Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Basketmaker's Shop (New York, N.Y.)”

This paper examines adoption of online grocery shopping, and potential cost and time savings compared to brick and mortar food retailers, by New York City public housing residents using Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. A mixed methods action research project involving the co-creation of an online shopping club, the Farragut Food Club (FFC), recruited 300 members who registered to shop online using SNAP, and received waivers on delivery minimums and provided technical assistance and centralized food delivery. We conducted a survey (n = 206) and focus groups to understand shopping practices; FFC members collected receipts of groceries over two weeks before and after the pilot to measure foods purchased, stores patronized, and prices. We interviewed FFC members to elicit experiences with the pilot, and estimated cost differences between products purchased in brick and mortar stores and equivalent products online, and transportation time and cost differences. Online shopping represented a small (2.4%) percentage of grocery spending. Unit prices for products purchased on Amazon ($0.28) were significantly higher than for equivalent products purchased in brick and mortar stores ($0.23) (p < 0.001.) Compatibility with existing routines, low relative advantage, and cost of online products limited the adoption of online shopping among SNAP users.

AbstractObjective:To examine cross-sectional associations between farmers’ market shopping behaviours and objectively measured and self-reported fruit and vegetable (FV) intake among rural North Carolina (NC) and New York City (NYC) shoppers.Design:Cross-sectional intercept surveys were used to assess self-reported FV intake and three measures of farmers’ market shopping behaviour: (1) frequency of purchasing FV; (2) variety of FV purchased and (3) dollars spent on FV. Skin carotenoids, a non-invasive biomarker for FV intake, were objectively measured using pressure-mediated reflection spectroscopy. Associations between farmers’ market shopping behaviours and FV intake were examined using regression models that controlled for demographic variables (e.g. age, sex, race, smoking status, education, income and state).Setting:Farmers’ markets (n 17 markets) in rural NC and NYC.Participants:A convenience sample of 645 farmers’ market shoppers.Results:Farmers’ market shoppers in NYC purchased a greater variety of FV and had higher skin carotenoid scores compared with shoppers in rural NC. Among all shoppers, there was a positive, statistically significant association between self-reported frequency of shopping at farmers’ markets and self-reported as well as objectively assessed FV intake. The variety of FV purchased and farmers’ market spending on FV also were positively associated with self-reported FV intake, but not skin carotenoids.Conclusion:Those who shop for FV more frequently at a farmers’ markets, purchase a greater variety of FV and spend more money on FV have higher self-reported, and in some cases higher objectively measured FV intake. Further research is needed to understand these associations and test causality.

ABSTRAK Halal fashion saat ini menjadi salah satu sektor yang diminati konsumen di Indonesia. Mayoritas penduduk Indonesia yang merupakan muslim menjadikan pangsa pasar industri fashion Muslim sangat besar. Permintaan produk fashion muslim semakin tinggi karena kesadaran perempuan Muslim dalam menutup aurat juga sudah tinggi. Apalagi, konsumen saat ini suka melihat fashion influencer di sosial media seperti Instagram. Serta penggunakan content marketing yang menarik juga mempengaruhi konsumen untuk membeli sebuah produk. Penjualan produk fashion muslim semakin mudah diakses konsumen dengan andanya media digital untuk melihat dan bertransaksi. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk melihat pengaruh pendukung selebriti dan pemasaran konten. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kuantitatif. Dengan teknik data yaitu kuisioner yang disebarkan secara online kepada 100 responden perempuan muslim yang pernah mengakses platform online brand fashion muslim Vanilla Hijab. Teknik analisis yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini yaitu regresi linier berganda. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan celebrity endorser memiliki pengaruh positif signifikan terhadap niat beli, dan konten pemasaran juga memiliki pengaruh positif signifikan terhadap niat beli toko online fashion Vanilla Hijab. Kata-Kunci: Celebrity Endorser, Content Marketing, Purchase Intention, Fashion Muslim. ABSTRACT Halal fashion is currently one of the sectors that consumers in Indonesia are interested in. The majority of Indonesia's population who are Muslim makes the market share of the Muslim fashion industry very large. The demand for Muslim fashion products is getting higher because the awareness of Muslim women in covering their genitals is high. Moreover, consumers today like to see fashion influencers on social media like Instagram. And the use of attractive content marketing also influences consumers to buy a product. The sale of Muslim fashion products is increasingly accessible to consumers by relying on digital media to view and transact. The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of celebrity supporters and content marketing. This research uses quantitative methods. With the data technique, namely a questionnaire distributed online to 100 Muslim female respondents who have accessed the online platform for the Muslim fashion brand Vanilla Hijab. The analysis technique used in this study is multiple linear regression. The results of this study indicate celebrity endorsers have a significant positive effect on purchase intention, and marketing content also has a significant positive effect on purchase intention of Vanilla Hijab fashion online shop. Keywords: Celebrity Endorser, Content Marketing, Purchase Intention, Fashion Muslim. DAFTAR PUSTAKA Abbas, A., Afshan, G., & Khan, S. B. (2018). 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Abstract Objective: The food retail environment is an important determinant of food access and the ability to achieve a healthy diet. However, immigrant communities may procure their food in different ways than the mainstream population owing to preferences for specific cultural products or limited English language proficiency. The objective of this analysis was to describe the grocery shopping patterns and behaviours of one of the largest immigrant groups in New York City, Chinese Americans – a group experiencing high poverty and cardio-metabolic disparities. Design: Cross-sectional survey data. Setting: Community-based sample. Participants: Self-identified Chinese Americans in the New York metropolitan area (n 239). Results: Three shopping patterns were identified: type 1: shopped weekly at an ethnic grocery store – and nowhere else; type 2: shopped weekly at a non-ethnic grocery store, with occasional shopping at an ethnic store and type 3: did not perform weekly shopping. Type 1 v. type 2 shoppers tended to have lower education levels (37·5 v. 78·0 % with college degree); to be on public insurance (57·6 v. 22·8 %); speak English less well (18·4 v. 41·4 %); be food insecure (47·2 v. 24·2 %; P < 0·01 for all) and to travel nearly two miles further to shop at their primary grocery store (β = −1·55; 95 % CI −2·81, −0·30). Discussion: There are distinct grocery shopping patterns amongst urban-dwelling Chinese Americans corresponding to demographic and sociocultural factors that may help inform health interventions in this understudied group. Similar patterns may exist among other immigrant groups, lending preliminary support for an alternative conceptualisation of how immigrant communities interact with the food retail environment.

I'll grow up some time then you'll be mine I want to screw you down whilst my mind is on the ground I want to move your switch make you go squish my desiring machine -- Sonic Youth A small story: the other saturday night, having just completed my saturday ritual of visiting the video shop and the beer shop, I was sitting at a bus-stop. And it just so happens that on this saturday evening, the bus-stop I was sitting at was opposite a catholic church in the middle of the mass. Now, its been many years since I was a catholic -- I am in fact happily pagan -- however, I strongly identify with that well-known atheist and socialist (and co-incidentally, British Minister of Overseas Development) Clare Short, who nonetheless describes herself as 'culturally catholic' (as they say, 'once a catholic always a catholic'). And so, as I was sitting at this bus-stop, I found myself having the usual internal conversation I seem to have whenever I pass a catholic mass, in which I imagine I'm having to justify just why I'm not in there as well and why I think their beliefs are theoretically unsustainable and politically regressive. During this internal dialogue however, I realised that what the micks were doing in their mass -- that is, expressing a desire to connect with something outside of themselves -- was the same thing I did whenever I witnessed a sabbat or esbat, or visited a stone circle, fairy mound or burial barrow. Admittedly, whereas I achieve this experience of being with something outside myself through the earth, the sun, the moon, the passing of time, and my relationships with my friends and lovers, they did it through a submissive appeal to a fetishised figure of an alien God. And that this wasn't much different from or any worse than the mindless commodity fetishism practiced by so many materialists within our advanced industrialised economy. And all of this led me to speculate on just what the nature of desire is: that perhaps desire is the self's experience, within the self, of something outside of (or greater than) the self -- desire as theology, that is. If I can be a bit clearer: that perhaps desire is a recognition, not of a lack, but of the necessary and perpetual circulation across the threshold of the self -- if i can put it that way -- of the array of subjectless individuations that collectively constitute us as 'human'. This is not at all to suggest that desire is what makes us 'better', or that it is solely a positive thing -- and not simply because I refuse the implication that desiring to be with the Christian God can ever be positive. In formulating desire as a circulation of affects across the boundary of the self, I am explicitly refusing the narrative of original sin of the self, either in its Christian 'guilt' or psychoanalytic 'lack' manifestations that desire is often framed in. What I am suggesting here is that 'desire' is the name for that perpetual and spontaneous process of 'becoming' through which the self is continuously constructed and reconstructed, and that this process is by definition circulatory. The obvious analogy here is with meteorological phenomena, in particular frontal systems. The cold front that brings rain with it, and usually marked on the evening television weather forecasts with a thick, identifiable line, is in fact a fictional construct. It marks, in practice, a perpetual and spontaneous exchange of heat, through a thermodynamic process, between a relatively warmer body of air and a relatively colder one behind it. The front, so lively on the weather map, marching across the continent with martial purpose, in fact moves only as it is drawn by pressure differentials, by the rotation of the earth, and by the very process of heat exchange that it signifies. As a line, an interface, a boundary, the front is permeable, unstable, fractal and undefinable; an effect that becomes a metonym for the process it represents. Similarly, the thing we call 'the self' -- myself, yourself, themselves -- is an effect, an ever-shifting, fluid and variable effect of a circulation of affect that is called desire. This is not at all to suggest that desire is what makes us 'better', or that it is solely a positive thing -- and not simply because I refuse the implication that desiring to be with the Christian God can ever be positive. In formulating desire as a circulation of affects across the boundary of the self, I am explicitly refusing the narrative of original sin of the self, either in its Christian 'guilt' or psychoanalytic 'lack' manifestations that desire is often framed in. What I am suggesting here is that 'desire' is the name for that perpetual and spontaneous process of 'becoming' through which the self is continuously constructed and reconstructed, and that this process is by definition circulatory. The obvious analogy here is with meteorological phenomena, in particular frontal systems. The cold front that brings rain with it, and usually marked on the evening television weather forecasts with a thick, identifiable line, is in fact a fictional construct. It marks, in practice, a perpetual and spontaneous exchange of heat, through a thermodynamic process, between a relatively warmer body of air and a relatively colder one behind it. The front, so lively on the weather map, marching across the continent with martial purpose, in fact moves only as it is drawn by pressure differentials, by the rotation of the earth, and by the very process of heat exchange that it signifies. As a line, an interface, a boundary, the front is permeable, unstable, fractal and undefinable; an effect that becomes a metonym for the process it represents. Similarly, the thing we call 'the self' -- myself, yourself, themselves -- is an effect, an ever-shifting, fluid and variable effect of a circulation of affect that is called desire. In one sense this definition is almost a truism, because as Deleuze & Guattari make explicitly clear in A Thousand Plateaus, almost all formations can be described in some sense as fasiscular, and even the most rhizomatic formation can have aborescent knots. That is, the distinction between rhizomatic and aborescent schemas is not dualistic, there is "no ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad"; rather their relationship is processual: The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. ... No, this is not a new or different dualism. (Deleuze & Guattari 20) Thus, as Deleuze & Guattari are at pains to explain, what they call rhizomatic formations are neither better or worse than arborescent formations, nor are they two mutually exclusive, they are two different ways of organising and doing things which can each lead to the other or contain the other. In this sense, Probyn is not suggesting anything new to say that desire can be considered as rhizomatic, as engendering an uncountable array of unruly connections, because the possibility that anything might be thusly considered is contained within the princples of 'the rhizome' that Deleuze & Guattari provide. What I am suggesting however, is that desire is more than simply an excellent example of this processual movement between and across rhizomes and arborescences. For whilst the arborescent knots, the despotic formations of desire are readily apparent -- who isn't familiar with the disappointment that is an inevitable and integral part of commodity fetishism; the desolation of unrequited loves or the destructive capacity of satiated desires -- I am suggesting that desire is solely and strictly rhizomatic, and that as a rhizome that subverts, subtends and extends the self, it processually defines 'the human'. In his insightful commentary upon deleuzoguattarian philosophy entitled A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi states that desire, "in its widest connotation" is the plane of consistency as multiple cocausal becoming ... on the human level, it is never a strictly personal affair, but a tension between sub- and superpersonal tendencies that intersect in the person as an empty signifier. (82) For Massumi then, desire is a profoundly anti-human, or more accurately nonhuman, process, whose operation has the effect of causing what he calls 'the person' to be precipitated. Desire is, therefore, the definition of the machinic auto-poiesis -- the immanent and pragmatic functioning of the process of becoming -- that generates each of us as human subjects. Contra Massumi however, I would suggest that the resultant effect of desire -- that is, the instantiation of the person -- is far from being an empty signifier, a precipitious by-product. Even the most inchoate desire, the most mute and directionless 'I want', articulates a connection beyond the self that carries within it an implicit enunciation of what the self might be. As Michel Foucault argued in a somewhat different context, the trangressing of a boundary by a productive process -- such as desire -- does not ipso facto circumvent that boundary or render it devoid of meaning, although it might have that effect; the function of crossing or trangressing a limit is to liminalise it, to re-inscribe it (for two differing examples, see Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1 45, and Foucault, "Revolutionary Action: Until Now" 226). For although 'the person' does not pre-figure desire, and is in fact constituted and re-constituted through the operation of desire, it is neither an empty signifier nor a level playing field. "The word religion", says the French philosopher Michel Serres, could have two origins. According to the first, it would come from the Latin verb religare, to attach. Does religion bind us together, does it assure the bond of this world to another? According to the second ... it would mean to assemble, gather, lift up, traverse or read. (47) But, observes Serres, we are rarely told what sublime word our language opposes to the religious, in order to deny it: negligence. Whoever has no religion should not be called an atheist or unbeliever, but negligent. (48) The process, perpetual and spontaneous, of attachment to things, subjects, objects-multiplicities-outside of ourselves, whether it is to an unseeing God, the earth, one's friends, family and lovers or that funky new consumer durable, that we call desire, is what defines us as human. "Without love", says Serres "there are no ties or alliances" (49). Thus, the rhizomatic functioning of desire as a process of becoming continually produces, in a transversal fashion, the articulation of the self: we are each the product of desire. Desire, as a thermodynamic process, is thus the engine of 'the human', of a form of contingent humanism -- although a humanism that isn't simply limited to people: a becoming that liminalises the self through its incorporation of subjectless individuations beyond the self, within the self, through which the self is processually experienced and embodied. Whether it is the desire for the reified God, the becoming-another of the carnal and corporeal, the longing for the fetishised commodity or the 'I want to believe' of the search for extra-terrestrials, desire is the motive force that defines us as human, our raison d'être, our theology. And all this from sitting at a bus-stop. References Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. With foreword by Brian Massumi. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1978. Foucault, Michel. "Revolutionary Action: Until Now." Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. Massumi, Brian. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. A Swerve Edition. Cambridge, MA.: MIT P, 1992. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Sonic Youth. "Female Mechanic on Duty." A Thousand Leaves. Compact Disc. Geffen, GEFD-25203, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sean Aylward Smith. "[ t o b e a n d t o h a v e ]." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/be.php>. Chicago style: Sean Aylward Smith, "[ t o b e a n d t o h a v e ]," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/be.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Sean Aylward Smith. (1999) [ t o b e a n d t o h a v e ]. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/be.php> ([your date of access]).

