va dalle imprese tradizionali che esternalizzano e delocalizzano parte della loro produzione fino al puro networking di varia natura. Noi ci concentreremo solo su quelle reti interorganizzative che rappresentano forme nuove di impresa, di quasi impresa, di sistemi di imprese che consentono una gestione competitiva e innovativa della catena del valore e dei processi fondamentali, conseguendo risultati economici e sociali, in una parola prosperitŕ. Ci occuperemo in particolare del fenomeno piů nuovo che caratterizza l'Italian way of doing industry, ossia lo sviluppo e i successi delle medie imprese, nodi di reti inter-organizzative che coinvolgono non solo imprese piccole, ma anche imprese grandi, in una proiezione spesso globale. Su queste nuove forme di reti inter-organizzative, si apre uno spazio di intervento straordinario per i policy maker in azioni di attivazione, incentivazione e supporto, capaci di condurre a superiori livelli di competitivitŕ le imprese componenti le reti, le reti stesse e i territori da cui esse muovono, ovvero capaci di favorire una maggiore prosperitŕ. Tali spazi di governo delle reti inter-organizzative possono avere natura infrastrutturale (trasporti, edilizia, tecnologie, credito, servizi, ecc.), relazionale (governo della catena del valore, dei processi, dei flussi, delle architetture d'impresa, dei sistemi informativi e di comunicazione, dei sistemi professionali ecc.) e cognitiva (capitale umano, capitale intellettuale, sistema di valori e norme, ecc.). Tutte e tre queste dimensioni sono importantissime e vanno gestite congiuntamente in nuove forme di management assicurate dalle imprese "pivotali" e nell'ambito di quello che nell'articolo č definito come meta-management, ovvero quelle posizioni di attori pubblici e privati - spesso in raccordo fra loro - che assicurano supporto e guida strategica alle reti. Nuovi modelli di management e di meta-management implicano una conoscenza profonda della rete e, di conseguenza, una visione d'insieme attuale e futura sicura e convincente e una capacitŕ di execution che sappia consolidare o riorientare la rete; valorizzare le risorse, materiali e personali, lě racchiuse e soprattutto perseguire obiettivi e misurare risultati. Meta-management non significa favorire il mero networking tra imprese, ma attivarsi come agenzie strategiche e provvedimenti concreti capaci di disegnare politiche di accompagnamento e sostegno alla creazione e alla valorizzazione di robusti network tra imprese e tra imprese e istituzioni, che trascendano le consuete filiere e agglomerazioni locali. Una economia e una societŕ fatta di reti inter-organizzative non č uguale a quella fatta prevalentemente di singole imprese "castello". Sulle reti di impresa e sull'impresa rete incombono alcune rilevanti questioni a cui il nostro lavoro tenta di dare alcune risposte Vediamole qui di seguito. 1. Diagnosi. L'organizzazione a rete č oggi scarsamente riconoscibile. Come diagnosticarla, come identificarne le caratteristiche strutturali e comprenderne i problemi critici? 2. Sviluppo e progettazione. L'organizzazione a rete si puň supportare con adeguati servizi, sviluppare intenzionalmente o addirittura progettare, come qui si sostiene? E se sě, in che modo? I metodi da adoperare per gestire questo sviluppo sono certo diversi da quelli adottati da strutture accentrate, sono meno top-down e meno razionalistici: ma quali possono essere? 3. Stabilitŕ e mutamento. Ogni nodo o soggetto della rete fa parte di reti diverse, in alcuni casi abbandona in rapida successione le une per legarsi ad altre. Come combinare l'estrema mutevolezza di queste multiple appartenenze con l'esigenza di stabilitŕ e crescita di ogni singolo nodo, come far sě che l'intera rete si comporti come un "attore collettivo" capace di un governo? 4. Risultati. Se e come definire obiettivi o ri-articolarli velocemente nel tempo? Come valutare i risultati delle diverse dimensioni economiche e sociali? 5. Decisioni e misura. L'organizzazione a rete - come e piů dell'impresa tradizionale - cambia per repentine innovazioni, per adattamento, per micro-decisioni, per miglioramento continuo, č il risultato di scelte su cosa fare dentro e cosa comprare, su quali funzioni accentrare e quali decentrare, su quando acquisire o vendere unitŕ aziendali e su quando fare accordi, dove allocare geograficamente le attivitŕ. Vi sono criteri e metodi da adottare, per operare in questi contesti di agilitŕ, velocitŕ e rapiditŕ di processi decisionali? 6. Sistemi. Quali tecniche o sistemi operativi adatti all'impresa rete dovranno essere sviluppati? Quali sistemi di pianificazione e controllo di gestione dell'impresa rete, if any? Č possibile stabilire standard di qualitŕ per la rete? Come sviluppare dimensioni quali linguaggi, culture, politiche di marchio e di visibilitŕ, come potenziare le comunitŕ, come promuovere formazione e apprendimenti? 7. Strutture. Le reti di impresa includono una grande varietŕ di forme, come vedremo. La rete di imprese puň includere una parte di gerarchia: quali modelli di organigrammi sono compatibili? Quali sistemi informativi, di telecomunicazioni, di social network sono adatti per la rete di imprese? Quali sistemi logistici? Quali regole e contratti formali? Quali flussi finanziari? Le risorse umane si possono gestire e sviluppare lungo la rete? E in che modo? E che dire dei sistemi di controllo della qualitŕ? 8. Nascita e morte. La rete di imprese e soprattutto i suoi "nodi" hanno un tasso di natalitŕ/ mortalitŕ piů elevato dell'impresa tradizionale. Gestire la nascita e la morte delle imprese diventerŕ ancora piů importante che gestire le imprese. Chi lo farŕ e come? 9. Vincoli e opportunitŕ. La legislazione, le relazioni industriali, la cultura manageriale sono oggi vincoli e opportunitŕ allo sviluppo di forme di rete di imprese. La globalizzazione dell'economia, lo sviluppo dei servizi, le nuove tecnologie, la cultura dei giovani, invece, sembrano operare piů come fattori facilitanti quando addirittura non cogenti. Come gestire (e non subire) vincoli e opportunitŕ? Cosa puň fare l'impresa, e cosa possono fare le istituzioni pubbliche? Vi sono nuovi programmi e regole nazionali e regionali per la costituzione delle reti di impresa: quale č la loro efficacia e impatto? In tale quadro, un'Agenzia Strategica (una grande impresa, una media impresa, un ente governativo, una Camera di commercio, un'associazione imprenditoriale, un istituto di credito) puň esercitare un ruolo centrale nella promozione e governo delle reti inter-organizzative per la competitivitŕ dei territori, mettendo a fuoco i propri interventi di policy avendo come oggetto prioritario queste nuove forme di impresa, quasi-impresa, sistemi di impresa usando diverse leve: - innanzitutto, fornendo o favorendo l'accesso a risorse chiave, come credito, finanziamenti, sgravi fiscali, servizi per l'internazionalizzazione, conoscenze, marketing ecc.; - agendo da fluidificatore delle reti tra imprese, che sappia rimuovere ostacoli nelle strutture relazionali e irrobustire nodi, processi, strutture di governance laddove necessario; inserendosi direttamente nelle strutture relazionali come ponte per connettere nodi disconnessi; - esercitando a pieno il ruolo di meta-manager di reti inter-organizzative ossia imprimendo al sistema un indirizzo strategico di fondo, governando i processi "politici" interni alla rete ossia la distribuzione di potere e risorse e creando le condizioni culturali, strategiche organizzative e tecnologiche; - facendo leva sull'essere un policy maker cross-settoriale e multi-territoriale. Le reti di impresa hanno successo se si integrano entro "piattaforme industriali" (ad es. IT, Green economy, portualitŕ e logistica), entro cluster territoriali (es. distretti, economie regionali, etc.), sistemi eterogenei interistituzionali (che includono imprese pubbliche, amministrazioni, istituzioni e associazioni). La nostra tesi č che azioni di governo della rete attraverso nuove forme di management e di meta-management sono tanto piů efficaci quanto piů contribuiscono a supportare e strutturare reti organizzative robuste o che tendono a diventare tali, ossia imprese reti e reti di impresa governate; sono tanto meno efficaci o quanto meno misurabili quanto piů supportano solo processi di networking poco definiti destinati a rimanere tali. Nei termini di Axelsson, policy e management hanno effetto su reti che esprimono a) modelli di relazione fra diverse organizzazioni per raggiungere fini comuni. Hanno un effetto minore o nullo quando le reti di cui si parla sono solo b) "connessioni lasche fra organizzazioni legate da relazioni sociali" o c) un insieme di due o piů relazioni di scambio.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to classify service quality elements using Kano’s two-way quality model in terms of their instrumentality to customer satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach – Service quality attributes as borrowed from the literature are classified into attractive, one dimensional, and must-be quality elements. Combinations of participants’ response to the functional and dysfunctional questions formed around each service quality element in the Kano evaluation table were instrumental in categorizing service quality elements. Customer satisfaction index in the form of satisfaction increment index (SII) and the dissatisfaction decrement index (DDI) is calculated for each of the quality attributes and service quality dimensions. Findings – Out of the 15 service quality elements two are attractive quality, six are one-dimensional quality, and seven are found to be of must-be quality. No attribute can be identified as indifferent quality or reverse quality. The convenience dimension and the operating hours attribute list on top in terms of satisfaction increment index score. The reliability dimension and the courteousness attribute list on top in terms of dissatisfaction decrement index score. Practical implications – The findings help the marketer to prioritize improvement of service quality elements and/or dimensions to satisfy customers. Originality/value – The paper develops an integrated approach to facilitate marketers identify which of the service quality elements and/or dimensions require attention to strategize effectively in order to achieve a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Kuliah Kerja Nyata (KKN) started from April to May 2021. The distribution of locations for the implementation of KKN 79 includes Kulon Progo Regency and Gunungkidul Regency, Yogyakarta Special Region Province. In its implementation, KKN 79 Unit N Group 69 is located in Katongan Village, Nglipar District, Gunungkidul Regency. Broadly speaking, Katongan Village has the main potential in the field of aloe vera processing. Based on observations, this village already has a business in processed aloe vera products, such as beverage products from aloe vera and chips from aloe vera. However, this activity has constraints on the marketing of the resulting product so it requires a marketing strategy. The purpose of implementing the Group 69 Community Service Program is to provide information on how to market the aloe vera product so that it can compete with other products. The compilation of KKN outcomes is carried out by collecting (secondary) data, presenting qualitative reports that are descriptive-analysis and method of documentation. The result of the dedication of KKN 79 Unit N Group 69 are processed products of aloe vera that can be marketed from inside and outside the village with various form of effective marketing strategies in helping the people of Katongan Village.

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between leadership, employee engagement and service orientation, specific to the private service sector organizations in India. The paper also explores the ability of leadership style and engagement to predict service orientation in the given cross section. Design/methodology/approach – The paper has used a single cross-sectional descriptive design. Purposive sampling has been used to identify respondents who are managers in the private service sector organisations in India. A valid sample size of 106 has been used for the analysis. Instruments used for perceived leadership style are as follows: Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ-5X short form); Employee Engagement E3 (DDI) and Service Orientation (Frimpong and Wilson, 2012). Findings – Service orientation is found to be strongly correlated to employee engagement and employee engagement is a strong predictor of service orientation. The other relationships which are significant and moderately correlated are that of transformational leadership and employee engagement and also of transformational leadership and service orientation. Research limitations/implications – The study highlights the importance and significant role of leadership and employee engagement for higher service orientation in the given cross section. The mediating impact of employee engagement of the leadership style and service orientation relationship could be further explored through path analysis or structured equation modeling techniques. Practical implications – The research emphasizes that organizations need to focus on employee engagement as much as they focus on customers. The differential advantage to organizations will come through the employees and their behaviors towards customers. Appropriate leadership styles that drive engagement and service-oriented behaviors can be fostered in organizations to drive service performance. The mediating impact of employee engagement of the leadership style and service orientation relationship could be further explored through path analysis or structured equation modeling techniques. Originality/value – The research is focused in the private service sector organizations in India and data and results support the need to focus on employees for higher scores on customer parameters. The respondents are from a cross section of service organizations and, hence, emphasizing the interplay of the three variables across organizations. The paper supports the critical role of leadership and employees in creating a higher service orientation.

Objective: This paper aims to study the experience of call center service customers the academic and corporate perspectives; it proposes a management model focused on looking after the customer’s experience during a phone interaction. Methodology: The methodology of this article adopts the internal Benchmarking process as a diagnostic tool and describes the user’s perceptive of internal corporate operations and key performance indicators established in a call center’s balanced scorecard. It uses an exploratory factor analysis to reduce dimensions and a confirmatory analysis to validate the statistical model proposed. Results: The results determine the existence of gaps between the key performance indicators implemented to assess the customer’s experience and satisfaction, they show organizational opportunities characterized for the necessity of transforming production methods into simple processes, aimed to give solutions to the customers within the timeframes specified in just one phone interaction. Limitations: The constructs used are limited by the instrument and metrics implemented by the company under study for evaluating the quality of customer interaction when a customer reaches a customer service’s call center. Practical implications: This study is useful in the marketing, marketing relationships, and customer service areas, since it allows the establishment of an inflection point that proposes an integrated balanced scorecard construction the customer’s experience analysis.

Resumen El objetivo del presente estudio es explicar la publicidad digital y CIM en empresas de yoga y compararla en empresas españolas y mexicanas, mediante una investigación con enfoque cualitativo de método netnográfico de las páginas de Facebook oficiales de dos empresas de Yoga, desde la perspectiva hipotética deductiva e inductiva, se realizó análisis de contenido de las conversaciones más populares de estas empresas, identificadas mediante un informe de la plataforma Fanpagekarma. Los resultados revelan que el uso de logotipo, colores institucionales de una manera alineada, integrada y coherente, junto con la comunicación de atributos del precio, la calidad y el tipo de servicio, en este caso los estilos de yoga, como parte de la comunicación integrada del marketing, así como la actitud afectiva o cognitiva de la publicidad digital, son elementos que generan mayor interacción o presencia entre los usuarios del Facebook de empresas de yoga.

<em><span lang="EN-US">This study aims to determine the role of netizen actors on social media in the digital marketing of a product brand, like #HondaBeAT. Nowadays, the use of social media to exchange information is increasing for the dissemination of messages and other contents. In the digital marketing ecosystem, social media plays an important role in introducing products, enhancing a positive image, and building relationships with customers. The use of social media platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram, has attracted the attention of the younger generation, especially the millennial generation (Y) and the post-millennial generation (Z). The level of effectiveness of digital marketing is also influenced and determined by the progress of netizen actors, such as followers, influencers, and buzzers. Their role is increasingly important to convey information more effectively through various product and service brand content on various social media platforms. This study uses a qualitative approach to analyze data from social media conversations on Twitter and Instagram within a certain period of time with the help of the Drone Emprit Academic (DEA) application. This research reveals the progress of netizen actors on the company’s official accounts of Twitter and Instagram as a basic understanding for designing and compiling digital marketing strategies using product brand hashtags. This study also found that the netizen actors studied had their respective roles in strengthening the delivery of messages and content on social media.</span></em>

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to estimate retailing efficiency in a 26-store women clothing retail chain and to decompose it in several measures in order to contribute to the performance improvement of this retail service firm, as well as to compare the efficiency of the different decision making units. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses the following measures to estimate efficiency: sigma convergence analysis; efficiency analysis; technical efficiency (TE) analysis; pure technical efficiency (PTE) analysis and scale efficiency (SE) analysis for a set of 26 stores of a women retail service brand operating in Portugal. A cross-section input-oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to analyse quarterly data sets from 2010 to 2013. Findings – The results show that costs with personnel are slightly increasing when analysed using the sigma convergence method, although there are some geographical differences. Moreover, it is possible to witness that the retail store chain’s TE diminishes as the operations outputs do not grow as fast as input savings. On the other hand, there are no SE problems as the levels of SE are larger than pure efficiency levels. Research limitations/implications – The main limitation of the study stems from the fact that the analysis is based on a simple retail chain, which makes it a single case study. Therefore, the generalisation of the conclusions for other firms or for other periods of analysis should be made cautiously. Practical implications – It is shown that some stores have a good TE and other stores have some SE advantage. As such, it is possible to select some stores as benchmarks to deploy internal efficiency throughout the retail chain. Originality/value – The contribution of this paper is based on the application of the sigma conversion and DEA techniques to evaluate efficiency in retail service store.

Tourism, especially hotels, is one sector that has felt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. To accelerate the economic recovery of the tourism sector, especially hotels, regulations are needed that can strengthen this change, both from regulations from the central and regional governments that can encourage hospitality to return to enthusiasm referring to health protocols. The purpose of this study is to examine the marketing strategy of the Cabin Sutomo hotel based on the new Yogyakarta tourism institutions. This research is descriptive qualitative, which is based on scientific studies, principles, and fundamental assumptions of science, by utilizing deductive reasoning supported by valid information and then processed for analysis through research principles. The collection method uses interviews and documentation. The results of the study explain the existence of Pergub Number 48 of 2020, the D.I. Government. Yogyakarta regarding Guidelines for Preparation, Guidelines for Implementation of Public Service Activities and Community Economics in the Special Region of Yogyakarta in the prevention and control of Covid-19 and the book Pranatan Anyar Plesiran Jogya, Guidelines for Adapting New Habits of Tourism DIY, encourage Hotel Cabin Sutomo to make changes to marketing strategies, through product aspects services and employees who pay attention to health protocols, prices with new normal jargon, increasing online (digital) promotions. With this measure in 2020 during the pandemic, room sales decreased by 22.7% compared to 2019. With this decline in sales, Hotel Cabin can still operate without reducing employees.Keywords: Marketing strategy, New institutions, Tourism

Pengabdian Pada Masyarakat (PPM) ini berjudul “Pelatihan Pengembangan Pemasaran Bordir dan Kelom geulis Tasikmalaya”. Kegiatan ini merupakan terintegrasi dengan Riset Fundamental Unpad (RFU) lanjutan tahun 2019. Pemilihan judul PPM kali ini dilatarbelakangi oleh meluasnya pangsa pasar bagi para pelaku ekonomi kreatif seiring berkembangnya penggunaan media sosial dari semula sebagai media komunikasi menjadi media pemasaran produk barang dan jasa. Ini merupakan peluang bagi pelaku usaha bordir dan kelom geulis di Kota Tasikmalaya untuk meluaskan pemasarannya ke skala nasional hingga internasional. Bahkan, bukan tidak mungkin, melebarkan pasarnya hingga skala ekspor. Adanya kegiatan PPM ini diharapkan dapat menumbuhkan semangat pelaku usaha bordir maupun kelom geulis di Kota Tasikmalaya untuk mengoptimalkan penggunaan media sosial sebagai media pemasaran dalam memperluas pasar dan meningkatkan omset yang diperoleh. Kegiatan PPM ini diselenggarakan pada 30 Juli 2019 di Rumah Kreatif BRI di Jalan Siliwangi 51, Kota Tasikmalaya, dengan peserta pelaku usaha bordir dan kelom geulis di Kota Tasikmalaya. Kegiatan ini menghadirkan pembicara dari Kamar Dagang dan Industri (Kadin) Kota Tasikmalaya dan Dosen STMIK DCI, Kota Tasikmalaya. Hasil evaluasi terhadap para peserta pelatihan menunjukkan adanya manfaat yang diperoleh peserta dari materi yang disampaikan narasumber, baik yang berkaitan langsung maupun tidak berkaitan langsung dengan media sosial. Walaupun setelah mengikuti pelatihan tersebut, peserta belum mempraktikkan materi yang diberikan, setidaknya pelatihan membuka wawasan peserta mengenai metode pemasaran yang bisa dilakukan selain pemasaran offline yang biasa dilakukan. Para peserta berharap, ke depannya, pelatihan lebih banyak menghadirkan para praktisi, agar materi pelatihan bisa diarahkan pada materi praktis, lebih kekinian, dan waktunya diperpanjang. The title of our Community Service (PPM) activity is "Training on Marketing Development of Embroidery and Kelom geulis Tasikmalaya". This activity is integrated with Riset Fundamental Unpad (RFU) in 2019. The title is motivated by the expanding market share for a creative economic entrepreneur in line with the development of social media usage as a media marketing products and services. This is an opportunity for embroidery and kelom geulis entrepreneurs IN Tasikmalaya City to expand their marketing to a national and international scale. The existence of PPM activities is expected to foster the enthusiasm of embroidery and kelom geulis entrepreneurs in Tasikmalaya City to optimize the use of social media as a marketing medium in expanding markets and increasing turnover obtained. The PPM activity was held on July 30, 2019, at BRI's Creative House on Jalan Siliwangi 51, Tasikmalaya City. The participants are embroidery and kelom geulis entrepreneurs in Tasikmalaya City. We present the speakers from Tasikmalaya City Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) and STMIK DCI Lecturer, Tasikmalaya City. We use the lecture method and sharing experiences in marketing products through online media to motivate and strengthen SMEs in the City of Tasikmalaya to use available social media to expand the product marketing. The results showed that the presentation material brings benefits for the participants, the benefits are directly or indirectly are related to social media. Even after participating in the training, the participants did not practice the material provided, at least the training opened the participants' insights into marketing methods that could be carried out other than the usual offline marketing. The participants hoped, in the future, the training would bring more practitioners, so that the training materials could be directed to practical, more contemporary, and extended time.

El Centro de Recursos para el Aprendizaje y la Investigación de la Universidad del Pacífico ha incorporado un servicio virtual como plan de contingencia a la Pandemia de la COVID-19 al programa de Alfabetización en Información (ALFIN). El objetivo de este estudio descriptivo de corte transversal es evaluar el servicio virtual incorporado entre mayo a octubre de 2020, utilizaron el servicio 216 estudiantes de los 1.384 matriculados y 49 de 213 docentes. Las actividades se organizaron en sesión 1 (inicial) para docentes y estudiantes sin conocimiento previo interesados en realizar búsqueda de información en fuentes fiables; sesión 2 (nivel intermedio) para perfeccionar las búsquedas en fuentes más especializadas y la sesión 3 (nivel avanzado) para potenciar las habilidades y competencias en información. Además, se incluyó asesorías personalizadas y grupales. Se aplicó una encuesta de satisfacción en Google formulario con la Escala de Likert. El 75% de los estudiantes fue de Medicina y 33% de los docentes de Marketing. Las sesiones con mayor participación de estudiantes fue la sesión 2 (37%) y de docentes sección 1 y 3, ambos con 45%. La evaluación fue positiva, que propicia la continuidad del servicio y su mejora constante.

Nowadays, concerns about environmental issues are increasing. Therefore, companies and producers are under pressure from government rules and regulations on one hand, and on the other hand, maintaining customer satisfaction concerning cares about the environment. Green supply chain management (GSCM) is a procedure to increase efficiency and decrease environmental effects for companies that collaborate with customers and suppliers. According to GSCM, there is some research about applying green aspects of purchasing, design, manufacture, distribution, packaging, marketing, and reverse logistics of supply chains to improve their company’s performance regarding environmental issues. Moreover, recently, DEA as a nonparametric model is used to evaluate the efficiency and performance of supply chains as decision-making units (DMUs). However, previous studies on efficiency improvement in GSCM did not investigate the effect of some economic and environmental factors together such as service level, emissions (CO2), and size of the supply chains (arcs) on the efficiency of the whole supply system. These factors are essential as they can affect the manager’s ability to distinguish the true performance of a green supply chain. Thus, evaluating the efficiency of GSCM by DEA models and imposing the green principles to find out the efficient ones for increasing management performance is vital. Fulfilling the mentioned research gap, this paper developed a benchmark approach to verifying efficient DMUs and potential efficient DMUs which may improve costs and efforts to become efficient. In the case study, the benchmarks and potentially efficient DMUs are found by DEA standard models and slight adjustment is conducted for potentially efficient DMUs to change their status to efficient DMUs. Moreover, the effect of some green principles on the efficiency value of DMUs is verified using Tobit regression before and after the mentioned modification. A set of realistic results provided for the priority of potential DMUs modification confirmed the applicability of the proposed procedure.

In the 21st century knowledge-based economy, long-term economic growth and development depend on the ability to use the knowledge and technology so as to create product, process, organisational, marketing and even social innovations. The knowledge and technology, human resources and social capital (facilitating the transfer of technology from the world of science to the economy), comprise the most important production factors today. Research and development (R&D) activities are among the diverse determinants affecting the economy’s ability to innovate. They are carried out by public technical universities. One of the tasks that these entities face is to conduct basic, industrial (applied) research and development works. Their results can then be transferred to industrial and service enterprises as novel solutions. Research and development activities of universities are financed mainly from public sources, which suggests the need to assess the efficiency of this task. This can be done with the use of various methods, e.g. the non-parametric DEA method. The purpose of the paper is to measure the efficiency of research and development activities of public technical universities in Poland with the aid of the DEA method. The fourteen universities which in the years 2015–2017 reported to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (MNiSW) were included in the study. The efficiency of the universities in filing new patent solutions and being granted patents was analysed. The results acquired indicate very low and low efficiency of most Polish technical universities. This is due both to a small number of patent applications and a small number of patents granted. In the examined period, the group of most efficient technical universities in both aspects comprised 4 to 5 universities.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the sunk cost argument on the auction price of the frequency spectrum by measuring the efficiency of the frequency license fee paid by the auction winner. The efficiency method employs a nonparametric approach, namely Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with the Linear Programming method, with the hypothesis model tested using Path Analysis. The dataset under consideration was Indonesia's Big Three Service Providers (2015-2020). The results show that the spectrum auction price is efficient in its impact on service prices, revenues, and income taxes. The spectrum auction price has no effect, lending credence to the argument that the spectrum auction price is considered a sunk cost in the telecommunications industry. The research reason is that the higher the auction price, combined with the lower cost of service due to high competition, the harder it is for small businesses to win the auction. The winning bidder will remain under the control of the prominent organizers, so the government issues a merger policy for small businesses to compete in spectrum auction bids.

Banking plays an important role in business and economic growth. However, since a couple decades ago, there have been issues with efficiency and performance. This paper aims to examine Indonesia’s Islamic banking performance through non-parametric production efficiency analysis before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, 2010–2021. This study differentiated between different dimensions of Indonesia’s Islamic banks (IIB) finance and non-finance aspects, as well as investigated the relationships between these dimensions of finance, including assets, deposits, equity, financing, and income, and non-financial variables, namely employees and offices. Non-parametric analysis, with the input-oriented variable constant return to scale (CRS) and returns to scale (VRS) models as a framework, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to calculate the IIB of overall, pure, and scale efficiency. However, the resources of technology IIB management are lacking, as well as macroeconomic and environmental effects. This study found that IIB operational needs to enhance investment in technology beyond the office. This means that the number of offices has a smaller impact on enhancing deposits and revenue. Technology investment has a crucial role in enhancing IIB equity, income, and innovation service. As a result, IIB managers and policymakers must improve their efficiency scores in order to increase competition and innovation. Furthermore, IIB needs to increase and spend their assets and experience to enhance technology, which significantly affects efficiency.

The objective of this panel is to provide attendees with the opportunity to learn about what they always wanted to know about the wide world of human factors consulting, but were afraid to ask (or didn’t know to ask). This session should be of interest to meeting attendees at any stage of their career, including students and those who might be considering a career change or branching out. These panelists, together, have experience over a wide range of consulting domains, as well as being individuals who are at different stages in their consulting careers. As such, the panel session will provide attendees with multiple perspectives on select topics and on responses to attendees’ questions. Sheree Gibson, PE, CPE is President of Ergonomic Applications, a small industrial ergonomics consulting firm in South Carolina. She has been a consultant for most of her professional life, working for a forensic consulting firm as well as an in-house ergonomics consultant for Michelin Tire before setting out on her own. She has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a M.S.E. in Applied Ergonomics, both from West Virginia University. She is active in the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the American Society of Safety Engineers and HFES. Sheree is also Vice-President of the Foundation for Professional Ergonomics. Richard Kelly, PhD earned his doctorate in Engineering Psychology from New Mexico State University and went on to work as an engineering psychologist for the Army at White Sands and then for the Navy at SPAWAR in San Diego. After about 10 years supporting large and small RDT&E programs and leading teams of scientists and engineers, he left the government to start Pacific Science & Engineering (PSE). Over the past 34 years, PSE has grown steadily from 2 to 50 employees and has been a prime contractor, subcontractor, and consultant on hundreds of projects in many different domains, including military, intelligence, industrial process, commercial, medical, education, autonomous vehicles, and more. PSE remains an independent, employee-owned company entirely focused on human performance in complex systems. The technical staff have received numerous recognitions from clients and professional groups for their outstanding work that makes a real difference for our users. Dee Miller, PhD works at Dell, Inc. in the Business Transformation Office as the Senior Principal UX & Service Design Engineer building relationships and appropriately influencing relevant internal teams and direct business contacts in the adoption of a human-centered approach to designing internal systems and processes and delivering services related to Order Experience Life Cycle. She recently started an independent consultancy called Dawn Specialty Consulting. One of the first projects of the new consultancy is consulting with a local non-profit and a police department on applying design thinking to community policing initiatives. Dee has prior experience consulting with state and federal government agencies on matters pertaining to transportation and healthcare. Tom Albin, PE, CPE, PhD is a licensed professional engineer and a certified professional ergonomist. He holds a PhD from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. Currently the principal of High Plains Ergonomics Service, Tom has been engaged in ergonomics consulting since 2001. He has extensive experience as a researcher, a corporate ergonomist and as a product developer. He is active in the US and International Standards community, chairing the ANSI/HFES 100 computer workstation standard and serving as an accredited US expert on several ISO committees. He was Executive Director of the Office Ergonomics Research Committee from 2007 until retiring in 2018. Tom’s consulting work has been principally concerned with physical ergonomics issues in office and industrial settings. Current projects deal with evaluation of injury risk during push and pull tasks and with applied anthropometry. Topics Panelists will each be given time to introduce themselves at the beginning of the session. Each will speak for 7-10 minutes about their career path, ‘what I like best about consulting’, and ‘3-5 things I wish I had known before I started consulting’. The panel will also address the following topics: ethics, running a business (business plans, financing, insurance, legalities, managing employees, marketing, building relationships with clients, and writing contracts), and work/life balance. These topics will be introduced, in the form of questions from the moderator if/when questions from the audience are exhausted.

Abstract Background: GILT is an oral potent selective FLT3 kinase inhibitor approved for marketing for the treatment (Tx) of patients (pts) with relapsed/refractory FLT3 mutated (FLT3m) AML but efficacy in older ND FLT3m AML pts is unknown. Furthermore, FLT3m can be present as a dominant or subclone and impact of FLT3 inhibitor therapy in this setting is uncertain. Here we report the results of a Phase 2/1b sub-study of the Beat AML Master Trial to assess the efficacy of GILT monotherapy (GILTm) in ND FLT3m AML pts aged ≥60 years with high and low VAF and the subsequent response-driven addition of DEC Tx. (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03013998) Methods: The study was an open-label multicenter (15 sites), 3-outcome, 2-stage Phase 2 design that assigned pts to either Dominant FLT3/Group 1 (GP1) or Non-Dominant FLT3/Group 2 (GP2) as shown in Figure 1. Key eligibility criteria included ND FLT3m AML pts with high and low VAF and/or ITD ratio, aged ≥60 years, and ECOG performance status 0-2. In the Phase 2 study, all pts received GILTm 120 mg/day on days 1 - 28. Pts without CR/CRi after cycle 2 were transferred to the Phase 1b study to receive GILT + DEC (Figure 1). Phase 1b study utilized a standard 3+3 design to evaluate the safety/tolerability of concurrent GILT + DEC. Pts received GILT (dose level 1 [DL1] = 80 mg/day or dose level 2 [DL2] = 120 mg/day on days 1-28) + DEC 20 mg/m 2 IV on days 1-10 or 1-5 every 28 days. Primary endpoint was CR+CRi rate (Phase 2). Response was assessed using modified 2017 ELN AML criteria. The non-dominant GP2 was stopped for futility, GP1 was stopped early to modify trial to include venetoclax. Results: Phase 2 - Between 9/10/2018 to 2/11/2020, 19 / 20 enrolled pts (GP1: n = 9; GP2: n = 10) received GILTm and were included in analyses. Baseline pt characteristics are shown in Table 1. Median (range) time on GILTm was 3 cycles (1 - 18) in GP1 and 1 cycle (1 - 9) in GP2. Most common reasons for discontinuing Tx were Tx failure (TF; 44%) and relapse (33%) in GP1 and TF (70%) and disease progression (PD; 20%) in GP2. Overall CR+CRi was achieved in 4 pts (44%) in GP1 and 1 pt (10%) in GP2. Response duration are shown in Table 2. After median follow-up of 14.3 months (mos) and 19 mos in GP1 and GP2, respectively, 1-year OS was 56% and 76%. Most common Grade ≥3 adverse events (AEs) were febrile neutropenia and colitis (each 25%) in GP1; anemia and low platelet count in GP2 (each 30%). Overall, 7 pts had 15 serious AEs (SAEs) and all SAEs occurred in GP1 pts; most common SAE was colitis (25%) and 1 pt (13%) had a Tx-related Grade 3 SAE of tumor lysis syndrome. In GP2, 1 pt (10%) had Tx-related Grade 2 AE of differentiation syndrome. In GP1, 2 pts died within 60 days of Tx and none in GP2. Phase1b - After up to 2 cycles of GILTm, 12 pts with no CR/CRi (GP1: n = 4; GP2: n = 8) were transferred to receive GILT + DEC (Figure 1). At the time of this report, 1 pt with CRh remained on Tx. Median total time on Tx (including GILTm) was 4 cycles and median time on GILT + DEC Tx was 3 cycles (Table 2). Most common reasons for discontinuing Tx were PD (33%) and TF (25%); and 2 pts (17%) stopped Tx due to an AE. Pts were treated with DL1 GILT + DEC (n = 3), then DL2 GILT + DEC (n = 9); only 1 pt had dose-limiting toxicity (DLT) at DL2 (Grade 3 hyperbilirubinemia and pneumonitis requiring steroid therapy), hence, DL2 GILT + DEC was considered the MTD. CR+CRi rate was 25% in 3 pts, all at DL2 (Table 2). After a median follow-up of 17.8 mos, the 1-year OS from start of GILT + DEC Tx was 57%. Most common Grade ≥3 Tx-related AEs were anemia, febrile neutropenia and low WBC count (each 22%). Overall, 6 pts had 12 SAEs; 1 pt with SAE of Grade 4 sepsis died. Three GILT-related SAEs occurred in 1 pt - Grade 3 hyperbilirubinemia, and pneumonitis and Grade 1 transaminases increased. One pt died within 30 days and a second within 60 days of Tx. No difference was observed in GILT pharmacokinetics (PK) with or without DEC, however steady state Ctrough values were 1.4 to 2.3-fold greater than in relapsed/refractory AML pts (Admiral trial). Conclusions: In ND pts ≥60 years old with dominant FLT3 AML, GILTm induced a high 44% CR+CRi rate and long median OS (21.7 mos). Pts with non-dominant FLT3 had low 10% CR+CRi rate. GILTm was generally safe and was associated with differentiation syndrome in 1 pt. Concurrent GILT + DEC was acceptably tolerated, only 1 pt had a DLT, and the MTD was 120 mg/day GILT + DEC. A subset of pts with no CR/CRi during GILTm achieved remission with addition of DEC. Based on these results, a triple combination Tx study with venetoclax is currently enrolling. Figure 1 Figure 1. Disclosures Traer: Genentech: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Schrodinger: Research Funding; Incyte: Research Funding; Abbvie: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Servier/Agios: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Astellas: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; ImmunoGen: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Mims: Glycomemetics: Research Funding; Daiichi Sankyo: Consultancy, Research Funding; Aptevo: Research Funding; Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Beat AML clinical study: Consultancy, Research Funding; Genentech: Consultancy; Xencor: Research Funding; Kartos Pharmaceuticals: Research Funding; Abbvie: Consultancy; BMS: Consultancy; Kura Oncology: Consultancy; Syndax Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy; BMS: Consultancy; Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy; Aptevo: Research Funding. Stein: Agios Pharmaceuticals, Inc: Consultancy; Novartis: Consultancy; Astellas: Consultancy; Syndax Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy; Daiichi Sankyo: Consultancy; Syros Pharmaceuticals, Inc.: Consultancy; PinotBio: Consultancy; Celgene: Consultancy; Bristol Myers Squibb: Consultancy; Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy; Foghorn Therapeutics: Consultancy; Blueprint Medicines: Consultancy; Gilead Sciences, Inc.: Consultancy; Abbvie: Consultancy; Janssen Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy; Genentech: Consultancy. Stock: Pfizer: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; amgen: Honoraria; agios: Honoraria; jazz: Honoraria; kura: Honoraria; kite: Honoraria; morphosys: Honoraria; servier: Honoraria; syndax: Consultancy, Honoraria; Pluristeem: Consultancy, Honoraria. Kovacsovics: AbbVie: Research Funding; Jazz Pharmaceutials: Honoraria; Janssen Pharmaceuticals: Research Funding; Amgen Inc.: Research Funding; Stemline: Honoraria; Novartis: Research Funding. Blum: Xencor: Research Funding; Abbvie: Honoraria; Nkarta: Research Funding; Celyad Oncology: Research Funding; AmerisourceBergen: Honoraria; Forma Therapeutics: Research Funding; Leukemia and Lymphoma Society: Research Funding; Syndax: Honoraria. Arellano: Syndax Pharmaceuticals, Inc: Consultancy; KITE Pharma, Inc: Consultancy. Schiller: Actinium Pharmaceuticals, Inc: Research Funding; Mateon: Research Funding; Tolero: Research Funding; Geron: Research Funding; Regimmune: Research Funding; Kite/Gilead: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Celator: Research Funding; Sangamo: Research Funding; Stemline Therapeutics, Inc.: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Takeda: Research Funding; PrECOG: Research Funding; Pfizer: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company, Research Funding; Karyopharm: Research Funding; Incyte: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Gamida Cell Ltd.: Research Funding; FujiFilm: Research Funding; Samus: Research Funding; Trovagene: Research Funding; Daiichi-Sankyo: Research Funding; Constellation Pharmaceuticals: Research Funding; BMS/Celgene: Consultancy, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Abbvie: Research Funding; Actuate: Research Funding; Arog: Research Funding; Delta-Fly: Research Funding; Amgen: Consultancy, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company, Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Agios: Consultancy, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Novartis: Consultancy, Research Funding; Jazz: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Elevate: Research Funding; Ono-UK: Consultancy, Research Funding; Onconova: Research Funding; Deciphera: Research Funding; Astellas: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Forma: Research Funding; Genentech-Roche: Research Funding; Bio: Research Funding; Sanofi: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Pharma: Consultancy; Johnson & Johnson: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company; Biomed Valley Discoveries: Research Funding; Eli Lilly: Research Funding; ASH foundation: Other: Chair-unpaid; Sellas: Research Funding; Ono: Consultancy; Incyte: Consultancy; Ariad: Research Funding; AstraZeneca: Consultancy; Kaiser Permanente: Consultancy; Cyclacel: Research Funding; MedImmune: Research Funding; Ambit: Research Funding; Leukemia & Lymphoma Society: Research Funding; Bluebird Bio: Research Funding; Boehringer-Ingleheim: Research Funding; Cellerant: Research Funding; CTI Biopharma: Research Funding; Janssen: Research Funding; Kura Oncology: Research Funding; Pharmacyclics: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Millennium: Research Funding; National Marrow Donor Program: Research Funding; NIH: Research Funding; Onyx: Research Funding; Pharmamar: Research Funding; UC Davis: Research Funding; UCSD: Research Funding; Evidera: Consultancy; NCI: Consultancy; Novartis: Speakers Bureau. Olin: Astellas: Honoraria, Research Funding; Daiichi Sankyo: Research Funding; Genentech: Research Funding; Pfizer: Research Funding; Cellectis: Research Funding; Amgen: Honoraria; Abbvie: Honoraria; Actinium: Honoraria. Foran: taiho: Honoraria; syros: Honoraria; kura: Research Funding; boehringer ingelheim: Research Funding; sanofi aventis: Honoraria; trillium: Research Funding; aptose: Research Funding; abbvie: Research Funding; pfizer: Honoraria; gamida: Honoraria; actinium: Research Funding; takeda: Research Funding; certara: Honoraria; OncLive: Honoraria; bms: Honoraria; revolution medicine: Honoraria; servier: Honoraria; novartis: Honoraria; h3bioscience: Research Funding; aprea: Research Funding; sellas: Research Funding; stemline: Research Funding. Litzow: AbbVie: Research Funding; Jazz: Other: Advisory Board; Pluristem: Research Funding; Amgen: Research Funding; Omeros: Other: Advisory Board; Actinium: Research Funding; Astellas: Research Funding; Biosight: Other: Data monitoring committee. Lin: AbbVie, Aptevo Therapeutics, Astellas Pharma, Bio-Path Holdings, Celgene, Celyad, Genentech-Roche, Gilead Sciences, Incyte, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Novartis, Ono Pharmaceutical, Pfizer, Prescient Therapeutics, Seattle Genetics, Tolero, Trovagene: Research Funding. Patel: BMS-Celgene, Agios: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Peerview: Honoraria; Aptevo Therapeutics: Research Funding. Foster: Bellicum Pharmaceuticals: Research Funding; Macrogenics: Research Funding; Rafael Pharmaceuticals: Research Funding; Macrogenics: Consultancy; Daiichi Sankyo: Consultancy; Agios: Consultancy. Cogle: Aptevo therapeutics: Research Funding; Celgene: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Vergilio: Foundation Medicine: Current Employment. Gana: The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society: Consultancy; Bausch: Current holder of individual stocks in a privately-held company. Druker: VB Therapeutics: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; The RUNX1 Research Program: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; GRAIL: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company; Third Coast Therapeutics: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; EnLiven: Consultancy, Research Funding; Iterion Therapeutics: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Recludix Pharma, Inc.: Consultancy; Pfizer: Research Funding; Merck & Co: Patents & Royalties; Cepheid: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis Pharmaceuticals: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Patents & Royalties; Nemucore Medical Innovations, Inc.: Consultancy; Bristol-Myers Squibb: Research Funding; Blueprint Medicines: Consultancy, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Aptose Therapeutics: Consultancy, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Amgen: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; ALLCRON: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Aileron: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Vincerx Pharma: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Vivid Biosciences: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Byrd: Novartis, Trillium, Astellas, AstraZeneca, Pharmacyclics, Syndax: Consultancy, Honoraria; Vincerx Pharmaceuticals: Current equity holder in publicly-traded company, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Newave: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Levine: Auron: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Incyte: Consultancy; Ajax: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; C4 Therapeutics: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Isoplexis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Astellas: Consultancy; Celgene: Research Funding; Roche: Honoraria, Research Funding; Zentalis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Prelude: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Mission Bio: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Amgen: Honoraria; Janssen: Consultancy; Gilead: Honoraria; Morphosys: Consultancy; Imago: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; QIAGEN: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Lilly: Honoraria. Borate: Pfizer: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Blueprint Medicine: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Genentech: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: Advisory Board; AbbVie: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Jazz Pharma: Research Funding; Daiichi-Sankyo: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Takeda: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Astellas: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; incyte: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Rampal: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Galecto, Inc.: Consultancy; Promedior: Consultancy.

