Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "Ministers' Club (Boston, Mass.)"

Care during mass casualty events (MCE) has improved during the last 15 years. Military and civilian collaboration has led to partnerships which augment the response to MCE. Much has been written about strategies to deliver care during an MCE, but there is little about how to transition back to normal operations after an event. A panel discussion entitled The Day(s) After: Lessons Learned from Trauma Team Management in the Aftermath of an Unexpected Mass Casualty Event at the 76th Annual American Association for the Surgery of Trauma meeting on September 13, 2017 brought together a cadre of military and civilian surgeons with experience in MCEs. The events described were the First Battle of Mogadishu (1993), the Second Battle of Fallujah (2004), the Bagram Detention Center Rocket Attack (2014), the Boston Marathon Bombing (2013), the Asiana Flight 214 Plane Crash (2013), the Baltimore Riots (2015), and the Orlando Pulse Night Club Shooting (2016). This article focuses on the lessons learned from military and civilian surgeons in the days after MCEs.

In his moral philosophy of transcendentalism the American essayist, lecturer and poet R.W. Emerson (1803–1882) reflected the quest of a whole generation of American intellectuals for a new spirituality in the first half of the 19th century. Rooted in the heritage of Protestant faith and culture, like many of his ancestors for two centuries, Emerson received spiritual training and education and began his ministry as a pastor of one of the oldest parishes in Boston. However, later, in the course of spiritual and philosophical inquiries, he changed both his worldview and the nature of his creative activity. Emerson evolved from being a pastor for a local community to a popular lecturer to mass audiences across America's cities and states. Considering this change, the paper traces the genesis of R.W. Emerson's historical epistemology as it developed from his early writings (sermons and notebooks, including correspondence) towards his lectures and essays. We start by discussing the interest of Nietzsche in historical ideas of Emerson, identify the points at which their concepts diverge in their attitude towards doctrines of Christianity. We immerse Emerson's perceptions of history in the context of covenant theology, the meaning of Lord's Supper and the nature of Christ as expressed in the opinions of the ministers of Congregational and Unitarian Churches in Massachusetts. Special attention is paid to Emerson's concept of history denying Gospel events as the centre of the world's history and implying a possibility for an authentic and credible reenactment of historical events within the subjective experience of an individual. The analysis involves the essay History, Sermons No.5 and No.162, the Lectures on the Gospels and on the Philosophy of History.

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]).

Obsolescence is most frequently talked about in relation to the history of technology. A still-common way of understanding modernity is as a linear succession of emerging technologies which supersede existing ones, and which are themselves, in time, made redundant. The cycle of novelty and obsolescence underpins a narrative including episodes of human invention, mastery and eventual technological failure. Nevertheless, it makes technologies themselves the subjects of history, rather than the human beings whose choices frame their contingent births, shapings, adoptions and uses. Many have pointed out the extent to which this simplifies history, but this has made precious little impact, if the way in which many writers treat digital communications technologies is any guide. Professional new media evangelists, including media and cultural theorists who subscribe to what Turner describes as an entrenched “digital orthodoxy”, are nowadays wont to describing mass media – including all broadcast and print media – as “heritage” media. This neat rhetorical trick confirms all remaining manifestations and uses of such media as remnants of the past in the present, as curiosities, even perhaps as impediments to the “imaginary futures” (Barbrook) regularly projected onto new technologies. On the other hand, similar assumptions underlie narratives of decline and decay which attach themselves to new media technologies. Thus we can understand laments for the lost qualities (and quality) of old media from writers such as Andrew Keen, which themselves shape self-interested pronouncements about the decadence of the new communications environment from the highest echelons of established media (Hartigan). A history of scholarship from media historians has worked to try to nuance the contours of this oldest of modern stories, and to complicate the relationship between modernity, technological obsolescence, and social reality. Brian Winston’s work has shown how messy the business of invention and adoption is. Caroline Marvyn’s book When Old Technologies Were New showed how durable are the terms in which we are invited to link new technologies with progress. Lisa Gitelman’s Always Already New shows how complexly interweaved our understanding of media history is with our own media use. Collections like New Media, 1740-1915 and Residual Media have offered a number of theoretical critiques and case-studies which show the contemporary persistence of old media, and the recurrence of simplifying, totalising rhetorics of media history. More specifically, work like Sterne’s shows how contemplating obsolescence can give us a way of thinking about the downside of media change in terms of the problem of ecological damage in the form of e-waste. Most importantly for us, though, are those who use the category of obsolescence as a way of understanding that in the forward march of modernity, there are losers as well as winners. Watkins links technological obsolescence with the production of certain people, certain segments of the population as obsolescent. For him, obsolescent people can be understood as engaged in a “useless survival”, and are linked with obsolete technologies. David Simon, the creator of the television series The Wire, which richly depicted the “useless survival” of the city of Baltimore and its civic institutions, recently put this same position bluntly, linking obsolescence with class and race in contemporary America: these really are the excess people in America, we – our economy doesn't need them. We don't need ten or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones that are undereducated, that have been ill served by the inner city school system, that have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy... The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It's the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. And we don't, as we said before, economically, we don't need those people. The American economy doesn't need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we're willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. (Moyers) Five series of The Wire showed the incapacity of police, labour unions, the school system, civic government and newspapers in serving those people who Zygmunt Bauman calls “human waste”, those who are “redundant” in the new economy. The decline of manufacturing industries, rapid advances in the capacity of communication technologies, and the troubled business models of “old media” have advantaged those with the skills and