My thesis is that new media, starting with analog broadcast and going through digital convergence, blur the line between work time and free time. The technology that we are adopting has transformed free time into potential and actual labour time. At the dawn of the modern age, work shifted from tasked time to measured time. Previously, tasked time intermingled work and leisure according to the vagaries of nature. All this was banished when industrial capitalism instituted the work clock (Mumford 12-8). But now, many have noticed how post-industrial capitalism features a new intermingling captured in such expressions as "24/7" and "multi-tasking." Yet, we are only beginning to understand that media are driving a return to the pre-modern where the hour and the space are both ambiguous, available for either work or leisure. This may be the unfortunate side effect of the much vaunted "interactivity." Do you remember the old American TV show Dobie Gillis (1959-63) which featured the character Maynard G. Krebs? He always shuddered at the mention of the four-letter word "work." Now, American television shows makes it a point that everyone works (even if just barely). Seinfeld was a bold exception in featuring the work-free Kramer; a deliberate homage to the 1940s team of Abbott and Costello. Today, as welfare is turned into workfare, The New York Times scolds even the idle rich to adopt the work ethic (Yazigi). The Forms of Broadcast and Digital Media Are Driving the Merger of Work and Leisure More than the Content It is not just the content of television and other media that is undermining the leisured life; it is the social structure within which we use the media. Broadcast advertisements were the first mode/media combinations that began to recolonise free time for the new consumer economy. There had been a previous buildup in the volume and the ubiquity of advertising particularly in billboards and print. However, the attention of the reader to the printed commercial message could not be controlled and measured. Radio was the first to appropriate and measure its audience's time for the purposes of advertising. Nineteenth century media had promoted a middle class lifestyle based on spending money on home to create a refuge from work. Twentieth century broadcasting was now planting commercial messages within that refuge in the sacred moments of repose. Subsequent to broadcast, home video and cable facilitated flexible work by offering entertainment on a 24 hour basis. Finally, the computer, which juxtaposes image/sound/text within a single machine, offers the user the same proto-interactive blend of entertainment and commercial messages that broadcasting pioneered. It also fulfills the earlier promise of interactive TV by allowing us to work and to shop, in all parts of the day and night. We need to theorise this movement. The theory of media as work needs an institutional perspective. Therefore, I begin with Dallas Smythe's blindspot argument, which gave scholarly gravitas to the structural relationship of work and media (263-299). Horkheimer and Adorno had already noticed that capitalism was extending work into free time (137). Dallas Smythe went on to dissect the precise means by which late capitalism was extending work. Smythe restates the Marxist definition of capitalist labour as that human activity which creates exchange value. Then he considered the advertising industry, which currently approaches200 billion in the USA and realised that a great deal of exchange value has been created. The audience is one element of the labour that creates this exchange value. The appropriation of people's time creates advertising value. The time we spend listening to commercials on radio or viewing them on TV can be measured and is the unit of production for the value of advertising. Our viewing time ipso facto has been changed into work time. We may not experience it subjectively as work time although pundits such as Marie Winn and Jerry Mander suggest that TV viewing contributes to the same physical stresses as actual work. Nonetheless, Smythe sees commercial broadcasting as expanding the realm of capitalism into time that was otherwise set aside for private uses. Smythe's essay created a certain degree of excitement among political economists of media. Sut Jhally used Smythe to explain aspects of US broadcast history such as the innovations of William Paley in creating the CBS network (Jhally 70-9). In 1927, as Paley contemplated winning market share from his rival NBC, he realised that selling audience time was far more profitable than selling programs. Therefore, he paid affiliated stations to air his network's programs while NBC was still charging them for the privilege. It was more lucrative to Paley to turn around and sell the stations' guaranteed time to advertisers, than to collect direct payments for supplying programs. NBC switched to his business model within a year. Smythe/Jhally's model explains the superiority of Paley's model and is a historical proof of Smythe's thesis. Nonetheless, many economists and media theorists have responded with a "so what?" to Smythe's thesis that watching TV as work. Everyone knows that the basis of network television is the sale of "eyeballs" to the advertisers. However, Smythe's thesis remains suggestive. Perhaps he arrived at it after working at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from 1943 to 1948 (Smythe 2). He was part of a team that made one last futile attempt to force radio to embrace public interest programming. This effort failed because the tide of consumerism was too strong. Radio and television were the leading edge of recapturing the home for work, setting the stage for the Internet and a postmodern replication of the cottage industries of pre and proto-industrial worlds. The consequences have been immense. The Depression and the crisis of over-production Cultural studies recognises that social values have shifted from production to consumption (Lash and Urry). The shift has a crystallising moment in the Great Depression of 1929 through 1940. One proposal at the time was to reduce individual work hours in order to create more jobs (see Hunnicut). This proposal of "share the work" was not adopted. From the point of view of the producer, sharing the work would make little difference to productivity. However, from the retailer's perspective each individual worker would accumulate less money to buy products. Overall sales would stagnate or decline. Prominent American economists at the time argued that sharing the work would mean sharing the unemployment. They warned the US government this was a fundamental threat to an economy based on consumption. Only a fully employed laborer could have enough money to buy down the national inventory. In 1932, N. A. Weston told the American Economic Association that: " ...[the labourers'] function in society as a consumer is of equal importance as the part he plays as a producer." (Weston 11). If the defeat of the share the work movement is the negative manifestation of consumerism, then the invasion by broadcast of our leisure time is its positive materialisation. We can trace this understanding by looking at Herbert Hoover. When he was the Secretary of Commerce in 1924 he warned station executives that: "I have never believed that it was possible to advertise through broadcasting without ruining the [radio] industry" (Radio's Big Issue). He had not recognised that broadcast advertising would be qualitatively more powerful for the economy than print advertising. By 1929, Hoover, now President Hoover, approved an economics committee recommendation in the traumatic year of 1929 that leisure time be made "consumable " (Committee on Recent Economic Changes xvi). His administration supported the growth of commercial radio because broadcasting was a new efficient answer to the economists' question of how to motivate consumption. Not so coincidentally network radio became a profitable industry during the great Depression. The economic power that pre-war radio hinted at flourished in the proliferation of post-war television. Advertisers switched their dollars from magazines to TV, causing the demise of such general interest magazines as Life, The Saturday Evening Postet al. Western Europe quickly followed the American broadcasting model. Great Britain was the first, allowing television to advertise the consumer revolution in 1955. Japan and many others started to permit advertising on television. During the era of television, the nature of work changed from manufacturing to servicing (Preston 148-9). Two working parents also became the norm as a greater percentage of the population took salaried employment, mostly women (International Labour Office). Many of the service jobs are to monitor the new global division of labour that allows industrialised nations to consume while emerging nations produce. (Chapter seven of Preston is the most current discussion of the shift of jobs within information economies and between industrialised and emerging nations.) Flexible Time/ Flexible Media Film and television has responded by depicting these shifts. The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuted in September of 1970 (see http://www.transparencynow.com/mary.htm). In this show nurturing and emotional attachments were centered in the work place, not in an actual biological family. It started a trend that continues to this day. However, media representations of the changing nature of work are merely symptomatic of the relationship between media and work. Broadcast advertising has a more causal relationship. As people worked more to buy more, they found that they wanted time-saving media. It is in this time period that the Internet started (1968), that the video cassette recorder was introduced (1975) and that the cable industry grew. Each of these ultimately enhanced the flexibility of work time. The VCR allowed time shifting programs. This is the media answer to the work concept of flexible time. The tired worker can now see her/his favourite TV show according to his/her own flex schedule (Wasser 2001). Cable programming, with its repeats and staggered starting times, also accommodates the new 24/7 work day. These machines, offering greater choice of programming and scheduling, are the first prototypes of interactivity. The Internet goes further in expanding flexible time by adding actual shopping to the vicarious enjoyment of consumerist products on television. The Internet user continues to perform the labour of watching advertising and, in addition, now has the opportunity to do actual work tasks at any time of the day or night. The computer enters the home as an all-purpose machine. Its purchase is motivated by several simultaneous factors. The rhetoric often stresses the recreational and work aspects of the computer in the same breath (Reed 173, Friedrich 16-7). Games drove the early computer programmers to find more "user-friendly" interfaces in order to entice young consumers. Entertainment continues to be the main driving force behind visual and audio improvements. This has been true ever since the introduction of the Apple II, Radio Shack's TRS 80 and Atari 400 personal computers in the 1977-1978 time frame (see http://www.atari-history.com/computers/8bits/400.html). The current ubiquity of colour monitors, and the standard package of speakers with PC computers are strong indications that entertainment and leisure pursuits continue to drive the marketing of computers. However, once the computer is in place in the study or bedroom, its uses fully integrates the user with world of work in both the sense of consuming and creating value. This is a specific instance of what Philip Graham calls the analytical convergence of production, consumption and circulation in hypercapitalism. The streaming video and audio not only captures the action of the game, they lend sensual appeal to the banner advertising and the power point downloads from work. In one regard, the advent of Internet advertising is a regression to the pre-broadcast era. The passive web site ad runs the same risk of being ignored as does print advertising. The measure of a successful web ad is interactivity that most often necessitates a click through on the part of the viewer. Ads often show up on separate windows that necessitate a click from the viewer if only to close down the program. In the words of Bolter and Grusin, click-through advertising is a hypermediation of television. In other words, it makes apparent the transparent relationship television forged between work and leisure. We do not sit passively through Internet advertising, we click to either eliminate them or to go on and buy the advertised products. Just as broadcasting facilitated consumable leisure, new media combines consumable leisure with flexible portable work. The new media landscape has had consequences, although the price of consumable leisure took awhile to become visible. The average work week declined from 1945 to 1982. After that point in the US, it has been edging up, continuously (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics). There is some question whether the computer has improved productivity (Kim), there is little question that the computer is colonising leisure time for multi-tasking. In a population that goes online from home almost twice as much as those who go online from work, almost half use their online time for work based activities other than email. Undoubtedly, email activity would account for even more work time (Horrigan). On the other side of the blur between work and leisure, the Pew Institute estimates that fifty percent use work Internet time for personal pleasure ("Wired Workers"). Media theory has to reengage the problem that Horkheimer/Adorno/Smythe raised. The contemporary problem of leisure is not so much the lack of leisure, but its fractured, non-contemplative, unfulfilling nature. A media critique will demonstrate the contribution of the TV and the Internet to this erosion of free time. References Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Committee on Recent Economic Changes. Recent Economic Changes. Vol. 1. New York: no publisher listed, 1929. Friedrich, Otto. "The Computer Moves In." Time 3 Jan. 1983: 14-24. Graham, Philip. Hypercapitalism: A Political Economy of Informational Idealism. In press for New Media and Society2.2 (2000). Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1944/1987. Horrigan, John B. "New Internet Users: What They Do Online, What They Don't and Implications for the 'Net's Future." Pew Internet and American Life Project. 25 Sep. 2000. 24 Oct. 2001 <http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=22>. Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. Work without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work. 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Links http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=20 http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=22 http://www.atari-history.com/computers/8bits/400.html http://www.transparencynow.com/mary.htm http://www.digitaleconomy.gov/powerpoint/triplett/index.htm http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282%28193203%2922%3C8%3ASWTAU%3 E2.0.CO%3B2-3 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Wasser, Frederick. "Media Is Driving Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml >. Chicago Style Wasser, Frederick, "Media Is Driving Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Wasser, Frederick. (2001) Media Is Driving Work. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml > ([your date of access]).

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Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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On 17 January 2013, Wired chose the smart contact lens as one of “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World” describing a Google-led research project. Wired explains that the inventor, Dr. Babak Parviz, wants to build a microsystem on a contact lens: “Using radios no wider than a few human hairs, he thinks these lenses can augment reality and incidentally eliminate the need for displays on phones, PCs, and widescreen TVs”. Explained further in other sources, the technology entails an antenna, circuits embedded into a contact lens, GPS, and an LED to project images on the eye, creating a virtual display (Solve for X). Wi-Fi would stream content through a transparent screen over the eye. One patent describes a camera embedded in the lens (Etherington). Another mentions medical sensing, such as glucose monitoring of tears (Goldman). In other words, Google proposes an imagined future when we use contact lenses to search the Internet (and be searched by it), shop online, communicate with friends, work, navigate maps, swipe through Tinder, monitor our health, watch television, and, by that time, probably engage in a host of activities not yet invented. Often referred to as a bionic contact, the smart contact lens would signal a weighty shift in the way we work, socialize, and frame our online identities. However, speculative discussion over this radical shift in personal computing, rarely if ever, includes consideration of how the body, acting as a host to digital information, will manage to assimilate not only significant affordances, but also significant constraints and vulnerabilities. At this point, for most people, the smart contact lens is just an idea. Is a new medium of communication started when it is launched in an advertising campaign? When we Like it on Facebook? If we chat about it during a party amongst friends? Or, do a critical mass of people actually have to be using it to say it has started? One might say that Apple’s Macintosh computer started as a media platform when the world heard about the famous 1984 television advertisement aired during the American NFL Super Bowl of that year. Directed by Ridley Scott, the ad entails an athlete running down a passageway and hurling a hammer at a massive screen depicting cold war style rulers expounding state propaganda. The screen explodes freeing those imprisoned from their concentration camp existence. The direct reference to Orwell’s 1984 serves as a metaphor for IBM in 1984. PC users were made analogous to political prisoners and IBM served to represent the totalitarian government. The Mac became a something that, at the time, challenged IBM, and suggested an alternative use for the desktop computer that had previously been relegated for work rather than life. Not everyone bought a Mac, but the polemical ad fostered the idea that Mac was certainly the start of new expectations, civic identities, value-systems, and personal uses for computers. The smart contact lens is another startling start. News of it shocks us, initiates social media clicks and forwards, and instigates dialogue. But, it also indicates the start of a new media paradigm that is already undergoing popular adoption as it is announced in mainstream news and circulated algorithmically across media channels. Since 2008, news outlets like CNN, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Asian International News, United News of India, The Times of London and The Washington Post have carried it, feeding the buzz in circulation that Google intends. Attached to the wave of current popular interest generated around any technology claiming to be “wearable,” a smart contact lens also seems surreptitious. We would no longer hold smartphones, but hide all of that digital functionality beneath our eyelids. Its emergence reveals the way commercial models have dramatically changed. The smart contact lens is a futuristic invention imagined for us and about us, but also a sensationalized idea socializing us to a future that includes it. It is also a real device that Parviz (with Google) has been inventing, promoting, and patenting for commercial applications. All of these workings speak to a broader digital culture phenomenon. We argue that the smart contact lens discloses a process of nascent posthuman adaptation, launched in an era that celebrates wearable media as simultaneously astonishing and banal. More specifically, we adopt technology based on our