Welcome to the fourth issue of volume 43 of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ 43:4, 2019). The first article is authored by Jessica Mozersky, Heidi Walsh, Meredith Parsons, Tristan McIntosh, Kari Baldwin, and James M. DuBois – all located at the Bioethics Research Center, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri in USA. They ask the question “Are we ready to share qualitative research data?”, with the subtitle “Knowledge and preparedness among qualitative researchers, IRB Members, and data repository curators.” The subtitle indicates that their research includes a survey of key personnel related to scientific data sharing. The report is obtained through semi-structured in-depth interviews with 30 data repository curators, 30 qualitative researchers, and 30 IRB staff members in the USA. IRB stands for Institutional Review Board, which in other countries might be called research ethics committee or similar. There is generally an increasing trend towards data sharing and open science, but qualitative data are rarely shared. The dilemma behind this reluctance to share is exemplified by health data where qualitative methods explore sensitive topics. The sensitivity leads to protection of confidentiality, which hinders keeping sufficient contextual detail for secondary analyses. You could add that protection of confidentiality is a much bigger task in qualitative data, where sensitive information can be hidden in every corner of the data, that consequently must be fine-combed, while with quantitative data most decisions concerning confidentiality can be made at the level of variables. The reporting in the article gives insights into the differences between the three stakeholder groups. An often-found answer among researchers is that data sharing is associated with quantitative data, while IRB members have little practice with qualitative. Among curators, about half had curated qualitative data, but many only worked with quantitative data. In general, qualitative data sharing lacks guidance and standards. The second article also raises a question: “How many ways can we teach data literacy?” We are now in Asia with a connection to the USA. The author Yun Dai is working at the Library of New York University Shanghai, where they have explored many ways to teach data literacy to undergraduate students. These initiatives, described in the article, included workshops and in-class instruction - which tempted students by offering up-to-date technology, through online casebooks of topics in the data lifecycle, to event series with appealing names like “Lying with Data.” The event series had a marketing mascot - a “Lying with Data” Pinocchio - and sessions on being fooled by advertisements and getting the truth out of opinion surveys. Data literacy has a resemblance to information literacy and in that perspective, data literacy is defined as “critical thinking applied to evaluating data sources and formats, and interpreting and communicating findings,” while statistical literacy is “the ability to evaluate statistical information as evidence.” The article presents the approaches and does not conclude on the question, “How many?” No readers will be surprised by the missing answer, and I am certain readers will enjoy the ideas of the article and the marketing focus. With the last article “Examining barriers for establishing a national data service,” the author Janez Štebe takes us to Europe. Janez Štebe is head of the social science data archives (Arhiv Družboslovnih Podatkov) at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) is a distributed European social science data infrastructure for access to research data. CESSDA has many - but not all - European countries as members. The focus is on the situation in 20 non-CESSDA member European countries, with emerging and immature data archive services being developed through such projects as the CESSDA Strengthening and Widening (SaW 2016 and 2017) and CESSDA Widening Activities (WA 2018). By identifying and comparing gaps and differences, a group of countries at a similar level may consider following similar best practice examples to achieve a more mature and supportive open scientific data ecosystem. Like the earlier articles, this article provides good references to earlier literature and description of previous studies in the area. In this project 22 countries were selected, all CESSDA non-members, and interviewees among social science researchers and data librarians were contacted with an e-mail template between October 2018 and January 2019. The article brings results and discussion of the national data sharing culture and data infrastructure. Yes, there is a lack of money! However, it is the process of gradually establishing a robust data infrastructure that is believed to impact the growth of a data sharing culture and improve the excellence and the efficiency of research in general. Submissions of papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. We welcome input from IASSIST conferences or other conferences and workshops, from local presentations or papers especially written for the IQ. When you are preparing such a presentation, give a thought to turning your one-time presentation into a lasting contribution. Doing that after the event also gives you the opportunity of improving your work after feedback. We encourage you to login or create an author login to https://www.iassistquarterly.com (our Open Journal System application). We permit authors to “deep link” into the IQ as well as to deposit the paper in your local repository. Chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is also much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the limited number of session participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST Quarterly website at https://www.iassistquarterly.com. Authors are very welcome to take a look at the instructions and layout: https://www.iassistquarterly.com/index.php/iassist/about/submissions Authors can also contact me directly via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk. Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor(s) I will also be delighted to hear from you. Karsten Boye Rasmussen - December 2019

ABSTRAK Penurunan profit bisnis kecil akibat implikasi ekonomi pasca pandemi COVID-19. Persoalan struktur permodalan menjadi kendala dalam mempertahankan dan meningkatkan usahanya secara terus menerus seiring kerubahan zaman. Koperasi Syariah sebagai salah satu lembaga keuangan Islam yang keislaman lebih dekat secara eksistensi maupun teritorial dengan masyarakat tingkat bawah sehingga menjadi alternatif pengembangan usaha masyarakat secara syariah sesuai persyaratan yang diberikan. Studi ini bertujuan untuk untuk menganalisis pengaruh literasi keuangan syariah dalam sikap, pengaruh sosial dan self-efficacy terhadap perilaku pemanfaatan produk koperasi syariah di Indonesia. Studi kuantitatif survey online dengan melibatkan 280 calon anggota koperasi syariah yang membutuhkan pembiayaan dan merupakan pemilik UMKM dijalankan dengan teknik analisis SEM PLS. Hasil studi menunjukkan pengaruh literasi keuangan terhadap sikap, pengaruh sosial dan self-efficacy lalu dilanjutkan arah jalur dukungan hipotesis terhadap niat untuk memilih Koperasi Syariah sebagai solusi kebutuhan finansial UMKM ditemukan. Strategi manajerial khususnya pemasaran dikembangkan dengan mempertimbangkan efek sikap positif, pengaruh sosial dan efikasi diri calon anggota sebagai pemilik bisnis atau produk keuangan syariah yang akan mereka tawarkan kepada pelanggan mereka akan berkontribusi pada pertumbuhan sektor UMKM khususnya UMKM Generasi Millenial dan UMKM Hijau di Indonesia melalui upaya promosi dan kerjasama. Kata Kunci: ASE Model, Ekonomi Islam, Koperasi Syariah, Pemberdayaan, UMKM. ABSTRACT The decline in small business profits due to the post-COVID-19 pandemic economy. The issue of capital structure is an obstacle in maintaining and increasing development continuously in line with the changing times. Sharia cooperatives as one of the Islamic financial institutions are closer in existence and territorially to the lower level of society so that they become an alternative for community business development in accordance with the requirements given. This study aims to analyze the effect of Islamic financial literacy on attitudes, social influence and self-efficacy on the application of Islamic cooperative products in Indonesia. Quantitative study of online surveys involving 280 prospective members of Islamic cooperatives who need financing and are MSME owners carried out with the PLS SEM analysis technique. The results of the study show the effect of financial literacy on attitudes, social influence and self-efficacy, then choosing the direction of hypothesis support for the intention to find Islamic Cooperatives as a solution to the financial needs of MSMEs. Managerial strategies especially marketing that are developed taking into account the effects of positive attitudes, social influence and self-efficacy of prospective members as owners or Islamic financial products that they will offer to their customers will increase the growth of the MSME sector, especially Millennial Generation MSMEs and Green MSMEs in Indonesia through promotional efforts and cooperation. Keywords: ASE Model, Islamic Economics, Sharia Cooperatives, Empowerment, MSMEs. REFERENCES Abourrig, A. (2021). Social influence in predicting Islamic banking acceptance: Evidence from Morocco. International Journal of Accounting, Finance, Auditing, 2(2), 42–56. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4641472 Ajzen, I. (1991a). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T Ajzen, I. (1991b). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T Al-Awlaqi, M. A., & Aamer, A. M. (2022a). Islamic financial literacy and Islamic banks selection: an exploratory study using multiple correspondence analysis on banks’ small business customers. International Journal of Emerging Markets. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOEM-09-2021-1354 Al-Awlaqi, M. A., & Aamer, A. M. (2022b). Islamic financial literacy and Islamic banks selection: an exploratory study using multiple correspondence analysis on banks’ small business customers. International Journal of Emerging Markets. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOEM-09-2021-1354 Albaity, M., & Rahman, M. (2019). The intention to use Islamic banking: An exploratory study to measure Islamic financial literacy. International Journal of Emerging Markets, 14(5), 988–1012. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOEM-05-2018-0218 Albashir, W. A., Zainuddin, Y., Krupasindhu Panigrahi, S., & Pahang, M. (2018). The acceptance of Islamic banking products in Libya: A theory of planned behavior approach. International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, 8(3), 105–111. Ali, H. (2019). Purchase decision and repurchase models: Product quality and process analysis (Case study of house ownership credit financing in permata sharia bank Jakarta). Scholars Bulletin, 05(09), 526–535. https://doi.org/10.36348/sb.2019.v05i09.006 Atal, N. U., Iranmanesh, M., Hashim, F., & Foroughi, B. (2022). Drivers of intention to use Murabaha financing: religiosity as moderator. Journal of Islamic Marketing, 13(3), 740–762. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIMA-07-2019-0147 Berakon, I., Aji, H. M., & Hafizi, M. R. (2022). Impact of digital Sharia banking systems on cash-waqf among Indonesian Muslim youth. Journal of Islamic Marketing, 13(7), 1551–1573. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIMA-11-2020-0337 Budiono, A. (2017). Penerapan prinsip syariah pada lembaga keuangan syariah. Law and Justice, 2(1), 54–65. https://doi.org/10.23917/laj.v2i1.4337 Cristea, M., & Gheorghiu, A. (2016). Attitude, perceived behavioral control, and intention to adopt risky behaviors. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 43, 157–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2016.10.004 Daradkah, D., Aldaher, A. A., & Shinaq, H. R. (2020). Islamic financial literacy: Evidence from Jordan. Transition Studies Review, 27(2), 109–123. https://doi.org/10.14665/1614-4007-27-2-009 De Vries, H., & Mudde, A. N. (1998a). Predicting stage transitions for smoking cessation applying the attitude-social influence-efficacy model. Psychology and Health, 13(2), 369–385. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870449808406757 De Vries, H., & Mudde, A. N. (1998b). Predicting stage transitions for smoking cessation applying the attitude-social influence-efficacy model. Psychology and Health, 13(2), 369–385. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870449808406757 Dewi, M. K., & Ferdian, I. R. (2021). Enhancing Islamic financial literacy through community-based workshops: a transtheoretical model. Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research, 12(5), 729–747. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIABR-08-2020-0261 Dietrich, A. M., Kuester, K., Müller, G. J., & Schoenle, R. (2022). News and uncertainty about COVID-19: Survey evidence and short-run economic impact. Journal of Monetary Economics, 129, S35–S51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2022.02.004 Duong, T., & Duc Le, N. (2021). PLS-SEM approach in measuring the impact of influencing factors on user’s perceived security and trust in e-payment – The case of rural areas in Vietnam. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications (IJSRP), 11(4), 357–364. https://doi.org/10.29322/ijsrp.11.04.2021.p11249 Dwi Hernanik, N., & Pratikto, H. (2022). Religiusity and bank products and their relationship with decision making in micro small medium business funding in PT Bank Muamalat Indonesia. International Journal of Science, Technology & Management, 3(4), 1202–1210. https://doi.org/10.46729/ijstm.v3i4.532 Etikan, I. (2016). Comparison of Convenience Sampling and Purposive Sampling. American Journal of Theoretical and Applied Statistics, 5(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajtas.20160501.11 Farrell, L., Fry, T. R. L., & Risse, L. (2016). The significance of financial self-efficacy in explaining women’s personal finance behaviour. Journal of Economic Psychology, 54, 85–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2015.07.001 Fauzi, R. U. A., Saputra, A., & Ningrum, I. I. P. (2022). The effect of religiosity, profit and loss sharing, and promotion on consumer intention to financing in Islamic bank toward trust as an intervening variable. Jurnal Studi Ekonomi Dan Bisnis Islam, 8(1), 1–14. Fessler, P., Silgoner, M., & Weber, R. (2020). Financial knowledge, attitude and behavior: Evidence from the Austrian survey of financial literacy. Empirica, 47(4), 929–947. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10663-019-09465-2 Firdaus, M. S. (2022). Pemberdayaan pesantren melalui pendirian koperasi syariah dalam meningkatkan ekonomi masyarakat empowering islamic boarding school through the establishment of sharia cooperatives in imroving the economy community koperasi simpan pinjam pembiayaan syariah. ALMUJTAMAE: Jurnal Pengabdian Masyarakat, 2(1), 29–36. https://doi.org/10.30997/almujtamae.v2i1.2952 Gijsbers, B., Mesters, I., Knottnerus, J. A., & Van Schayck, C. P. (2006a). Factors associated with the initiation of breastfeeding in asthmatic families: The attitude–social influence–self-efficacy model. Breastfeeding Medicine, 1(4), 236–246. https://doi.org/10.1089/BFM.2006.1.236 Gijsbers, B., Mesters, I., Knottnerus, J. A., & Van Schayck, C. P. (2006b). Factors associated with the initiation of breastfeeding in asthmatic families: The attitude–social influence–self-efficacy model. Breastfeeding Medicine, 1(4), 236–246. https://doi.org/10.1089/BFM.2006.1.236 Hair, J. F., Risher, J. J., Sarstedt, M., & Ringle, C. M. (2019). When to use and how to report the results of PLS-SEM. European Business Review, 31(1), 2–24. https://doi.org/10.1108/EBR-11-2018-0203 Hair, J., Hollingsworth, C. L., Randolph, A. B., & Chong, A. Y. L. (2017). An updated and expanded assessment of PLS-SEM in information systems research. Industrial Management and Data Systems, 117(3), 442–458. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-04-2016-0130 Hair Jr., J. F., Matthews, L. M., Matthews, R. L., & Sarstedt, M. (2017). PLS-SEM or CB-SEM: updated guidelines on which method to use. International Journal of Multivariate Data Analysis, 1(2), 107. https://doi.org/10.1504/ijmda.2017.10008574 Hakim, L., & Kurnia, A. (2022). Tafsir riba di media sosial perspektif Roy Shakti dan Arli Kurnia. EKOMA: Jurnal Ekonomi, Manajemen, Akuntansi, 1(2), 312–325. Hartono, H., & Ardini, R. (2022). The effect of opportunity recognition and organization capability on SME performance in Indonesia moderated by business model innovation. The Winners, 23(1), 35–41. https://doi.org/10.21512/tw.v23i1.6932 Hasanah, U., & Lubis, S. D. (2022). Penerapan asas kebebasan berkontrak dalam akad pembiayaan mudharabah pada bank syariah Indonesia kantor cabang pembantu Asahan. Taqmin: Jurnal Syariah Dan Hukum, 11(1), 81–92. https://doi.org/10.37893/jbh.v11i1.683 Hayati, S. R. (2019). Strategi bank syariah dalam meningkatkan literasi keuangan syariah pada masyarakat (Studi Kasus pada BPRS Madina Mandiri Sejahtera). JESI (Jurnal Ekonomi Syariah Indonesia), 8(2), 129. https://doi.org/10.21927/jesi.2018.8(2).129-137 Hendrik, S., Iwan, T., Dedi, M. A., & Zaki, B. (2018). Evidence from Indonesia: Is it true that mudharabah financing and micro business financing are at high risk for sharia banking business? RJOAS, 6(June), 197–205. Hikmawati, T. S., & Muharam, H. (2022). The capital market response to the information content of the announcement of Indonesia entering a recession in 2020 and free of recession in 2021 in the covid-19 pandemic. Budapest International Research and Critics Institute (BIRCI-Journal): Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(2), 16019–16027. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.33258/birci.v5i2.5518 16019 Hoque, M. N., Rahman, M. K., Said, J., Begum, F., & Hossain, M. M. (2022). What factors influence customer attitudes and mindsets towards the use of services and products of Islamic banks in Bangladesh? Sustainability (Switzerland), 14(8). https://doi.org/10.3390/su14084703 Hutomo Mukti, H. (2020). Development of Indonesian sharia banks with Malaysia comparation method (Study of history, products and legal assets). Lambung Mangkurat Law Journal, 5(1), 75. https://doi.org/10.32801/lamlaj.v5i1.140 Im, I., Hong, S., & Kang, M. S. (2011). An international comparison of technology adoption: Testing the UTAUT model. Information & Management, 48(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.IM.2010.09.001 Irwansyah, S., & Alam, A. P. (2022). Analisis penggunaan akad pada produk pembiayaan multijasa pada PT. Bank Sumut Syariah KCP Stabat. Jurna Islahiyah, 1. Izuma, K. (2017). The neural bases of social influence on valuation and behavior. In Decision neuroscience: An integrative perspective (pp. 199–209). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-805308-9.00016-6 Jaffar, M. A., & Musa, R. (2014). Determinants of attitude towards Islamic financing among halal-certified micro and SMEs: A preliminary investigation. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 130, 135–144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.04.017 Jaffar, M. A., & Musa, R. (2016). Determinants of attitude and intention towards Islamic financing adoption among non-users. Fifth International Conference on Marketing and Retailing, 37(16), 227–233. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2212-5671(16)30118-6 Khairi, M. S., & Baridwan, Z. (2015). An empirical study on organizational acceptance accounting information systems in sharia banking. The International Journal of Accounting and Business Society, 23(1), 19. https://doi.org/10.1109/hicss.2000.926665 Lechner, L., & De Vries, H. (1995a). Starting participation in an employee fitness program: Attitudes, social influence, and self-efficacy. Preventive Medicine, 24(6), 627–633. https://doi.org/10.1006/PMED.1995.1098 Lechner, L., & De Vries, H. (1995b). Starting participation in an employee fitness program: Attitudes, social influence, and self-efficacy. Preventive Medicine, 24(6), 627–633. https://doi.org/10.1006/PMED.1995.1098 Leguina, A. (2015). A primer on partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 38(2), 220–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727x.2015.1005806 Madeira, C., & Margaretic, P. (2022). The impact of financial literacy on the quality of self-reported financial information. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 34, 100660. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2022.100660 Mamman, M., Ogunbado, A. F., & Abu-bakr, A. S. (2016). Factors influencing customer’s behavioral intention to adopt Islamic banking in Northern Nigeria: A proposed framework. Journal of Economics and Finance, 7(1), 51–55. https://doi.org/10.9790/5933-07135155 Mardian, S. (2019). Tingkat kepatuhan syariah di lembaga keuangan syariah. Jurnal Akuntansi Dan Keuangan Islam, 3(1), 57–68. https://doi.org/10.35836/jakis.v3i1.41 Memon, M. A., T., R., Cheah, J.-H., Ting, H., Chuah, F., & Cham, T. H. (2021). PLS-SEM statistical programs: A Review. Journal of Applied Structural Equation Modeling, 5(1), i–xiv. https://doi.org/10.47263/jasem.5(1)06 Mindra, R., Bananuka, J., Kaawaase, T., Namaganda, R., & Teko, J. (2022). Attitude and Islamic banking adoption: Moderating effects of pricing of conventional bank products and social influence. Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research, 13(3), 534–567. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIABR-02-2021-0068 Mirzaei, M., & Buer, T. (2022). First results on financial literacy in Oman. Managerial Finance, 48(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1108/MF-09-2021-0456 Mukti, T., Shohiha, T. A., Garbo, A., & Latifah, S. (2022a). The effect of sharia financial literacy on the decision of the use of service products in the sharia pawn in Yogyakarta. The 3rd International Conference on Advance & Scientific Innovation (ICASI) Volume 2022 Research, 2022(1), 273–284. https://doi.org/10.18502/kss.v7i10.11365 Mukti, T., Shohiha, T. A., Garbo, A., & Latifah, S. (2022b). The effect of sharia financial literacy on the decision of the use of service products in the sharia pawn in Yogyakarta. The 3rd International Conference on Advance & Scientific Innovation (ICASI) Volume 2022 Research, 2022(1), 273–284. https://doi.org/10.18502/kss.v7i10.11365 Nimfa, D. T., Abdul Wahab, S., Shaharudin Abdul Latiff, A., & Abd Wahab, S. (2021). Theories underlying sustainable growth of small and medium enterprises. African Journal of Emerging Issues (AJOEI). Online ISSN, 3, 43–66. Nugroho, A. P., Hidayat, A., & Kusuma, H. (2017a). The influence of religiosity and self-efficacy on the saving behavior of the Islamic banks. Banks and Bank Systems, 12(3), 35–47. https://doi.org/10.21511/bbs.12(3).2017.03 Nugroho, A. P., Hidayat, A., & Kusuma, H. (2017b). The influence of religiosity and self-efficacy on the saving behavior of the Islamic banks. Banks and Bank Systems, 12(3), 35–47. https://doi.org/10.21511/bbs.12(3).2017.03 Ouachani, S., Belhassine, O., & Kammoun, A. (2021). Measuring financial literacy: A literature review. Managerial Finance, 47(2), 266–281. https://doi.org/10.1108/MF-04-2019-0175 Purwantini, A. H., Noor Athief, F. H., & Waharini, F. M. (2020). Indonesian consumers’ intention of adopting Islamic financial technology services. Shirkah: Journal of Economics and Business, 5(2), 171. https://doi.org/10.22515/shirkah.v5i2.304 Purwanto, A., & Sudargini, Y. (2021). Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis for social and management research: A literature review. Journal of Industrial Engineering & Management Research, 2(4), 114–123. Rahman, S. A., Tajudin, A., & Tajuddin, A. F. A. (2018a). Determinant factors of Islamic financial literacy in Malaysia. American Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Research, 2(10), 125–132. Rahman, S. A., Tajudin, A., & Tajuddin, A. F. A. (2018b). Determinant factors of Islamic financial literacy in Malaysia. American Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Research, 2(10), 125–132. Rai, N., & Thapa, B. (2015). A study on purposive sampling method in research. In Kathmandu Publisher (1st ed.). Kathmandu School of Law. Rasheed, R., & Siddiqui, S. H. (2022). SMEs behavioral intention towards usage of financial products: A comparative study of Islamic and conventional Banks in Pakistan. Sustainable Business and Society in Emerging Countries, 4(1), 141–150. Razak, D. A., & Abduh, M. (2012a). Customers’ attitude towards diminishing partnership home financing in Islamic banking. American Journal of Applied Sciences, 9(4), 593–599. Razak, D. A., & Abduh, M. (2012b). Customers’ attitude towards diminishing partnership home financing in Islamic banking. American Journal of Applied Sciences, 9(4), 593–599. Rigdon, E. E., Sarstedt, M., & Ringle, C. M. (2017). On comparing results from CB-SEM and PLS-SEM: Five perspectives and five recommendations. Marketing ZFP, 39(3), 4–16. https://doi.org/10.15358/0344-1369-2017-3-4 Rini, E. E. D. S. (2022). Pengaruh promosi, penerapan prinsip syariah dan bagi hasil terhadap keputusan menjadi bank BNI syariah cabang Pasuruan. An-Nisbah: Jurnal Perbankan Syariah, 33(1), 1–12. Rokhman, W., & Abduh, M. (2020). Antecedents of SMEs’ satisfaction and loyalty towards Islamic microfinance: Evidence from Central Java, Indonesia. Journal of Islamic Marketing, 11(6), 1327–1338. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIMA-05-2018-0090 Safe’i, A. (2012). Koperasi syariah: Tinjauan terhadap kedudukan dan peranannya dalam pemberdayaan ekonomi kerakyatan. Media Syariah, 14(1), 39–62. Sarstedt, M., Hair, J. F., Cheah, J. H., Becker, J. M., & Ringle, C. M. (2019). How to specify, estimate, and validate higher-order constructs in PLS-SEM. Australasian Marketing Journal, 27(3), 197–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ausmj.2019.05.003 Saygılı, M., Durmuşkaya, S., Sütütemiz, N., & Ersoy, A. Y. (2022a). Determining intention to choose Islamic financial products using the attitude–social influence–self-efficacy (ASE) model: the case of Turkey. International Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Finance and Management. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMEFM-11-2020-0569 Saygılı, M., Durmuşkaya, S., Sütütemiz, N., & Ersoy, A. Y. (2022b). Determining intention to choose Islamic financial products using the attitude–social influence–self-efficacy (ASE) model: the case of Turkey. International Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Finance and Management. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMEFM-11-2020-0569 Sevriana, L., Febrian, E., Anwar, M., & Ahmad Faisal, Y. (2022). A proposition to implement inclusive Islamic financial planning in Indonesia through bibliometric analysis. Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIABR-01-2022-0022 Shabrina, Z., Yuliati, L. N., & Simanjuntak, M. (2018). The effects of religiosity, pricing and corporate image on the attitude and the intention to use sharia micro financing. Indonesian Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship, 4(2), 197–206. https://doi.org/10.17358/ijbe.4.2.197 Sitepu, C. F., & Hasyim, H. (2018). Perkembangan ekonomi koperasi di indonesia. Niagawan, 7(2), 59–68. https://doi.org/10.24114/niaga.v7i2.10751 Srisusilawati, P., Malik, Z. A., Silviany, I. Y., & Eprianti, N. (2021). The roles of self-efficacy and sharia financial literacy to SMEs performance: business model as an intermediate variable. F1000Research, 10(May), 1310. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.76001.1 Sumiyati, Y., Januarita, R., Ramli, T. A., & Yusdiansyah, E. (2021a). Konstruksi hukum terhadap penetapan bunga tinggi pada investasi yang diselenggarakan koperasi simpan pinjam. Jurnal Magister Hukum Udayana (Udayana Master Law Journal), 10(2), 385. https://doi.org/10.24843/jmhu.2021.v10.i02.p14 Sumiyati, Y., Januarita, R., Ramli, T. A., & Yusdiansyah, E. (2021b). Konstruksi hukum terhadap penetapan bunga tinggi pada investasi yang diselenggarakan koperasi simpan pinjam. Jurnal Magister Hukum Udayana (Udayana Master Law Journal), 10(2), 385. https://doi.org/10.24843/jmhu.2021.v10.i02.p14 Syamsiyah, N., Syahrir, A. M., & Susanto, I. (2019). Peran koperasi syariah baitul tamwil muhammadiyah terhadap pemberdayaan usaha kecil dan menengah di Bandar Lampung. Al Amin: Jurnal Kajian Ilmu Dan Budaya Islam, 2(1), 63–73. https://doi.org/10.36670/alamin.v2i1.17 Takidah, E., & Kassim, S. (2021). Determinants of Islamic financial inclusion in Indonesia: A demand-side analysis. Journal of Islamic Finance, 10(2), 38–52. Venkatesh, V. (2022). Adoption and use of AI tools: A research agenda grounded in UTAUT. Annals of Operations Research, 308(1–2), 641–652. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-020-03918-9 Vidia Khairunnisa, B., & Hendratmi, A. (2019). The influence of product knowledge and attitude towards intention in mudharabah funding products in sharia banks in Mataram. KnE Social Sciences, 3(13), 663. https://doi.org/10.18502/kss.v3i13.4239 Widityani, S. F., Faturohman, T., Rahadi, R. A., & Yulianti, Y. (2020). Do socio-demographic characteristics and Islamic financial literacy matter for selecting Islamic financial products among college students in Indonesia? Journal of Islamic Monetary Economics and Finance, 6(1), 51–76. https://doi.org/10.21098/jimf.v6i1.1057 Yuniar, A., Talli, A. H., & Kurniati, K. (2021). Bisnis koperasi syariah di Indonesia. Al-Azhar Journal of Islamic Economics, 3(2), 79–88. https://doi.org/10.37146/ajie.V3i2.103 Zaman, Z., Mehmood, B., Aftab, R., Shahid, M., & Ameen, Y. (2017). Role of Islamic financial literacy in the adoption of Islamic banking services: An empirical evidence from Lahore, Pakistan. Journal of Islamic Business and Management (JIBM), 7(2), 230–247. https://doi.org/10.26501/jibm/2017.0702-006 Ziky, M., & Daouah, R. (2019). Exploring small and medium enterprises’ perceptions towards Islamic banking products in Morocco. International Journal of Economics and Finance, 11(10), 106. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijef.v11n10p106

ABSTRAK Strategi penghimpunan shadaqah di era modern harus menyesuaikan dengan kemajuan teknologi dan preferensi generasi milenial. Kitabisa.com merupakan platform donasi berbasis online yang terus mengalami pertumbuhan pengumpulan donasi dan banyak digunakan masyarakat muslim milenial. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk menganalisis faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi keputusan penggunaan platform kitabisa.com melalui pendekatan Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) dan Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Penelitian ini menggunakan teknik sampling purposive sampling. Proses pengkolektifan data dilakukan melalui pengisian kuesioner oleh 270 responden, dimana responden merupakan masyarakat muslim milenial yang pernah menggunakan platform kitabisa.com. Penelitian ini dianalisis dengan menggunakan Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) melalui aplikasi SmartPLS versi 3.0. Hasil analisis memperlihatkan bahwa variabel yang diadopsi dari TPB yaitu Perceived Behavioral Control (PBC), variabel sikap dan norma subjektif berpengaruh secara positif serta signifikan terhadap minat penggunaan platform kitabisa.com. Variabel yang diadopsi dari TAM yaitu Perceived ease of use memiliki pengaruh positif dan signifikan, sedangkan Perceived usefulness tidak berpengaruh terhadap minat penggunaan platform kitabisa.com. Kemudian, minat menggunakan platform kitabisa.com memiliki pengaruh positif serta signifikan terhadap keputusan penggunaan platform kitabisa.com. Implikasi dari penelitian ini adalah agar lembaga penghimpun sedekah online memiliki evaluasi atau penilaian untuk memperbaiki dan mengembangkan platform sedekah berbasis online bagi masyarakat muslim milenial maupun masyarakat secara umum yang akan melakukan sedekah secara online. Kata Kunci: Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Minat Penggunaan, Keputusan Penggunaan. ABSTRACT The strategy of collecting shadaqah (almsgiving) must be aligned with technological developments and millennial societies. Kitabisa.com is an online shadaqah platform that continues to grow in collecting shadaqahs and is widely used by the millennial Muslim society. The purpose of this research was to analyze the factors that influence the use behavior of kitabisa.com with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) approaches. The sampling technique in this study was taken using purposive sampling. The data collection process was carried out through filling out questionnaires by 270 respondents, of which the respondents were millennial who had used the Kitabisa.com platform. The analytical technique used is Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) using the SmartPLS version 3.0 application. The results of the analysis show that the variables adopted from TPB, namely Perceived Behavioral Control (PBC), attitudes towards use and subjective norms have a positive and significant influence on intention to use the kitabisa.com platform. While the variables adopted from TAM, Perceived ease of use has a positive and significant effect, while Perceived usefulness has no influence on intention to use the kitabisa.com platform. Then, intention to use the kitabisa.com platform has a positive and significant impact on the use behavior the kitabisa.com platform. The implication of this research is that online shadaqah collecting institutions have an evaluation or assessment to improve and develop an online-based shadaqah platform for millennial Muslim communities and the general public who will do shadaqah online. Keywords: Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Intention to Use, Behavior of use. REFERENCES Abdullah, P. M. (2015). Metode penelitian kuantitatif. Aswaja Pressindo. Aji, H. M., Albari, A., Muthohar, M., Sumadi, S., Sigit, M., Muslichah, I., & Hidayat, A. (2021). Investigating the determinants of online infaq intention during the COVID-19 pandemic: an insight from Indonesia. Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research, 12(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIABR-05-2020-0136 Ajzen, I. (1985). From intentions to actions: A theory of planned behavior. In Action Control. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-69746-3_2 Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T Ajzen, I. (2020). The theory of planned behavior: Frequently asked questions. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 2(4), 314-324. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.195 Amalia, S. N. A. (2018). Faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi minat individu terhadap financial technology (Fintech) syariah (Paytren) sebagai salah satu alat transaksi pembayaran (Pendekatan technology acceptance model (TAM) dan theory of planned behavior (TPB). Iqtishaduna, 41(1), 64-79. https://doi.org/10.20414/iqtishaduna.v9i1.687 APJII. (2019). Buletin APJII Edisi-40 2019. 6. Retrieved from https://apjii.or.id/survei Astuti, W., & Prijanto, B. (2021). Faktor yang memengaruhi minat muzaki dalam membayar zakat melalui kitabisa.com: Pendekatan technology acceptance model dan theory of planned behavior. Al-Muzara’Ah, 9(1), 21–44. https://doi.org/10.29244/jam.9.1.21-44 Bhattacherjee, A. (2000). Acceptance of e-commerce services: The case of electronic brokerages. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Part A: Systems and Humans, 30(4). https://doi.org/10.1109/3468.852435 BPS. (2021). Hasil Sensus Penduduk 2020. Berita Resmi Statistik, 16(7). Chen, Y., Dai, R., Yao, J., & Li, Y. (2019). Donate time or money? The determinants of donation intention in online crowdfunding. Sustainability (Switzerland), 11(16). https://doi.org/10.3390/su11164269 Chuang, L.-M., Liu, C.-C., & Kao, H.-K. (2016). The adoption of fintech service: TAM perspective. International Journal of Management and Administrative Sciences (IJMAS), 3(7), 1–15. Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly: Management Information Systems, 13(3). https://doi.org/10.2307/249008 Djimesah, I. E., Zhao, H., Okine, A. N. D., Li, Y., Duah, E., & Kissi Mireku, K. (2022). Analyzing the technology of acceptance model of Ghanaian crowdfunding stakeholders. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 175(2006), 121323. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2021.121323 Dzulfikar, M. Z., Santosa, P. B., & Gunanto, E. Y. A. (2022). Analysis of millennial muslims preferences on the crowdfunding platform. Indonesian Interdisciplinary Journal of Sharia Economics (IIJSE), 5(1), 24–47. https://doi.org/10.31538/iijse.v5i1.1796 Ferdinand, A. (2011). Metode penelitian manajemen pedoman penelitian untuk penulisan skripsi tesis dan disertai ilmu manajemen. Universitas Diponegoro. Ginantra, N. L. W. S. R., Simarmata, J., Purba, R. A., Tojiri, M. Y., Duwila, A. A., Siregar, M. N. H., Nainggolan, L. E., Marit, E. L., Sudirman, A., & Siswanti, I. (2020). Teknologi finansial: Sistem finansial berbasis teknologi di era digital. Yayasan Kita Menulis. Islam, M. T., & Khan, M. T. A. (2021). Factors influencing the adoption of crowdfunding in Bangladesh: A study of start-up entrepreneurs. Information Development, 37(1), 72–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/0266666919895554 Jaziri, R., & Miralam, M. (2019). Modelling the crowdfunding technology adoption among novice entrepreneurs: an extended TAM model. Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues, 7(1), 353–374. https://doi.org/10.9770/jesi.2019.7.1(26) Kusnandar, V. B. (2021). RISSC: Populasi Muslim Indonesia terbesar di dunia. Retrieved from https://databoks.katadata.co.id/ Linardi, C., & Nur, T. (2021). Faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi minat mahasiswa berdonasi melalui platform crowdfunding. INOBIS: Jurnal Inovasi Bisnis Dan Manajemen Indonesia, 4(2), 249–267. https://doi.org/10.31842/jurnalinobis.v4i2.181 Lumakto, G., & Dewi, N. K. (2021). Memahami modus dan pencegahan penipuan penggalangan donasi daring. Jurnal Bimas Islam, 14(2), 393–418. Mittelman, R., & Rojas-Méndez, J. (2018). Why Canadians give to charity: An extended theory of planned behaviour model. International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing, 15(2), 189–204. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12208-018-0197-3 Morosan, C., & DeFranco, A. (2016). It’s about time: Revisiting UTAUT2 to examine consumers’ intentions to use NFC mobile payments in hotels. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2015.11.003 Niswah, F. M., Mutmainah, L., & Legowati, D. A. (2019). Muslim millennials’ s intention of donating for charity using fintech platform. Journal of Islamic Monetary Economics and Finance, 5(3), 623–644. http://dx.doi.org/10.21098/jimf.v5i3.1080 Nugroho, A., Najib, M., & Simanjuntak, M. (2018). Factors affecting consumer interest in electronic money usage with theory of planned behavior (TPB). Journal of Consumer Sciences, 3(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.29244/jcs.3.1.15-27 Arrosyid, A., & Priyojadmiko, E. (2022). Analisis pengaruh sikap, norma subjektif, kontrol perilaku dengan religiusitas dan niat sebagai variabel moderasi terhadap keputusan muzakki dalam membayar zakat. Quranomic: Jurnal Ekonomi Dan Bisnis Islam, 1(1), 15–37. Puskas Baznas. (2020). Laporan hasil survey indeks literasi zakat 2020. Pusat Kajian Strategis BAZNAS. Puskas BAZNAS. (2021). Outlook Zakat 2021. BAZNAS PUSKAS Working Paper Series (Issue December). Ramadhan, A. F., Prasetyo, A. B., & Irviana, L. (2016). Persepsi mahasiswa dalam menggunakan e-money. Jurnal Dinamika Ekonomi & Bisnis, 13(2), 131-145. https://doi.org/10.34001/jdeb.v13i2.470 Setiawan, D., Darwanto, D., & Gunanto, E. Y. A. (2021). Determinants of behavioral intentions to use sharia financial technology (Fintech). Signifikan: Jurnal Ilmu Ekonomi, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.15408/sjie.v10i2.21451 Sheikh, Z., Islam, T., Rana, S., Hameed, Z., & Saeed, U. (2017). Acceptance of social commerce framework in Saudi Arabia. Telematics and Informatics, 34(8). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2017.08.003 Sugiyono. (2017). Metode penelitian pendidikan, pendekatan kuantitatif, kualitatif,dan R&D. CV Alfabeta. Sumerta, I. K., & Wardana, I. M. (2018). Analysis of intention to use electronic money in Denpasar city: TAM approach. Archives of Business Research, 6(10). https://doi.org/10.14738/abr.610.5356 Taylor, S., & Todd, P. (1995). Decomposition and crossover effects in the theory of planned behavior: A study of consumer adoption intentions. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 12(2). https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-8116(94)00019-K Venkatesh, V., Thong, J. Y. L., & Xu, X. (2012). Consumer acceptance and use of information technology: Extending the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. MIS Quarterly: Management Information Systems, 36(1). https://doi.org/10.2307/41410412 Zetira, A., & Fatwa, N. (2021). Optimalisasi penghimpunan zakat digital di masa pandemi. Eqien: Jurnal Ekonomi Dan Bisnis, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.34308/eqien.v8i2.241

L'analisi dell'efficacia dei sistemi CRM &egrave; un tema ancora fortemente dibattuto ed oggetto di numerosi studi nelle discipline di management (Elmuti et al., 2009; Perna-Baraldi, 2014). In tal senso, risulta interessante verificare le ragioni per cui numerosi progetti CRM intrapresi da imprese - soprattutto quelle operanti in mercati business-to-business e focalizzate sulla fornitura di servizi tecnologici pi&ugrave; o meno complessi - non generino benefici attesi e, quindi, falliscano successivamente o addirittura durante la fase implementativa.Il principale obiettivo del presente lavoro &egrave; quello di comprendere i fattori e le dimensioni che impattano sul livello di efficacia del CRM. Gli autori sono interessati, in modo particolare, ad investigare il complesso rapporto tra efficacia del CRM ed aspettative che le imprese manifestano circa il raggiungimento di benefici tangibili durante le fasi di gestione del cliente. Metodologicamente gli autori fanno riferimento all'uso del caso di studio qualitativo come strategia di ricerca.Nello specifico viene proposto il caso del gruppo Loccioni, impresa operante nel settore della produzione e fornitura di macchine di collaudo e servizi integrati ad alto contenuto tecnologico. L'azienda si caratterizza per aver avviato un processo di implementazione di un software CRM che ha comportato sensibili effetti a livello organizzativo e strategico. Inoltre, interessante notare come l'uso del sistema abbia a sua volta generato effetti inaspettati, non sempre prevedibili e variabili rispetto le diverse tipologie di relazioni aziendali.Lo studio propone diversi tipi di contributi. Dal lato empirico, il caso evidenzia ed illustra le problematiche relative al miglioramento di processi gestionali legati alla implementazione ed uso del CRM in un settore abbastanza particolare come quello della fornitura di servizi altamente tecnologici. Dal punto di vista teorico, si vuole contribuire nel marketing b2b e dei servizi riguardo al tema della efficacia di azioni di marketing in contesti di mercato altamente complessi.

Purpose – Describes how the German dual system of education and vocational training is being adopted by travel operator Tui in Turkey. Design/methodology/approach – Describes the experiences of two employees at the Robinson Club who are benefiting from the dual system of training and provides information from the human resources (HR) manager responsible for training. Findings – Explains that, apart from being taught by the Robinson Club experts and state schools, trainees spend another year training at the club, with additional modules and then an external examination, which enables them to obtain the certificate of equivalence meaning their qualification is also recognized in Germany. Additional topics covered by the course include marketing, sourcing and more in-depth knowledge about service and kitchen work. Practical implications – Reveals that, to make the Robinson education project happen, Tui is working with the Turkish education ministry, the German pubic-employment service [(ZAV) (the cross-border agency for skilled labor)], the chamber of trade and industry in Hanover and und. Entwicklungsgesellschaft (DEG) and the German investment and development company. Social implications – Highlights the particular value of the training when considered against the background of high unemployment in Turkey. Originality/value – Gives the inside story of how the German dual-training model is being exported abroad.