capacity to become “network capitalists” (Bradwell & Reeves) in the information era, but they have turned whole cities into what Bauman calls “waste yards”, wherein industries, social infrastructures and entire neighbourhoods are antiquated, surplus to requirements. In The Wire, those who are shown to benefit most readily from the collapse of these economic and social forces, from the improvements in networked communications, and the globalisation of trade are those who sell the drugs which have turned Baltimore’s inner city into a free-fire zone. Obsolescence, then, is a category which allows us to think about the destruction, or “useless persistence”, of the people, patterns of life and territories which are imbricated with those technologies which are seen as being past their prime. It allows us to think about the power that accrues to “early adopters” as against those who are forced to “make do” with older technologies, and how that power is often implicated in already-existing patterns of social disadvantage – how it maps onto existing class structures, or the horizontal inequalities of geography. But we can also think of the ways in which obsolete technologies are recuperated and celebrated, whether by resistant consumers or “fans” of a particular technology, or by the process whereby yesterday's trash is historicised and aestheticisied by collectors, curators and scholars. We also might reflect on our own practice as academics. To what extent are our traditional patterns of work lubricated and enhanced by digital processes, or are they themselves artefacts of the past. This issue of M/C Journal offers some specific meditations on the theme of obsolescence. The first three pieces think reflexively about the processes by which academics are credentialised and published. In our first feature, John Hartley wonders whether the passing of the traditional, paper scholarly journal as the main means for academic publication and community-building might not irrevocably change and even damage collegiality, and the way in which we understand our fields. Kate Bowles replies to Hartley in a piece which originated as a peer review of his paper, and which is published here at the request of both authors. For Bowles, Hartley’s focus on e-publishing and the obsolescence of paper journals is potentially a distraction – the real concern is the way in which bureaucratic rationality threatens to push organic forms of collegial behaviour into the dustbin of history. Donna Lee Brien argues that the traditional PhD may be obsolete, and it must change to reflect the needs of students, new models of learning, and the employment marketplace. The second group of articles asks questions about the inevitability of obsolescence, and case-studies of users pushing back against the obsolescence of favoured machines. In our second feature, Greg Shapley offers an expansive critique of the most fundamental recent narrative of obsolescence, which relies on the dichotomy of the analogue and the digital, and the supplanting of one by the other. Shapley complicates our history by relating the odd story of the fax machine. Peter Thomas shows how Super 8 cannot be approached simply, lazily as a fetishised object of nostalgia. He shows how Super 8 continues in use as a specialised filmmaking stock, but that its most crucial textural characteristics have been lost in the transition from widespread amateur use to professional applications. Huh and Ackerman discuss the determined resistance by users of the HP200LX PDA device to the discontinuation of the device. Our third set of articles rethink approaches to a technological field in which cycles of novelty and obsolescent are notoriously swift and prominent – computer games. James Newman unleashes an impassioned polemic regarding the need to preserve and archive “obsolete” games as an element of Britain’s and the world’s cultural heritage. Thompson, McAllister and Ruggill use their own efforts at curation and preservation as the starting point for a theoretical meditation on the relationships between nostalgia, collection and obsolescence. Chris Moore asks whether new methods of digital distribution might ameliorate one of the more pernicious side-effects of the games industry’s relentless focus on novelty – e-waste. He looks at the online distribution platform Steam as a venue where both hardware and software obsolescence may be countered and complicated by weightless distribution and the “long tail” effect. While acknowledging continuing concerns with Steam – for example concerns about user privacy – Moore wonders whether online distribution might make the more wasteful aspects of structured obsolescence, well, obsolete. Together, these articles make a contribution to a reorientation that’s already underway in media and cultural studies. It’s arguable that cultural and media studies perennial fetishisation of “youth”, subcultural and the new have been intensified by the shift to a focus on new media technologies. Perhaps this has been at the expense of a focus on the old, the ordinary, and what happened the day before yesterday. (Driscoll and Gregg) A focus on obsolescence allows us to count the complex costs of our perennial impulse to novelty. It allows us to think through the series of revaluations that technologies typically undergo as they pass from being the newest thing, to junk, to collectable. It helps us to think about the relationships between technology use and the social position of users. We present this as the first step in our own effort to bring a greater focus to the issues thrown up when we think about the obsolete. We hope you will enjoy this issue when it’s new, and not discard it lightly when the next one comes along. References Acland, Charles, ed. Residual Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Barbrook, Richard. Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village. London: Pluto, 2007. Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. London: John Wiley and Sons, 2003. Bradwell, Peter, and Richard Reeves. Network Citizens: Power and Responsibility at Work. London: Demos, 2009. Driscoll, Catherine, and Melissa Gregg. “The YouTube Generation: Moral Panic, Youth Culture and Internet Studies” in Usha Rodrigues (ed) Youth and Media in the Asia-Pacific Region. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. 2008. Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Boston: MIT Press. Hartigan, John. “John Hartigan address to the National Press Club.” news.com.au. 9 July 2009 ‹http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25718006-661,00.html›. Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2007. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Rethinking Electric Communication in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: OUP, 1990. Moyers, Bill. “David Simon: Transcript.” Bill Moyers Journal. 9 July 2009 ‹http://www.pbs.org/cove-media/http/PBS_CP_Bill_Moyers/58/1000/transcript1.html›. Sterne, Jonathan. “Out With the Trash: On the Future of New Media.” Residual Media. Ed Charles Acland. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Turner, Graeme. “Television and the Nation: Does This Matter Anymore?” Television Studies After TV. Ed Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Watkins, Evan. Throwaways: Work, Culture and Consumer Education. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Winston, Brian. Media, Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. New York and London: Routledge, 1998.