adaptation to it within our personal, political, medial, social, and biological contexts, which also function in a state of flux. N. Katherine Hayles writes that “Contemporary technogenesis, like evolution in general, is not about progress ... rather, contemporary technogenesis is about adaptation, the fit between organisms and their environments, recognizing that both sides of the engagement (human and technologies) are undergoing coordinated transformations” (81). This article attends to the idea that in these early stages, symbolic acts of adaptation signal an emergent medium through rhetorical processes that society both draws from and contributes to. In terms of project scope, this article contributes a focused analysis to a much larger ongoing digital rhetoric project. For the larger project, we conducted a discourse analysis on a collection of international publications concerning Babak Parviz and the invention. We searched for and collected newspaper stories, news broadcasts, YouTube videos from various sources, academic journal publications, inventors’ conference presentations, and advertising, all published between January 2008 and May 2014, generating a corpus of more than 600 relevant artifacts. Shortly after this time, Dr. Parviz, a Professor at the University of Washington, left the secretive GoogleX lab and joined Amazon.com (Mac). For this article we focus specifically on the idea of beginnings or genesis and how digital spaces increasingly serve as the grounds for emergent digital cultural phenomena that are rarely recognized as starting points. We searched through the corpus to identify a few exemplary international mainstream news stories to foreground predominant tropes in support of the claim we make that smart contacts lenses are a startling idea. Content producers deliberately use astonishment as a persuasive device. We characterize the idea of a smart contact lens cast in rhetorical terms in order to reveal how its allure works as a process of adaptation. Rhetorician and philosopher, Kenneth Burke writes that “rhetorical language is inducement to action (or to attitude)” (42). A rhetorical approach is instrumental because it offers a model to explain how we deploy, often times, manipulative meaning as senders and receivers while negotiating highly complex constellations of resources and contexts. Burke’s rhetorical theory can show how messages influence and become influenced by powerful hierarchies in discourse that seem transparent or neutral, ones that seem to fade into the background of our consciousness. For this article, we also concentrate on rhetorical devices such as ethos and the inventor’s own appeals through different modes of communication. Ethos was originally proposed by Aristotle to identify speaker credibility as a persuasive tactic. Addressed by scholars of rhetoric for centuries, ethos has been reconfigured by many critical theorists (Burke; Baumlin Ethos; Hyde). Baumlin and Baumlin suggest that “ethos describes an audience’s projection of authority and trustworthiness onto the speaker ... ethos suggests that the ethical appeal to be a radically psychological event situated in the mental processes of the audience – as belonging as much to the audience as to the actual character of a speaker” (Psychology 99). Discussed in the next section, our impression of Parviz and his position as inventor plays a dramatic role in the surfacing of the smart contact lens. Digital Rhetoric is an “emerging scholarly discipline concerned with the interpretation of computer-generated media as objects of study” (Losh 48). In an era when machine-learning algorithms become the messengers for our messages, which have become commodity items operating across globalized, capitalist networks, digital rhetoric provides a stable model for our approach. It leads us to demonstrate how this emergent medium and invention, the smart contact lens, is born amid new digital genres of speculative communication circulated in the everyday forums we engage on a daily basis. Smart Contact Lenses, Sensationalism, and Identity One relevant site for exploration into how an invention gains ethos is through writing or video penned or produced by the inventor. An article authored by Parviz in 2009 discusses his invention and the technical advancements that need to be made before the smart contact lens could work. He opens the article using a fictional and sensationalized analogy to encourage the adoption of his invention: The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.But why stop there?In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field—virtual captions that enhance the cyborg’s scan of a scene. In stories by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes. Identity building is made to correlate with smart contact lenses in a manner that frames them as exciting. Coming to terms with them often involves casting us as superhumans, wielding abilities that we do not currently possess. One reason for embellishment is because we do not need digital displays on the eyes, so the motive to use them must always be geared to transcending our assumed present condition as humans and society members. Consequently, imagination is used to justify a shift in human identity along a future trajectory.This passage above also instantiates a transformation from humanist to posthumanist posturing (i.e. “the cyborg”) in order to incent the adoption of smart contact lenses. It begins with the bold declarative statement, “The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse,” which is a comforting claim about our seemingly human superiority. Indexing abstract humanist values, Parviz emphasizes skills we already possess, including seeing a plethora of colours, adjusting to light on the fly, and thinking fast, indeed faster than “a high-speed Internet connection”. However, the text goes on to summon the Terminator character and his optic feats from the franchise of films. Filmic cyborg characters fulfill the excitement that posthuman rhetoric often seems to demand, but there is more here than sensationalism. Parviz raises the issue of augmenting human vision using science fiction as his contextualizing vehicle because he lacks another way to imbricate the idea. Most interesting in this passage is the inventor’s query “But why stop there?” to yoke the two claims, one biological (i.e., “The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse”) and one fictional (i.e. Terminator, Vernor Vinge characters). The query suggests, Why stop with human superiority, we may as well progress to the next level and embrace a smart contact lens just as fictional cyborgs do. The non-threatening use of fiction makes the concept seem simultaneously exciting and banal, especially because the inventor follows with a clear description of the necessary scientific engineering in the rest of the article. This rhetorical act signifies the voice of a technoelite, a heavily-funded cohort responding to global capitalist imperatives armed with a team of technologists who can access technological advancements and imbue comments with an authority that may extend beyond their fields of expertise, such as communication studies, sociology, psychology, or medicine. The result is a powerful ethos. The idea behind the smart contact lens maintains a degree of respectability long before a public is invited to use it.Parviz exhumes much cultural baggage when he brings to life the Terminator character to pitch smart contact lenses. The Terminator series of films has established the “Arnold Schwarzenegger” character a cultural mainstay. Each new film reinvented him, but ultimately promoted him within a convincing dystopian future across the whole series: The Terminator (Cameron), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Mostow), Terminator Salvation (McG) and Terminator Genisys (Taylor) (which appeared in 2015 after Parviz’s article). Recently, several writers have addressed how cyborg characters figure significantly in our cultural psyche (Haraway, Bukatman; Leaver). Tama Leaver’s Artificial Culture explores the way popular, contemporary, cinematic, science fiction depictions of embodied Artificial Intelligence, such as the Terminator cyborgs, “can act as a matrix which, rather than separating or demarcating minds and bodies or humanity and the digital, reinforce the symbiotic connection between people, bodies, and technologies” (31). Pointing out the violent and ultimately technophobic motive of The Terminator films, Leaver reads across them to conclude nevertheless that science fiction “proves an extremely fertile context in which to address the significance of representations of Artificial Intelligence” (63).Posthumanism and TechnogenesisOne reason this invention enters the public’s consciousness is its announcement alongside a host of other technologies, which seem like parts of a whole. We argue that this constant grouping of technologies in the news is one process indicative of technogenesis. For example, City A.M., London’s largest free commuter daily newspaper, reports on the future of business technology as a hodgepodge of what ifs: As Facebook turns ten, and with Bill Gates stepping down as Microsoft chairman, it feels like something is drawing to an end. But if so, it is only the end of the technological revolution’s beginning ... Try to look ahead ten years from now and the future is dark. Not because it is bleak, but because the sheer profusion of potential is blinding. Smartphones are set to outnumber PCs within months. After just a few more years, there are likely to be 3bn in use across the planet. In ten years, who knows – wearables? smart contact lenses? implants? And that’s just the start. The Internet of Things is projected to be a $300bn (£183bn) industry by 2020. (Sidwell) This reporting is a common means to frame the commodification of technology in globalized business news that seeks circulation as much as it does readership. But as a text, it also posits how individuals frame the future and their participation with it (Pedersen). Smart contacts appear to move along this exciting, unstoppable trajectory where the “potential is blinding”. The motive is to excite and scare. However, simultaneously, the effect is predictable. We are quite accustomed to this march of innovations that appears everyday in the morning paper. We are asked to adapt rather than question, consequently, we never separate the parts from the whole (e.g., “wearables? smart contact lenses? Implants”) in order to look at them critically.In coming to terms with Cary Wolf’s definition of posthumanism, Greg Pollock writes that posthumanism is the questioning that goes on “when we can no longer rely on ‘the human’ as an autonomous, rational being who provides an Archimedean point for knowing about the world (in contrast to “humanism,” which uses such a figure to ground further claims)” (208). With similar intent, N. Katherine Hayles formulating the term technogenesis suggests that we are not really progressing to another level of autonomous human existence when we adopt media, we are in effect, adapting to media and media are also in a process of adapting to us. She writes: As digital media, including networked and programmable desktop stations, mobile devices, and other computational media embedded in the environment, become more pervasive, they push us in the direction of faster communication, more intense and varied information streams, more integration of humans and intelligent machines, and more interactions of language with code. These environmental changes have significant neurological consequences, many of which are now becoming evident in young people and to a lesser degree in almost everyone who interacts with digital media on a regular basis. (11) Following Hayles, three actions or traits characterize adaptation in a manner germane to the technogenesis of media like smart contact lenses. The first is “media embedded in the environment”. The trait of embedding technology in the form of sensors and chips into external spaces evokes the onset of The Internet of Things (IoT) foundations. Extensive data-gathering sensors, wireless technologies, mobile and wearable components integrated with the Internet, all contribute to the IoT. Emerging from cloud computing infrastructures and data models, The IoT, in its most extreme, involves a scenario whereby people, places, animals, and objects are given unique “embedded” identifiers so that they can embark on constant data transfer over a network. In a sense, the lenses are adapted artifacts responding to a world that expects ubiquitous networked access for both humans and machines. Smart contact lenses will essentially be attached to the user who must adapt to these dynamic and heavily mediated contexts.Following closely on the first, the second point Hayles makes is “integration of humans and intelligent machines”. The camera embedded in the smart contact lens, really an adapted smartphone camera, turns the eye itself into an image capture device. By incorporating them under the eyelids, smart contact lenses signify integration in complex ways. Human-machine amalgamation follows biological, cognitive, and social contexts. Third, Hayles points to “more interactions of language with code.” We assert that with smart contact lenses, code will eventually govern interaction between countless agents in accordance with other smart devices, such as: (1) exchanges of code between people and external nonhuman networks of actors through machine algorithms and massive amalgamations of big data distributed on the Internet;(2) exchanges of code amongst people, human social actors in direct communication with each other over social media; and (3) exchanges of coding and decoding between people and their own biological processes (e.g. monitoring breathing, consuming nutrients, translating brainwaves) and phenomenological (but no less material) practices (e.g., remembering, grieving, or celebrating). The allure of the smart contact lens is the quietly pressing proposition that communication models such as these will be radically transformed because they will have to be adapted to use with the human eye, as the method of input and output of information. Focusing on genetic engineering, Eugene Thacker fittingly defines biomedia as “entail[ing] the informatic recontextualization of biological components and processes, for ends that may be medical or nonmedical (economic, technical) and with effects that are as much cultural, social, and political as they are scientific” (123). He specifies, “biomedia are not computers that simply work on or manipulate biological compounds. Rather, the aim is to provide the right conditions, such that biological life is able to demonstrate or express itself in a particular way” (123). Smart contact lenses sit on the cusp of emergence as a biomedia device that will enable us to decode bodily processes in significant new ways. The bold, technical discourse that announces it however, has not yet begun to attend to the seemingly dramatic “cultural, social, and political” effects percolating under the surface. Through technogenesis, media acclimatizes rapidly to change without establishing a logic of the consequences, nor a design plan for emergence. Following from this, we should mention issues such as the intrusion of surveillance algorithms deployed by corporations, governments, and other hegemonic entities that this invention risks. If smart contact lenses are biomedia devices inspiring us to decode bodily processes and communicate that data for analysis, for ourselves, and others in our trust (e.g., doctors, family, friends), we also need to be wary of them. David Lyon warns: Surveillance has spilled out of its old nation-state containers to become a feature of everyday life, at work, at home, at play, on the move. So far from the single all-seeing eye of Big Brother, myriad agencies now trace and track mundane activities for a plethora of purposes. Abstract data, now including video, biometric, and genetic as well as computerized administrative files, are manipulated to produce profiles and risk categories in a liquid, networked system. The point is to plan, predict, and prevent by classifying and assessing those profiles and risks. (13) In simple terms, the smart contact lens might disclose the most intimate information we possess and leave us vulnerable to profiling, tracking, and theft. Irma van der Ploeg presupposed this predicament when she wrote: “The capacity of certain technologies to change the boundary, not just between what is public and private information but, on top of that, between what is inside and outside the human body, appears to leave our normative concepts wanting” (71). The smart contact lens, with its implied motive to encode and disclose internal bodily information, needs considerations on many levels. Conclusion The smart contact lens has made a digital beginning. We accept it through the mass consumption of the idea, which acts as a rhetorical motivator for media adoption, taking place long before the device materializes in the marketplace. This occurrence may also be a sign of our “posthuman predicament” (Braidotti). We have argued that the smart contact lens concept reveals our posthuman adaptation to media rather than our reasoned acceptance or agreement with it as a logical proposition. By the time we actually squabble over the price, express fears for our privacy, and buy them, smart contact lenses will long be part of our everyday culture. References Baumlin, James S., and Tita F. Baumlin. “On the Psychology of the Pisteis: Mapping the Terrains of Mind and Rhetoric.” Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Eds. James S. Baumlin and Tita F. Baumlin. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994. 91-112. Baumlin, James S., and Tita F. Baumlin, eds. Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994. Bilton, Nick. “A Rose-Colored View May Come Standard.” The New York Times, 4 Apr. 2012. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Cameron, James, dir. The Terminator. Orion Pictures, 1984. DVD. Cameron, James, dir. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Artisan Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Etherington, Darrell. “Google Patents Tiny Cameras Embedded in Contact Lenses.” TechCrunch, 14 Apr. 2014. Goldman, David. “Google to Make Smart Contact Lenses.” CNN Money 17 Jan. 2014. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012. Hyde, Michael. The Ethos of Rhetoric. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Leaver, Tama. Artificial Culture: Identity, Technology, and Bodies. New York: Routledge, 2012. Losh, Elizabeth. Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes. Boston: MIT Press. 2009. Lyon, David, ed. Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. New York: Routledge, 2003. Mac, Ryan. “Amazon Lures Google Glass Creator Following Phone Launch.” Forbes.com, 14 July 2014. McG, dir. Terminator Salvation. Warner Brothers, 2009. DVD. Mostow, Jonathan, dir. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Warner Brothers, 2003. DVD. Parviz, Babak A. “Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens.” IEEE Spectrum, 1 Sep. 2009. Pedersen, Isabel. Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media. Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor Press, 2013. Pollock, Greg. “What Is Posthumanism by Cary Wolfe (2009).” Rev. of What is Posthumanism?, by Cary Wolfe. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9.1/2 (2011): 235-241. Sidwell, Marc. “The Long View: Bill Gates Is Gone and the Dot-com Era Is Over: It's Only the End of the Beginning.” City A.M., 7 Feb. 2014. “Solve for X: Babak Parviz on Building Microsystems on the Eye.” YouTube, 7 Feb. 2012. Taylor, Alan, dir. Terminator: Genisys. Paramount Pictures, 2015. DVD. Thacker, Eugene “Biomedia.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T Mitchell and Mark Hansen, Chicago: Chicago Press, 2010. 117-130. Van der Ploeg, Irma. “Biometrics and the Body as Information.” Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. Ed. David Lyon. New York: Routledge, 2003. 57-73. Wired Staff. “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World.” Wired.com, 17 Jan. 2013.