Abstract. This program aims to empower and develop the potential of the community, especially in terms of empowering and improving the community's economy in the Kasihan hamlet. The resulting output is the formation of a Joint Business Group (KUB) in the hamlet of Kasihan RT.6, products that can be marketed to a wider area, packaging that meets attractive product standards and branding, markets and manages their businesses well. In addition, the initiation of the formation of Sharia cooperatives is also one of the outcomes of this program. Another outcome of this program is the results of reporting can be disseminated and published in scientific journals / proceding. As the target of this service is the Kasihan hamlet community group that already has a cake and snack business. This partner was chosen because the problems they have can be integrated between KUB and business financing in the Syariah Cooperative. To achieve the success of this activity, the method used is a practical packaging and marketing discussion and training by instructors who are experts in marketing management, as well as initiating the formation of cooperatives with socialization on Sharia Cooperatives. The steps taken include the preparation and implementation phases through observation, preparation of training materials, scheduling training time, Sharia Cooperative socialization, training and assistance, monitoring and final report.Keywords: Kasiha Hamlet, KUB Snack, Sharia Cooperative, PKM, UMYAbstrak. Program ini bertujuan untuk memberdayakan dan mengembangkan potensi masyarakat, khususnya dalam hal pemberdayaan dan peningkatan ekonomi masyarakat di dusun Kasihan. Luaran yang dihasilkan adalah terbentuknya Kelompok Usaha Bersama (KUB) di dusun Kasihan RT.6, produk yang dapat dipasarkan ke daerah yang lebih luas, pengemasan yang memenuhi standard dan branding produk yang menarik, memasarkan serta memanajemen usahanya dengan baik. Selain itu, inisiasi pembentukan koperasi Syariah juga merupakan salah satu luaran dari program ini. Luaran lain dari program ini adalah hasil pelaporan dapat diseminarkan dan dipublikasikan dalam jurnal/proceding ilmiah. Sebagai sasaran pengabdian ini adalah kelompok masyarakat dusun Kasihan yang telah memiliki usaha kue dan snack. Mitra ini dipilih karena permasalahan yang dimiliki dapat diintegrasikan antara KUB dengan pembiayaan usaha di Koperasi Syariah. Untuk mencapai keberhasilan kegiatan ini, metode yang digunakan adalah diskusi dan pelatihan praktis pengemasan dan pemasaran oleh instruktur yang ahli dalam amanajemen pemasaran, serta menginisiasi terbentuknya koperasi dengan sosialisasi tentang Koperasi Syariah. Adapun langkah-langkah yang ditempuh meliputi tahap persiapan dan tahap pelaksanaan melalui observasi, penyiapan materi pelatihan, mengagendakan waktu pelatihan, sosialisasi Koperasi Syariah, pelatihan dan pendampingan, monitoring dan laporan akhir. Kata Kunci: Dusun Kasiha, KUB Snack, Koperasi Syariah, PKM, UMY

The use of RFID (radio frequency identification), also called “smart tags”, is on the rise in the retail industry. In short, RFID are tiny microchips using short range radio signals to emit information and can be used to tag goods, buildings, cars, pets, people etc. Unlike bar-code scanners, which must be held directly in front of the item being scanned, one of the benefits of RFID tags is that they can be scanned from a distance. It is expected that RFID will eventually replace the bar code and its use is likely to save companies like Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and Gillette millions of dollars as they can track every bottle of shampoo or packet of razor blades from the factory floor to the store shelf (Baard, “Lawmakers”). Most agree that using RFID to track goods from the point of manufacture to the location of sale in order to prevent goods being lost, stolen or handled inappropriately, is acceptable and not cause for privacy concerns. But as marketers often take every opportunity to learn more about consumers and their purchasing behaviours, some fear that tags embedded in clothing, membership cards, mobile phones etc. may be scanned inappropriately and used to target individuals with cleverly tailored marketing messages. In the effort to provide a more customised experience, business is at risk of becoming increasingly intrusive – something that will not be universally acceptable. But is it all bad? Privacy concerns aside, smart tags can add new functions as well as enable a whole range of innovative products and services when joined with other technologies. RFID beyond Traditional Value Chain Management Prada is often mentioned as an example of how RFID can be taken beyond the traditional value chain management. Prada has implemented some ground-breaking technology in their Manhattan (New York) store, all based around RFID. RF-receivers automatically detect and scan garments brought into the dressing room. Via a touch screen the customers view tips on how to mix and match, access information about available sizes, colours, fabrics and styles, and watch video clips of models wearing the very outfit they are trying on (Grassley, ”Prada’s”). Eventually customers will be able to create virtual closets and store information about what they have tried on or bought on their Prada Web account (”Prada’s”). Customers’ details, including notes made by sales assistants, e.g. preferences, can be stored automatically in customer cards, readable by sales assistants’ handhelds or at the cash register (”Prada’s”) – information that could be used by the assistant to spur further sales by suggesting for example: “Last time you were here, you bought a black skirt. We have a sweater that matches that skirt” (Batista). Another example is Precision Dynamics Corp (PDC), which developed an automatic identification wristband incorporating RFID technology. One application is the AgeBand which is used to verify the bearer’s age when purchasing alcohol. ID is checked when entering the venue and the customer receives a plastic wristband printed with personal details that cannot be removed without being damaged or destroyed (Swedberg). The embedded chip can be linked to a customer’s credit card number or a cash deposit to pay for purchases while on the premises. “It is also an easy way to collect statistics for marketing”, says PDC’s senior marketing communications specialist, Paula Maggio (qtd. in Swedberg). Although the RFID clearly provides benefits and new opportunities to business operations, there is an argument over whether consumers will ultimately gain or suffer when smart tags become more commonplace. Certainly it may be convenient to have smart hangers that project virtual clothes onto a customer’s reflection in the mirror so they can try on a range of outfits without having to remove their clothes, but the collection of personal information necessary to provide this convenience also raises complex privacy issues. Fear of Intrusive Marketing Hesseldahl believes that our homes, workplaces, shops, malls, cars, trains, planes and bicycles will all be environments that constantly notice who we are and what we are doing, and which – according to a detailed profile of our habits – will try to service us in ways we can hardly even imagine today (25). This may be helpful to us in many ways, but there are concerns that organisations will use RF-technology to connect product information to individuals in order to create personal profiles which can then be used for pin-pointed marketing purposes, or even for tracking individuals, without their knowledge or consent. A possible scenario is one where consumers are bombarded with intrusive advertising based on what they are wearing, what they are purchasing, their history of past purchases, demographics and more. “Kill Machines” Fearing that the technology will be abused, many privacy advocates suggest that RFID must only be used to keep track of goods in the supply chain and thus be deactivated as soon as they leave the store. For example, consumer organisations such as CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), the American Civil Liberties Union, and Electronic Frontiers Australia, lobby for the obligatory deactivation of the tags at the point of purchase. But companies such as Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart would prefer to keep the tags active after checkout, rather than disabling them with so called “kill machines”, so they can match the unique codes emitted by RF-tags to shopper’s personal information (Baard “Watchdog”). They will want to use RF technology to support the sales process and to provide the consumer with new and better services than what is otherwise possible. And without doubt, if the tags are deactivated some genuinely helpful applications would be lost to the consumer, e.g. being able to call your refrigerator from the supermarket to check if you need milk or your washing machine alerting you if you have accidentally put a delicate garment in your white wash. Looking at the Bright Side Privacy concerns aside, RFID technology, in fact, has the potential to empower consumers as it will put more information about products at consumers’ fingertips. Consumers will for example be able to go into competing supermarkets and scan items with an RF-receiver embedded in their mobile phone, record prices, store and process the information to evaluate which store offers better value. The information can then be shared with other shoppers via the Internet, and suddenly we have a powerful “shopping bot” which transcends the online world. Consequently, RFID has the potential to make competition between retailers tougher than ever before and to benefit consumers through lower and more transparent pricing. In addition, RFID tags may also make possible faster and more accurate services, particularly in supermarkets. Shopping carts are mounted with computers which automatically register all items put into the cart and enable the customer to keep track of items, their prices and their total amount (Blau). RFID can also be used to find the location of items in the store and show more detailed information on a product (origin, use by date, content etc.) and as the customer passes through the checkout, all purchases are registered automatically in a matter of seconds. Privacy Protection In Australia, the Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Act 2000, with its ten National Privacy Principles (NPP), has been highly criticised over the last few years as being much to open for interpretation and thus difficult to reinforce. In short, the NPP allows for marketers to use non-sensitive personal information for direct marketing purposes without seeking the individual’s consent if it is impracticable to do so (“Guidelines”). That is, as long as they make available a privacy policy explaining why the data is collected and who will have access, they ensure that the data is correct and up to date, protected from unauthorised access, and that individuals are given access to their data upon request (“Guidelines”). In 2003 the Spam Act was introduced in order to take a tougher stand on the escalating problem with massive amounts of unsolicited emails filling up inboxes, threatening the whole concept of the Internet and its many benefits. In essence, the Spam Act will not allow commercial electronic messages to be sent without the recipient’s prior consent or without a possibility to unsubscribe (“Spam”). In the same manner that the Spam Act was passed to regulate the collection of Internet users’ contact information, it may become necessary to regulate the collection and use of data obtained via RFID if the NPP are deemed inadequate. The difficulty will be to do so and at the same time safeguard many of the positive side-effects the technology may have for businesses and consumers. As argued by Roger Clarke, privacy has to be balanced against many other, often competing interests: “The privacy interest of one person may conflict with that of another person, or of a groups of people, or of an organisation, or of society as a whole. Hence: Privacy Protection is a process of finding appropriate balances between privacy and multiple competing interests.” It is therefore recommended that legislators and policy makers keep up with the development and undertake significant research into both sides before any legislation is passed so that the best interests of consumers and business are catered for. Can There Be a Win-Win Situation? Although business can expect some significant gains from the use of RFID, particularly through a more effective value chain management but also from more substantial and better quality business intelligence, consumers may in fact be the real winners as new and better business concepts, products and services are made available. Further, with the increased transparency in business, consumers can use the vast amounts of information available to find the best products and services, at the best price, and from the best provider. With the aid of smart software, such as search agents, it will be a rather effortless task and will provide consumers with a real advantage. But this assumes consumers are aware of the benefits and how they can be exploited, and have the means to do so – something that will require some skill, interest, money and time. Consumers will also have to give up some privacy in order to take full advantage of the new technology. For the industry, the main challenge will be communicating what these advantages are, as acceptance, adoption and thus also return on investment will depend upon it. For legislators and policy makers, the major dilemma will be to provide a regulatory framework that is flexible but distinct, and that will prevent abuse and at the same time enable positive outcomes for both business and consumers. A fine line that should be treaded wisely in order to create a future where everyone can gain from the benefits of using this technology. References Baard, Mark. “Lawmakers Alarmed by RFID Spying.” Wired News 26 Feb. 2004. 9 Mar. 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,62433,00.html>. Baard, Mark. ”Watchdog Push for RFID Laws.” Wired News 5 Apr. 2004. 6 Apr. 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,62922,00.html>. Batista, Elisa. ”What Your Clothes Say about You.” Wired News 12 Mar. 2003. 8 Mar. 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,58006,00.html>. Blau, John. ”Så fungerar det digitala snabbköpet.” PC för Alla 1 (2004). 8 Mar. 2004 http://www.idg.se/ArticlePages/200402/27/20040227165630_IDG. se760/20040227165630_IDG.se760.dbp.asp>. Clarke, Roger. Beyond the OECD Guidelines: Privacy Protection for the 21st Century. 4 Jan. 2000. 15 Mar. 2004 http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/PP21C.html>. Grassley, Tanya. ”Retailers Outfit Stores with Tech.” Wired News 18 Dec. 2002. 8 Mar. 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/holidays/0,1882,56885,00.html>. “Guidelines to the National Privacy Principles.” The Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner 2001. 4 Apr. 2004 http://www.privacy.gov.au/publications/nppgl_01.html#sum>. Hessledahl, Peter. Den globale organisme. Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2002. 24 Apr. 2004 http://www.global-organisme.dk/e-bog/den_globale_organisme.pdf>. ”Prada’s Smart Tags Too Clever?” Wired News 27 Oct. 2002. 9 Mar. 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,56042,00.html>. “Spam” DCITA 2004. 4 Apr. 2004 http://www2.dcita.gov.au/ie/trust/improving/spam>. Swedberg, Claire. ”Putting Drinks on the Cuff.” RFID Journal 15 Jun. 2004. 15 Jun. 2004 http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/987/1/1/>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Melchior, Angelika. "Tag & Trace Marketing." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/03-melchior.php>. APA Style Melchior, A. (Aug. 2005) "Tag & Trace Marketing," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/03-melchior.php>.

Introduction The social roles of alcohol consumption are rich and varied, with different types of alcoholic beverages reflecting important symbolic and cultural meanings. Sparkling wine is especially notable for its association with secular and sacred celebrations. Indeed, sparkling wine is rarely drunk as a matter of routine; bottles of such wine signal special occasions, heightened by the formality and excitement associated with opening the bottle and controlling (or not!) the resultant fizz (Faith). Originating in England and France in the late 1600s, sparkling wine marked a dramatic shift in winemaking techniques, with winemakers deliberately adding “fizz” or bubbles to their product (Faith). The resulting effervescent wines were first enjoyed by the social elite of European society, signifying privilege, wealth, luxury and nobility; however, new techniques for producing, selling and distributing the wines created a mass consumer culture (Guy). Production of Australian sparkling wines began in the late nineteenth century and consumption remains popular. As a “new world” country – that is, one not located in the wine producing areas of Europe – Australian sparkling wines cannot directly draw on the same marketing traditions as those of the “old world”. One enterprising company, Treasury Wine Estates, markets a range of wines, including a sparkling variety, called 19 Crimes, that draws, not on European traditions tied to luxury, wealth and prestige, but Australia’s colonial history. Using Augmented Reality and interactive story-telling, 19 Crimes wine labels feature convicts who had committed one or more of 19 crimes punishable by transportation to Australia from Britain. The marketing of sparkling wine using convict images and convict stories of transportation have not diminished the celebratory role of consuming “bubbly”. Rather, in exploring the marketing techniques employed by the company, particularly when linked to the traditional drink of celebration, we argue that 19 Crimes, while fun and informative, nevertheless romanticises convict experiences and Australia’s convict past. Convict Heritage and Re-Appropriating the Convict Image Australia’s cultural heritage is undeniably linked to its convict past. Convicts were transported to Australia from England and Ireland over an 80-year period between 1788-1868. While the convict system in Australia was not predominantly characterised by incarceration and institutionalisation (Jones 18) the work they performed was often forced and physically taxing, and food and clothing shortages were common. Transportation meant exile, and “it was a fierce punishment that ejected men, women and children from their homelands into distant and unknown territories” (Bogle 23). Convict experiences of transportation often varied and were dependent not just on the offender themselves (for example their original crime, how willing they were to work and their behaviour), but also upon the location they were sent to. “Normal” punishment could include solitary confinement, physical reprimands (flogging) or hard labour in chain gangs. From the time that transportation ceased in the mid 1800s, efforts were made to distance Australia’s future from the “convict stain” of its past (Jones). Many convict establishments were dismantled or repurposed with the intent of forgetting the past, although some became sites of tourist visitation from the time of closure. Importantly, however, the wider political and social reluctance to engage in discourse regarding Australia’s “unsavoury historical incident” of its convict past continued up until the 1970s (Jones 26). During the 1970s Australia’s convict heritage began to be discussed more openly, and indeed, more favourably (Welch 597). Many today now view Australia’s convicts as “reluctant pioneers” (Barnard 7), and as such they are celebrated within our history. In short, the convict heritage is now something to be celebrated rather than shunned. This celebration has been capitalised upon by tourist industries and more recently by wine label 19 Crimes. “19 Crimes: Cheers to the Infamous” The Treasury Wine Estates brand launched 19 Crimes in 2011 to a target population of young men aged between 18 and 34 (Lyons). Two limited edition vintages sold out in 2011 with “virtually no promotion” (19 Crimes, “Canadians”). In 2017, 19 Crimes became the first wine to use an Augmented Reality (AR) app (the app was later renamed Living Wines Labels in 2018) that allowed customers to hover their [smart] phone in front of a bottle of the wine and [watch] mugshots of infamous 18th century British criminals come to life as 3D characters who recount their side of the story. Having committed at least one of the 19 crimes punishable by exile to Australia, these convicts now humor and delight wine drinkers across the globe. (Lirie) Given the target audience of the 19 Crimes wine was already 18-34 year old males, AR made sense as a marketing technique. Advertisers are well aware the millennial generation is “digitally empowered” and the AR experience was created to not only allow “consumers to engage with 19 Crimes wines but also explore some of the stories of Australia’s convict past … [as] told by the convicts-turned-colonists themselves!” (Lilley cited in Szentpeteri 1-2). The strategy encourages people to collect convicts by purchasing other 19 Crimes alcohol to experience a wider range of stories. The AR has been highly praised: they [the labels] animate, explaining just what went down and giving a richer experience to your beverage; engaging both the mind and the taste buds simultaneously … . ‘A fantastic app that brings a little piece of history to life’, writes one user on the Apple app store. ‘I jumped out of my skin when the mugshot spoke to me’. (Stone) From here, the success of 19 Crimes has been widespread. For example, in November 2020, media reports indicated that 19 Crimes red wine was the most popular supermarket wine in the UK (Lyons; Pearson-Jones). During the UK COVID lockdown in 2020, 19 Crimes sales increased by 148 per cent in volume (Pearson-Jones). This success is in no small part to its innovative marketing techniques, which of course includes the AR technology heralded as a way to enhance the customer experience (Lirie). The 19 Crimes wine label explicitly celebrates infamous convicts turned settlers. The website “19 Crimes: Cheers to the Infamous” incorporates ideas of celebration, champagne and bubbles by encouraging people to toast their mates: the convicts on our wines are not fiction. They were of flesh and blood, criminals and scholars. Their punishment of transportation should have shattered their spirits. Instead, it forged a bond stronger than steel. Raise a glass to our convict past and the principles these brave men and women lived by. (19 Crimes, “Cheers”) While using alcohol, and in particular sparkling wine, to participate in a toasting ritual is the “norm” for many social situations, what is distinctive about the 19 Crimes label is that they have chosen to merchandise and market known offenders for individuals to encounter and collect as part of their drinking entertainment. This is an innovative and highly popular concept. According to one marketing company: “19 Crimes Wines celebrate the rebellious spirit of the more than 160,000 exiled men and women, the rule breakers and law defying citizens that forged a new culture and national spirit in Australia” (Social Playground). The implication is that by drinking this brand of [sparkling] wine, consumers are also partaking in celebrating those convicts who “forged” Australian culture and national spirit. In many ways, this is not a “bad thing”. 19 Crimes are promoting Australian cultural history in unique ways and on a very public and international scale. The wine also recognises the hard work and success stories of the many convicts that did indeed build Australia. Further, 19 Crimes are not intentionally minimising the experiences of convicts. They implicitly acknowledge the distress felt by convicts noting that it “should have shattered their spirits”. However, at times, the narratives and marketing tools romanticise the convict experience and culturally reinterpret a difficult experience into one of novelty. They also tap into Australia’s embracement of larrikinism. In many ways, 19 Crimes are encouraging consumers to participate in larrikin behaviour, which Bellanta identifies as being irreverent, mocking authority, showing a disrespect for social subtleties and engaging in boisterous drunkenness with mates. Celebrating convict history with a glass of bubbly certainly mocks authority, as does participating in cultural practices that subvert original intentions. Several companies in the US and Europe are now reportedly offering the service of selling wine bottle labels with customisable mugshots. Journalist Legaspi suggests that the perfect gift for anyone who wants a sparkling wine or cider to toast with during the Yuletide season would be having a customisable mugshot as a wine bottle label. The label comes with the person’s mugshot along with a “goofy ‘crime’ that fits the person-appealing” (Sotelo cited in Legaspi). In 2019, Social Playground partnered with MAAKE and Dan Murphy's stores around Australia to offer customers their own personalised sticker mugshots that could be added to the wine bottles. The campaign was intended to drive awareness of 19 Crimes, and mugshot photo areas were set up in each store. Customers could then pose for a photo against the “mug shot style backdrop. Each photo was treated with custom filters to match the wine labels actual packaging” and then printed on a sticker (Social Playground). The result was a fun photo moment, delivered as a personalised experience. Shoppers were encouraged to purchase the product to personalise their bottle, with hundreds of consumers taking up the offer. With instant SMS delivery, consumers also received a branded print that could be shared so [sic] social media, driving increased brand awareness for 19 Crimes. (Social Playground) While these customised labels were not interactive, they lent a unique and memorable spin to the wine. In many circumstances, adding personalised photographs to wine bottles provides a perfect and unique gift; yet, could be interpreted as making light of the conditions experienced by convicts. However, within our current culture, which celebrates our convict heritage and embraces crime consumerism, the reframing of a mugshot from a tool used by the State to control into a novelty gift or memento becomes culturally acceptable and desirable. Indeed, taking a larrikin stance, the reframing of the mugshot is to be encouraged. It should be noted that while some prisons were photographing criminals as early as the 1840s, it was not common practice before the 1870s in England. The Habitual Criminals Act of 1869 has been attributed with accelerating the use of criminal photographs, and in 1871 the Crimes Prevention Act mandated the photographing of criminals (Clark). Further, in Australia, convicts only began to be photographed in the early 1870s (Barnard) and only in Western Australia and Port Arthur (Convict Records, “Resources”), restricting the availability of images which 19 Crimes can utilise. The marketing techniques behind 19 Crimes and the Augmented app offered by Living Wines Labels ensure that a very particular picture of the convicts is conveyed to its customers. As seen above, convicts are labelled in jovial terms such as “rule breakers”, having a “rebellious spirit” or “law defying citizens”, again linking to notions of larrikinism and its celebration. 19 Crimes have been careful to select convicts that have a story linked to “rule breaking, culture creating and overcoming adversity” (19 Crimes, “Snoop”) as well as convicts who have become settlers, or in other words, the “success stories”. This is an ingenious marketing strategy. Through selecting success stories, 19 Crimes are able to create an environment where consumers can enjoy their bubbly while learning about a dark period of Australia’s heritage. Yet, there is a distancing within the narratives that these convicts are actually “criminals”, or where their criminal behaviour is acknowledged, it is presented in a way that celebrates it. Words such as criminals, thieves, assault, manslaughter and repeat offenders are foregone to ensure that consumers are never really reminded that they may be celebrating “bad” people. The crimes that make up 19 Crimes include: Grand Larceny, theft above the value of one shilling. Petty Larceny, theft under one shilling. Buying or receiving stolen goods, jewels, and plate... Stealing lead, iron, or copper, or buying or receiving. Impersonating an Egyptian. Stealing from furnished lodgings. Setting fire to underwood. Stealing letters, advancing the postage, and secreting the money. Assault with an intent to rob. Stealing fish from a pond or river. Stealing roots, trees, or plants, or destroying them. Bigamy. Assaulting, cutting, or burning clothes. Counterfeiting the copper coin... Clandestine marriage. Stealing a shroud out of a grave. Watermen carrying too many passengers on the Thames, if any drowned. Incorrigible rogues who broke out of Prison and persons reprieved from capital punishment. Embeuling Naval Stores, in certain cases. (19 Crimes, “Crimes”) This list has been carefully chosen to fit the narrative that convicts were transported in the main for what now appear to be minimal offences, rather than for serious crimes which would otherwise have been punished by death, allowing the consumer to enjoy their bubbly without engaging too closely with the convict story they are experiencing. The AR experience offered by these labels provides consumers with a glimpse of the convicts’ stories. Generally, viewers are told what crime the convict committed, a little of the hardships they encountered and the success of their outcome. Take for example the transcript of the Blanc de Blancs label: as a soldier I fought for country. As a rebel I fought for cause. As a man I fought for freedom. My name is James Wilson and I fight to the end. I am not ashamed to speak the truth. I was tried for treason. Banished to Australia. Yet I challenged my fate and brought six of my brothers to freedom. Think that we have been nearly nine years in this living tomb since our first arrest and that it is impossible for mind or body to withstand the continual strain that is upon them. One or the other must give way. While the contrived voice of James Wilson speaks about continual strain on the body and mind, and having to live in a “living tomb” [Australia] the actual difficulties experienced by convicts is not really engaged with. Upon further investigation, it is also evident that James Wilson was not an ordinary convict, nor was he strictly tried for treason. Information on Wilson is limited, however from what is known it is clear that he enlisted in the British Army at age 17 to avoid arrest when he assaulted a policeman (Snoots). In 1864 he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and became a Fenian; which led him to desert the British Army in 1865. The following year he was arrested for desertion and was convicted by the Dublin General Court Martial for the crime of being an “Irish rebel” (Convict Records, “Wilson”), desertion and mutinous conduct (photo from the Wild Geese Memorial cited in The Silver Voice). Prior to transportation, Wilson was photographed at Dublin Mountjoy Prison in 1866 (Manuscripts and Archives Division), and this is the photo that appears on the Blanc de Blancs label. He arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia on 9 January 1868. On 3 June 1869 Wilson “was sentenced to fourteen days solitary, confinement including ten days on bread and water” (photo from the Wild Geese Memorial cited in The Silver Voice) for an unknown offence or breach of conduct. A few years into his sentence he sent a letter to a fellow Fenian New York journalist John Devoy. Wilson wrote that his was a voice from the tomb. For is not this a living tomb? In the tomb it is only a man’s body is good for the worms but in this living tomb the canker worm of care enters the very soul. Think that we have been nearly nine years in this living tomb since our first arrest and that it is impossible for mind or body to withstand the continual strain that is upon them. One or the other must give way. (Wilson, 1874, cited in FitzSimons; emphasis added) Note the last two lines of the extract of the letter have been used verbatim by 19 Crimes to create their interactive label. This letter sparked a rescue mission which saw James Wilson and five of his fellow prisoners being rescued and taken to America where Wilson lived out his life (Reid). This escape has been nicknamed “The Great Escape” and a memorial was been built in 2005 in Rockingham where the escape took place. While 19 Crimes have re-created many elements of Wilson’s story in the interactive label, they have romanticised some aspects while generalising the conditions endured by convicts. For example, citing treason as Wilson’s crime rather than desertion is perhaps meant to elicit more sympathy for his situation. Further, the selection of a Fenian convict (who were often viewed as political prisoners that were distinct from the “criminal convicts”; Amos) allows 19 Crimes to build upon narratives of rule breaking by focussing on a convict who was sent to Australia for fighting for what he believed in. In this way, Wilson may not be seen as a “real” criminal, but rather someone to be celebrated and admired. Conclusion As a “new world” producer of sparkling wine, it was important for 19 Crimes to differentiate itself from the traditionally more sophisticated market of sparkling-wine consumers. At a lower price range, 19 Crimes caters to a different, predominantly younger, less wealthy clientele, who nevertheless consume alcoholic drinks symbolic to the occasion. The introduction of an effervescent wine to their already extensive collection encourages consumers to buy their product to use in celebratory contexts where the consumption of bubbly defines the occasion. The marketing of Blanc de Blancs directly draws upon ideas of celebration whilst promoting an image and story of a convict whose situation is admired – not the usual narrative that one associates with celebration and bubbly. Blanc de Blancs, and other 19 Crimes wines, celebrate “the rules they [convicts] broke and the culture they built” (19 Crimes, “Crimes”). This is something that the company actively promotes through its website and elsewhere. Using AR, 19 Crimes are providing drinkers with selective vantage points that often sensationalise the reality of transportation and disengage the consumer from that reality (Wise and McLean 569). Yet, 19 Crimes are at least engaging with the convict narrative and stimulating interest in the convict past. Consumers are being informed, convicts are being named and their stories celebrated instead of shunned. Consumers are comfortable drinking bubbly from a bottle that features a convict because the crimes committed by the convict (and/or to the convict by the criminal justice system) occurred so long ago that they have now been romanticised as part of Australia’s colourful history. The mugshot has been re-appropriated within our culture to become a novelty or fun interactive experience in many social settings. For example, many dark tourist sites allow visitors to take home souvenir mugshots from decommissioned police and prison sites to act as a memento of their visit. The promotional campaign for people to have their own mugshot taken and added to a wine bottle, while now a cultural norm, may diminish the real intent behind a mugshot for some people. For example, while drinking your bubbly or posing for a fake mugshot, it may be hard to remember that at the time their photographs were taken, convicts and transportees were “ordered to sit for the camera” (Barnard 7), so as to facilitate State survelliance and control over these individuals (Wise and McLean 562). Sparkling wine, and the bubbles that it contains, are intended to increase fun and enjoyment. Yet, in the case of 19 Crimes, the application of a real-life convict to a sparkling wine label adds an element of levity, but so too novelty and romanticism to what are ultimately narratives of crime and criminal activity; thus potentially “making light” of the convict experience. 19 Crimes offers consumers a remarkable way to interact with our convict heritage. The labels and AR experience promote an excitement and interest in convict heritage with potential to spark discussion around transportation. The careful selection of convicts and recognition of the hardships surrounding transportation have enabled 19 Crimes to successfully re-appropriate the convict image for celebratory occasions. References 19 Crimes. “Cheers to the Infamous.” 19 Crimes, 2020. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://www.19crimes.com>. ———. “The 19 Crimes.” 19 Crimes, 2020. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://www.19crimes.com/en-au/the-19-crimes>. ———. “19 Crimes Announces Multi-Year Partnership with Entertainment Icon Snoop Dogg.” PR Newswire 16 Apr. 2020. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/19-crimes-announces-multi-year-partnership-with-entertainment-icon-snoop-dogg-301041585.html>. ———. “19 Crimes Canadians Not Likely to Commit, But Clamouring For.” PR Newswire 10 Oct. 2013. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/19-crimes-canadians-not-likely-to-commit-but-clamouring-for-513086721.html>. Amos, Keith William. The Fenians and Australia c 1865-1880. Doctoral thesis, UNE, 1987. <https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/12781>. Barnard, Edwin. Exiled: The Port Arthur Convict Photographs. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2010. Bellanta, Melissa. Larrikins: A History. University of Queensland Press. Bogle, Michael. Convicts: Transportation and Australia. Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2008. Clark, Julia. ‘Through a Glass, Darkly’: The Camera, the Convict and the Criminal Life. PhD Dissertation, University of Tasmania, 2015. Convict Records. “James Wilson.” Convict Records 2020. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://convictrecords.com.au/convicts/wilson/james/72523>. ———. “Convict Resources.” Convict Records 2021. 23 Feb. 2021 <https://convictrecords.com.au/resources>. Faith, Nicholas. The Story of Champagne. Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2016. FitzSimons, Peter. “The Catalpa: How the Plan to Break Free Irish Prisoners in Fremantle Was Hatched, and Funded.” Sydney Morning Herald 21 Apr. 2019. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-catalpa-how-the-plan-to-break-free-irish-prisoners-in-fremantle-was-hatched-and-funded-20190416-p51eq2.html>. Guy, Kolleen. When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National identity. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. Jones, Jennifer Kathleen. Historical Archaeology of Tourism at Port Arthur, Tasmania, 1885-1960. PhD Dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 2016. Legaspi, John. “Need a Wicked Gift Idea? Try This Wine Brand’s Customizable Bottle Label with Your Own Mugshot.” Manila Bulletin 18 Nov. 2020. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://mb.com.ph/2020/11/18/need-a-wicked-gift-idea-try-this-wine-brands-customizable-bottle-label-with-your-own-mugshot/>. Lirie. “Augmented Reality Example: Marketing Wine with 19 Crimes.” Boot Camp Digital 13 Mar. 2018. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://bootcampdigital.com/blog/augmented-reality-example-marketing-wine-19-crimes/>. Lyons, Matthew. “19 Crimes Named UK’s Favourite Supermarket Wine.” Harpers 23 Nov. 2020. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://harpers.co.uk/news/fullstory.php/aid/28104/19_Crimes_named_UK_s_favourite_supermarket_wine.html>. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "John O'Reilly, 10th Hussars; Thomas Delany; James Wilson, See James Thomas, Page 16; Martin Hogan, See O'Brien, Same Page (16)." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1866. <https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dc-9768-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99>. Pearson-Jones, Bridie. “Cheers to That! £9 Bottle of Australian Red Inspired by 19 Crimes That Deported Convicts in 18th Century Tops List as UK’s Favourite Supermarket Wine.” Daily Mail 22 Nov. 2020. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-8933567/19-Crimes-Red-UKs-favourite-supermarket-wine.html>. Reid, Richard. “Object Biography: ‘A Noble Whale Ship and Commander’ – The Catalpa Rescue, April 1876.” National Museum of Australia n.d. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/2553/NMA_Catalpa.pdf>. Snoots, Jen. “James Wilson.” Find A Grave 2007. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/19912884/james-wilson>. Social Playground. “Printing Wine Labels with 19 Crimes.” Social Playground 2019. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://www.socialplayground.com.au/case-studies/maake-19-crimes>. Stone, Zara. “19 Crimes Wine Is an Amazing Example of Adult Targeted Augmented Reality.” Forbes 12 Dec. 2017. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/zarastone/2017/12/12/19-crimes-wine-is-an-amazing-example-of-adult-targeted-augmented-reality/?sh=492a551d47de>. Szentpeteri, Chloe. “Sales and Marketing: Label Design and Printing: Augmented Reality Bringing Bottles to Life: How Treasury Wine Estates Forged a New Era of Wine Label Design.” Australian and New Zealand Grapegrower and Winemaker 654 (2018): 84-85. The Silver Voice. “The Greatest Propaganda Coup in Fenian History.” A Silver Voice From Ireland 2017. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://thesilvervoice.wordpress.com/tag/james-wilson/>. Welch, Michael. “Penal Tourism and the ‘Dream of Order’: Exhibiting Early Penology in Argentina and Australia.” Punishment & Society 14.5 (2012): 584-615. Wise, Jenny, and Lesley McLean. “Pack of Thieves: The Visual Representation of Prisoners and Convicts in Dark Tourist Sites.” The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture. Eds. Marcus K. Harmes, Meredith A. Harmes, and Barbara Harmes. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 555-73.

PurposeThis paper aims to understand the most efficient hotel system and why efficiency varies across years and between the two differing types of hotel businesses in Turkey.Design/methodology/approachA data envelopment analysis (DEA) analysis was used to characterise the efficiency of all-inclusive (AI) and bed and breakfast (B&B) hotel businesses with one output (total revenue) and three inputs (labour, food and capital costs). The Malmquist approach is then used to discern changes in total efficiency (TTE) and intertemporal shifts in the efficiency frontier (technological change (Tch)).FindingsThe results reveal that the AI hotel operates at 100% efficiency in the summer and year-round. The B&B hotel business operates at 89.6% with variable constant returns to scale during the summer and with 100% efficiency. The results of the Malmquist approach indicate that the total factor productivity grew in the years 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019, while the other years were marked by inefficiency. Such increases were due to technical efficiency change (TEch) and Tch, which means that managerial and allocative efficiency (AE) were barely achieved. Slight differences were noted in the two time periods (all year and summer), suggesting that the scale of hotel businesses is prepared to operate all year round, and this calls for strategies to mitigate seasonality.Research limitations/implicationsAs to avenues for future research, the limitations of this study are threefold. First, the hotel businesses are not parallel in terms of the duration of their service offerings. Future research may consider including an AI hotel business that is in operation for the whole year. Second, businesses in Turkey are sceptical about sharing their data as it is considered confidential. However, to better generalise the results and encourage hoteliers to consider the positive outcomes of such analysis, the number of observations could be increased by considering more hotel businesses in both categories. Third, a mixture of data representing businesses operating in various countries may reflect if the efficiency scores vary internationally.Practical implicationsOverall, AI hotel businesses are more attractive but less efficient than B&B. Furthermore, the external crisis impacts the efficiency of hotel businesses meaning that hotel managers could keep on exploring AI, perhaps educating their hosts not to waste or not offer huge quantities. Hotel managers may also need to enlarge their seasonal activities to ensure more efficiency.Social implicationsDespite the intentions of AI hotel businesses to increase their profitability with a lower level of service quality, this study shows that the AI hotel business is very attractive but not so efficient due to the higher propensity of guests to consume food and beverages in excess that compromises the definition of efficiency as zero waste. AI is very attractive for family groups or those seeking the pleasure of relaxation at seaside resorts and is also very popular in Turkey. On the other hand, the B&B hotel business is more efficient but less attractive.Originality/valueThe contributions of this paper are threefold. First, the authors analysed the efficiency and inefficiency of hotel businesses within nine years of operations. During this period, Turkey experienced first a tourism boom (2011–2014) followed by stagnation and subsequently a sharp decline due to political instability resulting in an (in)direct impact on tourism (2015–2019). Second, the authors compared the efficiency and inefficiency of AI and B&B hotel businesses. Third, the authors examined the effects of hotel management factors to ensure efficiency.

Sticky, messy and nauseatingly saccharine, the sensory properties of jam may be a long way from the stylized corporate polish of Australia’s multi-billion dollar film exhibition industry, yet the history of Australian cinema space will be forever indebted to the Victoria Preserving Company; one-time producer of the humblest of sweet treats. Through an analysis of Melbourne’s Jam Factory cinema complex, this article explores the unusual intersection of jam, sensory gratification and contemporary Australian cinema-going at the dawn of the 21st century. Encompassing the historic architecture of the former Victoria Preserving Company, South Yarra’s Jam Factory complex provides a gentrified gloss to an inner suburban precinct historically renowned for the manufacturing of jam and preserves. Nestled in the heart of Chapel Street, less than two blocks down from Toorak road and a stone’s throw from the nightclub precinct of Commercial road, the Jam Factory occupies an important part of Melbourne’s cultural heritage; functioning as a quintessential signifier of the city’s traversal from wholesale manufacturing during the early 1900s into the service vectors of digital media technologies and mixed-use retail entertainment destinations at the start of the new millennium. Established in 1876, the Victoria Preserving Company, AKA the ‘Jam Factory’, hosts an array of diverse retail and leisure outlets. Included amongst its tenants are Borders Books, Villa & Hut, TGI Fridays, The Pancake Parlour, a Virgin Music Mega-store, an elaborate Village Cinema megaplex, and a range of ancillary restaurants, fashion stores and cafes. According to the venue’s promotional material, “The Jam Factory of today is, in short, ‘jam packed’ with entertainment” (Chapel St Precinct, n.pag.). With the original building’s façade and cooling store still intact, the architectural remnants of the Victoria Preserving Factory provide a culturally significant backdrop for what is ostensibly Australia’s most noteworthy cinema venture; Village Roadshow’s megaplex cinema flagship. Replete with fifteen large format screens, including two Gold Class cinemas, a Cinema Europa enclave and an interactive games alcove, The Village Jam Factory signifies Australia’s first foray into cinema-based retail entertainment destinations. In commenting on the opening of the Jam Factory megaplex in 1998, Village Roadshow’s general manager Mr. David Herman said, “The objective was to create Australia’s first non-gambling cinema and lifestyle complex” (Catalano 6). More than any other cinema venue, the Village Jam Factory played a key role in pushing Australian film exhibition standards into the new millennium. In an era marked by competing home theatre technologies and diversified sites of media consumption, the Jam Factory’s shift from suburban cinema to lifestyle complex dramatically altered both the business and social practice of movie-going in Australia. Central to this shift was a tripartite marketing strategy which sought to capitalize on: protracted movie-going experiences; sensory stimulation; and, venue promotion. Experiential Jam The promotion of a protracted movie-going experience has been essential to the continued success of the Village Jam Factory. As I have argued elsewhere, the Australian cinema industry of the mid 1990s faced a number of significant incentives for extending the movie going experience beyond the auditorium; not the least being the steady decline of box office takings that occurred during the late 1980s (Downing). In the face of new media technologies such as the internet, DVD and Pay TV, many cinema operators were forced to look beyond the box office as a primary source of profits. To this end Village Roadshow effectively used the Jam Factory as a testing ground for the generation of ancillary leisure and retail income streams. During the mid 1990s Village actively promoted the Jam Factory as a space in which audiences could not only see a film, but also engage in a series of expanded retail activities such as shopping, dining and video-game playing. Discussing the development of multi-use cinema venues during the 1990s, Charles Acland has commented that such spaces “…do not situate conditions of spectatorship alone; they also construct relations between public and cinematic practices” (Acland 119). Sensory Jam Far from being a traditional site of film consumption, the Jam Factory set an industry precedent by becoming the nation’s first cinema venue in which audiences were encouraged to engage in an entertainment experience that was, above all, aimed at stimulating the senses. In keeping with the ‘lifestyle destination’ mantra, the Village Jam Factory provided a new generation of Australians with a multi-sensory entertainment experience that could not be emulated by home theatre technologies. Wide sweeping foyers and elaborate ticket and merchandising counters greet the eye; ‘luxury’ stadium seating with wide aisles and broad armrests offer the ‘ultimate’ in tactile comfort; digital surround sound facilities pleasure the ears and a plethora of food and beverage novelties work to gratify the senses of taste and smell. More than any other Village cinema outlet, the Jam Factory venue smacks of sugar-coated commerce. With a revenue contribution of over 18%, the Village Roadshow candy bar is the undisputed cash-cow of the enterprise (Australian Film Commission 143). Colloquially known as ‘Lollywood’, the Village confectionary counter is an over-priced explosion of colour and candy that sustains industry revenue through a deliberate appeal to the audience’s sense of taste. This sugar dependency synchronistically mirrors the former success of Henry Jones, the entrepreneur behind Australia’s IXL jam brand, who operated his famous preserving company on the site between 1895 and 1926 (Chapel St Precinct, n.pag.). Venue Jam Village Roadshow’s promotion of the Jam Factory venue over the actual films being screened is indicative of Australia’s primary shift towards retail entertainment based cinema complexes. Unlike the homogenous multiplex venues of the 1970s and 1980s, the Village Jam Factory Complex has been aggressively marketed as a Melbourne icon, capable of offering a unique entertainment experience. This agenda is clearly documented in the 1999 Village Roadshow annual report which, pointing towards a perceived threat of home theatre technologies, proclaimed: [In] broadening the cinema going experience … [Village] aims to create an environment of quality entertainment theming and ancillary lifestyle retailing, thus providing a consistently high level of incentive for people to leave their homes for cinema anchored destinations. (Village Roadshow 19) To this end, the Jam Factory became the physical embodiment of Village Cinemas’ corporate tagline “Where Movies Live” (Village Cinemas, n.pag.). Throughout the late 1990s, a number of similar sites proliferated across Europe, the United States and Canada. Two noteworthy examples of this trend are the Manchester Times building in the UK (initially managed by a short lived Village-Warner synergy) and the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin; previous home to the Third Reich and later, the Berlin Wall. In both of these examples a similar venue-promotion agenda is clearly at work. In reflecting the cultural specificities of their host cities, each of these venues pays a semiotic homage to the previous occupants of their space. The Manchester Times building, for example, retains much of its former architecture and reflects the nocturnal vibrancy of 19th century printing plant. Similarly, the Sony Centre offers an architectural reflection on the complexities of Berlin history and German cinema. In Melbourne, the Jam Factory’s history of jam and jam making are equally preserved. Drawing heavily on postmodern architectural styles, the Jam Factory’s interior uses South Yarra’s local history as a backdrop for a schizophrenic collage of seemingly incommensurate time/place references. From the distinctive red-brick cooling tower (located in the centre of the building) one encounters a hybrid fusion of Mediterranean pasta courts, European coffee lounges, Romanesque artwork and columns (complete with weathered-look paint and ‘crumbling’ tops), statues of Hollywood stars, as well as a dazzling gaming alcove and a series of subdued ‘luxury’ (Gold Class) cinemas. Such eclectic displays of visual hyperbole have been prefigured by Umberto Eco, whose discussion on hyperreality addresses an imagination which “… demands the real thing, and in order to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake” (Eco 8). As a relatively recent contributor to Australian cinema history, the Village Jam Factory has achieved little sustained academic attention, yet its significance must not be undervalued. As Australia’s first cinema-oriented retail entertainment destination, the Village Jam Factory has been crucial in placing Australia into the global film exhibition arena. While the pungent aromas of ripened fruit, vinegar and boiling sugar have long since been replaced by the scent of popcorn and recycled air, the legacy and architecture of jam-making has played a key role in propelling Australian film exhibition into the new millennium. References Acland, Charles. Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Australian Film Commission. Get the Picture. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 2001. Catalano, Anthony. “Village to Extend Jam Factory to 14 Cinemas.” The Age 5 Aug. 1998. Chapel St Precinct. General History of Chapel Street & Surrounds. 2006. 30 Dec. 2006 http://www.chapelstreet.com.au/default.asp?mode=history>. Downing, Leanne. “More than Meets the Eye: The Suburban Cinema Megaplex as Sensory Heterotopia.” Refractory: Journal of Media and Culture 8 (2005). http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/journalissues/vol8/downing.html>. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality. Orlando Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Village Cinemas. 2006. 30 Dec. 2006. http://www.villagecinemas.com.au/>. Village Roadshow. Annual Report. Melbourne: Village Roadshow, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Downing, Leanne. "Sensory Jam: How the Victoria Preserving Company Pushed Australian Cinema Space into the New Millennium." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/05-downing.php>. APA Style Downing, L. (Dec. 2006) "Sensory Jam: How the Victoria Preserving Company Pushed Australian Cinema Space into the New Millennium," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/05-downing.php>.