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. 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Introduction“Chav” is a social phenomenon that gained significant popular media coverage and attention in the United Kingdom in the early 2000s. Chavs are often characterised, by others, as young people from a background of low socioeconomic status, usually clothed in branded sportswear. All definitions of Chav position them as culturally anomalous, as Other.This article maps out a multidisciplinary definition of the Chav, synthesised from 21 published academic publications: three recurrent themes in scholarly discussion emerge. First, this research presents whiteness as an assumed and essential facet of Chav identity. When marginalising Chavs because of their “incorrect whiteness”, these works assign them a problematic and complex relationship with ethnicity and race. Second, Chav discourse has previously been discussed as a form of intense class-based abhorrence. Chavs, it would seem, are perceived as anomalous by their own class and those who deem themselves of a higher socioeconomic status. Finally, Chavs’ consumption choices are explored as amplifying such negative constructions of class and white ethnic identities, which are deemed as forming an undesirable aesthetic. This piece is not intended to debate whether or not Chav is a subculture, clubculture or neotribe. Although Greg Martin’s discussion around the similarities between historical subcultures and Chavs remains pertinent and convincing, this article discusses how young people labelled as Chavs are excluded on a variety of fronts. It draws a cross-disciplinary mapping of the Chav, providing the beginnings of a definition of a derogatory label, applied to young people marking them anomalous in British society.What Is a Chav?The word Chav became officially included in the English language in the UK in 2003, when it was inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The current OED entry offers many points for further discussion, all centred upon a discriminatory positioning of Chav:chav, n. Etymology: Probably either < Romani čhavo unmarried Romani male, male Romani child (see chavvy n.), or shortened < either chavvy n. or its etymon Angloromani chavvy. Brit. slang (derogatory). In the United Kingdom (originally the south of England): a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status.Chav was adopted by British national media as a catch-all term encompassing regional variants. Many discussions have likened Chav to groups such as “Bogans” in Australia and “Trailer Trash” in the US. Websites such as UrbanDictionary and Chavscum have often, informally, defined Chav through a series of derogatory “backcronyms” such as Council Housed And Violent or Council House Associated Vermin, positioning it as a derogatory social label synonymous with notions of perceived criminality, poverty, poor taste, danger, fear, class, and whiteness.Chav came to real prominence in the early 2000s in mainstream British media, gaining visibility through television shows such as Shameless (2004-2013), Little Britain (2003-2006), and The Catherine Tate Show (2004-2009). The term exploded across the tabloid press, as noted by Antoinette Renouf in 2005. Extensive tabloid press coverage drove the phenomenon to front-page coverage in TIME magazine in 2008. Chavs were observed as often wearing Burberry check-patterned clothing. For the first time since its founding in 1856, and due to the extent of Chav’s negative media coverage, Burberry decided to largely remove its trademark check pattern between 2001 and 2014 from sale. Chavs in AcademiaThe rubric of the Chav did not emerge in academia with the same vigour as it did in popular media, failing to gain the visibility of previous youth social formations such as Punks, Mods, et al. Rather, there has been a modest but consistent number of academic publications discussing this subject: 1-3 publications per year, published between 2006-2015. Of the 22 academic texts explicitly addressing and discussing Chavs, none were published prior to 2006. Extensive searches on databases such as EBSCO, JSTOR and ProQuest, yielded no further academic publications on this subject since Joanne Heeney’s 2015 discussion of Chav and its relationship to contested conceptualisations of disability.From a review of the available literature, the following key thematic groupings run through the publications: Chavs’ embodiment of a "wrong" type of white identity; their embodiment of a "wrong" type of working-class identity; and finally, their depiction as flawed consumers. I will now discuss these groupings, and their implications for future research, in order to chart a multidisciplinary conceptualisation of the Chav. Ultimately, my discussion will evidence how "out of place" Chavs appear to be in terms of race and ethnicity, class, and consumption choices. Chavs as “Wrong” WhitesThe dividing practices (Foucault) evident in UK popular media and websites such as Urbandictionary in the early 2000s distinctly separated “hypervisible ‘filthy whites’” (Tyler) from the “respectable whiteness” of the British middle-class. As Imogen Tyler puts it, “the cumulative effect of this disgust is the blocking of the disenfranchised white poor from view; they are rendered invisible and incomprehensible”, a perspective revisited in relation to the "celebrity chav" by Tyler and Joe Bennett. In a wider discussion of ethnicity, segregation and discrimination, Colin Webster discusses Chav and “white trash”, within the context of discourses that criminalise certain forms of whiteness. The conspicuous absence of whiteness in debates regarding fair representation of ethnicity and exclusion is highlighted here, as is the difficulty that social sciences often encounter in conceptualising whiteness in terms exceeding privilege, superiority, power, and normality. Bennett discusses Chavspeak, as a language conceived as enacting combinations of well-known sociolinguistic stereotypes. Chavspeak derives from an amalgamation of Black English vernaculars, potentially identifying its speakers as "race traitors". Bennett's exploration of Chavs as turncoats towards their own whiteness places them in an anomalous position of exclusion, as “Other” white working-class people. A Google image search for Chav conducted on 8th July 2020 yielded, in 198 of the first 200 images, the pictures of white youth. In popular culture, Chavs are invariably white, as seen in shows such as Little Britain, The Catherine Tate Show and, arguably, also in Paul Abbott’s Shameless. There is no question, however, that