Taste and Lively Matter in the Anthropocene This paper is concerned with the role of taste in relation to food produced in backyard or community gardens. Taste, as outlined by Bourdieu, is constructed by many factors driven primarily by one’s economic position as well as certain cultural influences. Such arguments tend to work against a naïve reading of the “natural” attributes of food and the biological impulses and responses humans have to taste. Instead, within these frameworks, taste is positioned as a product of the machinations of human society. Along these lines, it is generally accepted that the economic and, consequently, the social shaping of tastes today have been significantly impacted on by the rise of international agribusiness throughout the twentieth century. These processes have greatly reduced the varieties of food commercially available due to an emphasis on economies of scale that require the production of food that can be grown in monocultures and which can withstand long transport times (Norberg-Hodge, Thrupp, Shiva). Of course, there are also other factors at play in relation to taste that give rise to distinction between classes. This includes the ways in which we perform our bodies and shape them in the face of our social and economic conditions. Many studies in this area focus on eating disorders and how control of food intake cannot be read simply as examples of disciplined or deviant bodies (Bordo, Probyn, Ferreday). Instead, the links between food and subjectivity are much more complex. However, despite the contradictions and nuance acknowledged in relation to understandings of food, it is primarily conceptualised as an economic and symbolic good that is controlled by humans and human informed processes. In line with the above observations, literature on food provisioning choices in the areas of food sociology and human geography tends to focus on efforts to understand food purchasing decisions and eating habits. There is a strong political-economic dimension to this research even when its cultural-symbolic value is acknowledged. This is highlighted by the work of Julie Guthman which, among other things, explores “the conversion of tastes into commodities (as well as the reverse)” (“Commodified” 296). Guthman’s analysis of alternative food networks, particularly the organic sector and farmers markets, has tended to reaffirm a Bourdieuan understanding of class and distinction whereby certain foods become appropriated by elites, driving up price and removing it from the reach of ordinary consumers (“Commodified”, “Fast Food”). There has also been, however, some recognition of the limits of such approaches and acknowledgement of the fragility and porous nature of boundaries in the food arena. For example, Jordan points out in her study of the heirloom tomato that, even when a food is appropriated by elites, thereby significantly increasing its cost, consumption of the food and its cultural-symbolic meaning can continue unchanged by those who have traditionally produced and consumed the food privately in their gardens. Guthman is quite right to highlight the presence of huge inequities in both mainstream and alternative food systems throughout the world. Food may, however, be able to disrupt the dominance of these economic and social representations through its very own agentic qualities. To explore this idea, this paper draws on the work of political theorist, Jane Bennett, and eco-feminist, Val Plumwood, and applies some of their key insights to data gathered through in-depth interviews with 20 community gardeners and 7 Canberra Show exhibitors carried out from 2009 to 2012. These interviews were approximately 1 to 2 hours long in duration and were carried out in, or following, an extensive tour of the gardens of the participants, during which tastings of the produce were regularly offered to the interviewers. Jane Bennett sets out to develop a theoretical approach which she names “thing-power materialism” which is grounded in the idea that objects, including food, have agency (354). Bennett conceptualises this idea through her notion of “lively matter” and the “thing power” of objects which she defines as “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (“The force” 351, “Vibrant”). The basic idea here is that if we are willing to read agency into the nonhuman things around us, then we become forced to recognise that humans are simply one more element of a world of things which can act on, with or against others through various assemblages (Deleuze and Guatarri). These assemblages can be made, undone and rebuilt in multiple ways. The power of the elements to act within these may not be equal, but nor are they stable and static. For Bennett, this is not simply a return to previous materialist theories premised on naïve notions of object agency. It is, instead, a theory motivated by attempts to develop understandings and strategies that encourage engaged ecological living practices which seek to avoid ongoing human-inflicted environmental damage caused by the “master rationality” (Plumwood) that has fuelled the era of the anthropocene, the first geological era shaped by human action. Anthropocentric thinking and its assumptions of human superiority and separateness to other elements of our ecological mesh (Morton “Thinking”) has been identified as fuelling wasteful, exploitative, environmentally damaging practices. It acts as a key impediment to the embrace of attitudinal and behavioural changes that could promote more ecologically responsible and sustainable living practices. These ideas are particularly prominent in the fields of ecological humanities, ecological feminism and political theory (Bennett “The force”, “Vibrant”; Morton “Ecological”, “Thinking”, “Ecology”; Plumwood). To redress these issues and reduce further human-inflicted environmental damage, work in these spaces tends to highlight the importance of identifying the interconnections and mutual reliance between humans and nonhumans in order to sustain life. Thus, this work challenges the “master rationality” of the anthropocene by highlighting the agentic (Bennett “The force,” “Vibrant”) or actant (Latour) qualities of nonhumans. In this spirit, Plumwood writes that we need to develop “an environmental culture that values and fully acknowledges the nonhuman sphere and our dependency on it, and is able to make good decisions about how we live and impact on the nonhuman world” (3). Food, as a basic human need, and its very gustatory taste, is animated by nonhuman elements. The role of these nonhumans is particularly visible to those who engage in their own gardening practices. As such, the ways in which gardeners understand and speak of these processes may provide insights into how an environmental culture as envisaged by Plumwood could be supported, harnessed and shared. The brevity of this paper means only a quick skim of the murky ontological waters into which its wades can be provided. The overarching aim is to identify how the recent resurgence of cultural materiality can be linked to the ways in which everyday people conceptualise and articulate their food provisioning practices. In so doing, it demonstrates that gardeners can conceptualise their food, and the biological processes as well as the nonhuman labour which bring it to fruition, as having actant qualities. This is most overtly recognised through the gardeners’ discussions of how their daily habits and routines alter in response to the qualities and “needs” of their food producing gardens. The gardeners do not express this in a strict nature/culture binary. Instead, they indicate an awareness of the interconnectedness and mutual reliance of the human and nonhuman worlds. In this way, understandings of “taste,” as produced by human centred relations predicated on exchange of capital, are being rethought. This rethinking may offer ways of promoting a more sustainable engagement with ecological beliefs and behaviours which work against the very notion of human dominance that produced the era of the anthropocene. Local Food, Taste and Nonhuman Agency Recent years have seen an increase in the purchasing, sale and growing of local food. This has materialised in multiple forms from backyard, verge and community gardens to the significant growth of farmers markets. Such shifts are attributed to increasing resistance to the privileging of globalised and industrial-scale agri-business, practices which highlight the “master rationality” underpinning the anthropocene. This backlash has been linked to environmental motivations (Seyfang “Shopping,” “Ecological,” “Growing”); desires to support local economies (particularly the financial well-being of farmers) (Norberg-Hodge); and health concerns in relation to the use of chemicals in food production (Goodman and Goodman). Despite evidence that people grow or buy food based on gustatory taste, this has received less overt attention as a motivator for food provisioning practices in the literature (Hugner). Where it is examined, taste is generally seen as a social/cultural phenomenon shaped by the ideas related to the environmental, economic and health concerns mentioned above. However, when consumers discuss taste they also refer to notions of freshness, the varieties of food that are available, and nostalgia for the “way food used to be”. Taste in its gustatory sense and pleasure from food consumption is alluded to in all of the interviews carried out for this research. While the reasons for gardening are multiple and varied, there is a common desire to produce food that tastes better and, thus, induces greater pleasure than purchased food. As one backyard gardener and successful Royal Canberra Show exhibitor notes: “[e]verything that you put [grow] in the garden [has a] better taste than from the market or from the shop.” The extent of this difference was often a surprise for the gardeners: “I never knew a home grown potato could taste so different from a shop bought potato until I grew [my own] […] and I couldn’t believe the taste.” The gardeners in this research all agreed that the taste of commercially available fruit and vegetables was inferior to self-produced food. This was attributed to the multiple characteristics of industrialised food systems. Participants referred specifically to issues ranging from reduction in the varieties available to the chemical intensive practices designed to lead to high yields in short periods of time. The resulting poor taste of such foods was exemplified by comments such as shop bought tomatoes “don’t taste like tomatoes” and the belief that “[p]otatoes and strawberries from the shop taste the same as each other”. Even when gardeners raised health concerns about mainstream food, emphasising their delight in growing their own because they “knew what had gone into their food” (Turner, “Embodied”), the issue of taste continued to play an important role in influencing their gardening practices. One gardener stated: “I prefer more [food that] is tasty than one that is healthy for me”. The tastiest food for her came from her own community garden plot and this motivated her to travel across town most days to tend the garden. While tasty food was often seen as being more nutritious, this was not the key driver in food production. The superior taste of the fruit and vegetables grown by these gardeners in Canberra calls their bodies and minds into action to avoid poor tasting food. This desire for tasty food was viewed as common to the general population but was strongly identified as only being accessible to people who grow their own. A backyard gardener, speaking of the residents of an aged care facility where he volunteers observes: “[w]hen you…meet these people they've lost that ability to do any gardening and they really express it. They miss the taste, the flavours.” Another backyard gardener and Show exhibitor recounted a story from two years prior when he and his wife invited guests for a New Year’s Day lunch. While eating their meal, a guest asked “did you grow these carrots?” When he confirmed that he had, she declared: “I can taste it.” Others noted that many young people don’t know what they are missing out on because they have never tasted home-grown produce. Through the sense of taste, the tomatoes, potatoes and carrots and myriad of other foodstuffs grown at homes or in community gardens actively encourage resistance to, or questioning of, the industrial agricultural system and its outputs. The gardeners link poor tasting food to a loss of human responsiveness to plants resulting from the spatial characteristics of industrial agriculture. Modern agribusiness requires large-scale, global production and streamlined agricultural processes that aim to limit the need for producers to respond to unique climatic and soil conditions (through genetically modification technology, see Turner, “Reflections”) and removes the need, and capacity, for individual care of plants. This has led to heavy reliance on agricultural chemicals. The gardeners tend to link high-level usage of pesticides and herbicides with poor taste. One highly successful Show exhibitor, states that in his food, “There’s better taste …because they haven’t got the chemicals in them, not much spray, not much fertiliser, for that is better”. However, when chemical use is limited or removed, the gardeners acknowledge that food plants require more intensive and responsive human care. This involves almost daily inspection of individual plants to pick off and squash (or feed to chickens and birds) the harmful bugs. The gardeners need to be vigilant and capable of developing innovative techniques to ensure the survival of their plants and the production of tasty food. They are, of course, not always successful. One organic community gardener lamented the rising populations of slaters and earwigs which could decimate whole beds of newly sprouted seedlings overnight. This was a common issue and, in response, the gardeners research and trial new methods of control (including encouraging the introduction of “good” bugs into the ecosystem through particular plantings). Ultimately, however, the gardeners were resigned to “learn[ing] to live with them [the ‘bad’ bugs]” while exerting regular bodily and mental efforts to reduce their populations and maximise their own food production. The lack of ultimate control over their growing patch, and the food it could produce, was acknowledged by the gardeners. There was an awareness and understanding of the role nonhuman elements play in food production, ranging from weather conditions to soil microbes to bugs. The gardeners talk of how their care-giving is responsive to these elements. As one community gardener asserts: “…we prefer to … garden in a way that naturally strengthens the plant immune system.” This involves regular attention to soil microbes and the practice of what was referred to as “homeopathic” gardening. Through a responsive approach to the “needs” of plants, the soil, and other nonhuman elements, the plants then delivered “vitamins and minerals” to the gardeners, packaged in tasty food. The tastiest foods ensured their survival through seed-saving practices: “[i]f something tastes good, we’ll save the seed from it”. In this way, the plant’s taste encourages gardeners to invest their human labour to secure its future. The production of tasty food was understood to be reliant on collaborative, iterative and ongoing efforts between human and nonhuman elements. While gardening has often been represented as an attempt to bend nature to the will of humans (Power), the gardeners in this study spoke about working with nature in their quest to produce good tasting food. This was particularly evident in the interviews with gardeners who exhibit produce in the Canberra Show (see NMA for further details). However, despite the fact that taste is the key motivator for growing their own food, it is not a factor in Show judging. Instead, fruit and vegetable entries (those not turned into value added goods such as jams or relishes) are judged on appearance. While this focus on appearance tends to perpetuate the myth that the fruits and vegetables we consume should conform to an ideal type that are blemish free and uniform in size (just as is prized in industrialised agriculture), the act of gardening for the Show and the process of selecting produce to enter, contradicted this assumption. Instead, entering the Show seemed to reinforce awareness of the limits of human control over nature and emphasise the very agency of nonhuman elements. This is highlighted by one exhibitor and community gardener who states: I suppose you grow vegetables for the enjoyment of eating them, but there’s also that side of getting enough and perfecting the vegetables and getting… sometimes it’s all down to the day of whether you’ve got three of something, if it’s the right size and colour and so I’ll enter it [in the Show] on the day instead of putting an entry form in before …you just don’t know what you’re going to have, the bugs decide to eat this or the mice get it or something. There’s always something. In this way, where “there’s always something” waiting to disrupt a gardener’s best laid plans, the exhibitors involved in this project seem to be acutely aware of the agency of nonhumans. In these interviews there is evidence that nonhuman elements act on the gardeners, forcing them to alter their behaviours and engage with plants to meet both of their needs. While perfect specimens can sometimes be grown for the Show, the gardeners acknowledge that this can only be done with an element of luck and careful cultivation of the partnership between human and nonhuman elements in the garden. And, even then, you never know what might happen. This lack of ultimate control is part of the challenge and, thus, the appeal, of competing in the Show. Conclusion The era of the anthropocene demonstrates the consequences of human blindness to ecological matters. Myths of human supremacy and a failure to respect nonhuman elements have fuelled a destructive and wasteful mentality that is having serious consequences for our environment. This has prompted efforts to identify new environmental cultures to promote the adoption of more sustainable lifestyles. The resurgence of cultural materialism and the agentic capacity of objects is one key way in which this is being explored as a means of promoting new ethical approaches to how humans live their lives enmeshed with nonhumans. Food, as a basic necessity, provides a key way in which the interconnected relationships between humans and nonhumans can be brought to the fore. Taste, as a biological response and organic attribute of foodstuffs, can induce humans to act. It can cause us to alter our daily habits, behaviours and beliefs. Perhaps a more attentive approach to food, its taste and how it is produced could provide a framework for rethinking human/nature relations by emphasising the very limits of human control. References Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Bennett, Jane. “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter.” Political Theory 32.3 (2004): 347–372. ---. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Ferreday, Donna. “Unspeakable Bodies: Erasure, Embodiment and the Pro-Ana Community.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (2003): 277–295. Goodman, David, and Michael Goodman. “Alternative Food networks.” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Ed. R. Kitchin and N. Thrift. Oxford: Elsevier, 2008. Guthman, Julie. “Commodified Meanings, Meaningful Commodities: Re–thinking Production–Consumption Links through the Organic System of Provision.” Sociologia Ruralis 42.4 (2002): 295–311. ---. “Fast Food/Organic Food: Reflexive Tastes and the Making of ‘Yuppie Chow’.” Social and Cultural Geography 4.1 (2003): 45–58. Hugner, Renee. S., Pierre McDonagh, Andrea Prothero, Clifford J. Scultz, and Julie Stanton. “Who Are Organic Food Consumers?: A Compilation And Review Of Why People Purchase Organic Food.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 6.2–3 (2007): 94–110. Jordan, Jennifer A. “The Heirloom Tomato as Cultural Object: Investigating Taste and Space.” Sociologia Ruralis 47.1 (2007): 20–41. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1987. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. ---. “Thinking Ecology, the Mesh, the Strange Stranger and the Beautiful Soul.” Collapse VI (2010): 265–293. ---. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. National Museum of Australia Urban Farming and the Agricultural Show. 12 Mar. 2014. ‹http://www.nma.gov.au/online_features/urban_farming_agricultural_show/home›. Norberg-Hodge, Helena. “Beyond the Monoculture: Strengthening Local Culture, Economy and Knowledge.” The Journal of Sustainability Education. 19 Mar. 2012. 13 Mar. 2014 ‹http://www.jsedimensions.org/wordpress/content/beyond-the-monoculture-strengthening-local-culture-economy-and-knowledge_2012_03›. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Power, Emma. “Human-Nature Relations in Suburban Gardens.” Australian Geographer 36.1 (2005): 39–53. Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Foodsexidentites. London: Routledge, 2000. Seyfang, Gil. “Shopping for Sustainability: Can Sustainable Consumption Promote Ecological Citizenship?”. Environmental Politics 14.2 (2005): 290–306. -----. “Ecological Citizenship and Sustainable Consumption: Examining Local Organic Food Networks.” Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006): 383–395. -----. “Growing Sustainable Consumption Communities: The Case Of Local Organic Food Networks.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 27.3/4 (2007): 120–134. Shiva, Vandana. Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Cambridge, MA: South End P, 2000. Thrupp, Lori Ann. “Linking Agricultural Biodiversity and Food Security.” International Affairs 76.2 (2000): 265–282. Turner, Bethaney. “Embodied Connections: Sustainability, Food Systems And Community Gardens.” Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 16.6 (2011): 509-522. ---. “Reflections On a New Technology”. National Museum of Australia 2012. 12 Mar. 2014. ‹http://www.nma.gov.au/history/pate/objects/collection_reflections/genetically_modified_food_and_farming›. Acknowledgements Thank you to the gardeners who volunteered to be part of this study. The interviews related to the Royal Canberra Show were carried out as part of a collaborative project between the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra (Joanna Henryks and Bethaney Turner) and the People and the Environment team (George Main and Kirsten Wehner) at the National Museum of Australia.