They may have been obscured by the popular media's fascination with the World Wide Web, but for many Net users, Usenet newsgroups still constitute an equally important interactive tool. While Web pages present relatively static information that can be structured through hypertext links and searched using Yahoo! and similar services, newsgroups are fora for open, interactive discussion on virtually any conceivable subject, amongst participants from around the world -- more than any other part of the Net, they are instrumental in the formation of virtual communities by allowing like-minded individuals to get together, exchange their opinions, and organise themselves. Having emerged from email mailing-lists, newsgroups are among the oldest uses of computer networks for communication; based around a simple exchange of all new postings among the participants, they offer few of the comforts of more modern technologies, and so it is not surprising that a number of services have begun to provide powerful Web interfaces for newsgroup access. One of the oldest and most reknowned amongst these sites is Deja News. Since its launch in May 1995, Deja News has expanded to cover around 50,000 different newsgroups, which are contained in a memory archive that is several hundred gigabytes in size, according to some reports (Woods, n.pag.); the company itself boasts accesses by more than three million users each month to the hundreds of millions of articles it has archived ("Company Background", n. pag.). What makes Deja News attractive to so many users are the many search options the service has added to its newsgroups interface. Deja News visitors can search for any article subjects, keywords, newsgroups, or participants' names they are interested in: if you're looking for the absolutely latest on the White House sex scandal, search for "Clinton + Lewinski" and limit your search to articles posted in the last few days or hours; if you want to know what newsgroups your co-worker is writing to in her lunch break, simply ask Deja News to find all postings by "Annabel Smith". If you can't quite remember the address for the latest Internet camera site, Deja News will. To put such powerful research capabilities at the fingertips of any Web user raises any number of legal as well as ethical questions, however. To begin with, does Deja News even have the right to archive anyone's and everyone's postings to newsgroups? The simple fact that users' articles are posted openly, for all newsgroup participants to see, does not necessarily automatically imply that the article may be made available to a greater public elsewhere -- by analogy, if you have a casual conversation with a group of people, you aren't usually expecting to see your words in the history books the next day (but analogies between the Internet and 'real life' are always dangerous). Unless you spoke to someone with a photographic memory, you can usually rely on them gradually forgetting what you said, even if you made a fool out of yourself -- that's human. Appearing as the result of a Deja News search, articles lose their original context -- the newsgroup discussion they were part of -- and are given an entirely different one, a context in which by virtue of being so presented they may gain new and potentially questionable authority. As is so often the case for information on Websites, the information in articles which can thus be found through services like Deja News cannot easily be verified or disproven; due to the loss of context, researchers cannot even gain a feel for a writer's trustworthiness in the same way that seasoned newsgroup members can. Neither may they always detect intentional irony and humour: playful exaggeration may easily appear as deliberate misinformation, friendly oneupmanship as an angry attack. The results of author-based searches may be even more potentially damaging, however. Deja News offers various mechanisms that can include searches restricted to the articles written by a particular user, culminating in the 'author profile' that can be used to list all posts ever made by a particular user. One does not need to be paranoid to imagine ways in which such a powerful research tool may be abused -- perhaps even (and most easily) by the Deja News company itself: since, following general Web etiquette, access to the service is free for normal users, Deja News relies on other avenues of income, and doubtlessly it would be tempting to sell the rights to exploit the Deja News database to professional spammers (Internet junk mailers). These could then aim their advertising emails directly towards the most promising target audience -- those who have in their newsgroups postings shown the most interest in a particular product or service. Indeed, Deja News notes, somewhat vaguely, that it "can provide efficient and effective Internet-based marketing for various types of online marketing goals, such as testing messages, building brand awareness, increasing Website traffic or generating leads" ("Company Background", n. pag.). While such uninvited advertising may be annoying to unsuspecting Internet users, more damaging and mean-spirited uses of the 'author profile' can also be imagined easily. What if your prospective new employer finds the comments you made about the company in a newsgroup article last year? What if they check your author profile for your attitude to drugs (did you ever write an article in rec.drugs.cannabis) or your sexual orientation (any posts to alt.sex.homosexual)? What if some extremist group targets you over your support for multiculturalism? Thanks to Deja News and similar services, anything you've ever said may be used against you. The virtual walls of cyberspace have ears, come with a perfect memory, and are prepared to share their knowledge with anyone. A valid line of argument against such criticism notes that we are all responsible for our own actions: newsgroups are, after all, public discussion fora that are open to all participants -- if you make a controversial statement in such a place, you must be prepared to suffer the consequences. However, the threat of being taken out of context must once more be emphasised at this point: while the articles that can be found through Deja News appear to accurately reflect their writers' views, the background against which such views were expressed is much more difficult to extract. Furthermore, only very few newsgroup participants will be aware that their postings are continually being archived, since newsgroups generally appear as a fairly ephemeral medium: only the last few days or, at most, weeks of newsgroup traffic are usually stored on news servers. An awareness of being archived would help writers protect themselves -- it may also serve to impoverish newsgroup discussion, however. Even more importantly, the already-digital, computer-mediated nature of newsgroup discussions has far-reaching implications. Dealing with units of data that come in a handy, easily stored format, services like Deja News tend to archive Usenet newsgroups interminably -- your first flames as a 'clueless newbie', years ago, may therefore today still be used to embarass you. This is the most important new development: analogue, organic, human memory eventually fades; we tend to organise our memories, and remember those things we regard as most important, while others gradually vanish. Many modern legal systems reflect this process by gradually deleting minor and even major offences from a citizen's criminal records -- they forgive as they forget. Other than in cases of extreme Alzheimer's brought about by server crashes and hard disk defects, digital memory, on the other hand, is perfect for unlimited periods of time: once entered into a database, newsgroup articles may be stored forever; ephemeral discussions become matters of permanent record. The computer doesn't forget. While its many Internet accolades bear witness to the benefits users have found in Deja News, the ethical questions the service raises have hardly been addressed so far, least of all on the Deja News Website itself. While apparently the inclusion of a header line "X-noarchive: yes" may prevent articles from being archived by Deja News, this isn't advertised anywhere; neither are there any statements justifying the unauthorised archiving of newsgroups, or any easily accessible mechanisms for users to have their own articles deleted from the archives. As has often been the case on the Internet, a private organisation has therefore become a semi-official institution, simply by virtue of having thought of an idea first; ethics and laws are left behind by technological development, and find that they have some catching-up to do. Of course, none of this should be seen as condemning Deja News as a malevolent organisation out to spy on Internet participants -- in fact, the company so far appears to have shown admirable restraint in declining to exploit its database. Deja News is at the centre of this controversy only by virtue of having implemented the idea of a 'memory of Usenet' too perfectly: not Deja News is the problem, but those who would use, to their own and possibly sinister ends, information made available without charge by Deja News. Eventually, in any way, Deja News itself may be overwhelmed by its own creation: with the amount of Internet users still continually increasing, and with newsgroup articles accumulating, it is gradually getting harder to still find the few most important postings amongst a multitude of discussions (in a similar way, search engine users are beginning to have trouble locating the most relevant Websites on any specific topic amongst a large number of less useful 'vanity' homepages). In the end, then, this new 'perfect' digital memory may have to learn an important capability from its analogue human counterpart: Deja News and similar archives may have to learn how to forget articles of lesser significance. A very simple first step towards this process has already been made: since December 1997, junk mail postings ('spam') are being removed from the Deja News archives (Woods, n. pag.). While such articles, whose uselessness is almost universally agreed upon by the Internet community at large, constitute a clear case for removal, however, any further deletions will mean a significant step away from the original Deja News goal of providing a complete archive of Usenet newsgroups, and towards increasingly controversial value-judgments -- who, after all, is to decide which postings are worth archiving, and which are irrelevant? If memory is to be selective, who will do the selecting? Eventually (and even if new memory management technologies help prevent outright deletion by relegating less important information to some sort of second-rate, less accessed memory space), it seems, the problem returns to being an ethical one -- of what is archived where and for how long, of who has access to these data, and of how newsgroup writers can regain control of their articles to protect themselves and prevent abuse. Deja News and the Internet community as a whole would be well-advised to address the problems raised by this perfect memory of originally ephemeral conversations before any major and damaging abuse can occur. References "Company Background." Deja News. 1998. 11 Aug. 1998 <http://www.dejanews.com/emarket/about/background.shtml> "Deja News Invites Internet Users to Search the World's Largest On-Line Newsgroup Archive." Deja News. 30 May 1996. 11 Aug. 1998 <http://www.dejanews.com/emarket/about/pr/1996/dnpr_960530.shtml>. Woods, Bob. "Deja News Cuts, Increases Content." Newsbytes 8 Dec. 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "Archiving the Ephemeral: Deja News and the Ethics of Perfect Memory." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/deja.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "Archiving the Ephemeral: Deja News and the Ethics of Perfect Memory," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/deja.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1998) Archiving the ephemeral: Deja News and the ethics of perfect memory. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/deja.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction The recent AOL/Time-Warner merger invites us to re-think the relationships amongst content producers, distributors, and audiences. Worth an estimated $300 billion (US), the largest Internet transaction of all time, the deal is 45 times larger than the AOL/Netscape merger of November 1998 (Ledbetter). Additionally, the Time Warner/EMI merger, which followed hard on the heels of the AOL/Time-Warner deal and is itself worth $28 billion (US), created the largest content rights organisation in the music industry. The joining of the Internet giant (AOL) with what was already the world's largest media corporation (Time-Warner-EMI) has inspired some exuberant reactions. An Infoworld column proclaimed: The AOL/Time-Warner merger signals the demise of traditional media companies and the ascendancy of 'new economy' media companies that will force any industry hesitant to adopt a complete electronic-commerce strategy to rethink and put itself on Internet time. (Saap & Schwarrtz) This comment identifies the distribution channel as the dominant component of the "new economy" media. But this might not really be much of an innovation. Indeed, the assumption of all industry observers is that Time-Warner will provide broadband distribution (through its extensive cable holdings) as well as proprietary content for AOL. It is also expected that Time-Warner will adopt AOL's strategy of seeking sponsorship for development projects as well as for content. However, both of these phenomena -- merger and sponsorship -- are at least as old as radio. It seems that the Internet is merely repeating an old industrial strategy. Nonetheless, one important difference distinguishes the Internet from earlier media: its characterisation of the audience. Internet companies such as AOL and Microsoft tend towards a simple and simplistic media- centred view of the audience as market. I will show, however, that as the Internet assumes more of the traditional mass media functions, it will be forced to adopt a more sophisticated notion of the mass audience. Indeed, the Internet is currently the site in which audience definitions borrowed from broadcasting are encountering and merging with definitions borrowed from marketing. The Internet apparently lends itself to both models. As a result, definitions of what the Internet does or is, and of how we should understand the audience, are suitably confused and opaque. And the behaviour of big Internet players, such as AOL and MSN, perfectly reflects this confusion as they seem to careen between a view of the Internet as the new television and a contrasting view of the Internet as the new shopping mall. Meanwhile, Internet users move in ways that most observers fail to capture. For example, Baran and Davis characterise mass communication as a process involving (1) an organized sender, (2) engaged in the distribution of messages, (3) directed toward a large audience. They argue that broadcasting fits this model whereas a LISTSERV does not because, even though the LISTSERV may have very many subscribers, its content is filtered through a single person or Webmaster. But why is the Webmaster suddenly more determining than a network programmer or magazine editor? The distinction seems to grow out of the Internet's technological characteristics: it is an interactive pipeline, therefore its use necessarily excludes the possibility of "broadcasting" which in turn causes us to reject "traditional" notions of the audience. However, if a media organisation were to establish an AOL discussion group in order to promote Warner TV shows, for example, would not the resulting communication suddenly fall under the definition as set out by Baran and Davis? It was precisely the confusion around such definitions that caused the CRTC (Canada's broadcasting and telecommunications regulator) to hold hearings in 1999 to determine what kind of medium the Internet is. Unlike traditional broadcasting, Internet communication does indeed include the possibility of interactivity and niche communities. In this sense, it is closer to narrowcasting than to broadcasting even while maintaining the possibility of broadcasting. Hence, the nature of the audience using the Internet quickly becomes muddy. While such muddiness might have led us to sharpen our definitions of the audience, it seems instead to have led many to focus on the medium itself. For example, Morris & Ogan define the Internet as a mass medium because it addresses a mass audience mediated through technology (Morris & Ogan 39). They divide producers and audiences on the Internet into four groups: One-to-one asynchronous communication (e-mail); Many-to-many asynchronous communication (Usenet and News Groups); One-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many synchronous communication (topic groups, construction of an object, role-playing games, IRC chats, chat rooms); Asynchronous communication (searches, many-to-one, one-to-one, one to- many, source-receiver relations (Morris & Ogan 42-3) Thus, some Internet communication qualifies as mass communication while some does not. However, the focus remains firmly anchored on either the sender or the medium because the receiver --the audience -- is apparently too slippery to define. When definitions do address the content distributed over the Net, they make a distinction between passive reception and interactive participation. As the World Wide Web makes pre-packaged content the norm, the Internet increasingly resembles a traditional mass medium. Timothy Roscoe argues that the main focus of the World Wide Web is not the production of content (and, hence, the fulfilment of the Internet's democratic potential) but rather the presentation of already produced material: "the dominant activity in relation to the Web is not producing your own content but surfing for content" (Rosco 680). He concludes that if the emphasis is on viewing material, the Internet will become a medium similar to television. Within media studies, several models of the audience compete for dominance in the "new media" economy. Denis McQuail recalls how historically, the electronic media furthered the view of the audience as a "public". The audience was an aggregate of common interests. With broadcasting, the electronic audience was delocalised and socially decomposed (McQuail, Mass 212). According to McQuail, it was not a great step to move from understanding the audience as a dispersed "public" to thinking about the audience as itself a market, both for products and as a commodity to be sold to advertisers. McQuail defines this conception of the audience as an "aggregate of potential customers with a known social- economic profile at which a medium or message is directed" (McQuail, Mass 221). Oddly though, in light of the emancipatory claims made for the Internet, this is precisely the dominant view of the audience in the "new media economy". Media Audience as Market How does the marketing model characterise the relationship between audience and producer? According to McQuail, the marketing model links sender and receiver in a cash transaction between producer and consumer rather than in a communicative relationship between equal interlocutors. Such a model ignores the relationships amongst consumers. Indeed, neither the effectiveness of the communication nor the quality of the communicative experience matters. This model, explicitly calculating and implicitly manipulative, is characteristically a "view from the media" (McQuail, Audience 9). Some scholars, when discussing new media, no longer even refer to audiences. They speak of users or consumers (Pavick & Dennis). The logic of the marketing model lies in the changing revenue base for media industries. Advertising-supported media revenues have been dropping since the early 1990s while user-supported media such as cable, satellite, online services, and pay-per-view, have been steadily growing (Pavlik & Dennis 19). In the Internet-based media landscape, the audience is a revenue stream and a source of consumer information. As Bill Gates says, it is all about "eyeballs". In keeping with this view, AOL hopes to attract consumers with its "one-stop shopping and billing". And Internet providers such as MSN do not even consider their subscribers as "audiences". Instead, they work from a consumer model derived from the computer software industry: individuals make purchases without the seller providing content or thematising the likely use of the software. The analogy extends well beyond the transactional moment. The common practice of prototyping products and beta-testing software requires the participation of potential customers in the product development cycle not as a potential audience sharing meanings but as recalcitrant individuals able to uncover bugs. Hence, media companies like MTV now use the Internet as a source of sophisticated demographic research. Recently, MTV Asia established a Website as a marketing tool to collect preferences and audience profiles (Slater 50). The MTV audience is now part of the product development cycle. Another method for getting information involves the "cookie" file that automatically provides a Website with information about the user who logs on to a site (Pavick & Dennis). Simultaneously, though, both Microsoft and AOL have consciously shifted from user-subscription revenues to advertising in an effort to make online services more like television (Gomery; Darlin). For example, AOL has long tried to produce content through its own studios to generate sufficiently heavy traffic on its Internet service in order to garner profitable advertising fees (Young). However, AOL and Microsoft have had little success in providing content (Krantz; Manes). In fact, faced with the AOL/Time-Warner merger, Microsoft declared that it was in the software rather than the content business (Trott). In short, they are caught between a broadcasting model and a consumer model and their behaviour is characteristically erratic. Similarly, media companies such as Time-Warner have failed to establish their own portals. Indeed, Time-Warner even abandoned attempts to create large Websites to compete with other Internet services when it shut down its Pathfinder site (Egan). Instead it refocussed its Websites so as to blur the line between pitching products and covering them (Reid; Lyons). Since one strategy for gaining large audiences is the creation of portals - - large Websites that keep surfers within the confines of a single company's site by providing content -- this is the logic behind the AOL/Time-Warner merger though both companies have clearly been unsuccessful at precisely such attempts. AOL seems to hope that Time- Warner will act as its content specialist, providing the type of compelling material that will make users want to use AOL, whereas Time- Warner seems to hope that AOL will become its privileged pipeline to the hearts and minds of untold millions. Neither has a coherent view of the audience, how it behaves, or should behave. Consequently, their efforts have a distinctly "unmanaged" and slighly inexplicable air to them, as though everyone were simultaneously hopeful and clueless. While one might argue that the stage is set to capitalise on the audience as commodity, there are indications that the success of such an approach is far from guaranteed. First, the AOL/Time-Warner/EMI transaction, merely by existing, has sparked conflicts over proprietary rights. For example, the Recording Industry Association of America, representing Sony, Universal, BMG, Warner and EMI, recently launched a $6.8 billion lawsuit against MP3.com -- an AOL subsidiary -- for alleged copyright violations. Specifically, MP3.com is being sued for selling digitized music over the Internet without paying royalties to the record companies (Anderson). A similar lawsuit has recently been launched over the issue of re- broadcasting television programs over the Internet. The major US networks have joined together against Canadian Internet company iCravetv for the unlawful distribution of content. Both the iCravetv and the MP3.com cases show how dominant media players can marshal their forces to protect proprietary rights in both content and distribution. Since software and media industries have failed to recreate the Internet in the image of traditional broadcasting, the merger of the dominant players in each industry makes sense. However, their simultaneous failure to secure proprietary rights reflects both the competitive nature of the "new media economy" and the weakness of the marketing view of the audience. Media Audience as Public It is often said that communication produces social cohesion. From such cohesion communities emerge on which political or social orders can be constructed. The power of social cohesion and attachment to group symbols can even create a sense of belonging to a "people" or nation (Deutsch). Sociologist Daniel Bell described how the mass media helped create an American culture simply by addressing a large enough audience. He suggested that on the evening of 7 March 1955, when one out of every two Americans could see Mary Martin as Peter Pan on television, a kind of social revolution occurred and a new American public was born. "It was the first time in history that a single individual was seen and heard at the same time by such a broad public" (Bell, quoted in Mattelart 72). One could easily substitute the 1953 World Series or the birth of little Ricky on I Love Lucy. The desire to document such a process recurs with the Internet. Internet communities are based on the assumption that a common experience "creates" group cohesion (Rheingold; Jones). However, as a mass medium, the Internet has yet to find its originary moment, that event to which all could credibly point as the birth of something genuine and meaningful. A recent contender was the appearance of Paul McCartney at the refurbished Cavern Club in Liverpool. On Tuesday, 14 December 1999, McCartney played to a packed club of 300 fans, while another 150,000 watched on an outdoor screen nearby. MSN arranged to broadcast the concert live over the Internet. It advertised an anticipated global audience of 500 million. Unfortunately, there was such heavy Internet traffic that the system was unable to accommodate more than 3 million people. Servers in the United Kingdom were so congested that many could only watch the choppy video stream via an American link. The concert raises a number of questions about "virtual" events. We can draw several conclusions about measuring Internet audiences. While 3 million is a sizeable audience for a 20 minute transmission, by advertising a potential audience of 500 million, MSN showed remarkably poor judgment of its inherent appeal. The Internet is the first medium that allows access to unprocessed material or information about events to be delivered to an audience with neither the time constraints of broadcast media nor the space limitations of the traditional press. This is often cited as one of the characteristics that sets the Internet apart from other media. This feeds the idea of the Internet audience as a participatory, democratic public. For example, it is often claimed that the Internet can foster democratic participation by providing voters with uninterpreted information about candidates and issues (Selnow). However, as James Curran argues, the very process of distributing uninterrupted, unfiltered information, at least in the case of traditional mass media, represents an abdication of a central democratic function -- that of watchdog to power (Curran). In the end, publics are created and maintained through active and continuous participation on the part of communicators and audiences. The Internet holds together potentially conflicting communicative relationships within the same technological medium (Merrill & Ogan). Viewing the audience as co-participant in a communicative relationship makes more sense than simply focussing on the Internet audience as either an aggregate of consumers or a passively constructed symbolic public. Audience as Relationship Many scholars have shifted attention from the producer to the audience as an active participant in the communication process (Ang; McQuail, Audience). Virginia Nightingale goes further to describe the audience as part of a communicative relationship. Nightingale identifies four factors in the relationship between audiences and producers that emphasize their co-dependency. The audience and producer are engaged in a symbiotic relationship in which consumption and use are necessary but not sufficient explanations of audience relations. The notion of the audience invokes, at least potentially, a greater range of activities than simply use or consumption. Further, the audience actively, if not always consciously, enters relationships with content producers and the institutions that govern the creation, distribution and exhibition of content (Nightingale 149-50). Others have demonstrated how this relationship between audiences and producers is no longer the one-sided affair characterised by the marketing model or the model of the audience as public. A global culture is emerging based on critical viewing skills. Kavoori calls this a reflexive mode born of an increasing familiarity with the narrative conventions of news and an awareness of the institutional imperatives of media industries (Kavoori). Given the sophistication of the emergent global audience, a theory that reduces new media audiences to a set of consumer preferences or behaviours will inevitably prove inadequate, just as it has for understanding audience behavior in old media. Similarly, by ignoring those elements of audience behavior that will be easily transported to the Web, we run the risk of idealising the Internet as a medium that will create an illusory, pre-technological public. Conclusion There is an understandable confusion between the two models of the audience that appear in the examples above. The "new economy" will have to come to terms with sophisticated audiences. Contrary to IBM's claim that they want to "get to know all about you", Internet users do not seem particularly interested in becoming a perpetual source of market information. The fragmented, autonomous audience resists attempts to lock it into proprietary relationships. Internet hypesters talk about creating publics and argue that the Internet recreates the intimacy of community as a corrective to the atomisation and alienation characteristic of mass society. This faith in the power of a medium to create social cohesion recalls the view of the television audience as a public constructed by the common experience of watching an important event. However, MSN's McCartney concert indicates that creating a public from spectacle it is not a simple process. In fact, what the Internet media conglomerates seem to want more than anything is to create consumer bases. Audiences exist for pleasure and by the desire to be entertained. As Internet media institutions are established, the cynical view of the audience as a source of consumer behavior and preferences will inevitably give way, to some extent, to a view of the audience as participant in communication. Audiences will be seen, as they have been by other media, as groups whose attention must be courted and rewarded. Who knows, maybe the AOL/Time-Warner merger might, indeed, signal the new medium's coming of age. References Anderson, Lessley. "To Beam or Not to Beam. MP3.com Is Being Sued by the Major Record Labels. Does the Digital Download Site Stand a Chance?" Industry Standard 31 Jan. 2000. <http://www.thestandard.com>. Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Methuen, 1985. Baran, Stanley, and Dennis Davis. Mass Communication Theory: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth 2000. Curran, James. "Mass Media and Democracy Revisited." Mass Media and Society. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. New York: Hodder Headline Group, 1996. Darlin, Damon. "He Wants Your Eyeballs." Forbes 159 (16 June 1997): 114-6. Egan, Jack, "Pathfinder, Rest in Peace: Time-Warner Pulls the Plug on Site." US News and World Report 126.18 (10 May 1999): 50. Gomery, Douglas. "Making the Web Look like Television (American Online and Microsoft)." American Journalism Review 19 (March 1997): 46. Jones, Steve, ed. CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995. Kavoori, Amandam P. "Discursive Texts, Reflexive Audiences: Global Trends in Television News Texts and Audience Reception." Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 43.3 (Summer 1999): 386-98. Krantz, Michael. "Is MSN on the Block?" Time 150 (20 Oct. 1997): 82. Ledbetter, James. "AOL-Time-Warner Make It Big." Industry Standard 11 Jan. 2000. <http://www.thestandard.com>. Lyons, Daniel. "Desparate.com (Media Companies Losing Millions on the Web Turn to Electronic Commerce)." Forbes 163.6 (22 March 1999): 50-1. Manes, Stephen. "The New MSN as Prehistoric TV." New York Times 4 Feb. 1997: C6. McQuail, Denis. Audience Analysis. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. ---. Mass Communication Theory. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 1987. Mattelart, Armand. Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture. Trans. Susan Emanuel and James A. Cohen. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Morris, Merrill, and Christine Ogan. "The Internet as Mass Medium." Journal of Communications 46 (Winter 1996): 39-50. Nightingale, Virginia. Studying Audience: The Shock of the Real. London: Routledge, 1996. Pavlik, John V., and Everette E. Dennis. New Media Technology: Cultural and Commercial Perspectives. 2nd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998. Reid, Calvin. "Time-Warner Seeks Electronic Synergy, Profits on the Web (Pathfinder Site)." Publisher's Weekly 242 (4 Dec. 1995): 12. Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper, 1993. Roscoe, Timothy. "The Construction of the World Wide Web Audience." Media, Culture and Society 21.5 (1999): 673-84. Saap, Geneva, and Ephraim Schwarrtz. "AOL-Time-Warner Deal to Impact Commerce, Content, and Access Markets." Infoworld 11 January 2000. <http://infoworld.com/articles/ic/xml/00/01/11/000111icimpact.xml>. Slater, Joanna. "Cool Customers: Music Channels Hope New Web Sites Tap into Teen Spirit." Far Eastern Economic Review 162.9 (4 March 1999): 50. Trott, Bob. "Microsoft Views AOL-Time-Warner as Confirmation of Its Own Strategy." Infoworld 11 Jan. 2000. <http://infoworld.com/articles/pi/xml/00/01/11/000111pimsaoltw.xml>. Yan, Catherine. "A Major Studio Called AOL?" Business Week 1 Dec. 1997: 1773-4. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Daniel M. Downes. "The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php>. Chicago style: Daniel M. Downes, "The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Daniel M. Downes. (2000) The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php> ([your date of access]).

We need a clear, unified, and consistent voice to effect the complete dismantling, the abolition, of the mechanisms of animal exploitation.And that will only come from what we say and do, no matter who we are.— Gary L. Francione, animal rights theoristThe history of hashtags is relatively short but littered with the remnants of corporate hashtags which may have seemed a good idea at the time within the confines of the boardroom. It is difficult to understand the rationale behind the use of hashtags as an effective communications tactic in 2019 by corporations when a quick stroll through their recent past leaves behind the much-derided #qantasluxury (Glance), #McDstories (Hill), and #myNYPD (Tran).While hashtags have an obvious purpose in bringing together like-minded publics and facilitating conversation (Kwye et al. 1), they have also regularly been the subject of “hashtag takeovers” by activists and other interested parties, and even by trolls, as the Ecological Society of Australia found in 2015 when their seemingly innocuous #ESA15 hashtag was taken over with pornographic images (news.com.au). Hashtag takeovers have also been used as a dubious marketing tactic, where smaller and less well-known brands tag their products with trending hashtags such as #iphone in order to boost their audience (Social Garden). Hashtags are increasingly used as a way for activists or other interested parties to disrupt a message. It is, I argue, predictable that any hashtag related to an even slightly controversial topic will be subject to some form of activist hashtag takeover, with varying degrees of success.That veganism and the dairy industry should attract such conflict is unsurprising given that the two are natural enemies, with vegans in particular seeming to anticipate and actively engage in the battle for the opposing hashtag.Using a comparative analysis of the #Veganuary and #Februdairy hashtags and how they have been used by both pro-vegan and pro-dairy social media users, this article illustrates that the enthusiastic and well-meaning social media efforts of farmers and dairy supporters have so far been unable to counteract those of well-organised and equally passionate vegan activists. This analysis compares tweets in the first week of the respective campaigns, concluding that organisations, industries and their representatives should be extremely wary of engaging said activists who are not only highly-skilled but are also highly-motivated. Grassroots, ideology-driven activism is a formidable opponent in any public space, let alone when it takes place on the outspoken and unstructured landscape of social media which is sometimes described as the “wild West” (Fitch 5) where anything goes and authenticity and plain-speaking is key (Macnamara 12).I Say Hashtag, You Say Bashtag#Februdairy was launched in 2018 to promote the benefits of dairy. The idea was first mooted on Twitter in 2018 by academic Dr Jude Capper, a livestock sustainability consultant, who called for “28 days, 28 positive dairy posts” (@Bovidiva; Howell). It was a response to the popular Veganuary campaign which aimed to “inspire people to try vegan for January and throughout the rest of the year”, a campaign which had gained significant traction both online and in the traditional media since its inception in 2014 (Veganuary). Hopes were high: “#Februdairy will be one month of dairy people posting, liking and retweeting examples of what we do and why we do it” (Yates). However, the #Februdairy hashtag has been effectively disrupted and has now entered the realm of a bashtag, a hashtag appropriated by activists for their own purpose (Austin and Jin 341).The Dairy Industry (Look Out the Vegans Are Coming)It would appear that the dairy industry is experiencing difficulties in public perception. While milk consumption is declining, sales of plant-based milks are increasing (Kaiserman) and a growing body of health research has questioned whether dairy products and milk in particular do in fact “do a body good” (Saccaro; Harvard Milk Study). In the 2019 review of Canada’s food guide, its first revision since 2007, for instance, the focus is now on eating plant-based foods with dairy’s former place significantly downgraded. Dairy products no longer have their own distinct section and are instead placed alongside other proteins including lentils (Pippus).Nevertheless, the industry has persevered with its traditional marketing and public relations activities, choosing to largely avoid addressing animal welfare concerns brought to light by activists. They have instead focused their message towards countering concerns about the health benefits of milk. In the US, the Milk Processing Education Program’s long-running celebrity-driven Got Milk campaign has been updated with Milk Life, a health focused campaign, featuring images of children and young people living an active lifestyle and taking part in activities such as skateboarding, running, and playing basketball (Milk Life). Interestingly, and somewhat inexplicably, Milk Life’s home page features the prominent headline, “How Milk Can Bring You Closer to Your Loved Ones”.It is somewhat reflective of the current trend towards veganism that tennis aces Serena and Venus Williams, both former Got Milk ambassadors, are now proponents for the plant-based lifestyle, with Venus crediting her newly-adopted vegan diet as instrumental in her recovery from an auto-immune disease (Mango).The dairy industry’s health focus continues in Australia, as well as the use of the word love, with former AFL footballer Shane Crawford—the face of the 2017 campaign Milk Loves You Back, from Lion Dairy and Drinks—focusing on reminding Australians of the reputed nutritional benefits of milk (Dawson).Dairy Australia meanwhile launched their Legendairy campaign with a somewhat different focus, promoting and lauding Australia’s dairy families, and with a message that stated, in a nod to the current issues, that “Australia’s dairy farmers and farming communities are proud, resilient and innovative” (Dairy Australia). This campaign could be perceived as a morale-boosting exercise, featuring a nation-wide search to find Australia’s most legendairy farming community (Dairy Australia). That this was also an attempt to humanise the industry seems obvious, drawing on established goodwill felt towards farmers (University of Cambridge). Again, however, this strategy did not address activists’ messages of suffering animals, factory farms, and newborn calves being isolated from their grieving mothers, and it can be argued that consumers are being forced to make the choice between who (or what) they care about more: animals or the people making their livelihoods from them.Large-scale campaigns like Legendairy which use traditional channels are of course still vitally important in shaping public opinion, with statistics from 2016 showing 85.1% of Australians continue to watch free-to-air television (Roy Morgan, “1 in 7”). However, a focus and, arguably, an over-reliance on traditional platforms means vegans and animal activists are often unchallenged when spreading their message via social media. Indeed, when we consider the breakdown in age groups inherent in these statistics, with 18.8% of 14-24 year-olds not watching any commercial television at all, an increase from 7% in 2008 (Roy Morgan, “1 in 7”), it is a brave and arguably short-sighted organisation or industry that relies primarily on traditional channels to spread their message in 2019. That these large-scale campaigns do little to address the issues raised by vegans concerning animal welfare leaves these claims largely unanswered and momentum to grow.This growth in momentum is fuelled by activist groups such as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) who are well-known in this space, with 5,494,545 Facebook followers, 1.06 million Twitter followers, 973,000 Instagram followers, and 453,729 You Tube subscribers (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). They are also active on Pinterest, a visual-based platform suited to the kinds of images and memes particularly detrimental to the dairy industry. Although widely derided, PETA’s reach is large. A graphic video posted to Facebook on February 13 2019 and showing a suffering cow, captioned “your cheese is not worth this” was shared 1,244 times, and had 4.6 million views in just over 24 hours (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). With 95% of 12-24 year olds in Australia now using social networking sites (Statista), it is little wonder veganism is rapidly growing within this demographic (Bradbury), with The Guardian labelling the rise of veganism unstoppable (Hancox).Activist organisations are joined by prominent and charismatic vegan activists such as James Aspey (182,000 Facebook followers) and Earthling Ed (205,000 Facebook followers) in distributing information and images that are influential and often highly graphic or disturbing. Meanwhile Instagram influencers and You Tube lifestyle vloggers such as Ellen Fisher and FreeLee share information promoting vegan food and the vegan lifestyle (with 650,320 and 785,903 subscribers respectively). YouTube video Dairy Is Scary has over 5 million views (Janus) and What the Health, a follow-up documentary to Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, promoting veganism, is now available on Netflix, which itself has 9.8 million Australian subscribers (Roy Morgan, “Netflix”). BOSH’s plant-based vegan cookbook was the fastest selling cookbook of 2018 (Chiorando).Additionally, the considerable influence of celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Beyonce, Alicia Silverstone, Zac Efron, and Jessica Chastain, to name just a few, speaking publicly about their vegan lifestyle, encourages veganism to become mainstream and increases its widespread acceptance.However not all the dairy industry’s ills can be blamed on vegans. Rising costs, cheap imports, and other pressures (Lockhart, Donaghy and Gow) have all placed pressure on the industry. Nonetheless, in the battle for hearts and minds on social media, the vegans are leading the way.Qualitative research interviewing new vegans found converting to veganism was relatively easy, yet some respondents reported having to consult multiple resources and required additional support and education on how to be vegan (McDonald 17).Enter VeganuaryUsing a month, week or day to promote an idea or campaign, is a common public relations and marketing strategy, particularly in health communications. Dry July and Ocsober both promote alcohol abstinence, Frocktober raises funds for ovarian cancer, and Movember is an annual campaign raising awareness and funds for men’s health (Parnell). Vegans Matthew Glover and Jane Land were discussing the success of Movember when they raised the idea of creating a vegan version. Their initiative, Veganuary, urging people to try vegan for the month of January, launched in 2014 and since then 500,000 people have taken the Veganuary pledge (Veganuary).The Veganuary website is the largest of its kind on the internet. With vegan recipes, expert advice and information, it provides all the answers to Why go vegan, but it is the support offered to answer How to go vegan that truly sets Veganuary apart. (Veganuary)That Veganuary participants would use social media to discuss and share their experiences was a foregone conclusion. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are all utilised by participants, with the official Veganuary pages currently followed/liked by 159,000 Instagram followers, receiving 242,038 Facebook likes, and 45,600 Twitter followers (Veganuary). Both the Twitter and Instagram sites make effective use of hashtags to spread their reach, not only using #Veganuary but also other relevant hashtags such as #TryVegan, #VeganRecipes, and the more common #Vegan, #Farm, and #SaveAnimals.Februdairy Follows Veganuary, But Only on the CalendarCalling on farmers and dairy producers to create counter content and their own hashtag may have seemed like an idea that would achieve an overall positive response.Agricultural news sites and bloggers spread the word and even the BBC reported on the industry’s “fight back” against Veganuary (BBC). However the hashtag was quickly overwhelmed with anti-dairy activists mobilising online. Vegans issued a call to arms across social media. The Vegans in Australia Facebook group featured a number of posts urging its 58,949 members to “thunderclap” the Februdairy hashtag while the Project Calf anti-dairy campaign declared that Februdairy offered an “easy” way to spread their information (Sandhu).Februdairy farmers and dairy supporters were encouraged to tell their stories, sharing positive photographs and videos, and they did. However this content was limited. In this tweet (fig. 1) the issue of a lack of diverse content was succinctly addressed by an anti-Februdairy activist.Fig. 1: Content challenges. (#Februdairy, 2 Feb. 2019)MethodUtilising Twitter’s advanced search capability, I was able to search for #Veganuary tweets from 1 to 7 January 2019 and #Februdairy tweets from 1 to 7 February 2019. I analysed the top tweets provided by Twitter in terms of content, assessed whether the tweet was pro or anti Veganuary and Februdairy, and also categorised its content in terms of subject matter.Tweets were analysed to assess whether they were on message and aligned with the values of their associated hashtag. Veganuary tweets were considered to be on message if they promoted veganism or possessed an anti-dairy, anti-meat, or pro-animal sentiment. Februdairy tweets were assessed as on message if they promoted the consumption of dairy products, expressed sympathy or empathy towards the dairy industry, or possessed an anti-vegan sentiment. Tweets were also evaluated according to their clarity, emotional impact and coherence. The overall effectiveness of the hashtag was then evaluated based on the above criteria as well as whether they had been hijacked.Results and FindingsOverwhelmingly, the 213 #Veganuary tweets were on message. That is they were pro-Veganuary, supportive of veganism, and positive. The topics were varied and included humorous memes, environmental facts, information about the health benefits of veganism, as well as a strong focus on animals. The number of non-graphic tweets (12) concerning animals was double that of tweets featuring graphic or shocking imagery (6). Predominantly the tweets were focused on food and the sharing of recipes, with 44% of all pro #Veganuary tweets featuring recipes or images of food. Interestingly, a number of well-known corporations tweeted to promote their vegan food products, including Tesco, Aldi, Iceland, and M&S. The diversity of veganism is reflected in the tweets. Organisations used the hashtag to promote their products, including beauty and shoe products, social media influencers promoted their vegan podcasts and blogs, and, interestingly, the Ethiopian Embassy of the United Kingdom tweeted their support.There were 23 (11%) anti-Veganuary tweets. Of these, one was from Dr. Jude Capper, the founder of Februdairy. The others expressed support for farming and farmers, and a number were photographs of meat products, including sausages and fry-ups. One Australian journalist tweeted in favour of meat, stating it was yummy murder. These tweets could be described as entertaining and may perhaps serve as a means of preaching to the converted, but their ability to influence and persuade is negligible.Twitter’s search tool provided access to 141 top #Februdairy tweets. Of these 82 (52%) were a hijack of the hashtag and overtly anti-Februdairy. Vegan activists used the #Februdairy hashtag to their advantage with most of their tweets (33%) featuring non-graphic images of animals. They also tweeted about other subject matters, including environmental concerns, vegan food and products, and health issues related to dairy consumption.As noted by the activists (see fig. 1 above), most of the pro-Februdairy tweets were images of milk or dairy products (41%). Images of farms and farmers were the next most used (26%), followed by images of cows (17%) (see fig. 2). Fig. 2: An activist makes their anti-Februdairy point with a clear, engaging image and effective use of hashtags. (#Februdairy, 6 Feb. 2019)The juxtaposition between many of the tweets was also often glaring, with one contrasting message following another (see fig. 3). Fig. 3: An example of contrasting #Februdairy tweets with an image used by the activists to good effect, making their point known. (#Februdairy, 2 Feb. 2019)Storytelling is a powerful tool in public relations and marketing efforts. Yet, to be effective, high-quality content is required. That many of the Februdairy proponents had limited social media training was evident; images were blurred, film quality was poor, or they failed to make their meaning clear (see fig. 4). Fig. 4: A blurred photograph, reflective of some of the low-quality content provided by Februdairy supporters. (#Februdairy, 3 Feb. 2019)This image was tweeted in support of Februdairy. However the image and phrasing could also be used to argue against Februdairy. We can surmise that the tweeter was suggesting the cow was well looked after and seemingly content, but overall the message is as unclear as the image.While some pro-Februdairy supporters recognised the need for relevant hashtags, often their images were of a low-quality and not particularly engaging, a requirement for social media success. This requirement seems to be better understood by anti-Februdairy activists who used high-quality images and memes to create interest and gain the audience’s attention (see figs. 5 and 6). Fig. 5: An uninspiring image used to promote Februdairy. (#Februdairy, 6 Feb. 2019) Fig. 6: Anti-Februdairy activists made good use of memes, recognising the need for diverse content. (#Februdairy, 3 Feb. 2019)DiscussionWhat the #Februdairy case makes clear, then, is that in continuing its focus on traditional media, the dairy industry has left the battle online to largely untrained, non-social media savvy supporters.From a purely public relations perspective, one of the first things we ask our students to do in issues and crisis communication is to assess the risk. “What can hurt your organisation?” we ask. “What potential issues are on the horizon and what can you do to prevent them?” This is PR101 and it is difficult to understand why environmental scanning and resulting action has not been on the radar of the dairy industry long before now. It seems they have not fully anticipated or have significantly underestimated the emerging issue that public perception, animal cruelty, health concerns, and, ultimately, veganism has had on their industry and this is to their detriment. In Australia in 2015–16 the dairy industry was responsible for 8 per cent (A$4.3 billion) of the gross value of agricultural production and 7 per cent (A$3 billion) of agricultural export income (Department of Agriculture and Water Resources). When such large figures are involved and with so much at stake, it is hard to rationalise the decision not to engage in a more proactive online strategy, seeking to engage their publics, including, whether they like it or not, activists.Instead there are current attempts to address these issues with a legislative approach, lobbying for the introduction of ag-gag laws (Potter), and the limitation of terms such as milk and cheese (Worthington). However, these measures are undertaken while there is little attempt to engage with activists or to effectively counter their claims with a widespread authentic public relations campaign, and reflects a failure to understand the nature of the current online environment, momentum, and mood.That is not to say that the dairy industry is not operating in the online environment, but it does not appear to be a priority, and this is reflected in their low engagement and numbers of followers. For instance, Dairy Australia, the industry’s national service body, has a following of only 8,281 on Facebook, 6,981 on Twitter, and, crucially, they are not on Instagram. Their Twitter posts do not include hashtags and unsurprisingly they have little engagement on this platform with most tweets attracting no more than two likes. Surprisingly they have 21,013 subscribers on YouTube which featured professional and well-presented videos. This demonstrates some understanding of the importance of effective storytelling but not, as yet, trans-media storytelling.ConclusionSocial media activism is becoming more important and recognised as a legitimate voice in the public sphere. Many organisations, perhaps in recognition of this as well as a growing focus on responsible corporate behaviour, particularly in the treatment of animals, have adjusted their behaviour. From Unilever abandoning animal testing practices to ensure Dove products are certified cruelty free (Nussbaum), to Domino’s introducing vegan options, companies who are aware of emerging trends and values are changing the way they do business and are reaping the benefits of engaging with, and catering to, vegans. Domino’s sold out of vegan cheese within the first week and vegans were asked to phone ahead to their local store, so great was the demand. From their website:We knew the response was going to be big after the demand we saw for the product on social media but we had no idea it was going to be this big. (Domino’s Newsroom)As a public relations professional, I am baffled by the dairy industry’s failure to adopt a crisis-based strategy rather than largely rely on the traditional one-way communication that has served them well in the previous (golden?) pre-social media age. However, as a vegan, persuaded by the unravelling of the happy cow argument, I cannot help but hope this realisation continues to elude them.References@bovidiva. “Let’s Make #Februdairy Happen This Year. 28 Days, 28 Positive #dairy Posts. From Cute Calves and #cheese on Crumpets, to Belligerent Bulls and Juicy #beef #burgers – Who’s In?” Twitter post. 15 Jan. 2018. 1 Feb. 2019 <https://twitter.com/bovidiva/status/952910641840447488?lang=en>.Austin, Lucinda L., and Yan Jin. Social Media and Crisis Communication. New York: Routledge, 2018.Bradbury, Tod. “Data Shows Major Rise in Veganism among Young People.” Plant Based News 12 Oct. 2018. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.plantbasednews.org>.BBC. “Februdairy: The Dairy Industry Fights Back against Veganuary.” BBC.com 8 Feb. 2018. 1 Feb. 2019 <https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-42990941>.Campaign Brief. “Shane Crawford Stars in ‘Milk Loves You Back’ Work for Lion Dairy & Drinks via AJF Partnership.” Campaign Brief Australia 1 Jun. 2017. 12 Feb. 2019 <http://www.campaignbrief.com/2017/06/shane-crawford-stars-in-milk-l.html>.Chiorando, Maria. “BOSH!’s Vegan Cookbook Is Fastest Selling Cookery Title of 2018.” Plant Based News 26 April 2018. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.plantbasednews.org/post/bosh-s-vegan-cookbook-is-fastest-selling-cookery-title-of-2018>.Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret. Dir. Kip Anderson, and Keegan Kuhn. Appian Way, A.U.M. Films, First Spark Media, 2014.Dairy Australia. “About Legendairy Capital.” Legendairy.com.au, 2019. 12 Feb. 2019 <http://www.legendairy.com.au/dairy-talk/capital-2017/about-us>.Dawson, Abigail. “Lion Dairy & Drinks Launches Campaign to Make Milk Matter Again.” Mumbrella 1 Jun. 2017. 10 Feb 2019 <https://mumbrella.com.au/lion-dairy-drinks-launches-campaign-make-milk-matter-448581>.Department of Agriculture and Water Resources. “Dairy Industry.” Australian Government. 21 Sep. 2018. 20 Feb. 2019 <http://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/research-topics/surveys/dairy>.Domino’s Newsroom. “Meltdown! Domino’s Set to Run Out of Vegan Cheese!” Domino’s Australia 18 Jan. 2018. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://newsroom.dominos.com.au/home/2018/1/17/meltdown-dominos-set-to-run-out-of-vegan-cheese>.Fitch, Kate. “Making Friends in the Wild West: Singaporean Public Relations Practitioners’ Perceptions of Working in Social Media.” PRism 6.2 (2009). 10 Feb. 2019 <http://www.prismjournal.org/fileadmin/Praxis/Files/globalPR/FITCH.pdf>.Francione, Gary L. “Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach.” Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach 10 Feb. 2019. <https://www.abolitionistapproach.com/quotes/>.Glance, David. “#QantasLuxury: A Qantas Social Media Disaster in Pyjamas.” The Conversation 23 Nov. 2011. 10 Feb. 2019 <http://theconversation.com/qantasluxury-a-qantas-social-media-disaster-in-pyjamas-4421>.Hancox, Dan. “The Unstoppable Rise of Veganism: How a Fringe Movement Went Mainstream.” The Guardian 1 Apr. 2018. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/apr/01/vegans-are-coming-millennials-health-climate-change-animal-welfare>.“Harvard Milk Study: It Doesn’t Do a Body Good.” HuffPost Canada 25 Jul. 2013. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/07/05/harvard-milk-study_n_3550063.html>.Hill, Kashmir. “#McDStories: When a Hashtag Becomes a Bashtag.” Forbes.com 24 Jan. 2012. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/24/mcdstories-when-a-hashtag-becomes-a-bashtag/#1541ef39ed25>.Howell, Madeleine. “Goodbye Veganuary, Hello Februdairy: How the Dairy Industry Is Taking the Fight to Its Vegan Critics.” The Telegraph 9 Feb. 2018. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/goodbye-veganuary-hello-februdairy-dairy-industry-taking-fight/>.Janus, Erin. “DAIRY IS SCARY! The Industry Explained in 5 Minutes.” Video. 27 Dec. 2015. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI&t=192s>.Kaiserman, Beth. “Dairy Industry Struggles in a Sea of Plant-Based Milks.” Forbes.com 31 Jan. 2019. 20 Feb. 2019 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/bethkaiserman/2019/01/31/dairy-industry-plant-based-milks/#7cde005d1c9e>.Kwye, Su Mon, et al. “On Recommending Hashtags in Twitter Networks.” Proceedings of the Social Informatics: 4th International Conference, SocInfo. 5-7 Dec. 2012. Lausanne: Research Collection School of Information Systems. 337-50. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2696&context=sis_research>.Lockhart, James, Danny Donaghy, and Hamish Gow. “Milk Price Cuts Reflect the Reality of Sweeping Changes in Global Dairy Market.” The Conversation 12 May 2016. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://theconversation.com/milk-price-cuts-reflect-the-reality-of-sweeping-changes-in-global-dairy-market-59251>.Macnamara, Jim. “‘Emergent’ Media and Public Communication: Understanding the Changing Mediascape.” Public Communication Review 1.2 (2010): 3–17.Mango, Alison. “This Drastic Diet Change Helped Venus Williams Fight Her Autoimmune Condition.” Health.com 12 Jan. 2017. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.health.com/nutrition/venus-williams-raw-vegan-diet>.McDonald, Barbara. “Once You Know Something, You Can’t Not Know It. An Empirical Look at Becoming Vegan.” Foodethics.univie.ac.at, 2000. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://foodethics.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/inst_ethik_wiss_dialog/McDonald__B._2000._Vegan_...__An_Empirical_Look_at_Becoming_Vegan..pdf>.Milk Life. “What Is Milk Life?” 20 Feb. 2019 <https://milklife.com/what-is-milk-life>.News.com.au. “Twitter Trolls Take over Conference Hashtag with Porn.” News.com.au 30 Nov. 2015. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://www.news.com.au/national/twitter-trolls-take-over-ecology-conference-hashtag-with-porn/news-story/06a76d7ab53ec181776bdb11d735e422>.Nussbaum, Rachel. “Tons of Your Favorite Drugstore Products Are Officially Cruelty-Free Now.” Glamour.com 9 Oct. 2018. 21 Feb. 2019 <https://www.glamour.com/story/dove-cruelty-free-peta>.Parnell, Kerry. “Charity Theme Months Have Taken over the Calendar.” Daily Telegraph.com 26 Sep. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/charity-theme-months-have-taken-over-the-calendar/news-story/1f444a360ee04b5ec01154ddf4763932>.People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “This Cow Was Suffering on Dairy Farm and the Owner Refused to Help Her.” Facebook post. 13 Feb. 2019. 15 Feb. 2019 <https://www.facebook.com/official.peta>.Pippus, Anna. “Progress! Canada’s New Draft Food Guide Favors Plant-Based Protein and Eliminates Dairy as a Food Group.” Huffington Post 7 Dec. 2017. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/progress-canadas-new-food-guide-will-favor-plant_us_5966eb4ce4b07b5e1d96ed5e>.Potter, Will. “Ag-Gag Laws: Corporate Attempts to Keep Consumers in the Dark.” Griffith Journal of Law and Human Dignity (2017): 1–32.Roy Morgan. “Netflix Set to Surge beyond 10 Million Users.” Roy Morgan 3 Aug. 2018. 20 Feb. 2019 <http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/7681-netflix-stan-foxtel-fetch-youtube-amazon-pay-tv-june-2018-201808020452>.———. “1 in 7 Australians Now Watch No Commercial TV, Nearly Half of All Broadcasting Reaches People 50+, and Those with SVOD Watch 30 Minutes Less a Day.” Roy Morgan 1 Feb. 2016. 10 Feb. 2019 <http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/6646-decline-and-change-commercial-television-viewing-audiences-december-2015-201601290251>.Saccaro, Matt. “Milk Does Not Do a Body Good, Says New Study.” Mic.com 29 Oct. 2014. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://mic.com/articles/102698/milk-does-not-do-a-body-good#.o7MuLnZgV>.Sandhu, Serina. “A Group of Vegan Activists Is Trying to Hijack the ‘Februdairy’ Month by Encouraging People to Protest at Dairy Farms.” inews.co.uk 5 Feb. 2019. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/vegan-activists-hijack-februdairy-protest-dairy-farms-farmers/>.Social Garden. “Hashtag Blunders That Hurt Your Social Media Marketing Efforts.” Socialgarden.com.au 30 May 2014. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://socialgarden.com.au/social-media-marketing/hashtag-blunders-that-hurt-your-social-media-marketing-efforts/>.Statista: The Statista Portal. Use of Social Networking Sites in Australia as of March 2017 by Age. 2019. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.statista.com/statistics/729928/australia-social-media-usage-by-age/>.Tran, Mark. “#myNYPD Twitter Callout Backfires for New York Police Department.” The Guardian 23 Apr. 2014. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/23/mynypd-twitter-call-out-new-york-police-backfires>.University of Cambridge. “Farming Loved But Misunderstood, Survey Shows.” Cam.uc.uk 23 Aug. 2012. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/farming-loved-but-misunderstood-survey-shows>.Veganuary. “About Veganuary.” 2019. 21 Feb. 2019 <https://veganuary.com/about/>.———. “Veganuary: Inspiring People to Try Vegan!” 2019. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://veganuary.com/>.What the Health. Dir. Kip Anderson, and Keegan Kuhn. A.U.M. Films, 2017.Worthington, Brett. “Federal Government Pushes to Stop Plant-Based Products Labelled as ‘Meat’ or ‘Milk’.” ABC News 11 Oct. 2018. 20 Feb. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-11/federal-government-wants-food-standards-reviewed/10360200>.Yates, Jack. “Farmers Plan to Make #Februdairy Month of Dairy Celebration.” Farmers Weekly 20 Jan. 2018. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/farmers-plan-make-februdairy-month-dairy-celebration>.