whiteness is an assumed and essential facet of Chav identity. Explorations of class and consumption may help to clarify this muddy conceptualisation of ethnicity and Chavs. Chavs as “Wrong” Working ClassChav discourse has been discussed as addressing intense class-based abhorrence (Hayward and Yar; Tyler). Indeed, while focussing more upon the nexus between chavs, class, and masculinity, Anoop Nayak’s ethnographic approach identifies a clear distinction between “Charver kids” (a slang term for Chav found in the North-East of England) and “Real Geordies” (Geordie is a regional term identifying inhabitants from that same area, most specifically from Newcastle-upon-Tyne). Nayak identified Chavs as rough, violent and impoverished, against the respectable, skilled and upwardly mobile working-class embodied by the “Real Geordies” (825). Similar distinctions between different types of working classes appear in the work of Sumi Hollingworth and Katya Williams. In a study of white, middle-class students from English urban state comprehensive schools in Riverside and Norton, the authors found that “Chav comes to represent everything about whiteness that the middle-classes are not” (479). Here, Chav is discussed as a label that school-age children reserve for “others”, namely working-class peers who stand out because of their clothing, their behaviour, and their educational aspirations. Alterity is a concept reinforced by Bennett’s discussion of Chavspeak, as he remarks that “Chavs are other people, and Chavspeak is how other people talk” (8). The same position is echoed in Sarah Spencer, Judy Clegg, and Joy Stackhouse’s study of the interplay between language, social class, and education in younger generations. Chavspotting is the focus of Bennett’s exploration of lived class experiences. Here, the evocation of the Chav is seen as a way to reinforce and reproduce dominant rhetoric against the poor. Bennett discusses the ways in which websites such as Chavscum.com used towns, cities and shopping centres as ideal locations to practice Chav-spotting. What is evident, however, is that behind Chavspotting lies the need for recontextualisation of normalising social practices which involve identification of determinate social groups in social spaces. This finding is supported by the interviews conducted by Ken McCullock et al (548) who found the Chav label, along with its regional variant of Charva, to be an extension of these social practices of identification, as it was applied to people of lower socioeconomic status as a marker of difference: “Chav/Charva … it’s what more posh people use to try and describe thugs and that” (McCulloch et al., 552).The semi-structured interview data gathered by Spencer, Clegg, and Stackhouse reveals how the label of Chav trickled down from stereotypes in popular culture to the real-life experiences of school-aged children. Here, Chavs are likened by school children to animals, “the boys are like monkeys, and the girls are like squeaky squirrels who like to slap people if they even look at you” (136) and their language is defined as lacking complexity. It bears relevance that, in these interviews, children in middle-class areas are once again “othering” the Chav, applying the label to children from working-class areas. Heeney’s discussion of the Chav pivots around questions of class and race. This is particularly evident as she addresses the media contention surrounding glamour model Katie Price, and her receipt of disability welfare benefits for her son. Ethnicity and class are key in academic discussion of the Chav, and in this context they prove to be interwoven and inexorably slippery. Just as previous academic discussions surrounding ethnicity challenge assumptions around whiteness, privilege and discrimination, an equally labyrinthine picture is drawn on the relationship between class and the Chavs, and on the practices of exclusion and symbolic to which they are subject. Chavs as “Wrong” ConsumersKeith Hayward and Majid Yar’s much-cited work points to a rethinking of the underclass concept (Murray) through debates of social marginality and consumption practices. Unlike previous socio-cultural formations (subcultures), Chavs should not be viewed as the result of society choosing to “reject or invert mainstream aspirations or desires” but simply as “flawed” consumers (Hayward and Yar, 18). The authors remarked that the negative social construction and vilification of Chav can be attributed to “a set of narrow and seemingly irrational and un-aesthetic consumer choices” (18). Chavs are discussed as lacking in taste and/or educational/intelligence (cultural capital), and not in economic capital (Bourdieu): it is the former and not the latter that makes them the object of ridicule and scorn. Chav consumption choices are often regarded, and reported, as the wrong use of economic capital. Matthew Adams and Jayne Rainsborough also discuss the ways in which cultural sites of representation--newspapers, websites, television--achieve a level of uniformity in their portrayal of Chavs as out of place and continually framed as “wrong consumers", just as Nayak did. In their argument, they also note how Chavs have been intertextually represented as sites of bodily indiscretion in relation to behaviours, lifestyles and consumption choices. It is these flawed consumption choices that Paul Johnson discusses in relation to the complex ways in which the Chav stereotype, and their consumption choices, are both eroticised and subjected to a form of symbolic violence. Within this context, “Council chic” has been marketed and packaged towards gay men through themed club events, merchandise, sex lines and escort services. The signifiers of flawed consumption (branded sportswear, jewellery, etc), upon which much of the Chav-based subjugation is centred thus become a hook to promote and sell sexual services. As such, this process subjects Chavs to a form of symbolic violence, as their worth is fetishised, commodified, and further diminished in gay culture. The importance of consumption choices and, more specifically, of choices which are considered to be "wrong" adds one final piece to this map of the Chav (Mason and Wigley). What was already noted as discrimination towards Chavs centred upon notions of class, socioeconomic status, and, ethnicity, is amplified by emphasis on consumption choices deemed to be aesthetically undesirable. This all comes together through the “Othering” of a pattern of consumerist choices that encompasses branded clothes, sportswear and other garments typically labelled as "chavvy". Chav: Not Always a LabelIn spite of its rare occurrence in academic discourse on Chavs, it is worth noting here that not all scholarly discussions focus on the notion of Chav as assigned identity, as the work of Kehily, Nayak and Young clearly demonstrates.Kehily and Nayak’s performative approach to Chav adopts an urban ethnography approach to remark that, although these socio-economic-racial labels are felt as pejorative, they can be negotiated within immediate contexts to become less discriminatory and gain positive connotations of respectability in given situations. Indeed, such labels can be enacted as a transitional identity to be used and adopted intermittently. Chav remains an applied label, but a flexible label which can be negotiated and adapted. Robert Young challenges many established conceptualisations of Chav culture, paying particular attention to notions of class and self-identification. His study found that approximately 15% of his 3,000 fifteen-year old respondents, all based in the Glasgow area, self-identified as Chav or "Ned" (a Scottish variant of Chav). The cultural criminological approach taken by Young does not clearly specify what options were given to participants when selecting "Neds or popular" as self-identification. Young’s work is of real value in the discussion of Chav, since it constitutes the only example of self-identification as Chav (Ned); future work reasserting these findings is required for the debate to be continued in this direction. Conclusion: Marginalised on All Fronts?Have Chavs been ostracised for being the wrong type of white person? Much has been discussed around the problematic role of ethnicity in Chav culture. Indeed, many scholars have discussed how Chav adopted the language, dress and style of ethnic minority groups. This assimilation of non-white identities leaves the Chav stranded on two fronts: (1) they are marked as Other by predominantly white social groups and vilified as race/ethnicity traitors (Bennett, Chavspeak); (2) they stand apart from ethnic minority identities through a series of exaggerated and denigrated consumption choices – adopting a bricolage identity that defines them against other groups surrounding them. Are Chavs the wrong type of white, working-class consumer? We know from the seminal works of Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall that subcultural styles can often convey a range of semiotic messages to the outside world. If one were to bear in mind the potentially isolated nature of those considered Chavs, one could see in their dress a consumption of "status" (McCulloch et al., 554). The adoption of a style predominantly consisting of expensive-looking branded clothes, highly-visible jewellery associated with an exaggerated sporting lifestyle, stands as a symbol of disposable income and physical prowess, a way of ‘fronting up’ to labels of poverty, criminality and lack of social and cultural capital.As my charting process comes to a conclusion, with the exclusion of the studies conducted by Young, Kehily and Nayak, Chav is solely discussed as an “Othering” label, vastly different from the self-determined identities of other youth subcultures. As a matter of fact, a number of studies portray the angry reactions to such labelling (Hollingworth and Williams; Bennett; Mason and Wigley). So are Chavs vilified because of their whiteness, their class, or their consumption choices? More likely, they are vilified because of a combination of all of the above. Therefore, we would not be mistaken in identifying Chavs as completely lacking in identity capital. What is apparent from the literature discussed is that the Chav exists in an anomalous “no man's land”. ReferencesAdams, Matthew, and Jayne Raisborough. "The Self-Control Ethos and the Chav: Unpacking Cultural Representations of the White Working Class." Culture & Psychology 17.1 (2011): 81-97.Bennett, Joe. "‘And What Comes Out May Be a Kind of Screeching’: The Stylisation of Chavspeak in Contemporary Britain." Journal of Sociolinguistics 16.1 (2012): 5-27.———. "Chav-Spotting in Britain: The Representation of Social Class as Private Choice." Social Semiotics 23.1 (2013): 146-162.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Boston: Harvard UP, 1984.Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power." Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Brighton: Harvester, 1982. 777-795.Hayward, Keith, and Majid Yar. "The Chavphenomenon: Consumption, Media and the Construction of a New Underclass." Crime, Media, Culture 2.1 (2006): 9-28.Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979. Heeney, Joanne. "Disability Welfare Reform and the Chav Threat: A Reflection on Social Class and ‘Contested Disabilities’." Disability & Society 30.4 (2015): 650-653.Hollingworth, Sumi, and Katya Williams. "Constructions of the Working-Class ‘Other’ among Urban, White, Middle-Class Youth: ‘Chavs’, Subculture and the Valuing of Education." Journal of Youth Studies 12.5 (2009): 467-482.Johnson, Paul. "’Rude Boys': The Homosexual Eroticization of Class." Sociology 42.1 (2008): 65-82.Kehily, Mary Jane, and Anoop Nayak. "Charver Kids and Pram-Face Girls: Working-Class Youth, Representation and Embodied Performance." Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media. Eds. Sara Bragg and Mary Jane Kehily. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 150-165.Maffesoli, Michel. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: SAGE, 1995.Martin, Greg. "Subculture, Style, Chavs and Consumer Capitalism: Towards a Critical Cultural Criminology of Youth." Crime, Media, Culture 5.2 (2009): 123-145.Mason, Roger B., and Gemma Wigley. “The Chav Subculture: Branded Clothing as an Extension of the Self.” Journal of Economics and Behavioural Studies 5.3: 173-184.McCulloch, Ken, Alexis Stewart, and Nick Lovegreen. "‘We Just Hang Out Together’: Youth Cultures and Social Class." Journal of Youth Studies 9.5 (2006): 539-556.Murray, Charles. The Emerging British Underclass. London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1990.Nayak, Anoop. "Displaced Masculinities: Chavs, Youth and Class in the Post-Industrial City." Sociology 40.5 (2006): 813-831.Oxford English Dictionary. "Chav." 20 Apr. 2015.Renouf, Antoinette. “Tracing Lexical Productivity and Creativity in the British Media: The Chavs and the Chav-Nots.” Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts. Ed. Judith Munat. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2007. 61-93. 