IntroductionCroquembouche, blast chillers, and plating up—these terms have become normal to ordinary Australians despite Adriano Zumbo’s croquembouche recipe taking more than two hours to complete and blast chillers costing thousands of dollars. Network Ten’s reality talent quest MasterChef Australia (MCA) has brought fine dining and “foodie” culture to a mass audience who have responded enthusiastically. Vicariously “tasting” this once niche lifestyle is empowering viewers to integrate aspects of “foodie” culture into their everyday lives. It helps them become “everyday foodies.” “Everyday foodies” are individuals who embrace and incorporate an appreciation of gourmet food culture into their existing lifestyles, but feel limited by time, money, health, or confidence. So while a croquembouche and blast chiller may be beyond a MCA viewer’s reach, these aspects of “foodie” culture can still be enjoyed via the program. The rise of the “everyday foodie” challenges criticisms of vicarious consumption and negative discourses about reality and lifestyle television. Examining the very different and specific ways in which three MCA-viewing households vicariously experience gourmet food in their adoption of the “everyday foodie” lifestyle will demonstrate the positive value of vicarious consumption through reality and lifestyle programming. A brief background on the MCA phenomenon will be provided before a review of existing literature regarding vicarious consumption and tensions in the reality and lifestyle television field. Three case studies of MCA-viewing households who use vicarious consumption to satisfy “foodie” cravings and broaden their cultural tastes will be presented. Adapted from the United Kingdom’s MasterChef, which has aired since 1990, MCA has proven to be a catalyst for the “cheffing up” of the nation’s food culture. Twenty-odd amateur cooks compete in a series of challenges, guided, and critiqued by judges George Calombaris, Gary Mehigan, and Matt Preston. Contestants are eliminated as they move through a series of challenges, until one cook remains and is crowned the Master Chef of that series. Network Ten’s launch of MCA in 2009 capitalised on the popularity of reality talent quests that grew throughout the 2000s with programs such as Popstars (2000–2002), Australian Idol (2003–2009), X Factor (2005, 2010–) and Australia’s Got Talent (2007–). MCA also captures Australian viewers’ penchant for lifestyle shows including Better Homes and Gardens (1995–), Burke’s Backyard (1987-2004), The Living Room (2012–) and The Block (2003–2004, 2010–). The popularity of these shows, however, does not match the heights of MCA, which has transformed the normal cooking show audience of 200,000 into millions (Greenwood). MCA’s 2010 finale is Australia’s highest rating non-sporting program since OzTAM ratings were introduced in 2001 (Vickery). Anticipating this episode’s popularity, the 2010 Federal Election debate was moved to 6.30pm from its traditional Sunday 7.30pm timeslot (Coorey; Malkin). As well as attracting extensive press coverage and attention in opinion pieces and blogs, the level of academic attention MCA has already received underscores the show’s significance. So far, Lewis (Labours) and Seale have critiqued the involvement of ordinary people as contestants on the show while Phillipov (Communicating, Mastering) explores tensions within the show from a public health angle. While de Solier (TV Dinners, Making the Self, Foodie Makeovers) and Rousseau’s research does not focus on MCA itself, their investigation of Australian foodies and the impact of food media respectively provide relevant discussion about audience relationships with food media and food culture. This article focuses on how audiences use MCA and related programs. Vicarious consumption is presented as a negative practice where the leisure class benefit from another’s productivity (Veblen). Belk presents the simple example that “if our friend lives in an extravagant house or drives an extravagant car, we feel just a bit more extravagant ourselves” (157). Therefore, consuming through another is viewed as a passive activity. In the context of vicariously consuming through MCA, it could be argued that audiences are gaining satisfaction from watching others develop culinary skills and produce gourmet meals. What this article will reveal is that while MCA viewers do gain this satisfaction, they use it in a productive way to discipline their own eating and spending habits, and to allow them to engage with “foodie” culture when it may not otherwise be possible. Rather than embrace the opportunity to understand a new culture or lifestyle, critics of reality and lifestyle television dismiss the empowering qualities of these programs for two reasons. The practice of “advertainment” (Deery 1)—fusing selling and entertainment—puts pressure on, or excludes, the aspirational classes who want, but lack the resources to adopt, the depicted lifestyle (Ouellette and Hay). Furthermore, such programs are criticised for forcing bourgeois consumption habits on its viewers (Lewis, Smart Living) Both arguments have been directed at British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. Oliver’s latest cookbook Save with Jamie has been criticised as it promotes austerity cooking, but costs £26 (approx. 48AUD) and encourages readers to purchase staple ingredients and equipment that total more than £500 (approx. 919AUD) (Ellis-Petersen). Ellis-Petersen adds that the £500 cost uses the cheapest available options, not Oliver’s line of Tefal cooking equipment, “which come at a hefty premium” (7). In 2005, Oliver’s television series Jamie’s School Dinners, which follows his campaign for policy reform in the provision of food to students was met with resistance. 2008 reports claim students preferred to leave school to buy junk food rather than eat healthier fare at school (Rousseau). Parents supported this, providing money to their children rather than packing healthy lunches that would pass school inspections (Rousseau). Like the framing of vicarious consumption, these criticisms dismiss the potential benefits of engaging with different lifestyles and cultures. These arguments do not recognise audiences as active media consumers who use programs like MCA to enhance their lifestyles through the acquisition of cultural capital. Ouellette and Hay highlight that audiences take advantage of a multitude of viewing strategies. One such strategy is playing the role of “vicarious expert” (Ouellette and Hay 117) who judges participants and has their consumption practices reinforced through the show. While audiences are invited to learn, they can do this from a distance and are not obliged to feel as though they must be educated (Ouellette and Hay). Viewers are simply able to enjoy the fantasy and spectacle of food shows as escapes from everyday routines (Lewis, Smart Living). In cases like Emeril Live where the host and chef, Emeril Lagasse “favors [sic] showmanship over instruction” (Adema 115–116) the vicarious consumption of viewing a cooking show is more satisfying than cooking and eating. Another reason vicarious consumption provides pleasure for audiences is because “culinary television aestheticises food,” transforming it “into a delectable image, a form of ‘gastro-porn’ […] designed to be consumed with the eyes” (de Solier, TV Dinners 467). Audiences take advantage of these viewing strategies, using a balance of actual and vicarious consumption in order to integrate gourmet food culture into their pre-existing lifestyle, budget, and cooking ability. The following case studies emerged from research conducted to understand MCA’s impact on households. After shopping with, and interviewing, seven households, the integration of vicarious and actual food consumption habits was evident across three households. Enjoying food images onscreen or in cookbooks is a suitable substitute when actual consumption is unhealthy, too expensive, time consuming, or daunting. It is this balance between adopting consumption habits of a conventional “foodie” and using vicarious consumption in contexts where the viewer sees actual consumption as unreasonable or uncomfortable that makes the “everyday foodie.” Melanie—Health Melanie is 38 years old and works in the childcare industry. She enjoys the “gastro-porn” of MCA and other food media. Interestingly she says food media actually helps her resist eating sumptuous and rich foods: Yeah, like my house is just overrun by cookbooks, cooking magazines. I have Foxtel primarily for the Food Network […] But I know if I cooked it or baked it, I would eat it and I’ve worked too hard to get where I am physically to do that. So I just, I read about it and I watch it, I just don’t do it. This behaviour supports Boulos et al.’s finding that while the Food Network promotes irresponsible consumption habits, these programs are considered a “window into a wider social and cultural world” rather than food preparation guides (150). Using vicarious consumption in this way means Melanie feels she does not “cook as much as what a true foodie would cook,” but she will “have low fat and healthy [options] whenever I can so I can go out and try all the fancy stuff cooked by fancy people.” MCA and food media for Melanie serves a double purpose in that she uses it to restrict, but also aid in her consumption of gourmet food. In choosing a chef or restaurant for the occasions where Melanie wants to enjoy a “fancy” dining experience, she claims food media serves as an educational resource to influence her consumption of gourmet food: I looked up when I was in Sydney where Adriano Zumbo’s shop was to go and try macarons there […] It [MCA] makes me aware of chefs that I may not have been aware of and I may go and … seek that [their restaurants/establishments] out […] Would Adriano Zumbo be as big as he is without MasterChef? No. And I’m a sucker, I want to go and try, I want to know what everyone’s talking about. Melanie’s attitudes and behaviour with regards to food media and consumption illustrates audiences’ selective nature. MCA and other food media influence her to consume, but also control, her consumption. Curtis and Samantha—Broadening Horizons Time and money is a key concern for many “everyday foodies” including Curtis’ family. Along with his wife Samantha they are raising a one-year-old daughter, Amelia. Curtis expressed a fondness for food that he ate while on holiday in the United States: I guess in the last few weeks I’ve been craving the food that we had when we were in America, in particular stuff like pulled pork, ribs, stuff like that. So I’ve replicated or made our own because you can’t get it anywhere around Brisbane like from a restaurant. When talking about cooking shows more generally, Curtis speaks primarily about cooking shows he watches on Foxtel that have a food tourism angle. Curtis mentions programs including Cheese Slices, The Layover and Man v. Food. The latter of these shows follows Adam Richman around the United States attempting to conquer eating challenges set at famous local establishments. Curtis describes his reaction to the program: I say woah that looks good and then I just want to go back to America. But instead of paying thousands of dollars to go, it’s cheaper to look up a recipe and give it a go at home. Cookbooks and food television provide their viewers not only with a window through which they can escape their everyday routines but, as Curtis points out, inspiration or education to cook new dishes themselves. For money conscious “everyday foodies”, the cooking demonstration or mere introduction of a dish broadens viewers’ culinary knowledge. Curtis highlights the importance of this: Otherwise [without food media] you’d be stuck cooking the same things your mum and dad taught you, or your home economics teacher taught you in high school. You’d just be doing the same thing every day. Unless you went out to a restaurant and fell in love with something, but because you don’t go out to restaurants every day, you wouldn’t have that experience every day […] TV gives you the ability—we could flick over to the food channel right now and watch something completely amazing that we’ve never done before. His wife Samantha does not consider herself an adventurous eater. While she is interested in food, her passion lies in cakes and desserts and she jokes that ordering Nando’s with the medium basting is adventurous for her. Vicarious consumption through food media allows Samantha to experience a wider range of cuisines without consuming these foods herself: I would watch a lot more variety than I would actually try. There’s a lot of things that I would happily watch, but if it was put in front of me I probably wouldn’t eat it. Like with MasterChef, I’m quite interested in cooking and stuff, but the range of things [ingredients and cuisines] […] I wouldn’t go there. Rose and Andrew—Set in Their Ways Rose and her husband Andrew are a “basically retired” couple and the parents of Samantha. While they both enjoy MCA and feel it has given them a new insight on food, they find it easier to have a mediated engagement with gourmet food in some instances. Andrew believes MCA is: Taking food out of this sort of very conservative, meat, and three vegetables thing into […] something that is more exotic, for the want of a better word. And I guess that’s where we’ve—we follow it, I follow it. And saying, ‘Oh, geez it’d be nice to do that or to be able to do that,’ and enjoy a bit of creativity in that, but I think it’s just we’re probably pretty set in our ways probably and it’s a bit hard to put that into action sometimes. Andrew goes on to suggest that a generational gap makes their daughters, Samantha and Elle more likely to cook MCA-inspired meals than they are: See Samantha and Elle probably cook with that sort of thing [herbs] more and I always enjoy when they do it, but we probably don’t […] We don’t think about it when we go shopping. We probably shop and buy the basic things and don’t think about the nicer things. Andrew describes himself as “an extremely lazy reader” who finds following a recipe “boring.” Andrew says if he were tempted to cook an MCA-inspired dish, it is unlikely that the required ingredients would be on-hand and that he would not shop for one meal. Rose says she does buy the herbs, or “nicer things” as Andrew refers to them, but is hesitant to use them. She says the primary barrier is lacking confidence in her cooking ability, but also that she finds cooking tiring and is not used to cooking with the gas stove in her new home: Rose: I also think that I probably leave my run late and by night time I’m really tired and my feet are hurting and I tend to think ‘Oh I’ll just get something ready’ […] I know that probably sounds like a lame excuse, but yeah, it’s probably more the confidence thing I think. I often even buy the things [ingredients] to do it and then don’t make it. I’m not confident with my stovetop either. Researcher: Oh why—can you please explain more about that?Rose: Well it’s a gas stovetop and I used to have the electric. I felt like I could main—I could control the setting—the heat—better on it. Rose, in particular, does not let her lack of confidence and time stop her from engaging with gourmet food. Cookbooks and cooking shows like MCA are a valuable channel for her to appreciate “foodie” culture. Rose talks about her interest in MCA: Rose: I’m not a keen cook, but I do enjoy buying recipe books and looking at lovely food and watching—and I enjoyed watching how they did these beautiful dishes. As for the desserts, yes they probably were very fancy, but it was sort of nice to think if you had a really special occasion, you know […] and I would actually get on the computer afterwards and look for some of the recipes. I did subscribe to their magazine […] because I’m a bit of a magazine junkie.Researcher: What do you get out of the recipe books and magazines if you say you’re not a keen cook?Rose: I’d just dream about cooking them probably. That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But, and also probably inspire my daughters […] I like to show them “oh, look at this and this” or, you know, and probably quite often they will try it or—and one day I think I will try it, but whether I ever do or not, I don’t know. Rose’s response also treats the generation gap as a perceived barrier to actual consumption. But while the couple feel unable to use the knowledge they have gained through MCA in their kitchen, they credit the show with broadening the range of cuisines they would eat when dining out: Andrew: You know, even when we’ve been to—I like Asian food in Australia, you know, Chinese, Thai, any of those sorts of foods.Rose: Indian. Andrew: Indian, yeah I like that in Australia.Rose: Which we have probably tried more of since the likes of MasterChef.Andrew: Yeah.Rose: You know, you—and even sushi, like you would never have ever […]Andrew: Gone to sushi previously. And I won’t eat sashimi, but the sushi bar is all right. Um […] but [I] did not enjoy Chinese food in places like Hong Kong or Singapore. As the couple does not seek educational information from the show in terms of cooking demonstration, they appear more invested in the progress of the contestants of the show and how they respond to challenges set by the judges. The involvement of amateur cooks makes the show relatable as they identify with contestants who they see as potential extensions of themselves. Rose identifies with season one winner, Julie Goodwin who entered the program as a 38-year-old mother of three and owner of an IT consulting business: Rose: Well Julie of course is a—I don’t like to use the word square, but she’s sort of like a bit of an old fashioned lady, but you know, more like basic grandma cooking. But […]Andrew: She did it well though.Rose: Yes, yeah. Andrew: And she, she probably—she progressed dramatically, you know, from the comments from when she first started […] to winning. In how she presented, how she did things. She must have learnt a lot in the process is the way I would look at it anyway. Rose: And I’ve seen her sort of on things since then and she is very good at like […] talking about and telling you what she’s doing and—for basic sort of cook—you know what I mean, not basic, but […] for a basic person like me. Although Rose and Andrew feel that their life stage prevents has them from changing long established consumption habits in relation to food, their choices while dining out coupled with a keen interest in food and food media still exemplifies the “everyday foodie” lifestyle. Programs like MCA, especially with its focus on the development of amateur cooks, have allowed Rose and Andrew to experience gourmet food more than they would have otherwise. Conclusion Each viewer is empowered to live their version of the “everyday foodie” lifestyle through adopting a balance of actual and vicarious consumption practices. Vicariously tasting “foodie” culture has broadened these viewers’ culinary knowledge and to some extent has broadened their actual tastes. This is evident in Melanie’s visit to Adriano Zumbo’s patisserie, and Rose and Andrew’s sampling of various Asian cuisines while dining out, for example. It also provides pleasure in lieu of actual consumption in instances like Melanie using food images as a disciplinary mechanism or Curtis watching Man v. Food instead of travelling overseas. The attitudes and behaviours of these MCA viewers illustrate that vicarious consumption through food media is a productive and empowering practice that aids audiences to adopt an “everyday foodie” lifestyle. References Adema, Pauline. “Vicarious Consumption: Food, Television and the Ambiguity of Modernity.” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23.3 (2000): 113–23. Belk, Russell. “Possessions and the Extended Self.” Journal of Consumer Research 15.2 (1988): 139–68. Boulous, Rebecca, Emily Kuross Vikre, Sophie Oppenheimer, Hannah Chang, and Robin B. Kanarek. “ObesiTV: How Television is influencing the Obesity Epidemic.” Physiology & Behavior 107.1 (2012): 146–53. Coorey, Phillip. “Chefs Win in Ratings Boilover.” Sydney Morning Herald 20 Jul. 2010: n. pag. Deery, June. “Reality TV as Advertainment.” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (2005): 1–20. Ellis-Petersen, Hannah. “Jamie’s Idea of Cooking on a Budget—First Buy £500 of Kitchen Utensils and ‘Basics’ (And Yes Most Of Them DO Come From His Own Range).” Mail Online 31 Aug. 2013: n. pag. Greenwood, Helen. “From TV to Table.” Sydney Morning Herald 3 Jul. 2010: n. pag. Lewis, Tania. Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. -----. “You’ve Put Yourselves on a Plate: The Labours of Selfhood on MasterChef Australia.” Reality Television and Class. Eds. Helen Wood, and Beverly Skeggs. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 104–6. Malkin, Bonnie. “Australian Election Debate Makes Way for MasterChef Final.” The Telegraph 20 Jul. 2010: n. pag. Ouellette, Laurie, and James Hay. Better Living through Reality TV. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. Phillipov, Michelle. “Communicating Health Risks via the Media: What can we learn from MasterChef Australia?” The Australasian Medical Journal 5.11 (2012): 593–7. -----. “Mastering Obesity: MasterChef Australia and the Resistance to Public Health Nutrition.” Media, Culture & Society 35.4 (2013): 506–15. Rousseau, Signe. Food Media: Celebrity Chefs and the Politics of Everyday Interference. London: Berg, 2012. Seale, Kirsten. “MasterChef’s Amateur Makeovers.” Media International Australia 143 (2012): 28–35. de Solier, Isabelle. “Foodie Makeovers: Public Service Television and Lifestyle Guidance.” Exposing Lifestyle Television: The Big Reveal. Ed. Gareth Palmer. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 65–81. -----. “Making the Self in a Material World: Food and Moralities of Consumption.” Cultural Studies Review 19.1 (2013): 9–27. -----. “TV Dinners: Culinary Television, Education and Distinction.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 19.4 (2005): 465–81. Vickery, Colin. “Adam Liaw Wins MasterChef as Ratings Soar for Channel 10.” Herald Sun 25 Jul. 2010: n. pag. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.