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

Introduction In December 2010, Nespresso, the world’s leading brand of premium-portioned coffee, opened a flagship “boutique” in Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall. This was Nespresso’s fifth boutique opening of 2010, after Brussels, Miami, Soho, and Munich. The Sydney debut coincided with the mall’s upmarket redevelopment, which explains Nespresso’s arrival in the city: strategic geographic expansion is key to the brand’s growth. Rather than panoramic ubiquity, a retail option favoured by brands like McDonalds, KFC and Starbucks, Nespresso opts for iconic, prestigious locations. This strategy has been highly successful: since 2000 Nespresso has recorded year-on-year per annum growth of 30 per cent. This has been achieved, moreover, despite a global financial downturn and an international coffee market replete with brand variety. In turn, Nespresso marks an evolution in the coffee market over the last decade. The Nespresso Story Founded in 1986, Nespresso is the fasting growing brand in the Nestlé Group. Its headquarters are in Lausanne, Switzerland, with over 7,000 employees worldwide. In 2012, Nespresso had 270 boutiques in 50 countries. The brand’s growth strategy involves three main components: premium coffee capsules, “mated” with specially designed machines, and accompanied by exceptional customer service through the Nespresso Club. Each component requires some explanation. Nespresso offers 16 varieties of Grand Crus coffee: 7 espresso blends, 3 pure origin espressos, 3 lungos (for larger cups), and 3 decaffeinated coffees. Each 5.5 grams of portioned coffee is cased in a hermetically sealed aluminium capsule, or pod, designed to preserve the complex, volatile aromas (between 800 and 900 per pod), and prevent oxidation. These capsules are designed to be used exclusively with Nespresso-branded machines, which are equipped with a patented high-pressure extraction system designed for optimum release of the coffee. These machines, of which there are 28 models, are developed with 6 machine partners, and Antoine Cahen, from Ateliers du Nord in Lausanne, designs most of them. For its consumers, members of the Nespresso Club, the capsules and machines guarantee perfect espresso coffee every time, within seconds and with minimum effort—what Nespresso calls the “ultimate coffee experience.” The Nespresso Club promotes this experience as an everyday luxury, whereby café-quality coffee can be enjoyed in the privacy and comfort of Club members’ homes. This domestic focus is a relatively recent turn in its history. Nestlé patented some of its pod technology in 1976; the compatible machines, initially made in Switzerland by Turmix, were developed a decade later. Nespresso S. A. was set up as a subsidiary unit within the Nestlé Group with a view to target the office and fine restaurant sector. It was first test-marketed in Japan in 1986, and rolled out the same year in Switzerland, France and Italy. However, by 1988, low sales prompted Nespresso’s newly appointed CEO, Jean-Paul Gillard, to rethink the brand’s focus. Gillard subsequently repositioned Nespresso’s target market away from the commercial sector towards high-income households and individuals, and introduced a mail-order distribution system; these elements became the hallmarks of the Nespresso Club (Markides 55). The Nespresso Club was designed to give members who had purchased Nespresso machines 24-hour customer service, by mail, phone, fax, and email. By the end of 1997 there were some 250,000 Club members worldwide. The boom in domestic, user-friendly espresso machines from the early 1990s helped Nespresso’s growth in this period. The cumulative efforts by the main manufacturers—Krups, Bosch, Braun, Saeco and DeLonghi—lowered the machines’ average price to around US $100 (Purpura, “Espresso” 88; Purpura, “New” 116). This paralleled consumers’ growing sophistication, as they became increasingly familiar with café-quality espresso, cappuccino and latté—for reasons to be detailed below. Nespresso was primed to exploit this cultural shift in the market and forge a charismatic point of difference: an aspirational, luxury option within an increasingly accessible and familiar field. Between 2006 and 2008, Nespresso sales more than doubled, prompting a second production factory to supplement the original plant in Avenches (Simonian). In 2008, Nespresso grew 20 times faster than the global coffee market (Reguly B1). As Nespresso sales exceeded $1.3 billion AU in 2009, with 4.8 billion capsules shipped out annually and 5 million Club members worldwide, it became Nestlé’s fastest growing division (Canning 28). According to Nespresso’s Oceania market director, Renaud Tinel, the brand now represents 8 per cent of the total coffee market; of Nespresso specifically, he reports that 10,000 cups (using one capsule per cup) were consumed worldwide each minute in 2009, and that increased to 12,300 cups per minute in 2010 (O’Brien 16). Given such growth in such a brief period, the atypical dynamic between the boutique, the Club and the Nespresso brand warrants closer consideration. Nespresso opened its first boutique in Paris in 2000, on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It was a symbolic choice and signalled the brand’s preference for glamorous precincts in cosmopolitan cities. This has become the design template for all Nespresso boutiques, what the company calls “brand embassies” in its press releases. More like art gallery-style emporiums than retail spaces, these boutiques perform three main functions: they showcase Nespresso coffees, machines and accessories (all elegantly displayed); they enable Club members to stock up on capsules; and they offer excellent customer service, which invariably equates to detailed production information. The brand’s revenue model reflects the boutique’s role in the broader business strategy: 50 per cent of Nespresso’s business is generated online, 30 per cent through the boutiques, and 20 per cent through call centres. Whatever floor space these boutiques dedicate to coffee consumption is—compared to the emphasis on exhibition and ambience—minimal and marginal. In turn, this tightly monitored, self-focused model inverts the conventional function of most commercial coffee sites. For several hundred years, the café has fostered a convivial atmosphere, served consumers’ social inclinations, and overwhelmingly encouraged diverse, eclectic clientele. The Nespresso boutique is the antithesis to this, and instead actively limits interaction: the Club “community” does not meet as a community, and is united only in atomised allegiance to the Nespresso brand. In this regard, Nespresso stands in stark contrast to another coffee brand that has been highly successful in recent years—Starbucks. Starbucks famously recreates the aesthetics, rhetoric and atmosphere of the café as a “third place”—a term popularised by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe non-work, non-domestic spaces where patrons converge for respite or recreation. These liminal spaces (cafés, parks, hair salons, book stores and such locations) might be private, commercial sites, yet they provide opportunities for chance encounters, even therapeutic interactions. In this way, they aid sociability and civic life (Kleinman 193). Long before the term “third place” was coined, coffee houses were deemed exemplars of egalitarian social space. As Rudolf P. Gaudio notes, the early coffee houses of Western Europe, in Oxford and London in the mid-1600s, “were characterized as places where commoners and aristocrats could meet and socialize without regard to rank” (670). From this sanguine perspective, they both informed and animated the modern public sphere. That is, and following Habermas, as a place where a mixed cohort of individuals could meet and discuss matters of public importance, and where politics intersected society, the eighteenth-century British coffee house both typified and strengthened the public sphere (Karababa and Ger 746). Moreover, and even from their early Ottoman origins (Karababa and Ger), there has been an historical correlation between the coffee house and the cosmopolitan, with the latter at least partly defined in terms of demographic breadth (Luckins). Ironically, and insofar as Nespresso appeals to coffee-literate consumers, the brand owes much to Starbucks. In the two decades preceding Nespresso’s arrival, Starbucks played a significant role in refining coffee literacy around the world, gauging mass-market trends, and stirring consumer consciousness. For Nespresso, this constituted major preparatory phenomena, as its strategy (and success) since the early 2000s presupposed the coffee market that Starbucks had helped to create. According to Nespresso’s chief executive Richard Giradot, central to Nespresso’s expansion is a focus on particular cities and their coffee culture (Canning 28). In turn, it pays to take stock of how such cities developed a coffee culture amenable to Nespresso—and therein lays the brand’s debt to Starbucks. Until the last few years, and before celebrity ambassador George Clooney was enlisted in 2005, Nespresso’s marketing was driven primarily by Club members’ recommendations. At the same time, though, Nespresso insisted that Club members were coffee connoisseurs, whose knowledge and enjoyment of coffee exceeded conventional coffee offerings. In 2000, Henk Kwakman, one of Nestlé’s Coffee Specialists, explained the need for portioned coffee in terms of guaranteed perfection, one that demanding consumers would expect. “In general”, he reasoned, “people who really like espresso coffee are very much more quality driven. When you consider such an intense taste experience, the quality is very important. If the espresso is slightly off quality, the connoisseur notices this immediately” (quoted in Butler 50). What matters here is how this corps of connoisseurs grew to a scale big enough to sustain and strengthen the Nespresso system, in the absence of a robust marketing or educative drive by Nespresso (until very recently). Put simply, the brand’s ascent was aided by Starbucks, specifically by the latter’s success in changing the mainstream coffee market during the 1990s. In establishing such a strong transnational presence, Starbucks challenged smaller, competing brands to define themselves with more clarity and conviction. Indeed, working with data that identified just 200 freestanding coffee houses in the US prior to 1990 compared to 14,000 in 2003, Kjeldgaard and Ostberg go so far as to state that: “Put bluntly, in the US there was no local coffee consumptionscape prior to Starbucks” (Kjeldgaard and Ostberg 176). Starbucks effectively redefined the coffee world for mainstream consumers in ways that were directly beneficial for Nespresso. Starbucks: Coffee as Ambience, Experience, and Cultural Capital While visitors to Nespresso boutiques can sample the coffee, with highly trained baristas and staff on site to explain the Nespresso system, in the main there are few concessions to the conventional café experience. Primarily, these boutiques function as material spaces for existing Club members to stock up on capsules, and therefore they complement the Nespresso system with a suitably streamlined space: efficient, stylish and conspicuously upmarket. Outside at least one Sydney boutique for instance (Bondi Junction, in the fashionable eastern suburbs), visitors enter through a club-style cordon, something usually associated with exclusive bars or hotels. This demarcates the boutique from neighbouring coffee chains, and signals Nespresso’s claim to more privileged patrons. This strategy though, the cultivation of a particular customer through aesthetic design and subtle flattery, is not unique. For decades, Starbucks also contrived a “special” coffee experience. Moreover, while the Starbucks model strikes a very different sensorial chord to that of Nespresso (in terms of décor, target consumer and so on) it effectively groomed and prepped everyday coffee drinkers to a level of relative self-sufficiency and expertise—and therein is the link between Starbucks’s mass-marketed approach and Nespresso’s timely arrival. Starbucks opened its first store in 1971, in Seattle. Three partners founded it: Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, both teachers, and Gordon Bowker, a writer. In 1982, as they opened their sixth Seattle store, they were joined by Howard Schultz. Schultz’s trip to Italy the following year led to an entrepreneurial epiphany to which he now attributes Starbucks’s success. Inspired by how cafés in Italy, particularly the espresso bars in Milan, were vibrant social hubs, Schultz returned to the US with a newfound sensitivity to ambience and attitude. In 1987, Schultz bought Starbucks outright and stated his business philosophy thus: “We aren’t in the coffee business, serving people. We are in the people business, serving coffee” (quoted in Ruzich 432). This was articulated most clearly in how Schultz structured Starbucks as the ultimate “third place”, a welcoming amalgam of aromas, music, furniture, textures, literature and free WiFi. This transformed the café experience twofold. First, sensory overload masked the dull homogeny of a global chain with an air of warm, comforting domesticity—an inviting, everyday “home away from home.” To this end, in 1994, Schultz enlisted interior design “mastermind” Wright Massey; with his team of 45 designers, Massey created the chain’s decor blueprint, an “oasis for contemplation” (quoted in Scerri 60). At the same time though, and second, Starbucks promoted a revisionist, airbrushed version of how the coffee was produced. Patrons could see and smell the freshly roasted beans, and read about their places of origin in the free pamphlets. In this way, Starbucks merged the exotic and the cosmopolitan. The global supply chain underwent an image makeover, helped by a “new” vocabulary that familiarised its coffee drinkers with the diversity and complexity of coffee, and such terms as aroma, acidity, body and flavour. This strategy had a decisive impact on the coffee market, first in the US and then elsewhere: Starbucks oversaw a significant expansion in coffee consumption, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In the decades following the Second World War, coffee consumption in the US reached a plateau. Moreover, as Steven Topik points out, the rise of this type of coffee connoisseurship actually coincided with declining per capita consumption of coffee in the US—so the social status attributed to specialised knowledge of coffee “saved” the market: “Coffee’s rise as a sign of distinction and connoisseurship meant its appeal was no longer just its photoactive role as a stimulant nor the democratic sociability of the coffee shop” (Topik 100). Starbucks’s singular triumph was to not only convert non-coffee drinkers, but also train them to a level of relative sophistication. The average “cup o’ Joe” thus gave way to the latte, cappuccino, macchiato and more, and a world of coffee hitherto beyond (perhaps above) the average American consumer became both regular and routine. By 2003, Starbucks’s revenue was US $4.1 billion, and by 2012 there were almost 20,000 stores in 58 countries. As an idealised “third place,” Starbucks functioned as a welcoming haven that flattened out and muted the realities of global trade. The variety of beans on offer (Arabica, Latin American, speciality single origin and so on) bespoke a generous and bountiful modernity; while brochures schooled patrons in the nuances of terroir, an appreciation for origin and distinctiveness that encoded cultural capital. This positioned Starbucks within a happy narrative of the coffee economy, and drew patrons into this story by flattering their consumer choices. Against the generic sameness of supermarket options, Starbucks promised distinction, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term, and diversity in its coffee offerings. For Greg Dickinson, the Starbucks experience—the scent of the beans, the sound of the grinders, the taste of the coffees—negated the abstractions of postmodern, global trade: by sensory seduction, patrons connected with something real, authentic and material. At the same time, Starbucks professed commitment to the “triple bottom line” (Savitz), the corporate mantra that has morphed into virtual orthodoxy over the last fifteen years. This was hardly surprising; companies that trade in food staples typically grown in developing regions (coffee, tea, sugar, and coffee) felt the “political-aesthetic problematization of food” (Sassatelli and Davolio). This saw increasingly cognisant consumers trying to reconcile the pleasures of consumption with environmental and human responsibilities. The “triple bottom line” approach, which ostensibly promotes best business practice for people, profits and the planet, was folded into Starbucks’s marketing. The company heavily promoted its range of civic engagement, such as donations to nurses’ associations, literacy programs, clean water programs, and fair dealings with its coffee growers in developing societies (Simon). This bode well for its target market. As Constance M. Ruch has argued, Starbucks sought the burgeoning and lucrative “bobo” class, a term Ruch borrows from David Brooks. A portmanteau of “bourgeois bohemians,” “bobo” describes the educated elite that seeks the ambience and experience of a counter-cultural aesthetic, but without the political commitment. Until the last few years, it seemed Starbucks had successfully grafted this cultural zeitgeist onto its “third place.” Ironically, the scale and scope of the brand’s success has meant that Starbucks’s claim to an ethical agenda draws frequent and often fierce attack. As a global behemoth, Starbucks evolved into an iconic symbol of advanced consumer culture. For those critical of how such brands overwhelm smaller, more local competition, the brand is now synonymous for insidious, unstoppable retail spread. This in turn renders Starbucks vulnerable to protests that, despite its gestures towards sustainability (human and environmental), and by virtue of its size, ubiquity and ultimately conservative philosophy, it has lost whatever cachet or charm it supposedly once had. As Bryant Simon argues, in co-opting the language of ethical practice within an ultimately corporatist context, Starbucks only ever appealed to a modest form of altruism; not just in terms of the funds committed to worthy causes, but also to move thorny issues to “the most non-contentious middle-ground,” lest conservative customers felt alienated (Simon 162). Yet, having flagged itself as an ethical brand, Starbucks became an even bigger target for anti-corporatist sentiment, and the charge that, as a multinational giant, it remained complicit in (and one of the biggest benefactors of) a starkly inequitable and asymmetric global trade. It remains a major presence in the world coffee market, and arguably the most famous of the coffee chains. Over the last decade though, the speed and intensity with which Nespresso has grown, coupled with its atypical approach to consumer engagement, suggests that, in terms of brand equity, it now offers a more compelling point of difference than Starbucks. Brand “Me” Insofar as the Nespresso system depends on a consumer market versed in the intricacies of quality coffee, Starbucks can be at least partly credited for nurturing a more refined palate amongst everyday coffee drinkers. Yet while Starbucks courted the “average” consumer in its quest for market control, saturating the suburban landscape with thousands of virtually indistinguishable stores, Nespresso marks a very different sensibility. Put simply, Nespresso inverts the logic of a coffee house as a “third place,” and patrons are drawn not to socialise and relax but to pursue their own highly individualised interests. The difference with Starbucks could not be starker. One visitor to the Bloomingdale boutique (in New York’s fashionable Soho district) described it as having “the feel of Switzerland rather than Seattle. Instead of velvet sofas and comfy music, it has hard surfaces, bright colours and European hostesses” (Gapper 9). By creating a system that narrows the gap between production and consumption, to the point where Nespresso boutiques advertise the coffee brand but do not promote on-site coffee drinking, the boutiques are blithely indifferent to the historical, romanticised image of the coffee house as a meeting place. The result is a coffee experience that exploits the sophistication and vanity of aspirational consumers, but ignores the socialising scaffold by which coffee houses historically and perhaps naively made some claim to community building. If anything, Nespresso restricts patrons’ contemplative field: they consider only their relationships to the brand. In turn, Nespresso offers the ultimate expression of contemporary consumer capitalism, a hyper-individual experience for a hyper-modern age. By developing a global brand that is both luxurious and niche, Nespresso became “the Louis Vuitton of coffee” (Betts 14). Where Starbucks pursued retail ubiquity, Nespresso targets affluent, upmarket cities. As chief executive Richard Giradot put it, with no hint of embarrassment or apology: “If you take China, for example, we are not speaking about China, we are speaking about Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing because you will not sell our concept in the middle of nowhere in China” (quoted in Canning 28). For this reason, while Europe accounts for 90 per cent of Nespresso sales (Betts 15), its forays into the Americas, Asia and Australasia invariably spotlights cities that are already iconic or emerging economic hubs. The first boutique in Latin America, for instance, was opened in Jardins, a wealthy suburb in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Nespresso, Nestlé has popularised a coffee experience neatly suited to contemporary consumer trends: Club members inhabit a branded world as hermetically sealed as the aluminium pods they purchase and consume. Besides the Club’s phone, fax and online distribution channels, pods can only be bought at the boutiques, which minimise even the potential for serendipitous mingling. The baristas are there primarily for product demonstrations, whilst highly trained staff recite the machines’ strengths (be they in design or utility), or information about the actual coffees. For Club members, the boutique service is merely the human extension of Nespresso’s online presence, whereby product information becomes increasingly tailored to increasingly individualised tastes. In the boutique, this emphasis on the individual is sold in terms of elegance, expedience and privilege. Nespresso boasts that over 70 per cent of its workforce is “customer facing,” sharing their passion and knowledge with Club members. Having already received and processed the product information (through the website, boutique staff, and promotional brochures), Club members need not do anything more than purchase their pods. In some of the more recently opened boutiques, such as in Paris-Madeleine, there is even an Exclusive Room where only Club members may enter—curious tourists (or potential members) are kept out. Club members though can select their preferred Grands Crus and checkout automatically, thanks to RFID (radio frequency identification) technology inserted in the capsule sleeves. So, where Starbucks exudes an inclusive, hearth-like hospitality, the Nespresso Club appears more like a pampered clique, albeit a growing one. As described in the Financial Times, “combine the reception desk of a designer hotel with an expensive fashion display and you get some idea what a Nespresso ‘coffee boutique’ is like” (Wiggins and Simonian 10). Conclusion Instead of sociability, Nespresso puts a premium on exclusivity and the knowledge gained through that exclusive experience. The more Club members know about the coffee, the faster and more individualised (and “therefore” better) the transaction they have with the Nespresso brand. This in turn confirms Zygmunt Bauman’s contention that, in a consumer society, being free to choose requires competence: “Freedom to choose does not mean that all choices are right—there are good and bad choices, better and worse choices. The kind of choice eventually made is the evidence of competence or its lack” (Bauman 43-44). Consumption here becomes an endless process of self-fashioning through commodities; a process Eva Illouz considers “all the more strenuous when the market recruits the consumer through the sysiphian exercise of his/her freedom to choose who he/she is” (Illouz 392). In a status-based setting, the more finely graded the differences between commodities (various places of origin, blends, intensities, and so on), the harder the consumer works to stay ahead—which means to be sufficiently informed. Consumers are locked in a game of constant reassurance, to show upward mobility to both themselves and society. For all that, and like Starbucks, Nespresso shows some signs of corporate social responsibility. In 2009, the company announced its “Ecolaboration” initiative, a series of eco-friendly targets for 2013. By then, Nespresso aims to: source 80 per cent of its coffee through Sustainable Quality Programs and Rainforest Alliance Certified farms; triple its capacity to recycle used capsules to 75 per cent; and reduce the overall carbon footprint required to produce each cup of Nespresso by 20 per cent (Nespresso). This information is conveyed through the brand’s website, press releases and brochures. However, since such endeavours are now de rigueur for many brands, it does not register as particularly innovative, progressive or challenging: it is an unexceptional (even expected) part of contemporary mainstream marketing. Indeed, the use of actor George Clooney as Nespresso’s brand ambassador since 2005 shows shrewd appraisal of consumers’ political and cultural sensibilities. As a celebrity who splits his time between Hollywood and Lake Como in Italy, Clooney embodies the glamorous, cosmopolitan lifestyle that Nespresso signifies. However, as an actor famous for backing political and humanitarian causes (having raised awareness for crises in Darfur and Haiti, and backing calls for the legalisation of same-sex marriage), Clooney’s meanings extend beyond cinema: as a celebrity, he is multi-coded. Through its association with Clooney, and his fusion of star power and worldly sophistication, the brand is imbued with semantic latitude. Still, in the television commercials in which Clooney appears for Nespresso, his role as the Hollywood heartthrob invariably overshadows that of the political campaigner. These commercials actually pivot on Clooney’s romantic appeal, an appeal which is ironically upstaged in the commercials by something even more seductive: Nespresso coffee. References Bauman, Zygmunt. “Collateral Casualties of Consumerism.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7.1 (2007): 25–56. Betts, Paul. “Nestlé Refines its Arsenal in the Luxury Coffee War.” Financial Times 28 Apr. (2010): 14. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Butler, Reg. “The Nespresso Route to a Perfect Espresso.” Tea & Coffee Trade Journal 172.4 (2000): 50. Canning, Simon. “Nespresso Taps a Cultural Thirst.” The Australian 26 Oct. (2009): 28. Dickinson, Greg. “Joe’s Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.4 (2002): 5–27. Gapper, John. “Lessons from Nestlé’s Coffee Break.” Financial Times 3 Jan. (2008): 9. Gaudio, Rudolf P. “Coffeetalk: StarbucksTM and the Commercialization of Casual Conversation.” Language in Society 32.5 (2003): 659–91. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962. Illouz, Eva. “Emotions, Imagination and Consumption: A New Research Agenda.” Journal of Consumer Culture 9 (2009): 377–413. Karababa, EmInegül, and GüIIz Ger. “Early Modern Ottoman Coffehouse Culture and the Formation of the Consumer Subject." Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 737–60 Kjeldgaard, Dannie, and Jacob Ostberg. “Coffee Grounds and the Global Cup: Global Consumer Culture in Scandinavia”. Consumption, Markets and Culture 10.2 (2007): 175–87. Kleinman, Sharon S. “Café Culture in France and the United States: A Comparative Ethnographic Study of the Use of Mobile Information and Communication Technologies.” Atlantic Journal of Communication 14.4 (2006): 191–210. Luckins, Tanja. “Flavoursome Scraps of Conversation: Talking and Hearing the Cosmopolitan City, 1900s–1960s.” History Australia 7.2 (2010): 31.1–31.16. Markides, Constantinos C. “A Dynamic View of Strategy.” Sloan Management Review 40.3 (1999): 55. Nespresso. “Ecolaboration Initiative Directs Nespresso to Sustainable Success.” Nespresso Media Centre 2009. 13 Dec. 2011. ‹http://www.nespresso.com›. O’Brien, Mary. “A Shot at the Big Time.” The Age 21 Jun. (2011): 16. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Purpura, Linda. “New Espresso Machines to Tempt the Palate.” The Weekly Home Furnishings Newspaper 3 May (1993): 116. Purpura, Linda. “Espresso: Grace under Pressure.” The Weekly Home Furnishings Newspaper 16 Dec. (1991): 88. Reguly, Eric. “No Ordinary Joe: Nestlé Pulls off Caffeine Coup.” The Globe and Mail 6 Jul. (2009): B1. Ruzich, Constance M. “For the Love of Joe: The Language of Starbucks.” The Journal of Popular Culture 41.3 (2008): 428–42. Sassatelli, Roberta, and Federica Davolio. “Consumption, Pleasure and Politics: Slow Food and the Politico-aesthetic Problematization of Food.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10.2 (2010): 202–32. Savitz, Andrew W. The Triple Bottom Line: How Today’s Best-run Companies are Achieving Economic, Social, and Environmental Success—And How You Can Too. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006. Scerri, Andrew. “Triple Bottom-line Capitalism and the ‘Third Place’.” Arena Journal 20 (2002/03): 57–65. Simon, Bryant. “Not Going to Starbucks: Boycotts and the Out-sourcing of Politics in the Branded World.” Journal of Consumer Culture 11.2 (2011): 145–67. Simonian, Haig. “Nestlé Doubles Nespresso Output.” FT.Com 10 Jun. (2009). 2 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0dcc4e44-55ea-11de-ab7e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1tgMPBgtV›. Topik, Steven. “Coffee as a Social Drug.” Cultural Critique 71 (2009): 81–106. Wiggins, Jenny, and Haig Simonian. “How to Serve a Bespoke Cup of Coffee.” Financial Times 3 Apr. (2007): 10.

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer Porn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.

Introduction 2021 was the year that NFTs got big—not just in value but also in terms of the cultural consciousness. When digital artist Beeple sold the portfolio of his 5,000 daily images at Christie’s for US$69 million, the art world was left intrigued, confused, and outraged in equal measure. Depending on who you asked, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) seemed to be either a quick cash-grab or the future of the art market (Bowden and Jones; Smee). Following the Beeple sale, articles started to appear indicating that the film industry was abuzz for NFTs. Independent filmmaker Kevin Smith was quick to announce that he planned to release his horror film Killroy Was Here as an NFT (Alexander); in September 2021 the James Bond film No Time to Die also unveiled a series of collectibles to coincide with the film’s much-delayed theatrical release (Natalee); the distribution and collectible platforms Vuele, NFT Studios, and Mogul Productions all emerged, and the industry rumour mill suggests more start-ups are en route (CurrencyWorks; NFT Studios; NewsBTC). Blockchain disciples say that the technology will solve all the problems of the Internet (Tewari; Norton; European Business Review); critics say it will only perpetuate existing accessibility and equality issues (Davis and Flatow; Klein). Those more circumspect will doubtless sit back until the dust settles, waiting to see what parts of so-called web3 will be genuinely integrated into the architecture of the Internet. Pamela Hutchinson puts it neatly in terms of the arts sector: “the NFT may revolutionise the art market, film funding and distribution. Or it might be an ecological disaster and a financial bubble, in which few actual movies change hands, and fraudsters get rich from other people’s intellectual property” (Hutchinson). There is an uptick in the literature around NFTs and blockchain (see Quiniou; Gayvoronskaya & Meinel); however, the technology remains unregulated and unstandardised (Yeung 212-14; Dimitropoulos 112-13). Similarly, the sheer amount of funding being put into fundamental technical, data, and security-related issues speaks volumes to the nascency of the space (Ossinger; Livni; Gayvoronskaya & Meinel 52-6). Put very briefly, NFTs are part of a given blockchain system; think of them, like cryptocurrency coins, as “units of value” within that system (Roose). NFTs were initially rolled out on Ethereum, though several other blockchains have now implemented their own NFT frameworks. NFTs are usually not the artwork itself, but rather a unique, un-copyable (hence, non-fungible) piece of code that is attached, linked, or connected to another digital file, be that an image, video, text, or something else entirely. NFTs are often referred to as a digital artwork’s “certificate of authenticity” (Roose). At the time of writing, it remains to be seen how widely blockchain and NFT technology will be implemented across the entertainment industries. However, this article aims to outline the current state of implementation in the film trade specifically, and to attempt to sort true potential from the hype. Beginning with an overview of the core issues around blockchain and NFTs as they apply to film properties and adjacent products, current implementations of the technology are outlined, before finishing with a hesitant glimpse into the potential future applications. The Issues and Conversation At the core of current conversations around blockchain are three topics: intellectual property and ownership, concentrations of power and control, and environmental impact. To this I would like to add a consideration of social capital, which I begin with briefly here. Both the film industry and “crypto” — if we take the latter to encompass the various facets of so-called ‘web3’ — are engines of social capital. In the case of cinema, its products are commodified and passed through a model that begins with exclusivity (theatrical release) before progressing to mass availability (home media, streaming). The cinematic object, i.e., an individual copy of a film, is, by virtue of its origins as a mass product of the twentieth century, fungible. The film is captured, copied, stored, distributed, and shared. The film-industrial model has always relied on social phenomena, word of mouth, critical discourse, and latterly on buzz across digital social media platforms. This is perhaps as distinct from fine art, where — at least for dealers — the content of the piece does not necessarily matter so much as verification of ownership and provenance. Similarly, web3, with its decentralised and often-anonymised processes, relies on a kind of social activity, or at least a recorded interaction wherein the chain is stamped and each iteration is updated across the system. Even without the current hype, web3 still relies a great deal on discourse, sharing, and community, particularly as it flattens the existing hierarchies of the Internet that linger from Web 2.0. In terms of NFTs, blockchain systems attach scarcity and uniqueness to digital objects. For now, that scarcity and uniqueness is resulting in financial value, though as Jonathan Beller argues the notion of value could — or perhaps should — be reconsidered as blockchain technology, and especially cryptocurrencies, evolve (Beller 217). Regardless, NFT advocates maintain that this is the future of all online activity. To questions of copyright, the structures of blockchain do permit some level of certainty around where a given piece of intellectual property emerged. This is particularly useful where there are transnational differences in recognition of copyright law, such as in France, for instance (Quiniou 112-13). The Berne Convention stipulates that “the subsistence of copyright does not rest on the compliance with formal requirements: rights will exist if the work meets the requirements for protection set out by national law and treaties” (Guadamuz 1373). However, there are still no legal structures underpinning even the most transparent of transactions, when an originator goes out of their way to transfer rights to the buyer of the accompanying NFT. The minimum requirement — even courtesy — for the assignment of rights is the identification of the work itself; as Guadamuz notes, this is tricky for NFTs as they are written in code (1374). The blockchain’s openness and transparency are its key benefits, but until the code can explicitly include (or concretely and permanently reference) the ‘content’ of an NFT, its utility as a system of ownership is questionable. Decentralisation, too, is raised consistently as a key positive characteristic of blockchain technology. Despite the energy required for this decentralisation (addressed shortly), it is true that, at least in its base code, blockchain is a technology with no centralised source of truth or verification. Instead, such verification is performed by every node on the chain. On the surface, for the film industry, this might mean modes of financing, rights management, and distribution chains that are not beholden to multinational media conglomerates, streamers like Netflix, niche intermediaries, or legacy studios. The result here would be a flattening of the terrain: breaking down studio and corporate gatekeeping in favour of a more democratised creative landscape. Creators and creative teams would work peer-to-peer, paying, contracting, servicing, and distribution via the blockchain, with iron-clad, publicly accessible tracking of transactions and ownership. The alternative, though, is that the same imbalances persist, just in a different form: this is outlined in the next section. As Hunter Vaughan writes, the film industry’s environmental impact has long been under-examined. Its practices are diverse, distributed, and hard to quantify. Cinematic images, Vaughan writes, “do not come from nothing, and they do not vanish into the air: they have always been generated by the earth and sun, by fossil fuels and chemical reactions, and our enjoyment of them has material consequences” (3). We believe that by watching a “green” film like Avatar we are doing good, but it implicates us in the dirty secret, an issue of “ignorance and of voluntary psychosis” where “we do not see who we are harming or how these practices are affecting the environment, and we routinely agree to accept the virtual as real” (5). Beyond questions of implication and eco-material conceptualisation, however, there are stark facts. In the 1920s, the Kodak Park Plant in New York drew 12 million gallons of water from Lake Ontario each day to produce film stock. As the twentieth century came to a close, this amount — for a single film plant — had grown to 35-53 million gallons per day. The waste water was perfunctorily “cleaned” and then dumped into surrounding rivers (72-3). This was just one plant, and one part of the filmmaking process. With the shift to digital, this cost might now be calculated in the extraction of precious metals used to make contemporary cameras, computers, or storage devices. Regardless, extrapolate outwards to a global film industry and one quickly realises the impact is almost beyond comprehension. Considering — let alone calculating — the carbon footprint of blockchain requires outlining some fundamentals of the technology. The two primary architectures of blockchain are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), both of which denote methods of adding and verifying new blocks to a chain. PoW was the first model, employed by Bitcoin and the first iteration of Ethereum. In a PoW model, each new block has a specific cryptographic hash. To confirm the new block, crypto miners use their systems to generate a target hash that is less than or equal to that of the block. The systems process these calculations quickly, as the goal is to be “the first miner with the target hash because that miner is the one who can update the blockchain and receive crypto rewards” (Daly). The race for block confirmation necessitates huge amounts of processing power to make these quick calculations. The PoS model differs in that miners are replaced by validators (or staking services where participants pool validation power). Rather than investing in computer power, validators invest in the blockchain’s coins, staking those coins (tokens) in a smart contract (think of this contract like a bank account or vault). When a new block is proposed, an algorithm chooses a validator based on the size of their stake; if the block is verified, the validator receives further cryptocurrency as a reward (Castor). Given the ubiquity and exponential growth of blockchain technology and its users, an accurate quantification of its carbon footprint is difficult. For some precedent, though, one might consider the impact of the Bitcoin blockchain, which runs on a PoW model. As the New York Times so succinctly puts it: “the process of creating Bitcoin to spend or trade consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than is used by Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million” (Huang, O’Neill and Tabuchi). The current Ethereum system (at time of writing), where the majority of NFT transactions take place, also runs on PoW, and it is estimated that a single Ethereum transaction is equivalent to nearly nine days of power consumption by an average US household (Digiconomist). Ethereum always intended to operate on a PoS system, and the transition to this new model is currently underway (Castor). Proof of Stake transactions use significantly less energy — the new Ethereum will supposedly be approximately 2,000 times more energy efficient (Beekhuizen). However, newer systems such as Solana have been explicit about their efficiency goals, stating that a single Solana transaction uses less energy (1,837 Joules, to be precise) than keeping an LED light on for one hour (36,000 J); one Ethereum transaction, for comparison, uses over 692 million J (Solana). In addition to energy usage, however, there is also the question of e-waste as a result of mining and general blockchain operations which, at the time of writing, for Bitcoin sits at around 32 kilotons per year, around the same as the consumer IT wastage of the Netherlands (de Vries and Stoll). How the growth in NFT awareness and adoption amplifies this impact remains to be seen, but depending on which blockchain they use, they may be wasting energy and resources by design. If using a PoW model, the more valuable the cryptocurrency used to make the purchase, the more energy (“gas”) required to authenticate the purchase across the chain. Images abound online of jerry-rigged crypto data centres of varying quality (see also efficiency and safety). With each NFT minted, sold, or traded, these centres draw — and thus waste, for gas — more and more energy. With increased public attention and scrutiny, cryptocurrencies are slowly realising that things could be better. As sustainable alternatives become more desirable and mainstream, it is safe to predict that many NFT marketplaces may migrate to Cardano, Solana, or other more efficient blockchain bases. For now, though, this article considers the existing implementations of NFTs and blockchain technology within the film industry. Current Implementations The current applications of NFTs in film centre around financing and distribution. In terms of the former, NFTs are saleable items that can raise capital for production, distribution, or marketing. As previously mentioned, director Kevin Smith launched Jay & Silent Bob’s Crypto Studio in order to finish and release Killroy Was Here. Smith released over 600 limited edition tokens, including one of the film itself (Moore). In October 2021, renowned Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai sold an NFT with unreleased footage from his film In the Mood for Love at Sotheby’s for US$550,000 (Raybaud). Quentin Tarantino entered the arena in January 2022, auctioning uncut scenes from his 1994 film Pulp Fiction, despite the threat of legal action from the film’s original distributor Miramax (Dailey). In Australia, an early adopter of the technology is director Michael Beets, who works in virtual production and immersive experiences. His immersive 14-minute VR film Nezunoban (2020) was split into seven different chapters, and each chapter was sold as an NFT. Beets also works with artists to develop entry tickets that are their own piece of generative art; with these tickets and the chapters selling for hundreds of dollars at a time, Beets seems to have achieved the impossible: turning a profit on a short film (Fletcher). Another Australian writer-producer, Samuel Wilson, now based in Canada, suggests that the technology does encourage filmmakers to think differently about what they create: At the moment, I’m making NFTs from extra footage of my feature film Miles Away, which will be released early next year. In one way, it’s like a new age of behind-the-scenes/bonus features. I have 14 hours of DV tapes that I’m cutting into a short film which I will then sell in chapters over the coming months. One chapter will feature the dashing KJ Apa (Songbird, Riverdale) without his shirt on. So, hopefully that can turn some heads. (Wilson, in Fletcher) In addition to individual directors, a number of startup companies are also seeking to get in on the action. One of these is Vuele, which is best understood as a blockchain-based streaming service: an NFT Netflix, if you like. In addition to films themselves, the service will offer extra content as NFTs, including “behind the scenes content, bonus features, exclusive Q&As, and memorabilia” (CurrencyWorks). Vuele’s launch title is Zero Contact, directed by Rick Dugdale and starring Anthony Hopkins. The film is marketed as “the World’s First NFT Feature Film” (as at the time of writing, though, both Vuele and its flagship film have yet to launch). Also launching is NFT Studios, a blockchain-based production company that distributes the executive producer role to those buying into the project. NFT Studios is a decentralised administrative organisation (DAO), guided by tech experts, producers, and film industry intermediaries. NFT Studios is launching with A Wing and a Prayer, a biopic of aeronaut Brian Milton (NFT Studios), and will announce their full slate across festivals in 2022. In Australia, Culture Vault states that its aim is to demystify crypto and champion Australian artists’ rights and access to the space. Co-founder and CEO Michelle Grey is well aware of the aforementioned current social capital of NFTs, but is also acutely aware of the space’s opacity and the ubiquity of often machine-generated tat. “The early NFT space was in its infancy, there was a lot of crap around, but don’t forget there’s a lot of garbage in the traditional art world too,” she says (cited in Miller). Grey and her company effectively act like art dealers; intermediaries between the tech and art worlds. These new companies claim to be adhering to the principles of web3, often selling themselves as collectives, DAOs, or distributed administrative systems. But the entrenched tendencies of the film industry — particularly the persistent Hollywood system — are not so easily broken down. Vuele is a joint venture between CurrencyWorks and Enderby Entertainment. The former is a financial technology company setting up blockchain systems for businesses, including the establishment of branded digital currencies such as the controversial FreedomCoin (Memoria); the latter, Enderby, is a production company founded by Canadian film producer (and former investor relations expert in the oil and uranium sectors) Rick Dugdale (Wiesner). Similarly, NFT Studios is partnered with consulting and marketing agencies and blockchain venture capitalists (NFT Investments PLC). Depending on how charitable or cynical one is feeling, these start-ups are either helpful intermediaries to facilitate legacy media moving into NFT technology, or the first bricks in the capitalist wall to bar access for entry to other players. The Future Is… Buffering Marketplaces like Mintable, OpenSea, and Rarible do indeed make the minting and selling of NFTs fairly straightforward — if you’ve ever listed an item for sale on eBay or Facebook, you can probably mint an NFT. Despite this, the current major barrier for average punters to the NFT space remains technical knowledge. The principles of blockchain remain fairly opaque — even this author, who has been on a deep dive for this article, remains sceptical that widespread adoption across multiple applications and industries is feasible. Even so, as Rennie notes, “the unknown is not what blockchain technology is, or even what it is for (there are countless ‘use cases’), but how it structures the actions of those who use it” (235). At the time of writing, a great many commentators and a small handful of scholars are speculating about the role of the metaverse in the creative space. If the endgame of the metaverse is realised, i.e., a virtual, interactive space where users can interact, trade, and consume entertainment, the role of creators, dealers, distributors, and other brokers and players will be up-ended, and have to re-settle once again. Film industry practitioners might look to the games space to see what the road might look like, but then again, in an industry that is — at its best — somewhat resistant to change, this may simply be a fad that blows over. Blockchain’s current employment as a get-rich-quick mechanism for the algorithmic literati and as a computational extension of existing power structures suggests nothing more than another techno-bubble primed to burst (Patrickson 591-2; Klein). Despite the aspirational commentary surrounding distributed administrative systems and organisations, the current implementations are restricted, for now, to startups like NFT Studios. In terms of cinema, it does remain to be seen whether the deployment of NFTs will move beyond a kind of “Netflix with tchotchkes” model, or a variant of crowdfunding with perks. Once Vuele and NFT Studios launch properly, we may have a sense of how this all will play out, particularly alongside less corporate-driven, more artistically-minded initiatives like that of Michael Beets and Culture Vault. It is possible, too, that blockchain technology may streamline the mechanics of the industry in terms of automating or simplifying parts of the production process, particularly around contracts, financing, licensing. This would obviously remove some of the associated labour and fees, but would also de-couple long-established parts and personnel of the industry — would Hollywood and similar industrial-entertainment complexes let this happen? As with any of the many revolutions that have threatened to kill or resurrect the (allegedly) long-suffering cinematic object, we just have to wait, and watch. References Alexander, Bryan. “Kevin Smith Reveals Why He’s Auctioning Off New His Film ‘Killroy Was Here’ as an NFT.” USA TODAY, 15 Apr. 2021. <https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2021/04/15/kevin-smith-auctioning-new-film-nft-killroy-here/7244602002/>. Beekhuizen, Carl. “Ethereum’s Energy Usage Will Soon Decrease by ~99.95%.” Ethereum Foundation Blog, 18 May 2021. <https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/>. Beller, Jonathan. “Economic Media: Crypto and the Myth of Total Liquidity.” Australian Humanities Review 66 (2020): 215-225. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College P, 2006. Bowden, James, and Edward Thomas Jones. “NFTs Are Much Bigger than an Art Fad – Here’s How They Could Change the World.” The Conversation, 26 Apr. 2021. <http://theconversation.com/nfts-are-much-bigger-than-an-art-fad-heres-how-they-could-change-the-world-159563>. Cardano. “Cardano, Ouroboros.” 14 Feb. 2022 <https://cardano.org/ouroboros/>. Castor, Amy. “Why Ethereum Is Switching to Proof of Stake and How It Will Work.” MIT Technology Review, 4 Mar. 2022. <https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/04/1046636/ethereum-blockchain-proof-of-stake/>. CurrencyWorks. “Vuele - CurrencyWorks™.” 3 Feb. 2022 <https://currencyworks.io/project/vuele/>. Dailey, Natasha. “Quentin Tarantino Will Sell His ‘Pulp Fiction’ NFTs This Month despite a Lawsuit from the Film’s Producer Miramax.” Business Insider, 5 Jan. 2022. <https://www.businessinsider.com.au/quentin-tarantino-to-sell-pulp-fiction-nft-despite-miramax-lawsuit-2022-1>. Daly, Lyle. “What Is Proof of Work (PoW) in Crypto?” The Motley Fool, 27 Sep. 2021. <https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/financials/cryptocurrency-stocks/proof-of-work/>. Davis, Kathleen, and Ira Flatow. “Will Blockchain Really Change the Way the Internet Runs?” Science Friday, 23 July 2021. <https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/blockchain-internet/>. De Vries, Alex, and Christian Stoll. “Bitcoin’s Growing E-Waste Problem.” Resources, Conservation & Recycling 175 (2021): 1-11. Dimitropoulos, Georgios. “Global Currencies and Domestic Regulation: Embedding through Enabling?” In Regulating Blockchain: Techno-Social and Legal Challenges. Eds. Philipp Hacker et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019. 112–139. Edelman, Gilad. “What Is Web3, Anyway?” Wired, Nov. 2021. <https://www.wired.com/story/web3-gavin-wood-interview/>. European Business Review. “Future of Blockchain: How Will It Revolutionize the World in 2022 & Beyond!” The European Business Review, 1 Nov. 2021. <https://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/future-of-blockchain-how-will-it-revolutionize-the-world-in-2022-beyond/>. Fletcher, James. “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the NFT!” FilmInk, 2 Oct. 2021. <https://www.filmink.com.au/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-nft/>. Gayvoronskaya, Tatiana, and Christoph Meinel. Blockchain: Hype or Innovation. Cham: Springer. Guadamuz, Andres. “The Treachery of Images: Non-Fungible Tokens and Copyright.” Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice 16.12 (2021): 1367–1385. Huang, Jon, Claire O’Neill, and Hiroko Tabuchi. “Bitcoin Uses More Electricity than Many Countries. How Is That Possible?” The New York Times, 3 Sep. 2021. <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitcoin-carbon-footprint-electricity.html>. Hutchinson, Pamela. “Believe the Hype? What NFTs Mean for Film.” BFI, 22 July 2021. <https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/nfts-non-fungible-tokens-blockchain-film-funding-revolution-hype>. Klein, Ezra. “A Viral Case against Crypto, Explored.” The Ezra Klein Show, n.d. 7 Apr. 2022 <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-dan-olson.html>. Livni, Ephrat. “Venture Capital Funding for Crypto Companies Is Surging.” The New York Times, 1 Dec. 2021. <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/business/dealbook/crypto-venture-capital.html>. Memoria, Francisco. “Popular Firearms Marketplace GunBroker to Launch ‘FreedomCoin’ Stablecoin.” CryptoGlobe, 30 Jan. 2019. <https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2019/01/popular-firearm-marketplace-gunbroker-to-launch-freedomcoin-stablecoin/>. Miller, Nick. “Australian Start-Up Aims to Make the Weird World of NFT Art ‘Less Crap’.” Sydney Morning Herald, 19 Jan. 2022. <https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/australian-startup-aims-to-make-the-weird-world-of-nft-art-less-crap-20220119-p59pev.html>. Moore, Kevin. “Kevin Smith Drops an NFT Project Packed with Utility.” One37pm, 27 Apr. 2021. <https://www.one37pm.com/nft/art/kevin-smith-jay-and-silent-bob-nft-killroy-was-here>. Nano. “Press Kit.” 14 Feb. 2022 <https://content.nano.org/Nano-Press-Kit.pdf>. Natalee. “James Bond No Time to Die VeVe NFTs Launch.” NFT Culture, 22 Sep. 2021. <https://www.nftculture.com/nft-marketplaces/4147/>. NewsBTC. “Mogul Productions to Conduct the First Ever Blockchain-Based Voting for Film Financing.” NewsBTC, 22 July 2021. <https://www.newsbtc.com/news/company/mogul-productions-to-conduct-the-first-ever-blockchain-based-voting-for-film-financing/>. NFT Investments PLC. “Approach.” 21 Jan. 2022 <https://www.nftinvest.pro/approach>. NFT Studios. “Projects.” 9 Feb. 2022 <https://nftstudios.dev/projects>. Norton, Robert. “NFTs Have Changed the Art of the Possible.” Wired UK, 14 Feb. 2022. <https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nft-art-world>. Ossinger, Joanna. “Crypto World Hits $3 Trillion Market Cap as Ether, Bitcoin Gain.” Bloomberg.com, 8 Nov. 2021. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-08/crypto-world-hits-3-trillion-market-cap-as-ether-bitcoin-gain>. Patrickson, Bronwin. “What Do Blockchain Technologies Imply for Digital Creative Industries?” Creativity and Innovation Management 30.3 (2021): 585–595. Quiniou, Matthieu. Blockchain: The Advent of Disintermediation, New York: John Wiley, 2019. Raybaud, Sebastien. “First Asian Film NFT Sold, Wong Kar-Wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love’ Fetches US$550k in Sotheby’s Evening Sale, Auctions News.” TheValue.Com, 10 Oct. 2021. <https://en.thevalue.com/articles/sothebys-auction-wong-kar-wai-in-the-mood-for-love-nft>. Rennie, Ellie. “The Challenges of Distributed Administrative Systems.” Australian Humanities Review 66 (2020): 233-239. Roose, Kevin. “What are NFTs?” The New York Times, 18 Mar. 2022. <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/18/technology/nft-guide.html>. Smee, Sebastian. “Will NFTs Transform the Art World? Are They Even Art?” Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2021. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/12/18/nft-art-faq/>. Solana. “Solana’s Energy Use Report: November 2021.” Solana, 24 Nov. 2021. <https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-2021>. Tewari, Hitesh. “Four Ways Blockchain Could Make the Internet Safer, Fairer and More Creative.” The Conversation, 12 July 2019. <http://theconversation.com/four-ways-blockchain-could-make-the-internet-safer-fairer-and-more-creative-118706>. Vaughan, Hunter. Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies. New York: Columbia UP, 2019. Vision and Value. “CurrencyWorks (CWRK): Under-the-Radar, Crypto-Agnostic, Blockchain Pick-and-Shovel Play.” Seeking Alpha, 1 Dec. 2021. <https://seekingalpha.com/article/4472715-currencyworks-under-the-radar-crypto-agnostic-blockchain-pick-and-shovel-play>. Wiesner, Darren. “Exclusive – BC Producer – Rick Dugdale Becomes a Heavyweight.” Hollywood North Magazine, 29 Aug. 2017. <https://hnmag.ca/interview/exclusive-bc-producer-rick-dugdale-becomes-a-heavyweight/>. Yeung, Karen. “Regulation by Blockchain: The Emerging Battle for Supremacy between the Code of Law and Code as Law.” The Modern Law Review 82.2 (2019): 207–239.