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The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role (Illich 25).The most basic definition of Stillness refers to a state of being in the absence of both motion and disturbance. Some might say it is anti-American. Stillness denies the democratic freedom of mobility in a social system where, as Ivan Illich writes in Energy and Equity, people “believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen” (26). In America, it isn’t too far of a stretch to say that most are quite used to being interpolated as some sort of subject of the screen, be it the windshield or the flat screen. Whether in transport or tele-vision, life is full of traffic and flickering images. In the best of times there is a choice between being citizen-audience member or citizen-passenger. A full day might include both.But during the summer of 2008 things seemed to change. The citizen-passenger was left beached, not in some sandy paradise but in their backyard. In this state of SIMBY (stuck in my backyard), the citizen-passenger experienced the energy crisis first hand. Middle class suburbanites were forced to come to terms with a new disturbance due to rising fuel prices: unattainable motion. Domestic travel had been exchanged for domestication. The citizen-passenger was rendered what Paul Virilio might call, “a voyager without a voyage, this passenger without a passage, the ultimate stranger, and renegade to himself” (Crepuscular 131). The threat to capitalism posed by this unattainable motion was quickly thwarted by America’s 'big box' stores, hotel chains, and news networks. What might have become a culturally transformative politics of attainable stillness was hijacked instead by The Great American Staycation. The Staycation is a neologism that refers to the activity of making a vacation out of staying at home. But the Staycation is more than a passing phrase; it is a complex cultural phenomenon that targeted middle class homes during the summer of 2008. A major constraint to a happy Staycation was the uncomfortable fact that the middle class home was not really a desirable destination as it stood. The family home would have to undergo a series of changes, one being the initiation of a set of time management strategies; and the second, the adoption of new objects for consumption. Good Morning America first featured the Staycation as a helpful parenting strategy for what was expected to be a long and arduous summer. GMA defined the parameters of the Staycation with four golden rules in May of 2008:Schedule start and end dates. Otherwise, it runs the risk of feeling just like another string of nights in front of the tube. Take Staycation photos or videos, just as you would if you went away from home on your vacation. Declare a 'choratorium.' That means no chores! Don't make the bed, vacuum, clean out the closets, pull weeds, or nothing, Pack that time with activities. (Leamy)Not only did GMA continue with the theme throughout the summer but the other networks also weighed in. Expert knowledge was doled out and therapeutic interventions were made to make people feel better about staying at home. Online travel companies such as expedia.com and tripadvisor.com, estimated that 60% of regular vacation takers would be staying home. With the rise and fall of gas prices, came the rise of fall of the Staycation.The emergence of the Staycation occurred precisely at a time when American citizens were confronted with the reality that their mobility and localities, including their relationship to domestic space, were structurally bound to larger geopolitical forces. The Staycation was an invention deployed by various interlocutors most threatened by the political possibilities inherent in stillness. The family home was catapulted into the circuits of production, consumption, and exchange. Big TV and Big Box stores furthered individual’s unease towards having to stay at home by discursively constructing the gas prices as an impediment to a happy domestic life and an affront to the American born right to be mobile. What was reinforced was that Americans ideally should be moving, but could not. Yet, at the same time it was rather un-American not to travel. The Staycation was couched in a powerful rhetoric of one’s moral duty to the nation while playing off of middle class anxieties and senses of privilege regarding the right to be mobile and the freedom to consume. The Staycation satiates all of these tensions by insisting that the home can become a somewhere else. Between spring and autumn of 2008, lifestyle experts, representatives from major retailers, and avid Staycationers filled morning slots on ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, and CNN with Staycation tips. CNN highlighted the Staycation as a “1st Issue” in their Weekend Report on 12 June 2008 (Alban). This lead story centred on a father in South Windsor, Connecticut “who took the money he would normally spend on vacations and created a permanent Staycation residence.” The palatial home was fitted with a basketball court, swimming pool, hot tub, gardening area, and volleyball court. In the same week (and for those without several acres) CBS’s Early Show featured the editor of behindthebuy.com, a company that specialises in informing the “time starved consumer” about new commodities. The lifestyle consultant previewed the newest and most necessary items “so you could get away without leaving home.” Key essentials included a “family-sized” tent replete with an air conditioning unit, a projector TV screen amenable to the outdoors, a high-end snow-cone maker, a small beer keg, a mini-golf kit, and a fast-setting swimming pool that attaches to any garden hose. The segment also extolled the virtues of the Staycation even when gas prices might not be so high, “you have this stuff forever, if you go on vacation all you have are the pictures.” Here, the value of the consumer products outweighs the value of erstwhile experiences that would have to be left to mere recollection.Throughout the summer ABC News’ homepage included links to specific products and profiled hotels, such as Hiltons and Holiday Inns, where families could at least get a few miles away from home (Leamy). USA Today, in an article about retailers and the Staycation, reported that Wal-Mart would be “rolling back prices on everything from mosquito repellent to portable DVD players to baked beans and barbecue sauce”. Target and Kohl’s were celebrated for offering discounts on patio furniture, grills, scented candles, air fresheners and other products to make middle class homes ‘staycationable’. A Lexis Nexis count revealed over 200 news stories in various North American