Introduction Children are not only born digital, they are fashioned toward a lifestyle that needs them to be digital all the time (Palfrey and Gasser). They click, tap, save, circulate, download, and upload the texts of their lives, their friends’ lives, and the anonymous lives of the people that surround them. They are socialised as Internet consumers ready to participate in digital services targeted to them as they age such as Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube. But they are also fashioned as producers, whereby their lives are sold as content on these same markets. As commodities, the minutiae of their lives become the fodder for online circulation. Paradoxically, we also celebrate these digital behaviours as a means to express identity. Personal profile-building for adults is considered agency-building (Beer and Burrows), and as a consequence, we praise children for mimicking these acts of adult lifestyle. This article reflects on the Kids, Creative Storyworlds, and Wearables project, which involved an ethnographic study with five young children (ages 4-7), who were asked to share their autobiographical stories, creative self-narrations, and predictions about their future mediated lives (Atkins et al.). For this case study, we focus on commercialised forms of children’s automedia, and we compare discussions we had with 6-year old Cayden, a child we met in the study who expresses the desire to make himself famous online, with videos of Jacob, a child vlogger on YouTube’s Kinder Playtime, who clearly influences children like Cayden. We argue that child social influencers need consideration both as autobiographical agents and as child subjects requiring a sheltered approach to their online lives.Automedia Automedia is an emergent genre of autobiography (Smith and Watson Reading 190; “Virtually Me” 78). Broadcasting one’s life online takes many forms (Kennedy “Vulnerability”). Ümit Kennedy argues “Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, construct[ing] their identity online” (“Exploring”). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson write that “visual and digital modes are projecting and circulating not just new subjects but new notions of subjectivity through the effects of automediality” with the result that “the archive of the self in time, in space and in relation expands and is fundamentally reorganized” (Reading 190). Emma Maguire addresses what online texts “tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to communicate ‘real’ life through media” naming one tool, “automedia”. Further, Julie Rak calls on scholars “to rethink ‘life’ and ‘writing’ as automedia” to further “characterize the enactment of a personal life story in a new media environment.” We define automedia as a genre that involves the practices of creating, performing, sharing, circulating, and (at times) preserving one’s digital life narrative meant for multiple publics. Automedia revises identity formation, embodiment, or corporealities in acts of self-creation (Brophy and Hladki 4). Automedia also emphasizes circulation. As shared digital life texts now circulate through the behaviours of other human subjects, and automatically via algorithms in data assemblages, we contend that automediality currently involves a measure of relinquishing control over perpetually evolving mediatised environments. One cannot control how a shared life narrative will meet a public in the future, which is a revised way of thinking about autobiography. For the sake of this paper, we argue that children’s automedia ought to be considered a creative, autobiographical act, in order to afford child authors who create them the consideration they deserve as agents, now and in the future. Automedial practices often begin when children receive access to a device. The need for a distraction activity is often the reason parents hand a young child a smartphone, iPad, or even a wearable camera (Nansen). Mirroring the lives of parents, children aspire to share representations of their own personal lives in pursuit of social capital. They are often encouraged to use technologies and apps as adults do–to track aspects of self, broadcast life stories and eventually “live share” them—effectively creating, performing, sharing, and at times, seeking to preserve a public life narrative. With this practice, society inculcates children into spheres of device ubiquity, “socializing them to a future digital lifestyle that will involve always carrying a computer in some form” (Atkins et al. 49). Consequently, their representations become inculcated in larger media assemblages. Writing about toddlers, Nansen describes how the “archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito)” (Nansen). Children, like adult citizens, are increasingly faced with choices “not structured by their own preferences but by the economic imperatives of the private corporations that have recently come to dominate the internet” (Andrejevic). Recent studies have shown that for children and youth in the digital age, Internet fame, often characterized by brand endorsements, is a major aspiration (Uhls and Greenfield, 2). However, despite the ambition to participate as celebrity digital selves, children are also mired in the calls to shield them from exposure to screens through institutions that label these activities detrimental. In many countries, digital “protections” are outlined by privacy commissioners and federal or provincial/state statutes, (e.g. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada). Consequently, children are often caught in a paradox that defines them either as literate digital agents able to compose or participate with their online selves, or as subjectified wards caught up in commercial practices that exploit their lives for commercial gain.Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables ProjectBoth academic and popular cultural critics continually discuss the future but rarely directly engage the people who will be empowered (or subjugated) by it as young adults in twenty years. To address children’s lack of agency in these discussions, we launched the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables project to bring children into a dialogue about their own digital futures. Much has been written on childhood agency and participation in culture and mediated culture from the discipline of sociology (James and James; Jenks; Jenkins). In previous work, we addressed the perspective of child autobiographical feature filmmakers to explore issues of creative agency and consent when adult gatekeepers facilitate children in film production (Pedersen and Aspevig “My Eyes”; Pedersen and Aspevig “Swept”). Drawing on that previous work, this project concentrates on children’s automediated lives and the many unique concerns that materialize with digital identity-building. Children are categorised as a vulnerable demographic group necessitating special policy and legislation, but the lives they project as children will eventually become subsumed in their own adult lives, which will almost certainly be treated and mediated in a much different manner in the future. We focused on this landscape, and sought to query the children on their futures, also considering the issues that arise when adult gatekeepers get involved with child social media influencers. In the Storyworlds ethnographic study, children were given a wearable toy, a Vtech smartwatch called Kidizoom, to use over a month’s timeframe to serve as a focal point for ethnographic conversations. The Kidizoom watch enables children to take photos and videos, which are uploaded to a web interface. Before we gave them the tech, we asked them questions about their lives, including What are machines going to be like in the future? Can you imagine yourself wearing a certain kind of computer? Can you tell/draw a story about that? If you could wear a computer that gave you a super power, what would it be? Can you use your imagination to think of a person in a story who would use technology? In answering, many of them drew autobiographical drawings of technical inventions, and cast themselves in the images. We were particularly struck by the comments made by one participant, Cayden (pseudonym), a 6-year-old boy, and the stories he told us about himself and his aspirations. He expressed the desire to host a YouTube channel about his life, his activities, and the wearable technologies his family already owned (e.g. a GroPro camera) and the one we gave him, the Kidizoom smartwatch. He talked about how he would be proud to publically broadcast his own videos on YouTube, and about the role he had been allowed to play in the making of videos about his life (that were not broadcast). To contextualize Cayden’s commentary and his automedial aspirations, we extended our study to explore child social media influencers who broadcast components of their personal lives for the deliberate purpose of popularity and the financial gain of their parents.We selected the videos of Jacob, a child vlogger because we judged them to be representative of the kinds that Cayden watched. Jacob reviews toys through “unboxing videos,” a genre in which a child tells an online audience her or his personal experiences using new toys in regular, short videos on a social media site. Jacob appears on a YouTube channel called Kinder Playtime, which appears to be a parent-run channel that states that, “We enjoy doing these things while playing with our kids: Jacob, Emily, and Chloe” (see Figure 1). In one particular video, Jacob reviews the Kidizoom watch, serving as a child influencer for the product. By understanding Jacob’s performance as agent-driven automedia, as well as being a commercialised, mediatised form of advertising, we get a clearer picture of how the children in the study are coming to terms with their own digital selfhood and the realisation that circulated, life-exposing videos are the expectation in this context.Children are implicated in a range of ways through “family” influencer and toy unboxing videos, which are emergent entertainment industries (Abidin 1; Nansen and Nicoll; Craig and Cunningham 77). In particular, unboxing videos do impact child viewers, especially when children host them. Jackie Marsh emphasizes the digital literacy practices at play here that co-construct viewers as “cyberflâneur[s]” and she states that “this mode of cultural transmission is a growing feature of online practices for this age group” (369). Her stress, however, is on how the child viewer enjoys “the vicarious pleasure he or she may get from viewing the playing of another child with the toy” (376). Marsh writes that her study subject, a child called “Gareth”, “was not interested in being made visible to EvanHD [a child celebrity social media influencer] or other online peers, but was content to consume” the unboxing videos. The concept of the cyberflâneur, then, is fitting as a mediatising co-constituting process of identity-building within discourses of consumerism. However, in our study, the children, and especially Cayden, also expressed the desire to create, host, and circulate their own videos that broadcast their lives, also demonstrating awareness that videos are valorised in their social circles. Child viewers watch famous children perform consumer-identities to create an aura of influence, but viewers simultaneously aspire to become influencers using automedial performances, in essence, becoming products, themselves. Jacob, Automedial Subjects and Social Media InfluencersJacob is a vlogger on YouTube whose videos can garner millions of views, suggesting that he is also an influencer. In one video, he appears to be around the age of six as he proudly sits with folded hands, bright eyes, and a beaming, but partly toothless smile (see Figure 2). He says, “Welcome to Kinder Playtime! Today we have the Kidi Zoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech” (Kinder Playtime). We see the Kidi Zoom unboxed and then depicted in stylized animations amid snippets of Jacob’s smiling face. The voice and hands of a faceless parent guide Jacob as he uses his new wearable toy. We listen to both parent and child describe numerous features for recording and enhancing the wearer’s daily habits (e.g. calculator, calendar, fitness games), and his dad tells him it has a pedometer “which tracks your steps” (Kinder Playtime). But the watch is also used by Jacob to mediate himself and his world. We see that Jacob takes pictures of himself on the tiny watch screen as he acts silly for the camera. He also uses the watch to take personal videos of his mother and sister in his home. The video ends with his father mentioning bedtime, which prompts a “thank you” to VTech for giving him the watch, and a cheerful “Bye!” from Jacob (Kinder Playtime). Figure 1: Screenshot of Kinder Playtime YouTube channel, About page Figure 2: Screenshot of “Jacob,” a child vlogger at Kinder Playtime We chose Jacob for three reasons. First, he is the same age as the children in the Storyworlds study. Second, he reviews the smart watch artifact that we gave to the study children, so there was a common use of automedia technology. Third, Jacob’s parents were involved with his broadcasts, and we wanted to work within the boundaries of parent-sanctioned practices. However, we also felt that his playful approach was a good example of how social media influence overlaps with automediality. Jacob is a labourer trading his public self-representations in exchange for free products and revenue earned through the monetisation of his content on YouTube. It appears that much of what Jacob says is scripted, particularly the promotional statements, like, “Today we have the Kidizoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech. It’s the smartest watch for kids” (Kinder Playtime). Importantly, as an automedial subject Jacob reveals aspects of his self and his identity, in the manner of many child vloggers on public social media sites. His product reviews are contextualised within a commoditised space that provides him a means for the public performance of his self, which, via YouTube, has the potential to reach an enormous audience. YouTube claims to have “over a billion users—almost one-third of all people on the Internet—and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views” (YouTube). Significantly, he is not only filmed by others, Jacob is also a creative practitioner, as Cayden aspired to become. Jacob uses high-tech toys, in this case, a new wearable technology for self-compositions (the smart watch), to record himself, friends, family or simply the goings-on around him. Strapped to his wrist, the watch toy lets him play at being watched, at being quantified and at recording the life stories of others, or constructing automediated creations for himself, which he may upload to numerous social media sites. This is the start of his online automediated life, which will be increasingly under his ownership as he ages. To greater or lesser degrees, he will later be able to curate, add to, and remediate his body of automedia, including his digital past. Kennedy points out that “people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online” (“Exploring”). Her focus is on adult vloggers who consent to their activities. Jacob’s automedia is constructed collaboratively with his parents, and it is unclear how much awareness he has of himself as an automedia creator. However, if we don’t afford Jacob the same consideration as we afford adult autobiographers, that the depiction of his life is his own, we will reduce his identity performance to pure artifice or advertisement. The questions Jacob’s videos raise around agency, consent, and creativity are important here. Sidonie Smith asks “Can there be a free, agentic space; and if so, where in the world can it be found?” (Manifesto 188). How much agency does Jacob have? Is there a liberating aspect in the act of putting personal technology into the hands of a child who can record his life, himself? And finally, how would an adult Jacob feel about his childhood self advertising these products online? Is this really automediality if Jacob does not fully understand what it means to publicly tell a mediated life story?These queries lead to concerns over child social media influence with regard to legal protection, marketing ethics, and user consent. The rise of “fan marketing” presents a nexus of stealth marketing to children by other children. Stealth marketing involves participants, in this case, fans, who do not know they are involved in an advertising scheme. For instance, the popular Minecon Minecraft conference event sessions have pushed their audience to develop the skills to become advocates and advertisers of their products, for example by showing audiences how to build a YouTube channel and sharing tips for growing a community. Targeting children in marketing ploys seems insidious. Marketing analyst Sandy Fleisher describes the value of outsourcing marketing to fan labourers:while Grand Theft Auto spent $120 million on marketing its latest release, Minecraft fans are being taught how to create and market promotional content themselves. One [example] is Minecraft YouTuber, SkydoesMinecraft. His nearly 7 million strong YouTube army, almost as big as Justin Bieber’s, means his daily videos enjoy a lot of views; 1,419,734,267 to be precise. While concerns about meaningful consent that practices like this raise have led some government bodies, and consumer and child protection groups to advocate restrictions for children, other critics have questioned the limits placed on children’s free expression by such restrictions. Tech commentator Larry Magid has written that, “In the interest of protecting children, we sometimes deny them the right to access material and express themselves.” Meghan M. Sweeney notes that “the surge in collaborative web models and the emphasis on interactivity—frequently termed Web 2.0—has meant that children are not merely targets of global media organizations” but have “multiple opportunities to be active, critical, and resistant producers”...and ”may be active agents in the production and dissemination of information” (68). Nevertheless, writes Sweeney, “corporate entities can have restrictive effects on consumers” (68), by for example, limiting imaginative play to the choices offered on a Disney website, or limiting imaginative topics to commercial products (toys, video games etc), as in YouTube review videos. Automedia is an important site from which to consider young children’s online practices in public spheres. Jacob’s performance is indeed meant to influence the choice to buy a toy, but it is also meant to influence others in knowing Jacob as an identity. He means to share and circulate his self. Julie Rak recalls Paul John Eakin’s claims about life-writing that the “process does not even occur at the level of writing, but at the level of living, so that identity formation is the result of narrative-building.” We view Jacob’s performance along these lines. Kinder Playtime offers him a constrained, parent-sanctioned (albeit commercialised) space for role-playing, a practice bound up with identity-formation in the life of most children. To think through the legality of recognising Jacob’s automedial content as his life, Rak is also useful: “In Eakin’s work in particular, we can see evidence of John Locke’s contention that identity is the expression of consciousness which is continuous over time, but that identity is also a product, one’s own property which is a legal entity”. We have argued that children are often caught in the paradox that defines them either as literate digital creators composing and circulating their online selves or as subjectified personas caught up in commercial advertising practices that use their lives for commercial gain. However, through close observation of individual children, one who we met and questioned in our study, Cayden, the other who we met through his mediated, commercialized, and circulated online persona, Jacob, we argue that child social influencers need consideration as autobiographical agents expressing themselves through automediality. As children create, edit, and grow digital traces of their lives and selves, how these texts are framed becomes increasingly important, in part because their future adult selves have such a stake in the matter: they are being formed through automedia. Moreover, these children’s coming of age may bring legal questions about the ownership of their automedial products such as YouTube videos, an enduring legacy they are leaving behind for their adult selves. Crucially, if we reduce identity performances such as unboxing, toy review videos, and other forms of children’s fan marketing to pure advertisement, we cannot afford Jacob and other child influencers the agency that their self representation is legally and artistically their own.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor.” Social Media + Society 3.2 (2017): 1-15.Andrejevic, Mark. “Privacy, Exploitation, and the Digital Enclosure.” Amsterdam Law Forum 1.4 (2009). <http://amsterdamlawforum.org/article/view/94/168>.Atkins, Bridgette, Isabel Pedersen, Shirley Van Nuland, and Samantha Reid. “A Glimpse into the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables Project: A Work-in-Progress.” ICET 60th World Assembly: Teachers for a Better World: Creating Conditions for Quality Education – Pedagogy, Policy and Professionalism. 2017. 49-60.Beer, David, and Roger Burrows. “Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data.” Theory, Culture & Society 30.4 (2013): 47–71.Brophy, Sarah, and Janice Hladki. Introduction. Pedagogy, Image Practices, and Contested Corporealities. Eds. Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki. New York, NY: Routledge, 2014. 1-6.Craig, David, and Stuart Cunningham. “Toy Unboxing: Living in a(n Unregulated) Material World.” Media International Australia 163.1 (2017): 77-86.Fleischer, Sandy. “Watch Out for That Creeper: What Minecraft Teaches Us about Marketing.” Digital Marketing Magazine. 30 May 2014. <http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/articles/watch-out-for-that-creeper-what-minecraft-teaches-us-about-marketing>.James, Allison, and Adrian James. Key Concepts in Childhood Studies. London: Sage, 2012.Jenkins, Henry. The Childhood Reader. New York: NYU P, 1998.Jenks, Chris. Childhood. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2015.Kennedy, Ümit. "Exploring YouTube as a Transformative Tool in the 'The Power of MAKEUP!' Movement." M/C Journal 19.4 (2016). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1127>.———. “The Vulnerability of Contemporary Digital Autobiography” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.2 (2017): 409-411.Kinder Playtime. “VTech Kidizoom Smart Watch DX Review by Kinder Playtime.” YouTube, 4 Nov. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaxCSjwZjcA&t=28s>.Magid, Larry. “Protecting Children Online Needs to Allow for Their Right to Free Speech.” ConnectSafely 29 Aug. 2014. <http://www.connectsafely.org/protecting-children-online-needs-to-allow-for-their-right-to-free-speech/>.Maguire, Emma. “Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website.” M/C Journal 17.3 (2014). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/821>.Marsh, Jackie. “‘Unboxing’ Videos: Co-construction of the Child as Cyberflâneur.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 37.3 (2016): 369-380.Nansen, Bjorn. “Accidental, Assisted, Automated: An Emerging Repertoire of Infant Mobile Media Techniques.” M/C Journal 18.5 (2015). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1026>.———, and Benjamin Nicoll. “Toy Unboxing Videos and the Mimetic Production of Play.” Paper presented at the 18th Annual Conference of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Tartu, Estonia. 2017.Palfrey, John, and Urs Gasser. Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age. New York: Basic Books, 2016.Pedersen, Isabel, and Kristen Aspevig. “‘My Eyes Ended Up at My Fingertips, My Ears, My Nose, My Mouth’: Antoine, Autobiographical Documentary, and the Cinematic Depiction of a Blind Child Subject.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 34.4 (2011).Pedersen, Isabel, and Kristen Aspevig. “‘Swept to the Sidelines and Forgotten’: Cultural Exclusion, Blind Persons’ Participation, and International Film Festivals.” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 3.3 (2014): 29-52.Rak, Julie. “First Person? Life Writing versus Automedia.” International Association for Biography and Autobiography Europe (IABA Europe). Vienna, Austria. 30 Oct. – 3 Nov. 2013.Smith, Sidonie. “The Autobiographical Manifesto.” Ed. Shirely Neuman. Autobiography and Questions of Gender. London: Frank Cass, 1991.———, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.———. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.Sweeney, Meghan. “‘Where Happily Ever After Happens Every Day’: Disney's Official Princess Website and the Commodification of Play.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 3.2 (2011): 66-87.Uhls, Yalda, and Particia Greenfield. “The Value of Fame: Preadolescent Perceptions of Popular Media and Their Relationship to Future Aspirations.” Developmental Psychology 48.2 (2012): 315-326.YouTube. “YouTube for Press.” 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/press/>.