Affect theory is generally associated with the lifetime’s work of Silvan S. Tomkins, whose four volume work, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, was published between 1962-92. The volumes argue that humans are subject to a range of innate affects: two positive (interest/excitement; enjoyment/joy), one neutral (surprise/startle) and six negative (distress/anguish; fear/terror; anger/rage; shame/humiliation; dissmell [reaction to a bad smell]; disgust). In a crude “advanced search” using Google, affect is related to emotion in 3,620,000 Web references; to intellect in 1,530,000 instances; and to both intellect and emotion in 1,670,000 cases (Google). Affect may consequently be constructed as a common but complicated response which cannot be simply elided with either emotion or intellect but which involves the integration of both. In particular, affect is generally constructed as a human response to a precipitating stimulus (be it an idea, a physical event, etc). If this is accepted, then Tomkins’s Affect theory might imply that the innate affects only reach conscious awareness as a result of a change in circumstance (e.g., idea or event) which requires a response. The importance of affect as a motivator for action has long been put to good use by advertising and marketing professionals who recognised early in their professions’ development that it is the ESP (emotional selling proposition) that delivers more punch, more quickly, than rational argument. An organisation’s (or individual’s) unique selling point can be rational or emotional, but it is easier for many people marketing a product or service to craft a perceived (unique) difference using emotion rather than logical rationality. For example, Coke and Pepsi are generally constructed as fighting their turf wars based on their emotional appeals, rather than any logical difference between the brands. This paper deals with the use of affect to craft an online therapeutic Website (HeartNET) as a joint ARC-Linkage research project between the National Heart Foundation of Australia (WA Division) and Edith Cowan University’s School of Communications and Multimedia. The research originally started with the idea that heart patients would appreciate the opportunity to communicate online with people going through similar experiences, and that this might create a virtual community of mutually supportive recovering participants. The reality held a few surprises along the way, as we discuss below. HeartNET has been designed to: 1) reduce the disadvantage experienced by people in regional and remote areas; 2) aid the secondary prevention of heart disease in Australia; and, 3) investigate whether increased interaction with an organisation-sponsored affective environment (e.g., the Website) impacts upon perceptions of the organisation. (This might have long-term implications for the financial viability of charitable organisations). In brief, the purpose of the research is to understand the meanings that Web-participants might generate in terms of affective responses to the notion of a shared HeartNET community, and investigate whether these meanings are linked to lifestyle change and responses to the host charity. Ultimately the study aims to determine whether the Website can add value to the participants’ communication and support strategies. The study is still ongoing and has another 18 months to run. Some early results, however, indicate that we need more than a Website and a common life experience to build an affective relationship with others online. The added extra might be what makes the difference between interaction and affective interaction: this needs conscious strategies to generate involvement, aided by the construction of a dynamic (and evolving) Web environment. In short, one stimulus is not enough to generate persistent affective response; the environment has to sustain multiple, evolving and complex stimuli. Online support groups are proliferating because they are satisfying unmet needs and offering an alternative to face-to-face support programs (Madara). Social support also combines some elements of affective community, namely belongingness, intimacy and reciprocity. These community elements can be observed through three levels or layers of social support: 1) belongingness or a sense of integration, 2) bonding which is somewhat more personal and involves linkages between people, and, 3) binding whereby a sense of responsibility for others is experienced and expressed (Lin). Here, social support may prompt an affective response and provide a useful measure of community because it incorporates other elements. Initial Design The project was initially designed to build “an affective interactive space” in the belief that an effective online community might develop thereafter. However, the first stumbling block came in terms of recruiting participants: this took almost nine-months longer than anticipated (even once Ethics approval had been granted). Partly this was due to a specific focus on recruiting people born between 1946–64 (“baby boomers”), partly it was due to the requirement that participants had access to the Web, and partly it was because we sought to specifically recruit non-metropolitan Western Australians who had suffered a health-challenging heart-related episode. We were hoping to identify at least 80 such people, to allow for a control group in addition to the people invited to join the online community. Stage 1 was to be the analysis of the functioning of the online community; Stage 2 would take the form of interviews of both community members and the control group. One aspect of the research was to determine whether online participants perceived themselves as belonging to an online community (as opposed to “interacting on a Website”) and whether this community was constructed as therapeutic, or in other ways beneficial. Once the requisite number of people had been recruited, the Website went “live”. Usage was extremely hesitant, and this was the case even though more people were added to the Website than originally planned. (In the end we had to rely upon the help of cardiologists publicising the research among their heart patients. This had a continuing trickle effect that meant that the Website ultimately had 68 people who agreed to participate, of whom 15 never logged in. Of the remaining 53 participants, 31 logged in but never posted anything. Of the 22 people who posted, 17 made between one and four contributions. The remaining five people posted five or more times, and included the researcher and an experienced facilitator, Sven (name changed), who was serving in a “professionally-supportive” role (as well as a recovering heart patient himself). This was hardly the vibrant, affectively-supportive environment for which we had been planning. Even with the key researcher-moderator calling people individually and talking them through the mechanics of how to post, the interactions fell away and eventually ceased, more or less, altogether after 11 weeks. One of the particularly distressing implications of the lack of interaction was the degree of self-revelation that some participants had offered when first logging onto the site. New members, for example, were encouraged to “share their heart story”. Susan’s (name changed) is an example of how open these could be: I had a heart attack in February 2004. This came as a huge shock. I didn’t have any of the usual risk factors. Although my father has Coronary Vascular Disease, he didn’t have any symptoms until his mid 60s and never had a heart attack. I had angioplasty and a stent. I accept I will be taking medication for the rest of my life. I’m fine physically but am having treatment for depression, which was diagnosed 6 months after my heart attack. In normal social situations an affective revelation such as “I’m fine physically but am having treatment for depression” would elicit a sympathetic response. In fact, such “stories” did often get responses from active members (and always got a response from the researcher-moderator), but the original poster would often not log in again and would thus not receive the group’s feedback. In this case, it was particularly relevant that the poster should have learned that other site users were aware that some heart medication has depression as a common side effect and were urging Susan to ask her doctor whether this could be a factor in her case. A further problem was that there was no visible traffic on much of the Website. During the first 12 weeks, only seven of 155 posts were made to the discussion forums. Instead, participants tended to leave individual messages for each other in “private spaces” that had been designed as blogs, to allow people to keep online diaries (and where blog-visitors had the opportunity to post comments, feedback and encouragement). It was speculated that this pattern of invisible interaction was symptomatic of a generation that felt most comfortable with using the internet for e-mail, and were unfamiliar with discussion boards. (Privacy, ethics, research design and good practice meant that the only way that participants could contact each other was via the Website; they couldn’t use a private e-mail address.) The absence of visible interactive feedback was a disincentive to participation for even the most active posters and it was clear that, while some people felt able to reveal aspects of themselves and their heart condition online, they needed more that this opportunity to encourage them to return and participate further. Effectively, the research was in crisis. Crisis Measures After 10 weeks of the HeartNET interaction stalling, and then crashing, it was decided to do four things: write up what had been learned about what didn’t work (before the site was “polluted” by what we hoped would be the solution); redesign the Website to allow more ways to interact privately as well as publicly; throw it open to anyone who wished to join so that there was a more dynamic, developing momentum; use a “newbie” icon to indicate new network members joining in the previous seven days so that these people could be welcomed by existing members (who would also have an incentive to log in at least weekly). Five weeks into the revamped Website a number of things have become apparent. There is some “incidental traffic” apart from research-recruited participants and word-of-mouth, for example (Jane): “I discovered this site while surfing the net. I haven’t really sought much support since my heart attack which was nearly a year ago, but wish I had since it would have made those darker days a lot easier to get through.” An American heart patient has joined the community (Sam): “I have a lot to be positive about and feel grateful to have found this site full of caring people.” Further, some returnees, who had experienced the first iteration of the site, were warm with acknowledgement (Betty): “the site is taking off in leeps [sic] and bounds. You should all be so proud.” People are making consecutive postings, updating and developing their stories, revealing their need for support and recognising the help when they receive it. It is not hard to empathise with “Wonky” (name changed) who may not have family in whom s/he can confide: (Wonky, post 12, Wed) [I need] preventative surgery of this aorta [addressing a bi-cuspid aortic valve] before it has an aneurysm or dissects … and YES I AM SCARED … but trying to be brave cos at least now I know what is wrong with me and its kinda fixable … After being asked by interested members to update the community on his/her progress, Wonky makes the following posts: (Wonky, post 13, Wed) […] I am currently petrified … And anxiously waiting to see the cardio at 3 pm Thursday regarding the results of my aorta echo … and when they are going to decide I need lifesaving surgery … (Wonky, post 15, Fri) ok…so I am up to Friday morning and fasting for the CT scan of the dodgy aorta etc … this morning … why do I get hungry when I have to fast yet any other day I really have to force myself to remember to even eat … (Sven, online support person, Fri) great news [Wonky] and I sense a more ‘coming to terms’ understanding of your situation on your part. You’re in good hands believe you me and you are surrounded by a great number of friends who are here to cheer you on. Keep smiling. […] (Wonky, post 16, Sun) Yes [Sven], you are exactly right […] [declining health] I guess is what scared me and plus I had pretty-much not bothered to research into the condition early on when I was first diagnosed … but yeah … my cardio guy is wonderful and has assured me I am not going to drop dead any-time soon from this … For people who had experienced heart disease without support, the value of the HeartNET site was self-evident (Jace): “My heart attack was 18 months ago and I knew no one with a similar experience. My family and friends were very supportive but they were as shocked as me. Heartnet has given me the opportunity to hear other people’s stories.” Almost two weeks later, Jace was able to offer the benefit of her experience to someone suffering from panic attacks: I had several panic attacks post my heart attack. They are very frightening aren’t they? They seemed to come out of nowhere and I felt very out of control. I found making myself breath[e] more slowly and deeply, while telling myself to calm down, helped a lot. I also started listening to relaxation CDs as well. Take care, [Jace]. Others have asked for advice: (Anne): “Everyone, and I mean everyone, has been saying ‘are you sure you want to go [back to work]?’ Does anyone have coping strategies for those well meaning colleagues and bosses who think you need to be wrapped up in cotton wool?” Several people have taken the opportunity to confide their deepest fear: (Marc): “Why me? Why now? Can I get back to work normally? Every twinge you feel, you think is the big one or another attack that will get you this time.” (Anne): “I decided to spend last night in A&E [accident and emergency] after a nice little ambulance ride. It turned out to be nothing more than stress and indigestion but it scared the crap out of me. I have taken it so easy today and intend to rest up from now on in.” Some of the posts are both celebratory and inspirational (although the one cited below required a rider to the effect that any change in activity should be checked with a GP or specialist): (Joggy) I mentioned on an earlier post that I was going to run the 4km in the City to Surf and I actually did it. This is from someone who has probably run no more than 100 metres in one go in her life and guess what, I quite like it now […] I know that I am way fitter now than I have ever been and in a nutshell it’s great. Others see support as a two-way street: (Drew) “If you no longer fell [sic] YOU need the support, keep in mind others may benefit from YOUR support.” Discussion Tomkins’s Affect theory suggests that humans are subject to two positive affects: interest/excitement; enjoyment/joy, and one neutral affect: surprise/startle, along with six negative affects. All these affects are decoded/interpreted from facial expressions and require face-to-face interactions to be fully perceived. When we look at what affective prompts may be inciting people to log into HeartNET and communicate online, however, it becomes hard to second guess the affective motivation. Interest/excitement may be overstating the emotional impulse while enjoyment/joy may be an extreme way to describe the pleasure of recognition and identification with others in a similar situation. Arguably, HeartNET offers an opportunity to minimise negative affect, in particular “distress/anguish; fear/terror; anger/rage; shame/humiliation” – all of which may be present in some people’s experiences of heart disease. A strategy for reducing negative affect may be as valuable as the promise of increasing the experience of positive affect. As for the rational or emotional impact, it seems clear from the first stages of the research that rationally people were willing to take part in the trial and agreed to participate, but a large majority then failed to either log in or post any contribution. The site came to emotional life only when it was less obviously a “research project” (in the sense that all participants still had to log in via an ethics disclosure and informed consent screen) in that people could join when and if they were motivated to do so, and were invited to participate by those who were already online. Since the Website was revamped and relaunched on 2 August 2005 a further 124 people have joined. It appears that HeartNET is now both an affective and effective success. References “Affective Therapy.” Affective Therapy Website: Tomkins and Affect. 9 Oct. 2005 http://www.affectivetherapy.co.uk/Tomkins_Affect.htm>. “Google Advanced Search.” Google. 1 Nov. 2005 http://www.google.com.au/advanced_search>. Lin, Nan. Conceptualizing Social Support: Social Support, Life Events, and Depression. Ed. Nan Lin, Alfred Dean, & Walter Ensel. Orlando: Florida, Academic Press, 1986. Madara, Edward. “The Mutual-Aid Self-Help Online Revolution”. Social Policy 27 (1997): 20. Tomkins, Silvan S. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (Volume 1): The Positive Affects. New York: Springer, 1962. ———. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (Volume 2): The Negative Affects. New York: Springer, 1963. ———. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (Volume 3): The Negative Affects: Anger and Fear. New York: Springer, 1991. ———. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (Volume 4): Cognition: Duplication and Transformation of Information. New York: Springer, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bonniface, Leesa, Lelia Green, and Maurice Swanson. "Affect and an Effective Online Therapeutic Community." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/05-bonnifacegreenswanson.php>. APA Style Bonniface, L., L. Green, and M. Swanson. (Dec. 2005) "Affect and an Effective Online Therapeutic Community," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/05-bonnifacegreenswanson.php>.

Since the first days of the World Wide Web, artists like myself have been exploring the new possibilities of network interactivity. Some good tools and languages have been developed and made available free for the public to use. This has empowered individuals to participate in the media in ways that are quite remarkable. Nonetheless, the future of independent media is clouded by legal, regulatory, and organisational challenges that need to be addressed. It is not clear to what extent independent content producers will be able to build upon the successes of the 90s – it is yet to be seen whether their efforts will be largely nullified by the anticyclones of a hostile media market. Not so long ago, American news magazines were covering the Browser War. Several real wars later, the terms of surrender are becoming clearer. Now both of the major Internet browsers are owned by huge media corporations, and most of the states (and Reagan-appointed judges) that were demanding the break-up of Microsoft have given up. A curious about-face occurred in U.S. Justice Department policy when John Ashcroft decided to drop the federal case. Maybe Microsoft's value as a partner in covert activity appealed to Ashcroft more than free competition. Regardless, Microsoft is now turning its wrath on new competitors, people who are doing something very, very bad: sharing the products of their own labour. This practice of sharing source code and building free software infrastructure is epitomised by the continuing development of Linux. Everything in the Linux kernel is free, publicly accessible information. As a rule, the people building this "open source" operating system software believe that maintaining transparency is important. But U.S. courts are not doing much to help. In a case brought by the Motion Picture Association of America against Eric Corley, a federal district court blocked the distribution of source code that enables these systems to play DVDs. In addition to censoring Corley's journal, the court ruled that any programmer who writes a program that plays a DVD must comply with a host of license restrictions. In short, an established and popular media format (the DVD) cannot be used under open source operating systems without sacrificing the principle that software source code should remain in the public domain. Should the contents of operating systems be tightly guarded secrets, or subject to public review? If there are capable programmers willing to create good, free operating systems, should the law stand in their way? The question concerning what type of software infrastructure will dominate personal computers in the future is being answered as much by disappointing legal decisions as it is by consumer choice. Rather than ensuring the necessary conditions for innovation and cooperation, the courts permit a monopoly to continue. Rather than endorsing transparency, secrecy prevails. Rather than aiming to preserve a balance between the commercial economy and the gift-economy, sharing is being undermined by the law. Part of the mystery of the Internet for a lot of newcomers must be that it seems to disprove the old adage that you can't get something for nothing. Free games, free music, free pornography, free art. Media corporations are doing their best to change this situation. The FBI and trade groups have blitzed the American news media with alarmist reports about how children don't understand that sharing digital information is a crime. Teacher Gail Chmura, the star of one such media campaign, says of her students, "It's always been interesting that they don't see a connection between the two. They just don't get it" (Hopper). Perhaps the confusion arises because the kids do understand that digital duplication lets two people have the same thing. Theft is at best a metaphor for the copying of data, because the original is not stolen in the same sense as a material object. In the effort to liken all copying to theft, legal provisions for the fair use of intellectual property are neglected. Teachers could just as easily emphasise the importance of sharing and the development of an electronic commons that is free for all to use. The values advanced by the trade groups are not beyond question and are not historical constants. According to Donald Krueckeberg, Rutgers University Professor of Urban Planning, native Americans tied the concept of property not to ownership but to use. "One used it, one moved on, and use was shared with others" (qtd. in Batt). Perhaps it is necessary for individuals to have dominion over some private data. But who owns the land, wind, sun, and sky of the Internet – the infrastructure? Given that publicly-funded research and free software have been as important to the development of the Internet as have business and commercial software, it is not surprising that some ambiguity remains about the property status of the dataverse. For many the Internet is as much a medium for expression and the interplay of languages as it is a framework for monetary transaction. In the case involving DVD software mentioned previously, there emerged a grass-roots campaign in opposition to censorship. Dozens of philosophical programmers and computer scientists asserted the expressive and linguistic bases of software by creating variations on the algorithm needed to play DVDs. The forbidden lines of symbols were printed on T-shirts, translated into different computer languages, translated into legal rhetoric, and even embedded into DNA and pictures of MPAA president Jack Valenti (see e.g. Touretzky). These efforts were inspired by a shared conviction that important liberties were at stake. Supporting the MPAA's position would do more than protect movies from piracy. The use of the algorithm was not clearly linked to an intent to pirate movies. Many felt that outlawing the DVD algorithm, which had been experimentally developed by a Norwegian teenager, represented a suppression of gumption and ingenuity. The court's decision rejected established principles of fair use, denied the established legality of reverse engineering software to achieve compatibility, and asserted that journalists and scientists had no right to publish a bit of code if it might be misused. In a similar case in April 2000, a U.S. court of appeals found that First Amendment protections did apply to software (Junger). Noting that source code has both an expressive feature and a functional feature, this court held that First Amendment protection is not reserved only for purely expressive communication. Yet in the DVD case, the court opposed this view and enforced the inflexible demands of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Notwithstanding Ted Nelson's characterisation of computers as literary machines, the decision meant that the linguistic and expressive aspects of software would be subordinated to other concerns. A simple series of symbols were thereby cast under a veil of legal secrecy. Although they were easy to discover, and capable of being committed to memory or translated to other languages, fair use and other intuitive freedoms were deemed expendable. These sorts of legal obstacles are serious challenges to the continued viability of free software like Linux. The central value proposition of Linux-based operating systems – free, open source code – is threatening to commercial competitors. Some corporations are intent on stifling further development of free alternatives. Patents offer another vulnerability. The writing of free software has become a minefield of potential patent lawsuits. Corporations have repeatedly chosen to pursue patent litigation years after the alleged infringements have been incorporated into widely used free software. For example, although it was designed to avoid patent problems by an array of international experts, the image file format known as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) has recently been dogged by patent infringement charges. Despite good intentions, low-budget initiatives and ad hoc organisations are ill equipped to fight profiteering patent lawsuits. One wonders whether software innovation is directed more by lawyers or computer scientists. The present copyright and patent regimes may serve the needs of the larger corporations, but it is doubtful that they are the best means of fostering software innovation and quality. Orwell wrote in his Homage to Catalonia, There was a new rule that censored portions of the newspaper must not be left blank but filled up with other matter; as a result it was often impossible to tell when something had been cut out. The development of the Internet has a similar character: new diversions spring up to replace what might have been so that the lost potential is hardly felt. The process of retrofitting Internet software to suit ideological and commercial agendas is already well underway. For example, Microsoft has announced recently that it will discontinue support for the Java language in 2004. The problem with Java, from Microsoft's perspective, is that it provides portable programming tools that work under all operating systems, not just Windows. With Java, programmers can develop software for the large number of Windows users, while simultaneously offering software to users of other operating systems. Java is an important piece of the software infrastructure for Internet content developers. Yet, in the interest of coercing people to use only their operating systems, Microsoft is willing to undermine thousands of existing Java-language projects. Their marketing hype calls this progress. The software industry relies on sales to survive, so if it means laying waste to good products and millions of hours of work in order to sell something new, well, that's business. The consequent infrastructure instability keeps software developers, and other creative people, on a treadmill. From Progressive Load by Andy Deck, artcontext.org/progload As an Internet content producer, one does not appeal directly to the hearts and minds of the public; one appeals through the medium of software and hardware. Since most people are understandably reluctant to modify the software running on their computers, the software installed initially is a critical determinant of what is possible. Unconventional, independent, and artistic uses of the Internet are diminished when the media infrastructure is effectively established by decree. Unaccountable corporate control over infrastructure software tilts the playing field against smaller content producers who have neither the advance warning of industrial machinations, nor the employees and resources necessary to keep up with a regime of strategic, cyclical obsolescence. It seems that independent content producers must conform to the distribution technologies and content formats favoured by the entertainment and marketing sectors, or else resign themselves to occupying the margins of media activity. It is no secret that highly diversified media corporations can leverage their assets to favour their own media offerings and confound their competitors. Yet when media giants AOL and Time-Warner announced their plans to merge in 2000, the claim of CEOs Steve Case and Gerald Levin that the merged companies would "operate in the public interest" was hardly challenged by American journalists. Time-Warner has since fought to end all ownership limits in the cable industry; and Case, who formerly championed third-party access to cable broadband markets, changed his tune abruptly after the merger. Now that Case has been ousted, it is unclear whether he still favours oligopoly. According to Levin, global media will be and is fast becoming the predominant business of the 21st century ... more important than government. It's more important than educational institutions and non-profits. We're going to need to have these corporations redefined as instruments of public service, and that may be a more efficient way to deal with society's problems than bureaucratic governments. Corporate dominance is going to be forced anyhow because when you have a system that is instantly available everywhere in the world immediately, then the old-fashioned regulatory system has to give way (Levin). It doesn't require a lot of insight to understand that this "redefinition," this slight of hand, does not protect the public from abuses of power: the dissolution of the "old-fashioned regulatory system" does not serve the public interest. From Lexicon by Andy Deck, artcontext.org/lexicon) As an artist who has adopted telecommunications networks and software as his medium, it disappoints me that a mercenary vision of electronic media's future seems to be the prevailing blueprint. The giantism of media corporations, and the ongoing deregulation of media consolidation (Ahrens), underscore the critical need for independent media sources. If it were just a matter of which cola to drink, it would not be of much concern, but media corporations control content. In this hyper-mediated age, content – whether produced by artists or journalists – crucially affects what people think about and how they understand the world. Content is not impervious to the software, protocols, and chicanery that surround its delivery. It is about time that people interested in independent voices stop believing that laissez faire capitalism is building a better media infrastructure. The German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger reminds us that the media tyrannies that affect us are social products. The media industry relies on thousands of people to make the compromises necessary to maintain its course. The rapid development of the mind industry, its rise to a key position in modern society, has profoundly changed the role of the intellectual. He finds himself confronted with new threats and new opportunities. Whether he knows it or not, whether he likes it or not, he has become the accomplice of a huge industrial complex which depends for its survival on him, as he depends on it for his own. He must try, at any cost, to use it for his own purposes, which are incompatible with the purposes of the mind machine. What it upholds he must subvert. He may play it crooked or straight, he may win or lose the game; but he would do well to remember that there is more at stake than his own fortune (Enzensberger 18). Some cultural leaders have recognised the important role that free software already plays in the infrastructure of the Internet. Among intellectuals there is undoubtedly a genuine concern about the emerging contours of corporate, global media. But more effective solidarity is needed. Interest in open source has tended to remain superficial, leading to trendy, cosmetic, and symbolic uses of terms like "open source" rather than to a deeper commitment to an open, public information infrastructure. Too much attention is focussed on what's "cool" and not enough on the road ahead. Various media specialists – designers, programmers, artists, and technical directors – make important decisions that affect the continuing development of electronic media. Many developers have failed to recognise (or care) that their decisions regarding media formats can have long reaching consequences. Web sites that use media formats which are unworkable for open source operating systems should be actively discouraged. Comparable technologies are usually available to solve compatibility problems. Going with the market flow is not really giving people what they want: it often opposes the work of thousands of activists who are trying to develop open source alternatives (see e.g. Greene). Average Internet users can contribute to a more innovative, free, open, and independent media – and being conscientious is not always difficult or unpleasant. One project worthy of support is the Internet browser Mozilla. Currently, many content developers create their Websites so that they will look good only in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. While somewhat understandable given the market dominance of Internet Explorer, this disregard for interoperability undercuts attempts to popularise standards-compliant alternatives. Mozilla, written by a loose-knit group of activists and programmers (some of whom are paid by AOL/Time-Warner), can be used as an alternative to Microsoft's browser. If more people use Mozilla, it will be harder for content providers to ignore the way their Web pages appear in standards-compliant browsers. The Mozilla browser, which is an open source initiative, can be downloaded from http://www.mozilla.org/. While there are many people working to create real and lasting alternatives to the monopolistic and technocratic dynamics that are emerging, it takes a great deal of cooperation to resist the media titans, the FCC, and the courts. Oddly enough, corporate interests sometimes overlap with those of the public. Some industrial players, such as IBM, now support open source software. For them it is mostly a business decision. Frustrated by the coercive control of Microsoft, they support efforts to develop another operating system platform. For others, including this writer, the open source movement is interesting for the potential it holds to foster a more heterogeneous and less authoritarian communications infrastructure. Many people can find common cause in this resistance to globalised uniformity and consolidated media ownership. The biggest challenge may be to get people to believe that their choices really matter, that by endorsing certain products and operating systems and not others, they can actually make a difference. But it's unlikely that this idea will flourish if artists and intellectuals don't view their own actions as consequential. There is a troubling tendency for people to see themselves as powerless in the face of the market. This paralysing habit of mind must be abandoned before the media will be free. Works Cited Ahrens, Frank. "Policy Watch." Washington Post (23 June 2002): H03. 30 March 2003 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27015-2002Jun22?la... ...nguage=printer>. Batt, William. "How Our Towns Got That Way." 7 Oct. 1996. 31 March 2003 <http://www.esb.utexas.edu/drnrm/WhatIs/LandValue.htm>. Chester, Jeff. "Gerald Levin's Negative Legacy." Alternet.org 6 Dec. 2001. 5 March 2003 <http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/editorials/levin.php>. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. "The Industrialisation of the Mind." Raids and Reconstructions. London: Pluto Press, 1975. 18. Greene, Thomas C. "MS to Eradicate GPL, Hence Linux." 25 June 2002. 5 March 2003 <http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25378.php>. Hopper, D. Ian. "FBI Pushes for Cyber Ethics Education." Associated Press 10 Oct. 2000. 29 March 2003 <http://www.billingsgazette.com/computing/20001010_cethics.php>. Junger v. Daley. U.S. Court of Appeals for 6th Circuit. 00a0117p.06. 2000. 31 March 2003 <http://pacer.ca6.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/getopn.pl?OPINION=00a0... ...117p.06>. Levin, Gerald. "Millennium 2000 Special." CNN 2 Jan. 2000. Touretzky, D. S. "Gallery of CSS Descramblers." 2000. 29 March 2003 <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery>. Links http://artcontext.org/lexicon/ http://artcontext.org/progload http://pacer.ca6.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/getopn.pl?OPINION=00a0117p.06 http://www.billingsgazette.com/computing/20001010_cethics.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/editorials/levin.html http://www.esb.utexas.edu/drnrm/WhatIs/LandValue.htm http://www.mozilla.org/ http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25378.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27015-2002Jun22?language=printer Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Deck, Andy. "Treadmill Culture " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/04-treadmillculture.php>. APA Style Deck, A. (2003, Apr 23). Treadmill Culture . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/04-treadmillculture.php>

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. Hence, the gender and class inequalities exacerbated by Covid-19, and the precarious and pressured lives of elite athletes, were obscured. We contend that, in the final analysis, the sporting bubble mainly serves those inside, floating tantalisingly out of reach of most of those outside who try to grasp its elusive power. Yet, it is a small group beyond who wield that power, having created bubbles as armoured vehicles to salvage any available profit in the midst of a global pandemic. References AAP. “NRL Makes Desperate Plea to Government as It Announces Season Will Go Ahead.” 7News.com.au 15 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://7news.com.au/sport/rugby-league/nrl-makes-desperate-plea-to-government-as-it-announces-season-will-go-ahead-c-745711>. Al Jazeera English. “Sports TV: Faking Spectators and Spectacles.” The Listening Post 26 Sep. 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AlD63s26sQ&feature=youtu.be&t=827>. Barron, Jackson, Kylie Stevens, and Zoe Zaczek. “WAG Who Broke into COVID-19 Bubble for an Eight-Hour Rendezvous with Her AFL Star Boyfriend Opens Up on ‘How Easy It Was’—and Apologises for ‘Really Big Mistake’ That Cost Club $50,000.” The Daily Mail 19 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8638959/WAG-AFL-star-sacked-season-coronavirus-breach-reveals-easy-sneak-in.html>. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992. Benedict, Jeff. Public Heroes, Private Felons: Athletes and Crimes against Women. Boston: Northeastern Uni. Press, 1999. Benfante, Agata, Marialaura di Tella, Annunziata Romeo, and Lorys Castelli. “Traumatic Stress in Healthcare Workers during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review of the Immediate Impact.” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (23 Oct. 2020). Blaine, Lech. “The Art of Class War.” The Monthly. 17 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2020/august/1596204000/lech-blaine/art-class-war#mtr>. Brooks, Samantha K., Rebecca K. Webster, Louise E. Smith, Lisa Woodland, Simon Wessely, Neil Greenberg, and Gideon J. Rubin. “The Psychological Impact of Quarantine and How to Reduce It: Rapid Review of the Evidence.” The Lancet 26 Feb. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30460-8/fulltext>. Caust, Jo. “Coronavirus: 3 in 4 Australians Employed in the Creative and Performing Arts Could Lose Their Jobs.” The Conversation 20 Apr. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-3-in-4-australians-employed-in-the-creative-and-performing-arts-could-lose-their-jobs-136505>. Connor, James. “The Athlete as Widget: How Exploitation Explains Elite Sport.” Sport in Society 12.10 (2009): 1369–77. Courage, Cara. “Women in the Arts: Some Questions.” The Guardian 5 Mar. 2012. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2012/mar/05/women-in-the-arts-introduction>. Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. Beck. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. and ed. S. Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Dennien, Matt, and Lydia Lynch. “Footage Shows Relaxed Scenes from AFL Hub amid Calls for Exception Overhaul.” Brisbane Times 3 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/footage-shows-relaxed-scenes-from-afl-hub-amid-calls-for-exemption-overhaul-20200903-p55s74.html>. Dobeson, Shanee. “Bailey Defends Qld Border Rules after Grieving Mother Denied Entry to Bury Son.” MyGC.com.au 12 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.mygc.com.au/bailey-defends-qld-border-rules-after-grieving-mother-denied-exemption-to-bury-son>. Dunn, Amelia. “Who Is Deemed an ‘Essential’ Worker under Australia’s COVID-19 Rules?” SBS News 26 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AlD63s26sQ&feature=youtu.be&t=827>. Emiko. “Women’s Unpaid Care Work in Australia.” YWCA n.d. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.ywca.org.au/opinion/womens-unpaid-care-work-in-australia>. Fullagar, Simone, and Adele Pavlidis. “Thinking through the Disruptive Effects and Affects of the Coronavirus with Feminist New Materialism.” Leisure Sciences (2020). 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01490400.2020.1773996?journalCode=ulsc20>. Flood, Michael, and Sue Dyson. “Sport, Athletes, and Violence against Women.” NTV Journal 4.3 (2007): 37–46. Goodwin, Sam. “AFL Boss Left Fuming over ‘Out of Control’ Quarantine Party.” Yahoo! Sport 8 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://au.sports.yahoo.com/afl-2020-uproar-out-of-control-quarantine-party-224251554.html>. Griffith News. “New Research Shows Why Musicians among the Hardest Hit by COVID-19.” 18 June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://news.griffith.edu.au/2020/06/18/new-research-shows-why-musicians-among-the-hardest-hit-by-COVID-19>. Hart, Chloe. “‘This Is the Hardest It’s Going to Get’: NZ Warriors Open Up about Relocating to Australia for NRL.” ABC News 8 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-08/nz-warriors-open-up-about-relocation-to-australia-for-nrl/12531074>. Hooper, James. “10 Broncos Hit with Fines as Club Cops Huge Sanction over Pub Bubble Breach.” Fox Sports 18 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.foxsports.com.au/nrl/nrl-premiership/teams/broncos/nrl-2020-brisbane-broncos-pub-covid19-bubble-breach-fine-sanctions-who-was-at-the-pub/news-story/d3bd3c559289a8b83bc3fccbceaffe78>. Hytner, Mike. “AFL Suspends Season and Cancels AFLW amid Coronavirus Crisis.” The Guardian 22 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/mar/22/afl-nrl-and-a-league-press-on-despite-restrictions>. Jones, Wayne. “Ray of Hope for Medical Care across Border.” Echo Netdaily 14 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.echo.net.au/2020/08/ray-of-hope-for-medical-care-across-border>. Jouavel, Levi. “Women’s Football Shutdowns: ‘It’s Unfair Boys’ Academies Can Still Play’.” BBC News 10 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-54876198>. Keh, Andrew. “We Hope Your Cheers for This Article Are for Real.” The New York Times 16 June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/sports/coronavirus-stadium-fans-crowd-noise.html>. Kennedy, Else. “‘The Worst Year’: Domestic Violence Soars in Australia during COVID-19.” The Guardian 1 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/01/the-worst-year-domestic-violence-soars-in-australia-during-COVID-19>. Keoghan, Sarah. “‘Everyone’s Concerned’: Players Cop 70% Pay Cut.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/netball/everyone-s-concerned-players-cop-70-per-cent-pay-cut-20200328-p54esz.html>. Knox, Malcolm. “Gambling’s Share of NRL Revenue Could Well Double: That Brings Power.” Sydney Morning Herald. 15 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/gambling-s-share-of-nrl-revenue-could-well-double-that-brings-power-20200515-p54tbg.html>. McGrath, Pat. “Racing Victoria Got $16.6 Million in Emergency COVID Funding: Then Online Horse Racing Gambling Revenue Skyrocketed.” ABC News 3 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-03/racing-victoria-emergency-coronavirus-COVID-funding/12838012>. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009. Madden, Helena. “Lebron James’s Suite in the NBA Bubble Is Fit for a King.” Robb Report 16 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://robbreport.com/travel/hotels/lebron-james-nba-bubble-suite-1234569303>. Maguire, Joseph. “Sportization.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Ed. George Ritzer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 4710–11. Mathieson, Craig. “Michael Jordan Pierces the Bubble of Elite Sport in Juicy ESPN Doco.” Sydney Morning Herald. 13 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/michael-jordan-pierces-the-bubble-of-elite-sport-in-juicy-espn-doco-20200511-p54rwc.html>. Maurice, Megan. “Australia’s Summer of Cricket during COVID Is about Money and Power—and Men”. 6 Jan. 2021. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jan/06/australias-summer-of-cricket-during-COVID-is-about-money-and-power-and-men>. Murphy, Catherine. “Cricket Australia Contributed to Circumstances Surrounding Ball-Tampering Scandal, Review Finds”. ABC News 20 Oct. 2018. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-29/scathing-report-released-into-cricket-australia-culture/10440972>. News.com.au. “How an AFL Star Wide’s Instagram Post Led to a Hefty Fine and a Journalist Being Stood Down.” NZ Herald 3 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/how-an-afl-star-wifes-instagram-post-led-to-a-hefty-fine-and-a-journalist-being-stood-down/7IDR4SXQ6QW5WDFBV42BK3M7YQ>. Nicholson, Matthew, Anthony Kerr, and Merryn Sherwood. Sport and the Media: Managing the Nexus. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2015. Pavlidis, Adele. “Being Grateful: Materialising ‘Success’ in Women’s Contact Sport.” Emotion, Space and Society 35 (2020). 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1755458620300207>. Phillips, Sam. “‘The Future of the Season Is in Their Hands’: Palaszczuk’s NRL Warning.” Sydney Morning Herald 10 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/the-future-of-the-season-is-in-their-hands-palaszczuk-s-nrl-warning-20200810-p55k7j.html>. Pierik, Jon, and Ryan, Peter. “‘I Own the Consequences’: Stack, Coleman-Jones Apologise for Gold Coast Incident.” The Age 5 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/i-own-the-consequences-stack-apologises-for-gold-coast-incident-20200905-p55spq.html>. Poposki, Claudia, and Louise Ayling. “AFL Star’s Wife Who Caused Uproar by Breaching Quarantine to Go to a Spa Reveals She’s Been Smashed by Vile Trolls.” Daily Mail Australia 29 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8674083/AFL-WAG-Brooke-Cotchin-breached-COVID-19-quarantine-spa-cops-abuse-trolls.html>. Ramsey, Michael. “Axed Swan Spared Jail over Ex-Girlfriend Assault.” AFL.com.au 2 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.afl.com.au/news/526677/axed-swan-spared-jail-over-ex-girlfriend-assault>. Read, Brent. “The NRL Is Set to Finish the Season on a High after Stunning Financial Results.” The Australian 1 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/nrl/the-nrl-is-set-to-finish-the-season-on-a-high-after-stunning-financial-results/news-story/1ce9c2f9b598441d88daaa8cc2b44dc1>. Reel, Justine, J., and Emily Crouch. “#MeToo: Uncovering Sexual Harassment and Assault in Sport.” Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology 13.2 (2018): 177–79. Rogers, Michael. “Buckley, Sanderson to Pay Pies’ Huge Fine for COVID Breach.” AFL.com.au 1 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.afl.com.au/news/479118/buckley-sanderson-to-pay-pies-huge-fine-for-COVID-breach>. Richardson, David, and Richard Denniss. “Gender Experiences during the COVID-19 Lockdown: Women Lose from COVID-19, Men to Gain from Stimulus.” The Australia Institute June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/gender-experiences-during-the-COVID-19-lockdown>. Rowe, David. “All Sport Is Global: A Hard Lesson from the Pandemic.” Open Forum 28 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.openforum.com.au/all-sport-is-global-a-hard-lesson-from-the-pandemic>. ———. “And the Winner Is … Television: Spectacle and Sport in a Pandemic.” Open Forum 19 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.openforum.com.au/and-the-winner-istelevision-spectacle-and-sport-in-a-pandemic>. ———. Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. ———. “Scandals and Sport.” Routledge Companion to Media and Scandal. Eds. Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord. London: Routledge, 2019. 324–32. ———. “Subjecting Pandemic Sport to a Sociological Procedure.” Journal of Sociology 56.4 (2020): 704–13. Schout, David. “Cricket Prepares for Mental Health Challenges Thrown Up by Bubble Life.” The Guardian 8 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/nov/08/cricket-prepares-for-mental-health-challenges-thrown-up-by-bubble-life>. Spaaij, Ramón. Sport and Social Mobility: Crossing Boundaries. London: Routledge, 2011. The Sporting Bubble. Dir. Peter Dickson. Nine Network Australia, 2020. Swanston, Tim. “With Coronavirus Limiting Interstate Movement, Queensland Is the Nation’s Sporting Hub—Is That Really Safe?” ABC News 29 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-29/coronavirus-queensland-rules-for-sports-teams-explainer/12542634>. Toffoletti, Kim. “How Is Gender-Based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football League Sex Scandal.” Women's Studies International Forum 30.5 (2007): 427–38. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Walter, Brad. “From Shutdown to Restart: How NRL Walked Tightrope to Get Season Going Again.” NRL.com 25 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nrl.com/news/2020/05/25/from-shutdown-to-restart-how-nrl-walked-tightrope-to-get-season-going-again>. Wade, Lisa. “Rape on Campus: Athletes, Status, and the Sexual Assault Crisis.” The Conversation 7 Mar. 2017. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/rape-on-campus-athletes-status-and-the-sexual-assault-crisis-72255>. Webster, Andrew. “Sydney Roosters’ Mitchell Pearce Involved in a Drunken Incident with a Dog? And Your Point Is ...?” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Jan. 2016. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/sydney-roosters-mitchell-pearce-involved-in-a-drunken-incident-with-a-dog-and-your-point-is--20160127-gmfemh.html>. Whittaker, Troy. “Three-Peat Not Driving Broncos in NRLW Grand Final.” NRL.com 24 Oct. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nrl.com/news/2020/10/24/three-peat-not-driving-broncos-in-nrlw-grand-final>. Yahoo! Sport Staff. “‘Not Okay’: Uproar over ‘Disgusting’ Find inside Quarantine.” Yahoo! Sport 9 July 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://au.sports.yahoo.com/wnba-disturbing-conditions-coronavirus-bubble-slammed-003557243.html>.