sources, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Investors Guide, the Christian Science Monitor, and various local Consumer Credit Counselling Guides. Staying home was not necessarily an inexpensive option. USA Today reported brand new grills, grilling meats, patio furniture and other accoutrements were still going to cost six percent more than the previous year (24 May 2008). While it was suggested that the Staycation was a cost-saving option, it is clear Staycations were for the well-enough off and would likely cost more or as much as an actual vacation. To put this in context with US vacation policies and practices, a recent report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research called No-Vacation Nation found that the US is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation (Ray and Schmidt 3). Subsequently, without government standards 25% of Americans have neither paid vacation nor paid holidays. The Staycation was not for the working poor who were having difficulty even getting to work in the first place, nor were they for the unemployed, recently job-less, or the foreclosed. No, the Staycationers were middle class suburbanites who had backyards and enough acreage for swimming pools and tents. These were people who were going to be ‘stuck’ at home for the first time and a new grill could make that palatable. The Staycation would be exciting enough to include in their vacation history repertoire.All of the families profiled on the major networks were white Americans and in most cases nuclear families. For them, unattainable motion is an affront to the privilege of their white middle class mobility which is usually easy and unencumbered, in comparison to raced mobilities. Doreen Massey’s theory of “power geometry” which argues that different people have differential and inequitable relationships to mobility is relevant here. The lack of racial representation in Staycation stories reinforces the reality that has already been well documented in the works of bell hooks in Black Looks: Race and Representation, Lynn Spigel in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, and Jeremy Packer in Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars and Citizenship. All of these critical works suggest that taking easily to the great open road is not the experience of all Americans. Freedom of mobility is in fact a great American fiction.The proprietors for the Great American Staycation were finding all sorts of dark corners in the American psyche to extol the virtues of staying at home. The Staycation capitalised on latent xenophobic tendencies of the insular family. Encountering cultural difference along the way could become taxing and an impediment to the fully deserved relaxation that is the stuff of dream vacations. CNN.com ran an article soon after their Weekend Report mentioned above quoting a life coach who argued Staycations were more fitting for many Americans because the “strangeness of different cultures or languages, figuring out foreign currencies or worrying about lost luggage can take a toll” (12 June 2008). The Staycation sustains a culture of insularity, consumption, distraction, and fear, but in doing so serves the national economic interests quite well. Stay at home, shop, grill, watch TV and movies, these were the economic directives programmed by mass media and retail giants. As such it was a cultural phenomenon commensurable to the mundane everyday life of the suburbs.The popular version of the Staycation is a highly managed and purified event that reflects the resort style/compound tourism of ‘Club Meds’ and cruise ships. The Staycation as a new form of domestication bears a significant resemblance to the contemporary spatial formations that Marc Augé refers to as non-places – contemporary forms of homogeneous architecture that are scattered across disparate locales. The nuclear family home becomes another point of transfer in the global circulation of capital, information, and goods. The chain hotels and big box stores that are invested in the Staycation are touted as part of the local economy but instead devalue the local by making it harder for independent restaurants, grocers, farmers’ markets and bed and breakfasts to thrive. In this regard the Staycation excludes the local economy and the community. It includes backyards not balconies, hot-dogs not ‘other’ types of food, and Wal-Mart rather than then a local café or deli. Playing on the American democratic ideals of freedom of mobility and activating one’s identity as a consumer left little room to re-think how life in constant motion (moving capital, moving people, moving information, and moving goods) was partially responsible for the energy crisis in the first place. Instead, staying at home became a way for the American citizen to support the floundering economy while waiting for gas prices to go back down. And, one wouldn’t have to look that much further to see that the Staycation slips discursively into a renewed mission for a just cause – the environment. For example, ABC launched at the end of the summer a ruse of a national holiday, “National Stay at Home Week” with the tag line: “With gas prices so high, the economy taking a nosedive and global warming, it's just better to stay in and enjoy great ABC TV.” It comes as no shock that none of the major networks covered this as an environmental issue or an important moment for transformation. In fact, the air conditioning units in backyard tents attest to quite the opposite. Instead, the overwhelming sense was of a nation waiting at home for it all to be over. Soon real life would resume and everyone could get moving again. The economic slowdown and the energy crisis are examples of the breakdown and failure of capitalism. In a sense, a potential opened up in this breakdown for Stillness to become an alternative to life in constant and unrequited motion. That is, for the practice of non-movement and non-circulation to take on new political and cultural forms especially in the sprawling suburbs where the car moves individuals between the trifecta of home, box store, and work. The economic crisis is also a temporary stoppage of the flows. If the individual couldn’t move, global corporate capital would find a way to set the house in motion, to reinsert it back into the machinery that is now almost fully equated with freedom.The reinvention of the home into a campground or drive-in theatre makes the house a moving entity, an inverted mobile home that is both sedentary and in motion. Paul Virilio’s concept of “polar inertia” is important here. He argues, since the advent