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

The first uncomfortable twinges started when I was a grad student, churning out my Master’s thesis on a laptop that I worked on at the library, in my bedroom, on the kitchen table, and at the coffee shop. By the last few months, typing was becoming uncomfortable for my arms, but as any thesis writer will tell you, your whole body is uncomfortable with the endless hours sitting, inputting, and revising. I didn’t think much of it until I moved on to a new city to start a PhD program. Now the burning that accompanied my essay-typing binges started to worry me more, especially since I noticed the twinges didn’t go away when I got up to chat with my roommate, or to go to bed. I finally mentioned the annoying arm to Sonja, a medical student friend of mine visiting me one afternoon. She asked me to pick up a chair in front of me, palms out. I did, and the attempt stabbed pain up my arm and through my elbow joint. The chair fell out of my hands. We looked at each other, eyebrows raised.Six months and much computer work later, I still hadn’t really addressed the issue. Who had time? Chasing mystery ailments around and more importantly, doing any less typing were not high on my likely list. But like the proverbial frog in slowly heated water, things had gotten much worse without my really acknowledging it. That is, until the day I got up from my laptop, stretched out and wandered into the kitchen to put some pasta on to boil. When the spaghetti was ready, I grabbed the pot to drain it and my right arm gave as if someone had just handed me a 200-pound weight. The pot, pasta and boiling water hit the floor with a scalding splash that nearly missed both me and the fleeing cat. Maybe there was a problem here.Both popular and critical understandings of the body have been in a great deal of flux over the past three or four decades as digital media technologies have become ever more pervasive and personal. Interfacing with the popular Internet, video games, mobile devices, wearable computing, and other new media technologies have prompted many to reflect on and reconsider what it means to be an embodied human being in an increasingly digitally determined era. As a result, the body, at various times in this recent history, has been theoretically disowned, disavowed, discarded, disdained, replaced, idealised, essentialised, hollowed out, re-occupied, dismembered, reconstituted, reclaimed and re-imagined in light of new media. Despite all of the angst over the relationships our embodied selves have had to digital media, of course, our embodied selves have endured. It remains true, that “even in the age of technosocial subjects, life is lived through bodies” (Stone 113).How we understand our embodiments and their entanglements with technologies matter deeply, moreover, for these understandings shape not only discourse around embodiment and media, but also the very bodies and media in question in very real ways. For example, a long-held tenet in both popular culture and academic work has been the notion that media technologies extend our bodies and our senses as technological prostheses. The idea here is that media technologies work like prostheses that extend the reach of our eyes, ears, voice, touch, and other bodily abilities through time and space, augmenting our abilities to experience and influence the world.Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan is one influential proponent of this notion, and claimed that, in fact, “the central purpose of all my work is to convey this message, that by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them” (McLuhan and Zingrone 265). Other more contemporary media scholars reflect on how “our prosthetic technological extensions enable us to amplify and extend ourselves in ways that profoundly affect the nature and scale of human communication” (Cleland 75), and suggest that a media technology such as one’s mobile device, can act “as a prosthesis that supports the individual in their interactions with the world” (Glitsos 161). Popular and commercial discourses also frequently make use of this idea, from the 1980’s AT&T ad campaign that nudged you to “Reach out and Touch Someone” via the telephone, to Texas Instruments’s claim in the 1990’s that their products were “Extending Your Reach”, to Nikon’s contemporary nudge to “See Much Further” with the prosthetic assistance of their cameras. The etymology of the term “prosthesis” reveals that the term evolves from Greek and Latin components that mean, roughly, “to add to”. The word was originally employed in the 16th century in a grammatical context to indicate “the addition of a letter or syllable to the beginning of a word”, and was adopted to describe “the replacement of defective or absent parts of the body by artificial substitutes” in the 1700’s. More recently the world “prosthesis” has come to be used to indicate more simply, “an artificial replacement for a part of the body” (OED Online). As we see in the use of the term over the past few decades, the meaning of the word continues to shift and is now often used to describe technological additions that don’t necessarily replace parts of the body, but augment and extend embodied capabilities in various ways. Technology as prosthesis is “a trope that has flourished in a recent and varied literature concerned with interrogating human-technology interfaces” (Jain 32), and now goes far beyond signifying the replacement of missing components. Although the prosthesis has “become somewhat of an all-purpose metaphor for interactions of body and technology” (Sun 16) and “a tempting theoretical gadget” (Jain 49), I contend that this metaphor is not often used particularly faithfully. Instead of invoking anything akin to the complex lived corporeal experiences and conundrums of prosthetic users, what we often get when it comes to metaphors of technology-as-prostheses is a fascination with the potential of technologies in seamlessly extending our bodies. This necessitates a fantasy version of both the body and its prostheses as interchangeable or extendable appendages to be unproblematically plugged and unplugged, modifying our capabilities and perceptions to our varying whims.Of course, a body seamlessly and infinitely extended by technological prostheses is really no body. This model forgoes actual lived bodies for a shiny but hollow amalgamation based on what I have termed the “disembodimyth” enabled by technological transcendence. By imagining our bodies as assemblages of optional appendages, it is not far of a leap to imagine opting out of our bodies altogether and using technological means to unfasten our consciousness from our corporeal parts. Alison Muri points out that this myth of imminent emancipation from our bodies via unity with technology is a view that has become “increasingly prominent in popular media and cultural studies” (74), despite or perhaps because of the fact that, due to global overpopulation and wasteful human environmental practices, “the human body has never before been so present, or so materially manifest at any time in the history of humanity”, rendering “contradictory, if not absurd, the extravagantly metaphorical claims over the past two decades of the human body’s disappearance or obsolescence due to technology” (75-76). In other words, it becomes increasingly difficult to speak seriously about the body being erased or escaped via technological prosthetics when those prosthetics, and our bodies themselves, continue to proliferate and contribute to the piling up of waste and pollution in the current Anthropocene. But whether they imply smooth couplings with alluring technologies, or uncoupling from the body altogether, these technology-as-prosthesis metaphors tell us very little about “prosthetic realities” (Sun 24). Actual prosthetic realities involve learning curves; pain, frustrations and triumphs; hard-earned remappings of mental models; and much experimentation and adaption on the part of both technology and user in order to function. In this vein, Vivian Sobchak has detailed the complex sensations and phenomenological effects that followed the amputation of her leg high above the knee, including the shifting presence of her “phantom limb” perceptions, the alignments, irritations, movements, and stabilities offered by her prosthetic leg, and her shifting senses of bodily integrity and body-image over time. An oversimplistic application of the prosthetic metaphor for our encounters with technology runs the risk of forgetting this wealth of experiences and instructive first-hand accounts from people who have been using therapeutic prosthetics as long as assistive devices have been conceived of, built, and used. Of course, prosthetics have long been employed not simply to aid function and mobility, but also to restore and prop up concepts of what a “whole,” “normal” body looks like, moves like, and includes as essential components. Prosthetics are employed, in many cases, to allow the user to “pass” as able-bodied in rendering their own technological presence invisible, in service of restoring an ableist notion of embodied normality. Scholars of Critical Disability Studies have pushed back against these ableist notions, in service of recognising the capacities of “the disabled body when it is understood not as a less than perfect form of the normative standard, but as figuring difference in a nonbinary sense” (Shildrick 14). Paralympian, actress, and model Aimee Mullins has lent her voice to this cause, publicly contesting the prioritisation of realistic, unobtrusive form in prosthetic design. In a TED talk entitled It’s Not Fair Having 12 Pairs of Legs, she showcases her collection of prosthetics, including “cheetah legs” designed for optimal running speed, transparent glass-like legs, ornately carved wooden legs, Barbie doll-inspired legs customised with high heel shoes, and beautiful, impractical jellyfish legs. In illustrating the functional, fashionable, and fantastical possibilities, she challenges prosthetic designers to embrace more poetry and whimsy, while urging us all to move “away from the need to replicate human-ness as the only aesthetic ideal” (Mullins). In this same light, Sarah S. Jain asks “how do body-prosthesis relays transform individual bodies as well as entire social notions about what a properly functioning physical body might be?” (39). In her exploration of how prostheses can be simultaneously wounding and enabling, Jain recounts Sigmund Freud’s struggle with his own palate replacement following surgery for throat cancer in 1923. His prosthesis allowed him to regain the ability to speak and eat, but also caused him significant pain. Nevertheless, his artificial palate had to be worn, or the tissue would shrink and necessitate additional painful procedures (Jain 31). Despite this fraught experience, Freud himself espoused the trope of technologically enhanced transcendence, pronouncing “Man has, as it were, become a prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent.” However, he did add a qualification, perhaps reflective of his own experiences, by next noting, “but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times” (qtd. in Jain 31). This trouble is, I argue, important to remember and reclaim. It is also no less present in our interactions with our media prostheses. Many of our technological encounters with media come with unacknowledged discomforts, adjustments, lag, strain, ill-fitting defaults, and fatigue. From carpal tunnel syndrome to virtual reality vertigo, our interactions with media technologies are often marked by pain and “much trouble” in Freud’s sense. Computer Science and Cultural Studies scholar Phoebe Sengers opens a short piece titled Technological Prostheses: An Anecdote, by reflecting on how “we have reached the post-physical era. On the Internet, all that matters is our thoughts. The body is obsolete. At least, whoever designed my computer interface thought so.” She traces how concentrated interactions with computers during her graduate work led to intense tendonitis in her hands. Her doctor responded by handing her “a technological prosthesis, two black leather wrist braces” that allowed her to return to her keyboard to resume typing ten hours a day. Shortly after her assisted return to her computer, she developed severe tendonitis in her elbows and had to stop typing altogether. Her advisor also handed her a technological prosthesis, this time “a speech understanding system that would transcribe my words,” so that she could continue to work. Two days later she lost her voice. Ultimately she “learned that my body does not go away when I work. I learned to stop when it hurt […] and to refuse to behave as though my body was not there” (Sengers). My own experiences in grad school were similar in many ways to Sengers’s. Besides the pasta problem outlined above, my own computer interfacing injuries at that point in my career meant I could no longer turn keys in doors, use a screwdriver, lift weights, or play the guitar. I held a friend’s baby at Christmas that year and the pressure of the small body on my arm make me wince. My family doctor bent my arm around a little, then shrugging her shoulders, she signed me up for a nerve test. As a young neurologist proceeded to administer a series of electric shocks and stick pins into my arms in various places, I noticed she had an arm brace herself. She explained that she also had a repetitive strain injury aggravated by her work tasks. She pronounced mine an advanced repetitive strain injury involving both medial and lateral epicondylitis, and sent me home with recommendations for rest, ice and physiotherapy. Rest was a challenge: Like Sengers, I puzzled over how one might manage to be productive in academia without typing. I tried out some physiotherapy, with my arm connected to electrodes and currents coursing through my elbow until my arm contorted in bizarre ways involuntarily. I tried switching my mouse from my right side to my left, switching from typing to voice recognition software and switching from a laptop to a more ergonomic desktop setup. I tried herbal topical treatments, wearing an extremely ugly arm brace, doing yoga poses, and enduring chiropractic bone-cracking. I learned in talking with people around me at that time that repetitive strains of various kinds are surprisingly common conditions for academics and other computer-oriented occupations. I learned other things well worth learning in that painful process. In terms of my own writing and thinking about technology, I have even less tolerance for the idea of ephemeral, transcendent technological fusions between human and machine. Seductive slippages into a cyberspatial existence seem less sexy when bumping your body up against the very physical and unforgiving interface hurts more with each keystroke or mouse click. The experience has given me a chronic injury to manage carefully ever since, rationing my typing time and redoubling my commitment to practicing embodied theorising about technology, with attention to sensation, materiality, and the way joints (between bones or between computer and computant) can become points of inflammation. Although pain is rarely referenced in the myths of smooth human and technological incorporations, there is much to be learned in acknowledging and exploring the entry and exit wounds made when we interface with technology. The elbow, or wrist, or lower back, or mental health that gives out serves as an effective alarm, should it be ignored too long. If nothing else, like a crashed computer, a point of pain will break a flow of events typically taken for granted. Whether it is your screen or your pinky finger that unexpectedly freezes, a system collapse will prompt a step back to look with new perspective at the process you were engaged in. The lag, crash, break, gap, crack, or blister exposes the inherent imperfections in a system and offers up an invitation for reflection, critical engagement, and careful choice.One careful choice we could make would be a more critical engagement with technology-as-prosthesis by “re-membering” our jointedness with technologies. Of course, joints themselves are not distinct parts, but interesting articulated systems and relationships in the spaces in-between. Experiencing our jointedness with technologies involves recognising that this is not the smooth romantic union with technology that has so often been exalted. Instead, our technological articulations involve a range of pleasures and pain, flows and blockages, frictions and slippages, flexibilities and rigidities. I suggest that a new model for understanding technology and embodiment might employ “articulata” as a central figure, informed by the multiple meanings of articulation. At their simplest, articulata are hinged, jointed, plural beings, but they are also precarious things that move beyond a hollow collection of corporeal parts. The inspiration for an exploration of articulation as a metaphor in this way was planted by the work of Donna Haraway, and especially by her 1992 essay, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in which she touches briefly on articulation and its promise. Haraway suggests that “To articulate is to signify. It is to put things together, scary things, risky things, contingent things. I want to live in an articulate world. We articulate; therefore we are” (324). Following from Haraway’s work, this framework insists that bodies and technologies are not simply components cobbled together, but a set of relations that rework each other in complex and ongoing processes of articulation. The double-jointed meaning of articulation is particularly apt as inspiration for crafting a more nuanced understanding of embodiment, since articulation implies both physiology and communication. It is a term that can be used to explain physical jointedness and mobility, but also expressive specificities. We articulate a joint by exploring its range of motion and we articulate ideas by expressing them in words. In both senses we articulate and are articulated by our jointed nature. Instead of oversimplifying or idealising embodied relationships with prostheses and other technologies, we might conceive of them and experience them as part of a “joint project”, based on points of connexion that are not static, but dynamic, expressive, complex, contested, and sometimes uncomfortable. After all, as Shildrick reminds us, in addition to functioning as utilitarian material artifacts, “prostheses are rich in semiotic meaning and mark the site where the disordering ambiguity, and potential transgressions, of the interplay between the human, animal and machine cannot be occluded” (17). By encouraging the attentive embracing of these multiple meanings, disorderings, ambiguities, transgressions and interplays, my aim moving forward is to explore the ways in which we might all become more articulate about our articulations. After all, I too want to live in an articulate world.ReferencesAT&T. "AT&T Reach Out and Touch Someone Commercial – 1987." Advertisement. 13 Mar. 2014. YouTube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OapWdclVqEY>.Cleland, Kathy. "Prosthetic Bodies and Virtual Cyborgs." Second Nature 3 (2010): 74–101.Glitsos, Laura. "Screen as Skin: The Somatechnics of Touchscreen Music Media." Somatechnics 7.1 (2017): 142–165.Haraway, Donna. "Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others." Cultural Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 295–337.Jain, Sarah S. "The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and Disabling the Prosthetic Trope." Science, Technology, & Human Values 31.54 (1999): 31–54.McLuhan, Eric, and Frank Zingrone, eds. Essential McLuhan. Concord: Anansi P, 1995.Mullins, Aimee. Aimee Mullins: It’s Not Fair Having 12 Pairs of Legs. TED, 2009. <http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html>.Muri, Allison. "Of Shit and the Soul: Tropes of Cybernetic Disembodiment in Contemporary Culture." Body & Society 9.3 (2003): 73–92.Nikon. "See Much Further! Nikon COOLPIX P1000." Advertisement. 