This article investigates the prosthesis of identity through the process of branding. It examines cross-cultural manifestations of this phenomena from sixth millennium BCE Syria to twelfth century Japan and Britain. From the Neolithic Era, humanity has sort to extend their identities using pictorial signs that were characteristically simple. Designed to be distinctive and instantly recognisable, the totemic symbols served to signal the origin of the bearer. Subsequently, the development of branding coincided with periods of increased in mobility both in respect to geography and social strata. This includes fifth millennium Mesopotamia, nineteenth century Britain, and America during the 1920s.There are fewer articles of greater influence on contemporary culture than A Theory of Human Motivation written by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Nearly seventy-five years later, his theories about the societal need for “belongingness” and “esteem” remain a mainstay of advertising campaigns (Maslow). Although the principles are used to sell a broad range of products from shampoo to breakfast cereal they are epitomised by apparel. This is with refence to garments and accessories bearing corporation logos. Whereas other purchased items, imbued with abstract products, are intended for personal consumption the public display of these symbols may be interpreted as a form of signalling. The intention of the wearers is to literally seek the fulfilment of the aforementioned social needs. This article investigates the use of brands as prosthesis.Coats and Crests: Identity Garnered on Garments in the Middle Ages and the Muromachi PeriodA logo, at its most basic, is a pictorial sign. In his essay, The Visual Language, Ernest Gombrich described the principle as reducing images to “distinctive features” (Gombrich 46). They represent a “simplification of code,” the meaning of which we are conditioned to recognise (Gombrich 46). Logos may also be interpreted as a manifestation of totemism. According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the principle exists in all civilisations and reflects an effort to evoke the power of nature (71-127). Totemism is also a method of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166).This principle, in a form garnered on garments, is manifested in Mon Kiri. The practice of cutting out family crests evolved into a form of corporate branding in Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) (Christensen 14). During the Muromachi period (1336-1573) the crests provided an integral means of identification on the battlefield (Christensen 13). The adorning of crests on armour was also exercised in Europe during the twelfth century, when the faces of knights were similarly obscured by helmets (Family Crests of Japan 8). Both Mon Kiri and “Coat[s] of Arms” utilised totemic symbols (Family Crests of Japan 8; Elven 14; Christensen 13). The mon for the imperial family (figs. 1 & 2) during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia flowers (Goin’ Japaneque). “Coat[s] of Arms” in Britain featured a menagerie of animals including lions (fig. 3), horses and eagles (Elven).The prothesis of identity through garnering symbols on the battlefield provided “safety” through demonstrating “belongingness”. This constituted a conflation of two separate “needs” in the “hierarchy of prepotency” propositioned by Maslow. Fig. 1. The mon symbolising the Imperial Family during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia. "Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>.Fig. 2. An example of the crest being utilised on a garment can be found in this portrait of samurai Oda Nobunaga. "Japan's 12 Most Famous Samurai." All About Japan. 27 Aug. 2018. 27 July 2019 <https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/5818/>.Fig. 3. A detail from the “Index of Subjects of Crests.” Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. Henry Washbourne, 1847.The Pursuit of Prestige: Prosthetic Pedigree from the Late Georgian to the Victorian Eras In 1817, the seal engraver to Prince Regent, Alexander Deuchar, described the function of family crests in British Crests: Containing The Crest and Mottos of The Families of Great Britain and Ireland; Together with Those of The Principal Cities and Heraldic Terms as follows: The first approach to civilization is the distinction of ranks. So necessary is this to the welfare and existence of society, that, without it, anarchy and confusion must prevail… In an early stage, heraldic emblems were characteristic of the bearer… Certain ordinances were made, regulating the mode of bearing arms, and who were entitled to bear them. (i-v)The partitioning of social classes in Britain had deteriorated by the time this compendium was published, with displays of “conspicuous consumption” displacing “heraldic emblems” as a primary method of status signalling (Deuchar 2; Han et al. 18). A consumerism born of newfound affluence, and the desire to signify this wealth through luxury goods, was as integral to the Industrial Revolution as technological development. In Rebels against the Future, published in 1996, Kirkpatrick Sale described the phenomenon:A substantial part of the new population, though still a distinct minority, was made modestly affluent, in some places quite wealthy, by privatization of of the countryside and the industrialization of the cities, and by the sorts of commercial and other services that this called forth. The new money stimulated the consumer demand… that allowed a market economy of a scope not known before. (40)This also reflected improvements in the provision of “health, food [and] education” (Maslow; Snow 25-28). With their “physiological needs” accommodated, this ”substantial part” of the population were able to prioritised their “esteem needs” including the pursuit for prestige (Sale 40; Maslow).In Britain during the Middle Ages laws “specified in minute detail” what each class was permitted to wear (Han et al. 15). A groom, for example, was not able to wear clothing that exceeded two marks in value (Han et al. 15). In a distinct departure during the Industrial Era, it was common for the “middling and lower classes” to “ape” the “fashionable vices of their superiors” (Sale 41). Although mon-like labels that were “simplified so as to be conspicuous and instantly recognisable” emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century their application on garments remained discrete up until the early twentieth century (Christensen 13-14; Moore and Reid 24). During the 1920s, the French companies Hermes and Coco Chanel were amongst the clothing manufacturers to pioneer this principle (Chaney; Icon).During the 1860s, Lincolnshire-born Charles Frederick Worth affixed gold stamped labels to the insides of his garments (Polan et al. 9; Press). Operating from Paris, the innovation was consistent with the introduction of trademark laws in France in 1857 (Lopes et al.). He would become known as the “Father of Haute Couture”, creating dresses for royalty and celebrities including Empress Eugene from Constantinople, French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Australian Opera Singer Nellie Melba (Lopes et al.; Krick). The clothing labels proved and ineffective deterrent to counterfeit, and by the 1890s the House of Worth implemented other measures to authenticate their products (Press). The legitimisation of the origin of a product is, arguably, the primary function of branding. This principle is also applicable to subjects. The prothesis of brands, as totemic symbols, assisted consumers to relocate themselves within a new system of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166). It was one born of commerce as opposed to heraldry.Selling of Self: Conferring Identity from the Neolithic to Modern ErasIn his 1817 compendium on family crests, Deuchar elaborated on heraldry by writing:Ignoble birth was considered as a stain almost indelible… Illustrious parentage, on the other hand, constituted the very basis of honour: it communicated peculiar rights and privileges, to which the meaner born man might not aspire. (v-vi)The Twinings Logo (fig. 4) has remained unchanged since the design was commissioned by the grandson of the company founder Richard Twining in 1787 (Twining). In addition to reflecting the heritage of the family-owned company, the brand indicated the origin of the tea. This became pertinent during the nineteenth century. Plantations began to operate from Assam to Ceylon (Jones 267-269). Amidst the rampant diversification of tea sources in the Victorian era, concerns about the “unhygienic practices” of Chinese producers were proliferated (Wengrow 11). Subsequently, the brand also offered consumers assurance in quality. Fig. 4. The Twinings Logo reproduced from "History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>.The term ‘brand’, adapted from the Norse “brandr”, was introduced into the English language during the sixteenth century (Starcevic 179). At its most literal, it translates as to “burn down” (Starcevic 179). Using hot elements to singe markings onto animals been recorded as early as 2700 BCE in Egypt (Starcevic 182). However, archaeologists concur that the modern principle of branding predates this practice. The implementation of carved seals or stamps to make indelible impressions of handcrafted objects dates back to Prehistoric Mesopotamia (Starcevic 183; Wengrow 13). Similar traditions developed during the Bronze Age in both China and the Indus Valley (Starcevic 185). In all three civilisations branding facilitated both commerce and aspects of Totemism. In the sixth millennium BCE in “Prehistoric” Mesopotamia, referred to as the Halaf period, stone seals were carved to emulate organic form such as animal teeth (Wengrow 13-14). They were used to safeguard objects by “confer[ring] part of the bearer’s personality” (Wengrow 14). They were concurrently applied to secure the contents of vessels containing “exotic goods” used in transactions (Wengrow 15). Worn as amulets (figs. 5 & 6) the seals, and the symbols they produced, were a physical extension of their owners (Wengrow 14).Fig. 5. Recreation of stamp seal amulets from Neolithic Mesopotamia during the sixth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 14.Fig. 6. “Lot 25Y: Rare Syrian Steatite Amulet – Fertility God 5000 BCE.” The Salesroom. 27 July 2019 <https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/artemis-gallery-ancient-art/catalogue-id-srartem10006/lot-a850d229-a303-4bae-b68c-a6130005c48a>. Fig. 7. Recreation of stamp seal designs from Mesopotamia from the late fifth to fourth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49. 1 (2008): 16.In the following millennia, the seals would increase exponentially in application and aesthetic complexity (fig. 7) to support the development of household cum cottage industries (Wengrow 15). In addition to handcrafts, sealed vessels would transport consumables such as wine, aromatic oils and animal fats (Wengrow 18). The illustrations on the seals included depictions of rituals undertaken by human figures and/or allegories using animals. It can be ascertained that the transition in the Victorian Era from heraldry to commerce, from family to corporation, had precedence. By extension, consumers were able to participate in this process of value attribution using brands as signifiers. The principle remained prevalent during the modern and post-modern eras and can be respectively interpreted using structuralist and post-structuralist theory.Totemism to Simulacrum: The Evolution of Advertising from the Modern to Post-Modern Eras In 2011, Lisa Chaney wrote of the inception of the Coco Chanel logo (fig. 8) in her biography Chanel: An Intimate Life: A crucial element in the signature design of the Chanel No.5 bottle is the small black ‘C’ within a black circle set as the seal at the neck. On the top of the lid are two more ‘C’s, intertwined back to back… from at least 1924, the No5 bottles sported the unmistakable logo… these two ‘C’s referred to Gabrielle, – in other words Coco Chanel herself, and would become the logo for the House of Chanel. Chaney continued by describing Chanel’s fascination of totemic symbols as expressed through her use of tarot cards. She also “surrounded herself with objects ripe with meaning” such as representations of wheat and lions in reference prosperity and to her zodiac symbol ‘Leo’ respectively. Fig. 8. No5 Chanel Perfume, released in 1924, featured a seal-like logo attached to the bottle neck. “No5.” Chanel. 25 July 2019 <https://www.chanel.com/us/fragrance/p/120450/n5-parfum-grand-extrait/>.Fig. 9. This illustration of the bottle by Georges Goursat was published in a women’s magazine circa 1920s. “1921 Chanel No5.” Inside Chanel. 26 July 2019 <http://inside.chanel.com/en/timeline/1921_no5>; “La 4éme Fête de l’Histoire Samedi 16 et dimache 17 juin.” Ville de Perigueux. Musée d’art et d’archéologie du Périgord. 28 Mar. 2018. 26 July 2019 <https://www.perigueux-maap.fr/category/archives/page/5/>. This product was considered the “financial basis” of the Chanel “empire” which emerged during the second and third decades of the twentieth century (Tikkanen). Chanel is credited for revolutionising Haute Couture by introducing chic modern designs that emphasised “simplicity and comfort.” This was as opposed to the corseted highly embellished fashion that characterised the Victorian Era (Tikkanen). The lavish designs released by the House of Worth were, in and of themselves, “conspicuous” displays of “consumption” (Veblen 17). In contrast, the prestige and status associated with the “poor girl” look introduced by Chanel was invested in the story of the designer (Tikkanen). A primary example is her marinière or sailor’s blouse with a Breton stripe that epitomised her ascension from café singer to couturier (Tikkanen; Burstein 8). This signifier might have gone unobserved by less discerning consumers of fashion if it were not for branding. Not unlike the Prehistoric Mesopotamians, this iteration of branding is a process which “confer[s]” the “personality” of the designer into the garment (Wengrow 13 -14). The wearer of the garment is, in turn, is imbued by extension. Advertisers in the post-structuralist era embraced Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropological theories (Williamson 50). This is with particular reference to “bricolage” or the “preconditioning” of totemic symbols (Williamson 173; Pool 50). Subsequently, advertising creatives cum “bricoleur” employed his principles to imbue the brands with symbolic power. This symbolic capital was, arguably, transferable to the product and, ultimately, to its consumer (Williamson 173).Post-structuralist and semiotician Jean Baudrillard “exhaustively” critiqued brands and the advertising, or simulacrum, that embellished them between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Wengrow 10-11). In Simulacra and Simulation he wrote,it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)The symbolic power of the Chanel brand resonates in the ‘profound reality’ of her story. It is efficiently ‘denatured’ through becoming simplified, conspicuous and instantly recognisable. It is, as a logo, physically juxtaposed as simulacra onto apparel. This simulacrum, in turn, effects the ‘profound reality’ of the consumer. In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class:Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods it the means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure… costly entertainments, such as potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end… he consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to the consumption… he is also made to witness his host’s facility in etiquette. (47)Therefore, according to Veblen, it was the witnessing of “wasteful” consumption that “confers status” as opposed the primary conspicuous act (Han et al. 18). Despite television being in its experimental infancy advertising was at “the height of its powers” during the 1920s (Clark et al. 18; Hill 30). Post-World War I consumers, in America, experienced an unaccustomed level of prosperity and were unsuspecting of the motives of the newly formed advertising agencies (Clark et al. 18). Subsequently, the ‘witnessing’ of consumption could be constructed across a plethora of media from the newly emerged commercial radio to billboards (Hill viii–25). The resulting ‘status’ was ‘conferred’ onto brand logos. Women’s magazines, with a legacy dating back to 1828, were a primary locus (Hill 10).Belonging in a Post-Structuralist WorldIt is significant to note that, in a post-structuralist world, consumers do not exclusively seek upward mobility in their selection of brands. The establishment of counter-culture icon Levi-Strauss and Co. was concurrent to the emergence of both The House of Worth and Coco Chanel. The Bavarian-born Levi Strauss commenced selling apparel in San Francisco in 1853 (Levi’s). Two decades later, in partnership with Nevada born tailor Jacob Davis, he patented the “riveted-for-strength” workwear using blue denim (Levi’s). Although the ontology of ‘jeans’ is contested, references to “Jene Fustyan” date back the sixteenth century (Snyder 139). It involved the combining cotton, wool and linen to create “vestments” for Geonese sailors (Snyder 138). The Two Horse Logo (fig. 10), depicting them unable to pull apart a pair of jeans to symbolise strength, has been in continuous use by Levi Strauss & Co. company since its design in 1886 (Levi’s). Fig. 10. The Two Horse Logo by Levi Strauss & Co. has been in continuous use since 1886. Staff Unzipped. "Two Horses. One Message." Heritage. Levi Strauss & Co. 1 July 2011. 25 July 2019 <https://www.levistrauss.com/2011/07/01/two-horses-many-versions-one-message/>.The “rugged wear” would become the favoured apparel amongst miners at American Gold Rush (Muthu 6). Subsequently, between the 1930s – 1960s Hollywood films cultivated jeans as a symbol of “defiance” from Stage Coach staring John Wayne in 1939 to Rebel without A Cause staring James Dean in 1955 (Muthu 6; Edgar). Consequently, during the 1960s college students protesting in America (fig. 11) against the draft chose the attire to symbolise their solidarity with the working class (Hedarty). Notwithstanding a 1990s fashion revision of denim into a diversity of garments ranging from jackets to skirts, jeans have remained a wardrobe mainstay for the past half century (Hedarty; Muthu 10). Fig. 11. Although the brand label is not visible, jeans as initially introduced to the American Goldfields in the nineteenth century by Levi Strauss & Co. were cultivated as a symbol of defiance from the 1930s – 1960s. It documents an anti-war protest that occurred at the Pentagon in 1967. Cox, Savannah. "The Anti-Vietnam War Movement." ATI. 14 Dec. 2016. 16 July 2019 <https://allthatsinteresting.com/vietnam-war-protests#7>.In 2003, the journal Science published an article “Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion” (Eisenberger et al.). The cross-institutional study demonstrated that the neurological reaction to rejection is indistinguishable to physical pain. Whereas during the 1940s Maslow classified the desire for “belonging” as secondary to “physiological needs,” early twenty-first century psychologists would suggest “[social] acceptance is a mechanism for survival” (Weir 50). In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard wrote: Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… (1)In the intervening thirty-eight years since this document was published the artifice of our interactions has increased exponentially. In order to locate ‘belongness’ in this hyperreality, the identities of the seekers require a level of encoding. Brands, as signifiers, provide a vehicle.Whereas in Prehistoric Mesopotamia carved seals, worn as amulets, were used to extend the identity of a person, in post-digital China WeChat QR codes (fig. 12), stored in mobile phones, are used to facilitate transactions from exchanging contact details to commerce. Like other totems, they provide access to information such as locations, preferences, beliefs, marital status and financial circumstances. These individualised brands are the most recent incarnation of a technology that has developed over the past eight thousand years. The intermediary iteration, emblems affixed to garments, has remained prevalent since the twelfth century. Their continued salience is due to their visibility and, subsequent, accessibility as signifiers. Fig. 12. It may be posited that Wechat QR codes are a form individualised branding. Like other totems, they store information pertaining to the owner’s location, beliefs, preferences, marital status and financial circumstances. “Join Wechat groups using QR code on 2019.” Techwebsites. 26 July 2019 <https://techwebsites.net/join-wechat-group-qr-code/>.Fig. 13. Brands function effectively as signifiers is due to the international distribution of multinational corporations. This is the shopfront of Chanel in Dubai, which offers customers apparel bearing consistent insignia as the Parisian outlet at on Rue Cambon. Customers of Chanel can signify to each other with the confidence that their products will be recognised. “Chanel.” The Dubai Mall. 26 July 2019 <https://thedubaimall.com/en/shop/chanel>.Navigating a post-structuralist world of increasing mobility necessitates a rudimental understanding of these symbols. Whereas in the nineteenth century status was conveyed through consumption and witnessing consumption, from the twentieth century onwards the garnering of brands made this transaction immediate (Veblen 47; Han et al. 18). The bricolage of the brands is constructed by bricoleurs working in any number of contemporary creative fields such as advertising, filmmaking or song writing. They provide a system by which individuals can convey and recognise identities at prima facie. They enable the prosthesis of identity.ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. United States: University of Michigan Press, 1994.Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. United States: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.Chaney, Lisa. Chanel: An Intimate Life. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2011.Christensen, J.A. Cut-Art: An Introduction to Chung-Hua and Kiri-E. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1989. Clark, Eddie M., Timothy C. Brock, David E. Stewart, David W. Stewart. Attention, Attitude, and Affect in Response to Advertising. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis Group, 1994.Deuchar, Alexander. British Crests: Containing the Crests and Mottos of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland Together with Those of the Principal Cities – Primary So. London: Kirkwood & Sons, 1817.Ebert, Robert. “Great Movie: Stage Coach.” Robert Ebert.com. 1 Aug. 2011. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-stagecoach-1939>.Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. London: Henry Washbourne, 1847.Eisenberger, Naomi I., Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams. "Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion." Science 302.5643 (2003): 290-92.Family Crests of Japan. California: Stone Bridge Press, 2007.Gombrich, Ernst. "The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication." Scientific American 272 (1972): 82-96.Hedarty, Stephanie. "How Jeans Conquered the World." BBC World Service. 28 Feb. 2012. 26 July 2019 <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17101768>. Han, Young Jee, Joseph C. Nunes, and Xavier Drèze. "Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence." Journal of Marketing 74.4 (2010): 15-30.Hill, Daniel Delis. Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999. United States of Ame: Ohio State University Press, 2002."History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>. icon-icon: Telling You More about Icons. 18 Dec. 2016. 26 July 2019 <http://www.icon-icon.com/en/hermes-logo-the-horse-drawn-carriage/>. Jones, Geoffrey. Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>. Krick, Jessa. "Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895) and the House of Worth." Heilburnn Timeline of Art History. The Met. Oct. 2004. 23 July 2019 <https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrth/hd_wrth.htm>. Levi’s. "About Levis Strauss & Co." 25 July 2019 <https://www.levis.com.au/about-us.html>. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. London: Penguin, 1969.Lopes, Teresa de Silva, and Paul Duguid. Trademarks, Brands, and Competitiveness. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.Maslow, Abraham. "A Theory of Human Motivation." British Journal of Psychiatry 208.4 (1942): 313-13.Moore, Karl, and Susan Reid. "The Birth of Brand: 4000 Years of Branding History." Business History 4.4 (2008).Muthu, Subramanian Senthikannan. Sustainability in Denim. Cambridge Woodhead Publishing, 2017.Polan, Brenda, and Roger Tredre. The Great Fashion Designers. Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.Pool, Roger C. Introduction. Totemism. New ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Press, Claire. Wardrobe Crisis: How We Went from Sunday Best to Fast Fashion. Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2016.Sale, K. Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1996.Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Snyder, Rachel Louise. Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.Starcevic, Sladjana. "The Origin and Historical Development of Branding and Advertising in the Old Civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe." Marketing 46.3 (2015): 179-96.Tikkanen, Amy. "Coco Chanel." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 19 Apr. 2019. 25 July 2019 <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Coco-Chanel>.Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. London: Macmillan, 1975.Weir, Kirsten. "The Pain of Social Rejection." American Psychological Association 43.4 (2012): 50.Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Ideas in Progress. London: Boyars, 1978.

Introduction With a deluge of mouthwatering pre-publicity, the opening of The Spotted Pig, the USA’s first self-identified British-styled gastropub, in Manhattan in February 2004 was much anticipated. The late Australian chef, food writer and restauranteur Mietta O’Donnell has noted how “taking over a building or business which has a long established reputation can be a mixed blessing” because of the way that memories “can enrich the experience of being in a place or they can just make people nostalgic”. Bistro Le Zoo, the previous eatery on the site, had been very popular when it opened almost a decade earlier, and its closure was mourned by some diners (Young; Kaminsky “Feeding Time”; Steinhauer & McGinty). This regret did not, however, appear to affect The Spotted Pig’s success. As esteemed New York Times reviewer Frank Bruni noted in his 2006 review: “Almost immediately after it opened […] the throngs started to descend, and they have never stopped”. The following year, The Spotted Pig was awarded a Michelin star—the first year that Michelin ranked New York—and has kept this star in the subsequent annual rankings. Writing Restaurant Biography Detailed studies have been published of almost every type of contemporary organisation including public institutions such as schools, hospitals, museums and universities, as well as non-profit organisations such as charities and professional associations. These are often written to mark a major milestone, or some significant change, development or the demise of the organisation under consideration (Brien). Detailed studies have also recently been published of businesses as diverse as general stores (Woody), art galleries (Fossi), fashion labels (Koda et al.), record stores (Southern & Branson), airlines (Byrnes; Jones), confectionary companies (Chinn) and builders (Garden). In terms of attracting mainstream readerships, however, few such studies seem able to capture popular reader interest as those about eating establishments including restaurants and cafés. This form of restaurant life history is, moreover, not restricted to ‘quality’ establishments. Fast food restaurant chains have attracted their share of studies (see, for example Love; Jakle & Sculle), ranging from business-economic analyses (Liu), socio-cultural political analyses (Watson), and memoirs (Kroc & Anderson), to criticism around their conduct and effects (Striffler). Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is the most well-known published critique of the fast food industry and its effects with, famously, the Rolling Stone article on which it was based generating more reader mail than any other piece run in the 1990s. The book itself (researched narrative creative nonfiction), moreover, made a fascinating transition to the screen, transformed into a fictionalised drama (co-written by Schlosser) that narrates the content of the book from the point of view of a series of fictional/composite characters involved in the industry, rather than in a documentary format. Akin to the range of studies of fast food restaurants, there are also a variety of studies of eateries in US motels, caravan parks, diners and service station restaurants (see, for example, Baeder). Although there has been little study of this sub-genre of food and drink publishing, their popularity can be explained, at least in part, because such volumes cater to the significant readership for writing about food related topics of all kinds, with food writing recently identified as mainstream literary fare in the USA and UK (Hughes) and an entire “publishing subculture” in Australia (Dunstan & Chaitman). Although no exact tally exists, an informed estimate by the founder of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and president of the Paris Cookbook Fair, Edouard Cointreau, has more than 26,000 volumes on food and wine related topics currently published around the world annually (ctd. in Andriani “Gourmand Awards”). The readership for publications about restaurants can also perhaps be attributed to the wide range of information that can be included a single study. My study of a selection of these texts from the UK, USA and Australia indicates that this can include narratives of place and architecture dealing with the restaurant’s location, locale and design; narratives of directly food-related subject matter such as menus, recipes and dining trends; and narratives of people, in the stories of its proprietors, staff and patrons. Detailed studies of contemporary individual establishments commonly take the form of authorised narratives either written by the owners, chefs or other staff with the help of a food journalist, historian or other professional writer, or produced largely by that writer with the assistance of the premise’s staff. These studies are often extensively illustrated with photographs and, sometimes, drawings or reproductions of other artworks, and almost always include recipes. Two examples of these from my own collection include a centennial history of a famous New Orleans eatery that survived Hurricane Katrina, Galatoire’s Cookbook. Written by employees—the chief operating officer/general manager (Melvin Rodrigue) and publicist (Jyl Benson)—this incorporates reminiscences from both other staff and patrons. The second is another study of a New Orleans’ restaurant, this one by the late broadcaster and celebrity local historian Mel Leavitt. The Court of Two Sisters Cookbook: With a History of the French Quarter and the Restaurant, compiled with the assistance of the Two Sisters’ proprietor, Joseph Fein Joseph III, was first published in 1992 and has been so enduringly popular that it is in its eighth printing. These texts, in common with many others of this type, trace a triumph-over-adversity company history that incorporates a series of mildly scintillating anecdotes, lists of famous chefs and diners, and signature recipes. Although obviously focused on an external readership, they can also be characterised as an instance of what David M. Boje calls an organisation’s “story performance” (106) as the process of creating these narratives mobilises an organisation’s (in these cases, a commercial enterprise’s) internal information processing and narrative building activities. Studies of contemporary restaurants are much more rarely written without any involvement from the eatery’s personnel. When these are, the results tend to have much in common with more critical studies such as Fast Food Nation, as well as so-called architectural ‘building biographies’ which attempt to narrate the historical and social forces that “explain the shapes and uses” (Ellis, Chao & Parrish 70) of the physical structures we create. Examples of this would include Harding’s study of the importance of the Boeuf sur le Toit in Parisian life in the 1920s and Middlebrook’s social history of London’s Strand Corner House. Such work agrees with Kopytoff’s assertion—following Appadurai’s proposal that objects possess their own ‘biographies’ which need to be researched and expressed—that such inquiry can reveal not only information about the objects under consideration, but also about readers as we examine our “cultural […] aesthetic, historical, and even political” responses to these narratives (67). The life story of a restaurant will necessarily be entangled with those of the figures who have been involved in its establishment and development, as well as the narratives they create around the business. This following brief study of The Spotted Pig, however, written without the assistance of the establishment’s personnel, aims to outline a life story for this eatery in order to reflect upon the pig’s place in contemporary dining practice in New York as raw foodstuff, fashionable comestible, product, brand, symbol and marketing tool, as well as, at times, purely as an animal identity. The Spotted Pig Widely profiled before it even opened, The Spotted Pig is reportedly one of the city’s “most popular” restaurants (Michelin 349). It is profiled in all the city guidebooks I could locate in print and online, featuring in some of these as a key stop on recommended itineraries (see, for instance, Otis 39). A number of these proclaim it to be the USA’s first ‘gastropub’—the term first used in 1991 in the UK to describe a casual hotel/bar with good food and reasonable prices (Farley). The Spotted Pig is thus styled on a shabby-chic version of a traditional British hotel, featuring a cluttered-but-well arranged use of pig-themed objects and illustrations that is described by latest Michelin Green Guide of New York City as “a country-cute décor that still manages to be hip” (Michelin 349). From the three-dimensional carved pig hanging above the entrance in a homage to the shingles of traditional British hotels, to the use of its image on the menu, website and souvenir tee-shirts, the pig as motif proceeds its use as a foodstuff menu item. So much so, that the restaurant is often (affectionately) referred to by patrons and reviewers simply as ‘The Pig’. The restaurant has become so well known in New York in the relatively brief time it has been operating that it has not only featured in a number of novels and memoirs, but, moreover, little or no explanation has been deemed necessary as the signifier of “The Spotted Pig” appears to convey everything that needs to be said about an eatery of quality and fashion. In the thriller Lethal Experiment: A Donovan Creed Novel, when John Locke’s hero has to leave the restaurant and becomes involved in a series of dangerous escapades, he wants nothing more but to get back to his dinner (107, 115). The restaurant is also mentioned a number of times in Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle in relation to a (fictional) new movie of the same name. The joke in the book is that the character doesn’t know of the restaurant (26). In David Goodwillie’s American Subversive, the story of a journalist-turned-blogger and a homegrown terrorist set in New York, the narrator refers to “Scarlett Johansson, for instance, and the hostess at the Spotted Pig” (203-4) as the epitome of attractiveness. The Spotted Pig is also mentioned in Suzanne Guillette’s memoir, Much to Your Chagrin, when the narrator is on a dinner date but fears running into her ex-boyfriend: ‘Jack lives somewhere in this vicinity […] Vaguely, you recall him telling you he was not too far from the Spotted Pig on Greenwich—now, was it Greenwich Avenue or Greenwich Street?’ (361). The author presumes readers know the right answer in order to build tension in this scene. Although this success is usually credited to the joint efforts of backer, music executive turned restaurateur Ken Friedman, his partner, well-known chef, restaurateur, author and television personality Mario Batali, and their UK-born and trained chef, April Bloomfield (see, for instance, Batali), a significant part has been built on Bloomfield’s pork cookery. The very idea of a “spotted pig” itself raises a central tenet of Bloomfield’s pork/food philosophy which is sustainable and organic. That is, not the mass produced, industrially farmed pig which produces a leaner meat, but the fatty, tastier varieties of pig such as the heritage six-spotted Berkshire which is “darker, more heavily marbled with fat, juicier and richer-tasting than most pork” (Fabricant). Bloomfield has, indeed, made pig’s ears—long a Chinese restaurant staple in the city and a key ingredient of Southern US soul food as well as some traditional Japanese and Spanish dishes—fashionable fare in the city, and her current incarnation, a crispy pig’s ear salad with lemon caper dressing (TSP 2010) is much acclaimed by reviewers. This approach to ingredients—using the ‘whole beast’, local whenever possible, and the concentration on pork—has been underlined and enhanced by a continuing relationship with UK chef Fergus Henderson. In his series of London restaurants under the banner of “St. John”, Henderson is famed for the approach to pork cookery outlined in his two books Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, published in 1999 (re-published both in the UK and the US as The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating), and Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part II (coauthored with Justin Piers Gellatly in 2007). Henderson has indeed been identified as starting a trend in dining and food publishing, focusing on sustainably using as food the entirety of any animal killed for this purpose, but which mostly focuses on using all parts of pigs. In publishing, this includes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, Peter Kaminsky’s Pig Perfect, subtitled Encounters with Some Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them, John Barlow’s Everything but the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain and Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes (2008). In restaurants, it certainly includes The Spotted Pig. So pervasive has embrace of whole beast pork consumption been in New York that, by 2007, Bruni could write that these are: “porky times, fatty times, which is to say very good times indeed. Any new logo for the city could justifiably place the Big Apple in the mouth of a spit-roasted pig” (Bruni). This demand set the stage perfectly for, in October 2007, Henderson to travel to New York to cook pork-rich menus at The Spotted Pig in tandem with Bloomfield (Royer). He followed this again in 2008 and, by 2009, this annual event had become known as “FergusStock” and was covered by local as well as UK media, and a range of US food weblogs. By 2009, it had grown to become a dinner at the Spotted Pig with half the dishes on the menu by Henderson and half by Bloomfield, and a dinner the next night at David Chang’s acclaimed Michelin-starred Momofuku Noodle Bar, which is famed for its Cantonese-style steamed pork belly buns. A third dinner (and then breakfast/brunch) followed at Friedman/Bloomfield’s Breslin Bar and Dining Room (discussed below) (Rose). The Spotted Pig dinners have become famed for Henderson’s pig’s head and pork trotter dishes with the chef himself recognising that although his wasn’t “the most obvious food to cook for America”, it was the case that “at St John, if a couple share a pig’s head, they tend to be American” (qtd. in Rose). In 2009, the pigs’ head were presented in pies which Henderson has described as “puff pastry casing, with layers of chopped, cooked pig’s head and potato, so all the lovely, bubbly pig’s head juices go into the potato” (qtd. in Rose). Bloomfield was aged only 28 when, in 2003, with a recommendation from Jamie Oliver, she interviewed for, and won, the position of executive chef of The Spotted Pig (Fabricant; Q&A). Following this introduction to the US, her reputation as a chef has grown based on the strength of her pork expertise. Among a host of awards, she was named one of US Food & Wine magazine’s ten annual Best New Chefs in 2007. In 2009, she was a featured solo session titled “Pig, Pig, Pig” at the fourth Annual International Chefs Congress, a prestigious New York City based event where “the world’s most influential and innovative chefs, pastry chefs, mixologists, and sommeliers present the latest techniques and culinary concepts to their peers” (Starchefs.com). Bloomfield demonstrated breaking down a whole suckling St. Canut milk raised piglet, after which she butterflied, rolled and slow-poached the belly, and fried the ears. As well as such demonstrations of expertise, she is also often called upon to provide expert comment on pork-related news stories, with The Spotted Pig regularly the subject of that food news. For example, when a rare, heritage Hungarian pig was profiled as a “new” New York pork source in 2009, this story arose because Bloomfield had served a Mangalitsa/Berkshire crossbreed pig belly and trotter dish with Agen prunes (Sanders) at The Spotted Pig. Bloomfield was quoted as the authority on the breed’s flavour and heritage authenticity: “it took me back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, windows steaming from the roasting pork in the oven […] This pork has that same authentic taste” (qtd. in Sanders). Bloomfield has also used this expert profile to support a series of pork-related causes. These include the Thanksgiving Farm in the Catskill area, which produces free range pork for its resident special needs children and adults, and helps them gain meaningful work-related skills in working with these pigs. Bloomfield not only cooks for the project’s fundraisers, but also purchases any excess pigs for The Spotted Pig (Estrine 103). This strong focus on pork is not, however, exclusive. The Spotted Pig is also one of a number of American restaurants involved in the Meatless Monday campaign, whereby at least one vegetarian option is included on menus in order to draw attention to the benefits of a plant-based diet. When, in 2008, Bloomfield beat the Iron Chef in the sixth season of the US version of the eponymous television program, the central ingredient was nothing to do with pork—it was olives. Diversifying from this focus on ‘pig’ can, however, be dangerous. Friedman and Bloomfield’s next enterprise after The Spotted Pig was The John Dory seafood restaurant at the corner of 10th Avenue and 16th Street. This opened in November 2008 to reviews that its food was “uncomplicated and nearly perfect” (Andrews 22), won Bloomfield Time Out New York’s 2009 “Best New Hand at Seafood” award, but was not a success. The John Dory was a more formal, but smaller, restaurant that was more expensive at a time when the financial crisis was just biting, and was closed the following August. Friedman blamed the layout, size and neighbourhood (Stein) and its reservation system, which limited walk-in diners (ctd. in Vallis), but did not mention its non-pork, seafood orientation. When, almost immediately, another Friedman/Bloomfield project was announced, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room (which opened in October 2009 in the Ace Hotel at 20 West 29th Street and Broadway), the enterprise was closely modeled on the The Spotted Pig. In preparation, its senior management—Bloomfield, Friedman and sous-chefs, Nate Smith and Peter Cho (who was to become the Breslin’s head chef)—undertook a tasting tour of the UK that included Henderson’s St. John Bread & Wine Bar (Leventhal). Following this, the Breslin’s menu highlighted a series of pork dishes such as terrines, sausages, ham and potted styles (Rosenberg & McCarthy), with even Bloomfield’s pork scratchings (crispy pork rinds) bar snacks garnering glowing reviews (see, for example, Severson; Ghorbani). Reviewers, moreover, waxed lyrically about the menu’s pig-based dishes, the New York Times reviewer identifying this focus as catering to New York diners’ “fetish for pork fat” (Sifton). This representative review details not only “an entree of gently smoked pork belly that’s been roasted to tender goo, for instance, over a drift of buttery mashed potatoes, with cabbage and bacon on the side” but also a pig’s foot “in gravy made of reduced braising liquid, thick with pillowy shallots and green flecks of deconstructed brussels sprouts” (Sifton). Sifton concluded with the proclamation that this style of pork was “very good: meat that is fat; fat that is meat”. Concluding remarks Bloomfield has listed Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie as among her favourite food books. Publishers Weekly reviewer called Ruhlman “a food poet, and the pig is his muse” (Q&A). In August 2009, it was reported that Bloomfield had always wanted to write a cookbook (Marx) and, in July 2010, HarperCollins imprint Ecco publisher and foodbook editor Dan Halpern announced that he was planning a book with her, tentatively titled, A Girl and Her Pig (Andriani “Ecco Expands”). As a “cookbook with memoir running throughout” (Maurer), this will discuss the influence of the pig on her life as well as how to cook pork. This text will obviously also add to the data known about The Spotted Pig, but until then, this brief gastrobiography has attempted to outline some of the human, and in this case, animal, stories that lie behind all businesses. References Andrews, Colman. “Its Up To You, New York, New York.” Gourmet Apr. (2009): 18-22, 111. Andriani, Lynn. “Ecco Expands Cookbook Program: HC Imprint Signs Up Seven New Titles.” Publishers Weekly 12 Jul. (2010) 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/43803-ecco-expands-cookbook-program.html Andriani, Lynn. “Gourmand Awards Receive Record Number of Cookbook Entries.” Publishers Weekly 27 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/44573-gourmand-awards-receive-record-number-of-cookbook-entries.html Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 2003. First pub. 1986. Baeder, John. Gas, Food, and Lodging. New York: Abbeville Press, 1982. Barlow, John. Everything But the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Batali, Mario. “The Spotted Pig.” Mario Batali 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.mariobatali.com/restaurants_spottedpig.cfm Boje, David M. “The Storytelling Organization: A Study of Story Performance in an Office-Supply Firm.” Administrative Science Quarterly 36.1 (1991): 106-126. Brien, Donna Lee. “Writing to Understand Ourselves: An Organisational History of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 1996–2010.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses Apr. 2010 http://www.textjournal.com.au/april10/brien.htm Bruni, Frank. “Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate.” New York Times 13 Jun. 2007. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/dining/13glut.html Bruni, Frank. “Stuffed Pork.” New York Times 25 Jan. 2006. 4 Sep. 2010 http://events.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/dining/reviews/25rest.html Bushnell, Candace. Lipstick Jungle. New York: Hyperion Books, 2008. Byrnes, Paul. Qantas by George!: The Remarkable Story of George Roberts. Sydney: Watermark, 2000. Chinn, Carl. The Cadbury Story: A Short History. Studley, Warwickshire: Brewin Books, 1998. Dunstan, David and Chaitman, Annette. “Food and Drink: The Appearance of a Publishing Subculture.” Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007: 333-351. Ellis, W. Russell, Tonia Chao and Janet Parrish. “Levi’s Place: A Building Biography.” Places 2.1 (1985): 57-70. Estrine, Darryl. Harvest to Heat: Cooking with America’s Best Chefs, Farmers, and Artisans. Newton CT: The Taunton Press, 2010 Fabricant, Florence. “Food stuff: Off the Menu.” New York Times 26 Nov. 2003. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/26/dining/food-stuff-off-the-menu.html?ref=april_bloomfield Fabricant, Florence. “Food Stuff: Fit for an Emperor, Now Raised in America.” New York Times 23 Jun. 2004. 2 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/dining/food-stuff-fit-for-an-emperor-now-raised-in-america.html Farley, David. “In N.Y., An Appetite for Gastropubs.” The Washington Post 24 May 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052201105.html Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. The River Cottage Meat Book. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2004. Food & Wine Magazine. “Food & Wine Magazine Names 19th Annual Best New Chefs.” Food & Wine 4 Apr. 2007. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/2007-best-new-chefs Fossi, Gloria. Uffizi Gallery: Art, History, Collections. 4th ed. Florence Italy: Giunti Editore, 2001. Garden, Don. Builders to the Nation: The A.V. Jennings Story. Carlton: Melbourne U P, 1992. Ghorbani, Liza. “Boîte: In NoMad, a Bar With a Pub Vibe.” New York Times 26 Mar. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/fashion/28Boite.html Goodwillie, David. American Subversive. New York: Scribner, 2010. Guillette, Suzanne. Much to Your Chagrin: A Memoir of Embarrassment. New York, Atria Books, 2009. Henderson, Fergus. Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking. London: Pan Macmillan, 1999 Henderson, Fergus and Justin Piers Gellatly. Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part I1. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007. Hughes, Kathryn. “Food Writing Moves from Kitchen to bookshelf.” The Guardian 19 Jun. 2010. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/19/anthony-bourdain-food-writing Jakle, John A. and Keith A. Sculle. Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1999. Jones, Lois. EasyJet: The Story of Britain's Biggest Low-cost Airline. London: Aurum, 2005. Kaminsky, Peter. “Feeding Time at Le Zoo.” New York Magazine 12 Jun. 1995: 65. Kaminsky, Peter. Pig Perfect: Encounters with Some Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways To Cook Them. New York: Hyperion 2005. Koda, Harold, Andrew Bolton and Rhonda K. Garelick. Chanel. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” The Social Life of things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge U P, 2003. 64-94. (First pub. 1986). Kroc, Ray and Robert Anderson. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s, Chicago: H. Regnery, 1977 Leavitt, Mel. The Court of Two Sisters Cookbook: With a History of the French Quarter and the Restaurant. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2005. Pub. 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003. Leventhal, Ben. “April Bloomfield & Co. Take U.K. Field Trip to Prep for Ace Debut.” Grub Street 14 Apr. 2009. 3 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/04/april_bloomfield_co_take_uk_field_trip_to_prep_for_ace_debut.html Fast Food Nation. R. Linklater (Dir.). Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006. Liu, Warren K. KFC in China: Secret Recipe for Success. Singapore & Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley (Asia), 2008. Locke, John. Lethal Experiment: A Donovan Creed Novel. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2009. Love, John F. McDonald’s: Behind the Arches. Toronto & New York: Bantam, 1986. Marx, Rebecca. “Beyond the Breslin: April Bloomfield is Thinking Tea, Bakeries, Cookbook.” 28 Aug. 2009. 3 Sep. 2010 http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2009/08/beyond_the_bres.php Maurer, Daniel. “Meatball Shop, April Bloomfield Plan Cookbooks.” Grub Street 12 Jul. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2010/07/meatball_shop_april_bloomfield.html McLagan, Jennifer. Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2008. Michelin. Michelin Green Guide New York City. Michelin Travel Publications, 2010. O’Donnell, Mietta. “Burying and Celebrating Ghosts.” Herald Sun 1 Dec. 1998. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.miettas.com.au/restaurants/rest_96-00/buryingghosts.html Otis, Ginger Adams. New York Encounter. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, 2007. “Q and A: April Bloomfield.” New York Times 18 Apr. 2008. 3 Sep. 2010 http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/q-and-a-april-bloomfield Rodrigue, Melvin and Jyl Benson. Galatoire’s Cookbook: Recipes and Family History from the Time-Honored New Orleans Restaurant. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2005. Rose, Hilary. “Fergus Henderson in New York.” The Times (London) Online, 5 Dec. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/recipes/article6937550.ece Rosenberg, Sarah & Tom McCarthy. “Platelist: The Breslin’s April Bloomfield.” ABC News/Nightline 4 Dec. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/april-bloomfield-spotted-pig-interview/story?id=9242079 Royer, Blake. “Table for Two: Fergus Henderson at The Spotted Pig.” The Paupered Chef 11 Oct. 2007. 23 Aug. 2010 http://thepauperedchef.com/2007/10/table-for-two-f.html Ruhlman, Michael and Brian Polcyn. Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. New York: W. Norton, 2005. Sanders, Michael S. “An Old Breed of Hungarian Pig Is Back in Favor.” New York Times 26 Mar. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/dining/01pigs.html?ref=april_bloomfield Schlosser, Eric. “Fast Food Nation: The True History of the America’s Diet.” Rolling Stone Magazine 794 3 Sep. 1998: 58-72. Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Severson, Kim. “From the Pig Directly to the Fish.” New York Times 2 Sep. 2008. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/dining/03bloom.html Severson, Kim. “For the Big Game? Why, Pigskins.” New York Times 3 Feb. 2010. 23 Aug. 2010 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9502E2DB143DF930A35751C0A9669D8B63&ref=april_bloomfield Sifton, Sam. “The Breslin Bar and Dining Room.” New York Times 12 Jan. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://events.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/dining/reviews/13rest.htm Southern, Terry & Richard Branson. Virgin: A History of Virgin Records. London: A. Publishing, 1996. Starchefs.com. 4th Annual StarChefs.com International Chefs Congress. 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.starchefs.com/cook/icc-2009 Stein, Joshua David. “Exit Interview: Ken Friedman on the Demise of the John Dory.” Grub Street 15 Sep. 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/09/exit_interview_ken_friedman_on.html Steinhauer, Jennifer & Jo Craven McGinty. “Yesterday’s Special: Good, Cheap Dining.” New York Times 26 Jun. 2005. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/nyregion/26restaurant.html Striffler, Steve. Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. The Spotted Pig (TSP) 2010 The Spotted Pig website http://www.thespottedpig.com Time Out New York. “Eat Out Awards 2009. Best New Hand at Seafood: April Bloomfield, the John Dory”. Time Out New York 706, 9-15 Apr. 2009. 10 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/eat-out-awards/73170/eat-out-awards-2009-best-new-hand-at-seafood-a-april-bloomfield-the-john-dory Vallis, Alexandra. “Ken Friedman on the Virtues of No Reservations.” Grub Street 27 Aug. 2009. 10 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/08/ken_friedman_on_the_virtues_of.html Watson, James L. Ed. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1997.Woody, Londa L. All in a Day's Work: Historic General Stores of Macon and Surrounding North Carolina Counties. Boone, North Carolina: Parkway Publishers, 2001. Young, Daniel. “Bon Appetit! It’s Feeding Time at Le Zoo.” New York Daily News 28 May 1995. 2 Sep. 2010 http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/lifestyle/1995/05/28/1995-05-28_bon_appetit__it_s_feeding_ti.html