of transportation individuals live in a state of “resident polar inertia” wherein “people don’t move, even when they’re in a high speed train. They don’t move when they travel in their jet. They are residents in absolute motion” (Crepuscular 71). Lynn Spigel has written extensively about these dynamics, including the home as mobile home, in Make Room for TV and Welcome to the Dreamhouse. She examines how the introduction of the television into domestic space is worked through the tension between the private space of the home and the public world outside. Spigel refers to the dual emergence of portable television and mobile homes. Her work shows how domestic space is constantly imagined and longed for “as a vehicle of transport through which they (families) could imaginatively travel to an illicit place of passion while remaining in the safe space of the family home” (Welcome 60-61). But similarly to what Virilio has inferred Spigel points out that these mobile homes stayed parked and the portable TVs were often stationary as well. The Staycation exists as an addendum to what Spigel captures about the relationship between domestic space and the television set. It provides another example of advertisers’ attempts to play off the suburban tension between domestic space and the world “out there.” The Staycation exacerbates the role of the domestic space as a site of production, distribution, and consumption. The gendered dynamics of the Staycation include redecorating possibilities targeted at women and the backyard beer and grill culture aimed at men. In fact, ‘Mom’ might suffer the most during a Staycation, but that is another topic. The point is the whole family can get involved in a way that sustains the configurations of power but with an element of novelty.The Staycation is both a cultural phenomenon that feeds off the cultural anxieties of the middle class and an economic directive. It has been constructed to maintain movement at a time when the crisis of capital contains seeds for an alternative, for Stillness to become politically and culturally transformative. But life feels dull when the passenger is stuck and the virtues of Stillness are quite difficult to locate in this cultural context. As Illich argues, “the passenger who agrees to live in a world monopolised by transport becomes a harassed, overburdened consumer of distances whose shape and length he can no longer control” (45). When the passenger is the mode of identification, immobility becomes unbearable. In this context a form of “still mobility” such as the Staycation might be satisfying enough. ConclusionThe still citizen is a threatening figure for capital. In Politics of the Very Worst Virilio argues at the heart of capitalism is a state of permanent mobility, a condition to which polar inertia attests. The Staycation fits completely within this context of this form of mobile immobility. The flow needs to keep flowing. When people are stationary, still, and calm the market suffers. It has often been argued that the advertising industries construct dissatisfaction while also marginally eliminating it through the promises of various products, yet ultimately leaving the individual in a constant state of almost satisfied but never really. The fact that the Staycation is a mode of waiting attests to this complacent dissatisfaction.The subjective and experiential dimensions of living in a capitalist society are experienced through one’s relationship to time and staying on the right path. The economic slowdown and the energy crisis are also crises in pace, energy, and time. The mobility and tempo, the pace and path that capital relies on, has become unhinged and vulnerable to a resistant re-shaping. The Staycation re-sets the tempo of suburbia to meet the new needs of an economic slowdown and financial crisis. Following the directive to staycate is not necessarily a new form of false consciousness, but an intensified technological and economic mode of subjection that depends on already established cultural anxieties. But what makes the Staycation unique and worthy of consideration is that capitalists and other disciplinary institutions of power, in this case big media, construct new and innovative ways to control people’s time and regulate their movement in space. The Staycation is a particular re-territorialisation of the temporal and spatial dimensions of home, work, and leisure. In sum, Staycation and the staging of National Stay at Home Week reveals a systemic mobilising and control of a population’s pace and path. As Bernard Stiegler writes in Technics and Time: “Deceleration remains a figure of speed, just as immobility is a figure of movement” (133). These processes are inexorably tied to one another. Thinking back to the opening quote from Illich, we could ask how we might stop imagining ourselves as passengers – ushered along, falling in line, or complacently floating past. To be still in the flows could be a form of ultimate resistance. In fact, Stillness has the possibility of becoming an autonomous practice of refusal. It is after all this threatening potentiality that created the frenzied invention of the Staycation in the first place. To end where I began, Illich states that “the habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world” (25-26). The horizon of political possibility is uniformly limited for the passenger. Whether people actually did follow these directives during the summer of 2008 is hard to determine. The point is that the energy crisis and economic slowdown offered a potential to vacate capital’s premises, both its pace and path. But corporate capital is doing its best to make sure that people wait, staycate, and see it through. The Staycation is not just about staying at home for vacation. It is about staying within reach, being accounted for, at a time when departing global corporate capital seems to be the best option. ReferencesAlban, Debra. “Staycations: Alternative to Pricey, Stressful Travel.” CNN News 12 June 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://edition.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/06/12/balance.staycation/index.html›.Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso, London, 1995.hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity. New York: Perennial Library, 1974.Leamy, Elisabeth. “Tips for Planning a Great 'Staycation'.” ABC News 23 May 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/story?id=4919211›.Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: Minnesota U P, 1994.Packer, Jeremy. 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