Introduction In an era of upheaval and uncertainty for higher education institutions around the world, scholars, like those in many in other professions, are increasingly using social media to build communities around mutual support and professional development. These communities appear to offer opportunities for participants to exert more positive influence over the types of interactions they engage in with colleagues, in many cases being valued as more altruistic, transformational, or supportive than established academic structures (Gibson, and Gibbs; Mewburn, and Thomson; Maitzen). What has been described as ‘digital scholarship’ applies social media to “different facets of scholarly activity in a helpful and productive way” (Carrigan 5), with online scholarly communities being likened to evolutions of face-to-face practices including peer mentoring (Ferguson, and Wheat) or a “virtual staffroom” (Mewburn, and Thomson). To a large extent, these accounts of scholarly practice adapted for digital media have resonance. From writing groups (O’Dwyer, McDonough, Jefferson, Goff, and Redman-MacLaren) to conference attendance (Spilker, Silva, and Morgado) and funding (Osimo, Priego, and Vuorikari), the transformational possibilities of social media have been applied to almost every facet of existing academic practices. These practices have increasingly attracted scrutiny from higher education institutions, with social media profiles of staff both a potential asset and risk to institutions’ brands. Around the world, institutions use social media for marketing, student recruitment, student support and alumni communication (Palmer). As such, social media policies have emerged in recent years in attempts to ensure staff engage in ways that align with the interests of their employers (Solberg; Carrigan). However, engagement via social media is also still largely considered “supplementary to ‘real’ scholarly work” (Mussell 347).Paralleling this trend, guides to effectively managing an online profile as a component of professional reputation have also become increasingly common (e.g. Carrigan). While public relations and management literatures have approached reputation management in terms of how an organisation is regarded by its multiple stakeholders (Fombrun) this is increasingly being applied to individuals on social media. According to Gandini a “reputation economy” (22) has come to function for knowledge workers who seek to cultivate a reputation as a good community member through sociality in order to secure more (or better) work.The popularity of professional social media communities and scrutiny of participants raises questions about the work involved in building and participating in them. This article explores these questions through analysis of tweets from the first year of #ECRchat, a Twitter group for early career researchers (ECRs). The group was established in 2012 to provide an opportunity for ECRs (typically within five years of PhD completion) to discuss career-related issues. Since it was founded, the group has been administered through partnerships between early career scholars using a Twitter account (@ECRchat) and a blog. Tweets, the posts of 140 characters or fewer, which appear on a user’s profile and in followers’ feeds (Twitter) are organised into a ‘chat’ by participants through the use of the hashtag ‘#ECRchat’. Participants vote on chat topics and take on the role of hosting on a volunteer basis. The explicit career focus of this group provides an ideal case study to explore how work is represented in an online professionally-focused community, in order to reflect on what this might mean for the norms of knowledge work.Digital Labour The impact of Internet Communication Technologies (ICT), including social media, on the lives of workers has long been a source of both concern and hope. Mobile devices, wireless Internet and associated communications software enable increasing numbers of people to take work home. This flexibility has been welcomed as the means by which workers might more successfully access jobs and manage competing commitments (Raja, Imaizumi, Kelly, Narimatsu, and Paradi-Guilford). However, hours worked from home are often unpaid and carry with them a strong likelihood of interfering with rest, recreation and family time (Pocock and Skinner). Melissa Gregg describes this as “presence bleed” (2): the dilutions of focus from everyday activities as workers increasingly use electronic devices to ‘check in’ during non-work time. Moving beyond the limitations of this work-life balance approach, which tends to over-state divisions between employment and other everyday life practices, a growing literature seeks to address work in online environments by analysing the types of labour being practiced, rather than seeing such practices as adjunct to physical workplaces. Responding to claims that digital communication heralds a new age of greater freedom, creativity and democratic participation, this work draws attention to the reliance of such networks on unpaid labour (e.g. Hearn; Hesmondhalgh) with ratings, reviews and relationship maintenance serving business’ economic ends alongside the individual interests which motivate participants. The immaterial, affective, and often precarious labour that has been observed is “simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” (Terranova). This work builds particularly on feminist analysis of work (see McRobbie for a discussion of this), with behind the scenes moderator, convenor, and community builder roles largely female and largely unrecognised, be they activist (Gleeson), creative (Duffy) or consumer (Arcy) groups. For some, this suggests the emergence of a new ‘women’s work’ of affective immaterial labour which goes into building transformational communities (Jarrett). Yet, digital labour has not yet been foregrounded within research into higher education, where it is largely practiced in the messy intersections of employment, unpaid professional development, and leisure. Joyce Goggin argues that convergence of these spheres is a feature of digital labour. Consequently, this article seeks to add a consideration of digital labour, specifically the cultural politics of work that emerge in these spaces, to the literature on digital practices as a translation of existing academic responsibilities online. In the context of widespread concerns over academic workload and job market (Bentley, Coates, Dobson, Goedegebuure, and Meek) and the growing international engagement and impact agenda (Priem, Piwowar, and Hemminger), it raises questions about the implications of these practices. Researching Twitter Communities This article analyses tweets from the publicly available Twitter timeline, containing the hashtag #ECRchat, during scheduled chats, from 1 July 2012 to 31 July 2013 (the first year of operation). Initially, all tweets in this time period were analysed in anonymised form to determine the most commonly mentioned topics during chats. This content analysis removed the most common English language words, such as: the; it; I; and RT (which stands for retweet), which would otherwise appear as top results in almost any content analysis regardless of the community of interest. This was followed by qualitative analysis of tweets, to explore in more depth how important issues were articulated and rationalised within the group. This draws on Catherine Driscoll’s and Melissa Gregg’s idea of “sympathetic online cultural studies” which seeks to explore online communities first and foremost as communities rather than as exemplars of online communications (15-20). Here, a narrative approach was undertaken to analyse how participants curated, made sense of, and explained their own career stories (drawing on Pamphilon). Although I do not claim that participants are representative of all ECRs, or that the ideas given the most attention during chats are representative of the experiences of all participants, representations of work articulated here are suggestive of the kinds of public utterances that were considered reasonable within this open online space. Participants are identified according to the twitter handle and user name they had chosen to use for the chats being analysed. This is because the practical infeasibility of guaranteeing online anonymity (readers need only to Google the text of any tweet to associate it with a particular user, in most cases) and the importance of actively involving participants as agents in the research process, in part by identifying them as authors of their own stories, rather than informants (e.g. Butz; Evans; Svalastog and Eriksson).Representations of Work in #ECRchat The co-creation of the #ECRchat community through participant hosts and community votes on chat topics gave rise to a discussion group that was heavily focused on ‘the work’ of academia, including its importance in the lives of participants, relative appeal over other options, and negative effects on leisure time. I was clear that participants regarded participation as serving their professional interests, despite participation not being paid or formally recognised by employers. With the exception of two discussions focused on making decisions about the future of the group, #ECRchat discussions during the year of analysis focused on topics designed to help participants succeed at work such as “career progression and planning”, “different routes to postdoc funding”, and “collaboration”. At a micro-level, ‘work’ (and related terms) was the most frequently used term in #ECRchat, with its total number of uses (1372) almost double that of research (700), the next most used term. Comments during the chats reiterated this emphasis: “It’s all about the work. Be decent to people and jump through the hoops you need to, but always keep your eyes on the work” (Magennis).The depth of participants’ commitment comes through strongly in discussions comparing academic work with other options: “pretty much everyone I know with ‘real jobs’ hates their work. I feel truly lucky to say that I love mine #ECRchat” (McGettigan). This was seen in particular in the discussion about ‘careers outside academia’. Hashtags such as #altac (referring to alternative-academic careers such as university research support or learning and teaching administration roles) and #postac (referring to PhD holders working outside of universities in research or non-research roles) used both alongside the #ECRchat hashtag and separately, provide an ongoing site of these kinds of representations. While participants in #ECRchat sought to shift this perception and were critically aware that it could lead to undesirable outcomes: “PhDs and ECRs in Humanities don’t seem to consider working outside of academia – that limits their engagement with training #ECRchat” (Faculty of Humanities at the University of Manchester), such discussions frequently describe alternative academic careers as a ‘backup plan’, should academic employment not be found. Additionally, many participants suggested that their working hours were excessive, extending the professional into personal spaces and times in ways that they did not see as positive. This was often described as the only way to achieve success: “I hate to say it, but one of the best ways to improve track record is to work 70+ hours a week, every week. Forever. #ecrchat” (Dunn). One of the key examples of this dynamic was the scheduling of the chat itself. When founded in 2012, #ECRchat ran in the Australian evening and UK morning, eliding the personal/work distinction for both its coordinators and participants. While considerable discussion was concerned with scheduling the chat during times when a large number of international participants could attend, this discussion centred on waking rather than working hours. The use of scheduled tweets and shared work between convenors in different time zones (Australia and the United Kingdom) maintained an around the clock online presence, extending well beyond the ordinary working hours of any individual participant.Personal Disclosure The norms that were articulated in #ECRchat are perhaps not surprising for a group of participants seeking to establish themselves in a profession where a long-hours culture and work-life interference are common (Bentley, Coates, Dobson, Goedegebuure, and Meek). However, what is notable is that participation frequently involved the extension of the personal into the professional and in support of professional aims. In the chat’s first year, an element of personal disclosure and support for others became key to acting as a good community member. Beyond the well-established norms of white collar workers demonstrating professionalism by deploying “courtesy, helpfulness, and kindness” (Mills xvii), this community building relied on personal disclosure which to some extent collapsed personal and professional boundaries.By disclosing individual struggles, anxieties, and past experiences participants contributed to a culture of support. This largely functioned through discussions of work stress rather than leisure: “I definitely don’t have [work-life balance]. I think it’s because I don’t have a routine so work and home constantly blend into one another” (Feely). Arising from these discussions, ideas to help participants better navigate and build academic careers was one of the main ways this community support and concern was practiced: “I think I’m often more productive and less anxious if I'm working on a couple of things in parallel, too #ecrchat” (Brian).Activities such as preparing meals, caring for family, and leisure activities, became part of the discussion. “@snarkyphd Sorry, late, had to deal with toddler. Also new; currently doing casual teaching/industry work & applying for postdocs #ecrchat” (Ronald). Exclusively professional profiles were considered less engaging than the combination of personal and professional that most participants adopted: “@jeanmadams I’ve answered a few queries on ResearchGate, but agree lack of non-work opinions / personality makes them dull #ecrchat” (Tennant). However, this is not to suggest that these networks become indistinguishable from more informal, personal, or leisurely uses of social media: “@networkedres My ‘professional’ online identity is slightly more guarded than my ‘facebook’ id which is for friends and family #ECRchat” (Wheat). Instead, disclosure of certain kinds of work struggles came to function as a positive contribution to a more reflexive professionalism. In the context of work-focused discussion, #ECRchat opens important spaces for scholars to question norms they considered damaging or at least make these tacit norms explicit and receive support to manage them. Affective Labour The professional goals and focus of #ECRchat, combined with the personal support and disclosure that forms the basis for the supportive elements in this group is arguably one of its strongest and most important elements. Mark Carrigan suggests that the practices of revealing something of the struggles we experience could form the basis for a new collegiality, where common experiences which had previously not been discussed publicly are for the first time recognised as systemic, not individual challenges. However, there is work required to provide context and support for these emotional experiences which is largely invisible here, as has typically been the case in other communities. Such ‘affective labour’ “involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labour in the bodily mode … the labour is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion” (Hardt, and Negri 292). In #ECRchat, this ranges from managing the schedule and organising discussions – which involves following up offers to help, assisting people to understand the task, and then ensuring things go ahead as planned –to support offered by members of the group within discussions. This occurs in the overlaps between personal and professional representations, taking a variety of forms from everyday reassurance, affirmation, and patience: “Sorry to hear - hang in there. Hope you have a good support network. #ECRchat” (Galea) to empathy often articulated alongside the disclosure discussed earlier: “The feeling of guilt over not working sounds VERY familiar! #ecrchat” (Vredeveldt).The point here is not to suggest that this work is not sufficiently valued by participants, or that it does not parallel the kinds of work undertaken in more formal job roles, including in academia, where management, conference convening or participation in professional societies, and teaching, as just a few examples, involve degrees of affective labour. However, as a consequence of the (semi)public nature of these groups, the interactions observed here appear to represent a new inflection of professional reputation work, where, in building online professional communities, individuals peg their professional reputations to these forms of affective labour. Importantly, given the explicitly professional nature of the group, these efforts are not counted as part of the formal workload of those involved, be they employed (temporarily or more securely) inside or outside universities, or not in the paid workforce. Conclusion A growing body of literature demonstrates that online academic communities can provide opportunities for collegiality, professional development, and support: particularly among emerging scholars. These accounts demonstrate the value of digital scholarly practices across a range of academic work. However, this article’s discussion of the work undertaken to build and maintain #ECRchat in its first year suggests that these practices at the messy intersections of employment, unpaid professional development, and leisure constitute a new inflection of professional reputation and service work. This work involves publicly building a reputation as a good community member through a combination of personal disclosure and affective labour.In the context of growing emphasis on the economic, social, and other impacts of academic research and concerns over work intensification, this raises questions about possible scope for, and impact of, formal recognition of digital academic labour. While institutions’ work planning and promotion processes may provide opportunities to recognise work developing professional societies or conferences as a leadership or service to a discipline, this new digital service work remains outside the purview of such recognition and reward systems. Further research into the relationships between academic reputation and digital labour will be needed to explore the implications of this for institutions and academics alike. AcknowledgementsI would like to gratefully acknowledge the contributions and support of everyone who participated in developing and sustaining #ECRchat. Both online and offline, this paper and the community itself would not have been possible without many generous contributions of time, understanding and thoughtful discussion. In particular, I would like to thank Katherine L. Wheat, co-founder and convenor, as well as Beth Montague-Hellen, Ellie Mackin, and Motje Wolf, who have taken on convening the group in the years since my involvement. ReferencesArcy, Jacquelyn. “Emotion Work: Considering Gender in Digital Labor.” Feminist Media Studies 16.2 (2016): 365-68.Bentley, Peter, Hamish Coates, Ian Dobson, Leo Goedegebuure, and Lynn Meek. Job Satisfaction around the Academic World. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Brian, Deborah (@deborahbrian). “I think I’m often more productive and less anxious if I’m working on a couple of things in parallel, too #ecrchat” (11 April 2013, 10:25). Tweet.Butz, David. “Sidelined by the Guidelines: Reflections on the Limitations of Standard Informed Consent Procedures for the Conduct of Ethical Research.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 7 (2008): 239-59. Carrigan, Mark. Social Media for Academics. Los Angeles: Sage, 2016.Carrigan, Mark. Social Media and Academic Freedom. 2015. 5 Jan. 2016 <https://markcarrigan.net/2015/08/06/social-media-and-academic-freedom/>.Driscoll, Catherine, and Melissa Gregg. “My Profile: The Ethics of Virtual Ethnography.” Emotion, Space and Society 3.1 (2010): 15–20.Doorley, John, and Helio Fred Garcia. Reputation Management: The Key to Successful Public Relations and Corporate Communication. 2nd ed. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2012.Duffy, Brooke. “The Romance of Work: Gender and Aspirational Labour in the Digital Culture Industries.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 19.4 (2015): 441-57.Dunn, Adam (@AdamGDunn). “I hate to say it, but one of the best ways to improve track record is to work 70+ hours a week, every week. Forever. #ecrchat.” (14 Mar. 2013, 10:54). Tweet.Evans, Mike. “Ethics, Anonymity, and Authorship on Community Centred Research or Anonymity and the Island Cache.” Pimatisiwin: A Journal of Aboriginal and Indigenous Community Health 2 (2004): 59-76.Faculty of Humanities at the University of Manchester (@HumsResearchers). “PhDs and ECRs in Humanities don't seem to consider working outside of academia - that limits their engagement with training #ECRchat” (2 Aug. 2012, 10:14). Tweet.Feely, Cath (@cathfeely). “I definitely don’t have [work-life balance]. I think it's because I don’t have a routine so work and home constantly blend into one another” (16 Aug. 2012, 10:08). Tweet.Ferguson, Hazel, and Katherine L. Wheat. “Early Career Academic Mentoring Using Twitter: The Case of #ECRchat.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 37.1 (2015): 3-13.Fombrun, Charles. Reputation: Realizing Value from the Corporate Image. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 1996.Galea, Marguerite (@MVEG001). “Sorry to hear - hang in there. Hope you have a good support network. #ECRchat” (6 Dec. 2012, 10:32). Tweet.Gandini, Alessandro. The Reputation Economy: Understanding Knowledge Work in Digital Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.Gibson, Chris, and Leah Gibbs. “Social Media Experiments: Scholarly Practice and Collegiality.” Dialogues in Human Geography 3.1 (2013): 87-91. Gleeson, Jessamy. “(Not) ‘Working 9-5’: The Consequences of Contemporary Australian-Based Online Feminist Campaigns as Digital Labour.” Media International Australia 161.1 (2016): 77-85.Goggin, Joyce. “Playbour, Farming and Labour.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 11.4 (2011): 357-68.Gregg, Melissa. Work’s Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity P, 2011.Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.Hearn, Alison. “Structuring Feeling: Web 2.0, Online Ranking and Rating, and the Digital ‘Reputation’ Economy.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organisation 10.3/4 (2010): 421-38.Hesmondhalgh, David. “User-Generated Content, Free Labour and the Cultural Industries.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organisation 10.3/4 (2010): 267-84.Jarrett, Kylie. “The Relevance of ‘Women’s Work’ Social Reproduction and Immaterial Labor in Digital Media.” Television & New Media 15.1 (2014): 14-29.Magennis, Caroline (@DrMagennis). “It’s all about the work. Be decent to people and jump through the hoops you need to, but always keep your eyes on the work.” (26 July 2012, 10:56). Tweet.Maitzen, Rohan. “Scholarship 2.0: Blogging and/as Academic Practice.” Journal of Victorian Culture 17.3 (2012): 348-54.McGettigan, Carolyn (@c_mcgettigan). “pretty much everyone I know with ‘real jobs’ hates their work. I feel truly lucky to say that I love mine #ECRchat.” (31 Jan. 2013, 10:17). Tweet.McRobbie, Angela. 2010. “Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the Post-Fordist Regime.” New Formations 70: 60-76.Mewburn, Inger, and Pat Thomson. “Why Do Academics Blog? An Analysis of Audiences, Purposes and Challenges.” Studies in Higher Education 38.8 (2013): 1105-19. Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford UP, 1951/1973.Mussell, James. “Social Media.” Journal of Victorian Culture 17.3 (2012): 347-47.O’Dwyer, Siobhan, Sharon McDonough, Rebecca Jefferson, Jennifer Ann Goff, and Michelle Redman-MacLaren. “Writing Groups in the Digital Age: A Case Study Analysis of Shut Up and Write Tuesdays.” Research 2.0 and the Impact of Digital Technologies on Scholarly Inquiry. Ed. Antonella Esposito. Pennsylvania: IGI Global, 2016. 249-69.Osimo, David, Pujol Priego Laia, and Vuorikari Riina. “Alternative Research Funding Mechanisms: Make Funding Fit for Science 2.0.” Research 2.0 and the Impact of Digital Technologies on Scholarly Inquiry. Ed. Antonella Esposito. Pennsylvania: IGI Global, 2016. 53-67. Pamphilon, Barbara. “The Zoom Model: A Dynamic Framework for the Analysis of Life Histories.” Qualitative Inquiry, 5.3 (1999): 393-410.Palmer, Stuart. “Characterisation of the Use of Twitter by Australian Universities.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 35.4 (2013): 333-44.Pocock, Barbara, Natalie Skinner, and Philippa Williams. Time Bomb: Work, Rest and Play in Australia Today. Sydney: U of NSW P, 2012.Priem, Jason, Heather Piwowar, and Bradley Hemminger. “Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact.” 2012. 25 Mar. 2017 <https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4745>. Raja, Siddhartha, Saori Imaizumi, Tim Kelly, Junko Narimatsu, and Cecilia Paradi-Guilford. Connecting to Work: How Information and Communication Technologies Could Help Expand Employment Opportunities. Washington DC; World Bank. 2013. 5 Jan. 2016 <http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/290301468340843514/Connecting-to-work-how-information-and-communication-technologies-could-help-expand-employment-opportunities>.Ronald, N.A. (@naronresearch). “@snarkyphd Sorry, late, had to deal with toddler. Also new; currently doing casual teaching/industry work & applying for postdocs #ecrchat” (17 Jan. 2013, 10:15). Tweet.Solberg, Lauren. “Balancing Academic Freedom and Professionalism: A Commentary on University Social Media Policies.” FIU Law Review 75.1 (2013). 5 Jan. 2016 <http://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/lawreview/vol9/iss1/26>. Spilker, Maria J., Maria Paula Silva, and Lina Morgado. “Research 2.0: The Contribution of Content Curation.” Research 2.0 and the Impact of Digital Technologies on Scholarly Inquiry (2016): 231.Svalastog, Anna-Lydia, and Stefan Eriksson. “You Can Use My Name; You Don’t Have to Steal My Story—A Critique of Anonymity in Indigenous Studies.” Developing World Bioethics 10 (2010): 104-10.Tennant, Peter (@Peter_Tennant). “@jeanmadams I've answered a few queries on Research Gate, but agree lack of non-work opinions / personality makes them dull #ecrchat” (15 Nov. 2012, 19:26). Tweet.Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 18.2 (2000): 33-58.Twitter. “Help Center: New User FAQs.” 2016. 5 Jan. 2016 <https://support.twitter.com/articles/13920-get-to-know-twitter-new-user-faq#>.Vredeveldt, Annelies (@anneliesvrede). “The feeling of guilt over not working sounds VERY familiar! #ecrchat” (19 July 2012, 10:25). Tweet.Wheat, Katherine (@KL_Wheat). “@networkedres My ‘professional’ online identity is slightly more guarded than my ‘facebook’ id which is for friends and family #ECRchat” (15 Nov. 2012, 19:27). Tweet.

On the morning of Thursday, 4 May 2006, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing entitled “Terrorist Use of the Internet.” The Intelligence committee meeting was scheduled to take place in Room 1302 of the Longworth Office Building, a Depression-era structure with a neoclassical façade. Because of a dysfunctional elevator, some of the congressional representatives were late to the meeting. During the testimony about the newest political applications for cutting-edge digital technology, the microphones periodically malfunctioned, and witnesses complained of “technical problems” several times. By the end of the day it seemed that what was to be remembered about the hearing was the shocking revelation that terrorists were using videogames to recruit young jihadists. The Associated Press wrote a short, restrained article about the hearing that only mentioned “computer games and recruitment videos” in passing. Eager to have their version of the news item picked up, Reuters made videogames the focus of their coverage with a headline that announced, “Islamists Using US Videogames in Youth Appeal.” Like a game of telephone, as the Reuters videogame story was quickly re-run by several Internet news services, each iteration of the title seemed less true to the exact language of the original. One Internet news service changed the headline to “Islamic militants recruit using U.S. video games.” Fox News re-titled the story again to emphasise that this alert about technological manipulation was coming from recognised specialists in the anti-terrorism surveillance field: “Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games.” As the story circulated, the body of the article remained largely unchanged, in which the Reuters reporter described the digital materials from Islamic extremists that were shown at the congressional hearing. During the segment that apparently most captured the attention of the wire service reporters, eerie music played as an English-speaking narrator condemned the “infidel” and declared that he had “put a jihad” on them, as aerial shots moved over 3D computer-generated images of flaming oil facilities and mosques covered with geometric designs. Suddenly, this menacing voice-over was interrupted by an explosion, as a virtual rocket was launched into a simulated military helicopter. The Reuters reporter shared this dystopian vision from cyberspace with Western audiences by quoting directly from the chilling commentary and describing a dissonant montage of images and remixed sound. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults. Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001, statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity. According to the news reports, the key piece of evidence before Congress seemed to be a film by “SonicJihad” of recorded videogame play, which – according to the experts – was widely distributed online. Much of the clip takes place from the point of view of a first-person shooter, seen as if through the eyes of an armed insurgent, but the viewer also periodically sees third-person action in which the player appears as a running figure wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh, who dashes toward the screen with a rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder. Significantly, another of the player’s hand-held weapons is a detonator that triggers remote blasts. As jaunty music plays, helicopters, tanks, and armoured vehicles burst into smoke and flame. Finally, at the triumphant ending of the video, a green and white flag bearing a crescent is hoisted aloft into the sky to signify victory by Islamic forces. To explain the existence of this digital alternative history in which jihadists could be conquerors, the Reuters story described the deviousness of the country’s terrorist opponents, who were now apparently modifying popular videogames through their wizardry and inserting anti-American, pro-insurgency content into U.S.-made consumer technology. One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular “Battlefield 2” from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as “mods,” to video games. “Millions of people create mods on games around the world,” he said. “We have absolutely no control over them. It’s like drawing a mustache on a picture.” Although the Electronic Arts executive dismissed the activities of modders as a “mustache on a picture” that could only be considered little more than childish vandalism of their off-the-shelf corporate product, others saw a more serious form of criminality at work. Testifying experts and the legislators listening on the committee used the video to call for greater Internet surveillance efforts and electronic counter-measures. Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source. Ironically, the moment in the movie from which the sound clip is excerpted is one about intelligence gathering. As an agent of Team America, a fictional elite U.S. commando squad, the hero of the film’s all-puppet cast, Gary Johnston, is impersonating a jihadist radical inside a hostile Egyptian tavern that is modelled on the cantina scene from Star Wars. Additional laughs come from the fact that agent Johnston is accepted by the menacing terrorist cell as “Hakmed,” despite the fact that he utters a series of improbable clichés made up of incoherent stereotypes about life in the Middle East while dressed up in a disguise made up of shoe polish and a turban from a bathroom towel. The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists. It wasn’t intended for the purpose what it was portrayed to be by the media. So no I don’t regret making a funny video . . . why should I? The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters was objective and always right. The least they could do is some online research before publishing this. If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video, that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is everything al-Qaeda? Although Sonic Jihad dismissed his own work as “silly” or “funny,” he expected considerably more from a credible news agency like Reuters: “objective” reporting, “online research,” and fact-checking before “publishing.” Within the week, almost all of the salient details in the Reuters story were revealed to be incorrect. SonicJihad’s film was not made by terrorists or for terrorists: it was not created by “Islamic militants” for “Muslim youths.” The videogame it depicted had not been modified by a “tech-savvy militant” with advanced programming skills. Of course, what is most extraordinary about this story isn’t just that Reuters merely got its facts wrong; it is that a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play. Based on their exchanges in the public record, elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal. This environment of cultural reaction can be used to explain why policy makers’ reaction to terrorists’ use of networked communication and digital media actually tells us more about our own American ideologies about technology and rhetoric in a contemporary information environment. When the experts come forward at the Sonic Jihad hearing to “walk us through the media and some of the products,” they present digital artefacts of an information economy that mirrors many of the features of our own consumption of objects of electronic discourse, which seem dangerously easy to copy and distribute and thus also create confusion about their intended meanings, audiences, and purposes. From this one hearing we can see how the reception of many new digital genres plays out in the public sphere of legislative discourse. Web pages, videogames, and Weblogs are mentioned specifically in the transcript. The main architecture of the witnesses’ presentation to the committee is organised according to the rhetorical conventions of a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, the arguments made by expert witnesses about the relationship of orality to literacy or of public to private communications in new media are highly relevant to how we might understand other important digital genres, such as electronic mail or text messaging. The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property. To explain embarrassing leaks of infinitely replicable digital files, witness Ron Roughead says, “We’re not even sure that they don’t even hack into the kinds of spaces that hold photographs in order to get pictures that our forces have taken.” Another witness, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and International Affairs, Peter Rodman claims that “any video game that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and change the game for their needs.” Thus, the implication of these witnesses’ testimony is that the release of code into the public domain can contribute to political subversion, much as covert intrusion into computer networks by stealthy hackers can. However, the witnesses from the Pentagon and from the government contractor SAIC often present a contradictory image of the supposed terrorists in the hearing transcripts. Sometimes the enemy is depicted as an organisation of technological masterminds, capable of manipulating the computer code of unwitting Americans and snatching their rightful intellectual property away; sometimes those from the opposing forces are depicted as pre-modern and even sub-literate political innocents. In contrast, the congressional representatives seem to focus on similarities when comparing the work of “terrorists” to the everyday digital practices of their constituents and even of themselves. According to the transcripts of this open hearing, legislators on both sides of the aisle express anxiety about domestic patterns of Internet reception. Even the legislators’ own Web pages are potentially disruptive electronic artefacts, particularly when the demands of digital labour interfere with their duties as lawmakers. Although the subject of the hearing is ostensibly terrorist Websites, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) bemoans the difficulty of maintaining her own official congressional site. As she observes, “So we are – as members, I think we’re very sensitive about what’s on our Website, and if I retained what I had on my Website three years ago, I’d be out of business. So we know that they have to be renewed. They go up, they go down, they’re rebuilt, they’re – you know, the message is targeted to the future.” In their questions, lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions. Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) compares the polluting power of insurgent bloggers to that of influential online muckrakers from the American political Right. Hastings complains of “garbage on our regular mainstream news that comes from blog sites.” Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) attempts to project a media-savvy persona by bringing up the “phenomenon of blogging” in conjunction with her questions about jihadist Websites in which she notes how Internet traffic can be magnified by cooperative ventures among groups of ideologically like-minded content-providers: “These Websites, and particularly the most active ones, are they cross-linked? And do they have kind of hot links to your other favorite sites on them?” At one point Representative Wilson asks witness Rodman if he knows “of your 100 hottest sites where the Webmasters are educated? What nationality they are? Where they’re getting their money from?” In her questions, Wilson implicitly acknowledges that Web work reflects influences from pedagogical communities, economic networks of the exchange of capital, and even potentially the specific ideologies of nation-states. It is perhaps indicative of the government contractors’ anachronistic worldview that the witness is unable to answer Wilson’s question. He explains that his agency focuses on the physical location of the server or ISP rather than the social backgrounds of the individuals who might be manufacturing objectionable digital texts. The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries. The residual subtexts in the witnesses’ conjectures about competing cultures of orality and literacy may tell us something about a reactionary rhetoric around videogames and digital culture more generally. According to the experts before Congress, the Middle Eastern audience for these videogames and Websites is limited by its membership in a pre-literate society that is only capable of abortive cultural production without access to knowledge that is archived in printed codices. Sometimes the witnesses before Congress seem to be unintentionally channelling the ideas of the late literacy theorist Walter Ong about the “secondary orality” associated with talky electronic media such as television, radio, audio recording, or telephone communication. Later followers of Ong extend this concept of secondary orality to hypertext, hypermedia, e-mail, and blogs, because they similarly share features of both speech and written discourse. Although Ong’s disciples celebrate this vibrant reconnection to a mythic, communal past of what Kathleen Welch calls “electric rhetoric,” the defence industry consultants express their profound state of alarm at the potentially dangerous and subversive character of this hybrid form of communication. The concept of an “oral tradition” is first introduced by the expert witnesses in the context of modern marketing and product distribution: “The Internet is used for a variety of things – command and control,” one witness states. “One of the things that’s missed frequently is how and – how effective the adversary is at using the Internet to distribute product. They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of oral tradition, if you will.” Thus, although the Internet can be deployed for hierarchical “command and control” activities, it also functions as a highly efficient peer-to-peer distributed network for disseminating the commodity of information. Throughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order. Witness Eric Michael describes the “oral tradition” and the conventions of communal life in the Middle East to emphasise the primacy of speech in the collective discursive practices of this alien population: “I’d like to point your attention to the media types and the fact that the oral tradition is listed as most important. The other media listed support that. And the significance of the oral tradition is more than just – it’s the medium by which, once it comes off the Internet, it is transferred.” The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era. The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A[n] event takes place. There is an explosion in a city. Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is doing indiscriminate killing. This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution. It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the story and broadcasts it, at which point it’s now a fact. In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go back to this false initial report on network television and continue to reiterate that it’s a fact, even though the United States government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the network has since recanted the broadcast. In this example, many-to-many discussion on the “street” is formalised into a one-to many “sermon” and then further stylised using technology in a one-to-many broadcast on “network television” in which “propaganda” that is “false” can no longer be disputed. This “oral tradition” is like digital media, because elements of discourse can be infinitely copied or “recycled,” and it is designed to “reiterate” content. In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.” The film by SonicJihad is chosen as the final clip by the witnesses before Congress, because it allegedly combines many different types of emotional appeal, and thus it conveniently ties together all of the themes that the witnesses present to the legislators about unreliable oral or rhetorical sources in the Middle East: And there you see how all these products are linked together. And you can see where the games are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces. You can see how they use humor. You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct that response in the direction that they want. Jihadist digital products, especially videogames, are effective means of manipulation, the witnesses argue, because they employ multiple channels of persuasion and carefully sequenced and integrated subliminal messages. To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses. This sharp criticism of the artful use of a presentation style that is “crafted” is ironic, given that the witnesses’ “compilation” of jihadist digital material is staged in the form of a carefully structured PowerPoint presentation, one that is paced to a well-rehearsed rhythm of “slide, please” or “next slide” in the transcript. The transcript also reveals that the members of the House Intelligence Committee were not the original audience for the witnesses’ PowerPoint presentation. Rather, when it was first created by SAIC, this “expert” presentation was designed for training purposes for the troops on the ground, who would be facing the challenges of deployment in hostile terrain. According to the witnesses, having the slide show showcased before Congress was something of an afterthought. Nonetheless, Congressman Tiahrt (R-KN) is so impressed with the rhetorical mastery of the consultants that he tries to appropriate it. As Tiarht puts it, “I’d like to get a copy of that slide sometime.” From the hearing we also learn that the terrorists’ Websites are threatening precisely because they manifest a polymorphously perverse geometry of expansion. For example, one SAIC witness before the House Committee compares the replication and elaboration of digital material online to a “spiderweb.” Like Representative Eshoo’s site, he also notes that the terrorists’ sites go “up” and “down,” but the consultant is left to speculate about whether or not there is any “central coordination” to serve as an organising principle and to explain the persistence and consistency of messages despite the apparent lack of a single authorial ethos to offer a stable, humanised, point of reference. In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.” Of course, to maintain their share of the government market, the Science Applications International Corporation also employs practices of publicity and promotion through the Internet and digital media. They use HTML Web pages for these purposes, as well as PowerPoint presentations and online video. The rhetoric of the Website of SAIC emphasises their motto “From Science to Solutions.” After a short Flash film about how SAIC scientists and engineers solve “complex technical problems,” the visitor is taken to the home page of the firm that re-emphasises their central message about expertise. The maps, uniforms, and specialised tools and equipment that are depicted in these opening Web pages reinforce an ethos of professional specialisation that is able to respond to multiple threats posed by the “global war on terror.” By 26 June 2006, the incident finally was being described as a “Pentagon Snafu” by ABC News. From the opening of reporter Jake Tapper’s investigative Webcast, established government institutions were put on the spot: “So, how much does the Pentagon know about videogames? Well, when it came to a recent appearance before Congress, apparently not enough.” Indeed, the very language about “experts” that was highlighted in the earlier coverage is repeated by Tapper in mockery, with the significant exception of “independent expert” Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If the Pentagon and SAIC deride the legitimacy of rhetoric as a cultural practice, Bogost occupies himself with its defence. In his recent book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost draws upon the authority of the “2,500 year history of rhetoric” to argue that videogames represent a significant development in that cultural narrative. Given that Bogost and his Watercooler Games Weblog co-editor Gonzalo Frasca were actively involved in the detective work that exposed the depth of professional incompetence involved in the government’s line-up of witnesses, it is appropriate that Bogost is given the final words in the ABC exposé. As Bogost says, “We should be deeply bothered by this. We should really be questioning the kind of advice that Congress is getting.” Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see. References ABC News. “Terrorist Videogame?” Nightline Online. 21 June 2006. 22 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2105341>. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Game Politics. “Was Congress Misled by ‘Terrorist’ Game Video? We Talk to Gamer Who Created the Footage.” 11 May 2006. http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/285129.html#cutid1>. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. julieb. “David Morgan Is a Horrible Writer and Should Be Fired.” Online posting. 5 May 2006. Dvorak Uncensored Cage Match Forums. http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,130.0.html>. Mahmood. “Terrorists Don’t Recruit with Battlefield 2.” GGL Global Gaming. 16 May 2006 http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3090>. Morgan, David. “Islamists Using U.S. Video Games in Youth Appeal.” Reuters online news service. 4 May 2006 http://today.reuters.com/news/ArticleNews.aspx?type=topNews &storyID=2006-05-04T215543Z_01_N04305973_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY- VIDEOGAMES.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc= NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2>. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Methuen, 1982. Parker, Trey. Online posting. 7 May 2006. 9 May 2006 http://www.treyparker.com>. Plato. “Gorgias.” Plato: Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Shrader, Katherine. “Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites.” Associated Press 4 May 2006. SonicJihad. “SonicJihad: A Day in the Life of a Resistance Fighter.” Online posting. 26 Dec. 2005. Planet Battlefield Forums. 9 May 2006 http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefield/topic.asp?fid=13670&tid=1806909&p=1>. Tapper, Jake, and Audery Taylor. “Terrorist Video Game or Pentagon Snafu?” ABC News Nightline 21 June 2006. 30 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Technology/story?id=2105128&page=1>. U.S. Congressional Record. Panel I of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Subject: “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Communications.” Federal News Service. 4 May 2006. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and the New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Losh, Elizabeth. "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>. APA Style Losh, E. (Oct. 2007) "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>.