1 Nov. 2018. YouTube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtABWZX0U8w>.OED Online. "prosthesis, n." Oxford UP. June 2019. 1 Aug. 2019 <https://www-oed-com.proxy.hil.unb.ca/view/Entry/153069?redirectedFrom=prosthesis#eid>.Sengers, Phoebe. "Technological Prostheses: An Anecdote." ZKP-4 Net Criticism Reader. Eds. Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz. 1997.Shildrick, Margrit. "Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics." Hypatia 30.1 (2015): 13–29.Sobchak, Vivian. "Living a ‘Phantom Limb’: On the Phenomenology of Bodily Integrity." Body & Society 16.3 (2010): 51–67.Stone, Allucquere Roseanne. "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures." Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. 81–113.Sun, Hsiao-yu. "Prosthetic Configurations and Imagination: Dis/ability, Body and Technology." Concentric: Literacy and Cultural Studies 44.1 (2018): 13–39.Texas Instruments. "We Wrote the Book on Classroom Calculators." Advertisement. Teaching Children Mathematics 2.1 (1995): Back Matter. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/41196414>.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. — William Arthur WardIntroductionThe first documented use of the term Mentor can be traced back to the 8th century BC poem by Homer entitled Odyssey (Hay, Gerber and Minichiello). Although this original representation of Mentor is contested in the literature (Colley), historically the term mentor has evolved to imply a wise and trusted other who advises, teaches, protects and supports someone younger who is inexperienced and not so knowledgeable with the ways of the world. The mentor within a 21st century construct still aligns to this historical portrayal, however the evolution of society, the influence of technology, the growth of entrepreneurship, and a greater understanding of the impact of our interactions with others has forced us to consider mentoring in contemporary ways. As such, popular culture, through books, film and images, provide many impressions of the mentor and what it means to mentor in both historical and contemporary circumstances. Similarly, popular culture provides us with a variety of impressions of the teacher. Throughout old and new history, teaching is considered to be a honourable profession, one that is complex and involves specific skills and knowledge to be effective (Marsh). Society has high expectations of teachers as they are entrusted with shaping the future generation (Parkay). Although the levels of respect and trust of teachers changes within different cultural circumstances, society allows teachers to be one of the most influential figures in a child’s life. Popular film often picks up on this theme and portrays teachers as inspirational figures, pillars of society and those that can have a major influence over the development of the student’s in their care. Within the brief story that a film provides, teachers are more often than not, positioned as a ‘mentor type’ figure to the students entrusted in their care, who guides and supports them to become who they want to be. This paper explores the constructs of the mentor and mentorship through a popular culture lens. Culture is broadly described as the “bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings” (Willis 185) and our understandings are shaped by what we see, hear and do. The paper is framed by and seeks to answer the following question: To what extent is the teacher as mentor portrayed in popular film a realistic image? Accordingly this paper will examine the rise of the teacher as mentor and determine what images are portrayed through the medium of film. In order to answer the question, the paper will briefly examine current literature for the characteristics and roles of mentors and teachers. The paper will then delve into the way that teachers are portrayed in film and will be followed by an examination of a selection of films that portray teachers as mentors. A comparison will be made between the characteristics of mentors and the characteristics that the movie teachers display. Analysis through the use of reader-response theory will provide insight into the extent of the reality of the teacher as mentor that are portrayed. Mentors and Teachers: A Review of Selected Literature Mentoring consists of a series of interactions that can be of a social, intellectual or emotional nature (Lentz and Allen). Mentoring can be described as a helping relationship whereby two or more people work together in order to achieve personal and professional goals (Johnson and Ridley). Effective mentoring is also known to be mutually beneficial to all participants (Ambrosetti, Knight and Dekkers). When scanning the literature there are a number of common descriptors that are used consistently to situate the interactions a mentor undertakes: supporter, guide, advisor, teacher, protector and counselor (Sundli; Hall et al.). Such descriptors indicate that a mentor performs a series of roles that change according to the needs of those being mentored (Ambrosetti and Dekkers). If the mentor has a series of roles to perform, then it is logical that the mentee also will also have a number of roles to play, however these are lnot well documented in the literature. The roles that both mentors and mentees play during a relationship can be identified and underpinned through the three dimensions of mentoring: the relationship itself, the developmental needs of the participants and the integration of the context in which the mentoring is situated (Ambrosetti, Knight and Dekkers). The interactions that a mentor engages in with a mentee span over a number of dimensions and are often reactive in nature. The three dimensions of mentoring can assist in describing a mentor and the roles they play. The relational dimension includes such roles as supporter, protector, friend and counselor. The roles of guide, teacher/trainer, collaborator, facilitator and reflector can be classified as developmental whereas being a role model can be both a developmental role and contextual role (230). There are a number of characteristics that are common to a mentor. Johnson and Ridley summarize them to include the following traits: exuding warmth, listening actively, showing unconditional regard, tolerating idealization, embracing humor, not expecting perfection, being trustworthy, having interpersonal competence, respecting another’s values and not being jealous of the mentee (43-62). The above list of traits are personal and often linked to personality, thus can be connected explicitly to the relational dimension of mentoring. The possession (or non-possession) of such traits can impact on the interactions that occur within mentorship. Accordingly it can be assumed that the characteristics, in conjunction with the roles that mentors play, that not everyone is suited to the role of mentor. Most people have experienced schooling at some stage in their life and is therefore familiar with the role of a teacher. Teaching is one most well known professions and can be described as a “creative act in which teachers continually shape and reshape lessons, events and the experiences of their students”(Parkay 45). The role of a teacher is to teach both knowledge and skills to their learners in order to prepare them as citizens for the future. More specifically, the role of the teacher is to design and deliver learning experiences that cater for and challenge the learners, that develop skills and knowledge both inside and outside of the classroom, and help them become confident, creative and responsible citizens. Despite this important role, the image of teachers is split between two types: one that is bitter, spiteful and egocentric, and the other being caring, accepting and reflective (Connell). We remember teachers according to such categories. The types of characteristics that teachers hold are extensive, however the following encompasses those that are key within the literature. Teachers generally have compassion, empathy and a caring nature. They can be flexible, creative, personable, humorous, positive, knowledgeable, motivational and dependable. Teachers are often well organised people, fair minded and resourceful (Howell). When examining the characteristics of teachers and the traits of mentors, similarities can be seen indicating that a particular type of person may be more suited to being a teacher and/or mentor. Teachers as Mentors in Film Teachers seem to be a popular subject of feature films. Films such as Goodbye Mr Chips (1939), Blackboard Jungle (1955) and To Sir with Love (1967) provide us with insight into the way teachers are portrayed in society and the role they play. Film however, has the specific ability to shape the cultural understanding we develop and allows us to make comparisons to our own experiences and those that are played out in fictional circumstances (Delamarter). While there are some films that provide a negative portrayal of teachers, generally they provide a view that teachers are positive influences on the students in their care.A search of the World Wide Web about the teacher as mentor brings up a treasure trove of film titles that span from the 1930s to the present day. Despite such a choice of titles, the following films have been selected to examine in this paper: Dead Poets Society (1989), Dangerous Minds (1995), Freedom Writers (2007) and the Harry Potter series of films (2001-2011). Selection of these films was based on the following two criteria: 1) they occurred within in a school setting and 2) are embedded within a contemporary theme of struggle where rebellion and/or other teenage angst are highlighted. Reader-response theory will underpin the analysis of the teachers in each of the films selected, so that an answer to the earlier posed question can be illuminated. Broadly speaking, reader-response theory is concerned with how readers, or in this case viewers, “make meaning from their experience with the text” (Beach 1). There are many perspectives on reader-response theory and how one might focus upon when responding to a text. In this instance the author will highlight the transaction that occurs between the reader, the text and the context. The transactions will include the social, cultural, experiential, psychological and textual viewpoints (Beach 8). Firstly, each film will be briefly described. This will be followed by an analysis of the teachers portrayed in the films. Dead Poets Society (1989) is set at a conservative secondary boys academy in the late 1950s and focuses on a group of students completing their senior year. Mr Keating is a new English teacher who uses unconventional teaching methods in the classroom. He inspires his students to ‘seize the day’ and ‘make your lives extraordinary’ and does this through the teaching of poetry. He encourages them to stand on desks during his lessons and to throw out tradition. It is Keating’s messages to his students to question what they believe that permeates the film and inspires his students to pursue what they want to do and become. The film Dangerous Minds (1995) is set in a low socio-economic area, where un-privilege and protecting yourself is a way of life. The teacher in this film is new and young, but is an ex US Marine. The class the film centres on is a difficult one to teach. This teacher uses unorthodox methods to gain the attention and trust of her students. The film makes a point to show us that she makes particular effort to relate the curriculum to the students’ interests in order to engage them in learning. Emphasis is also on the fact that she takes an interest in the students and many become her ‘personal projects’ and helping them to realize who they can become. Freedom Writers (2007) is set in the years directly following the Los Angeles riots of 1992 whereby issues of racism, segregation and inequality along with the changing view of the world is the focus. The students in the classrooms of this film are from diverse backgrounds and un-trusting of the education system. Their teacher is new and young and her first attempts to earn their trust fail until she begins to get to know the students and make links between what is being taught to their own lives. She inspires her class to learn tolerance, apply themselves and pursue further education. In the Harry Potter (2001-2011) series of films, there are several teachers who make an impact upon the young wizards. Although set in a fantasy world, the audience is treated to both inspirational teachers looking to nurture, protect and develop their charges, and teachers who are painted as egocentric and suspicious. Inspirational teachers include Dumbledore and McGonagall who offer subtle life lessons, specific skills and knowledge and protect the young wizards from danger. Egocentric and somewhat suspicious teachers include Snape and Quirrell who look to thwart the wizard’s time at school, however they too offer subtle life lessons to their students. The theme of good versus evil is paramount throughout the film series and the teachers are aligned with this theme.Teachers as Mentors – An AnalysisAlthough only a brief description of each film has been offered, the teachers as mentors to their students is the focus. Mr Keating (Dead Poets Society) and LouAnne Johnson (Dangerous Minds) are both described as unorthodox as they each use teaching methods that are frowned upon by others. However their purposeful and different teaching methods draw their students into their lessons so that life learning can occur. In each film, the unorthodox teaching touches the students in ways unknown to them before and in both cases the students demonstrate intellectual and personal growth. The unorthodox methods provide an avenue for a different relationship that is far from the traditional. In some scenes friendship is hinted at where guiding and supporting the students towards their hopes and dreams is highlighted. Aspects of mentoring can be seen through relational, developmental and contextual domains as the students are supported, guided and provided explicit role modeling. The young teacher in Freedom Writers, Erin Gruwell, uses a teaching approach that includes taking time to get to know her students. This approach, like Keating and Johnson, provides the opportunity to tweak the curriculum to the interests of the students and thus engage them in academic learning. They teach skills and knowledge in ways which relate to the students’ lives and interests. They guide, support the students towards the unfamiliar and facilitate opportunities for success. They help them to set goals and make them realise that they have a future and can be successful in their lives. The transformations that occur due to the teaching approaches used by the teachers cause their students admire and want to be like them. In Harry Potter, teachers Dumbledore and McGonagall are wise in years and life experience. They offer wisdom, protection and guidance to the young wizards throughout the series. These teachers, like Keating, Johnson and Gruwell, are role models in that they represent what life can be like and how best to achieve that life. Snape and Quirell also take an interest in their students, but represent an alternative view of life and learning. The difference between the four Harry Potter teachers can be drilled down to the traits of effective teachers. Two of which emulate the traits and two whom do not readily display any of the traits. Dumbledore and McGonagall can be considered as teacher mentors whereas Snape and Quirell cannot. In each film the student can be seen as central to the teacher as mentor and this in turn influences the way in which they behave. The teachers in these films pass on life lessons through their teaching. Throughout the films the teachers are guiding, supporting, befriending, protecting and training their charges. Interactions that occur between the teachers and the students are followed by a reflective phase by the teachers, whereby solutions to problems are sought or self-realisation occurs. In many instances the films show the teacher learning from the student and thus learning their own life lessons through reflection. From a social and cultural perspective, what is portrayed within the storylines are often close to the reality of what is expected from teachers. In many instances these lead towards a stereotyping of who teachers are and how they behave. However, from an experiential point of view, our expectations of the actions that teachers undertake do not usually take such form. In reality, teachers are busy people with a complex job to do (Connell) and often do not have time to take personal interest in all of their students individually. The teachers within the films chosen seem to have one class to prepare for, whereas in reality, a school teacher will have many classes to consider. Psychologically, some teachers and the style they embrace appeal to a particular a type of student or group of students. In the case of Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, the storyline painted the students as those needing a particular type of teacher, someone who would save them from their circumstance and visa versa. The textual perspective was well highlighted by the teachers in the Harry Potter films as the viewer expects to see teachers with rather unusual but interesting teaching styles. However the text (within all films) included insight into mentor characteristics such as warmth, humour, tolerance, respect and unconditional regards. Generally, the films examined highlight two different types of teachers, challenging the categories written about by Connell. The first type of teacher highlighted was one who was seen as being more contemporary. One who is individual, unorthodox, and maybe a little rebellious; this teacher highlights that you need to be ‘different’ to make a difference. The second type was one who aligns to the traditional form of teacher; one who uses their knowledge, wisdom and life experience to break through to their student. Each of the films were underpinned by the relationship, the developmental needs and the context in which the narrative was played out, however the relationship between the students and the teacher was highlighted as being central to the storyline. Thus films of this nature often portray teachers as those who help their students in the emotional sense rather than the intellectual sense (Delamarter). Conclusion Several understandings about the teacher as mentor have been brought to light through the examination of the teacher as mentor in film. Firstly, in revisiting the mentoring definitions offered within this paper, it can be said that the teachers highlighted in the discussed films were mentoring their students in a way unique to the relationship developed between teacher and student. In each instance the teacher worked with their students to identify teaching approaches that would be successful in the context in which they were situated. Each film demonstrated that the teachers were committed to creating a relationship that met the developmental needs of their students. Interestingly, it was observed that the relationships were mutually beneficial in that the teachers grew along with the students with many coming to realisations about themselves through reflection and self thought. Secondly, the teachers within the films were portrayed as playing several important roles within their students’ lives. The teachers were role models inside and outside of the classroom. Each film’s storyline positioned the teacher as an influential other, whether they be portrayed as rebellious and unorthodox, evil and suspicious or inspirational and wise. The teachers in these films can be considered as mentors as they were supporting, guiding, protecting and nurturing the students to become better versions of themselves. However, the question that this article sought to answer was: to what extent is the teacher as mentor portrayed in popular film a realistic image? In looking back at the image the teacher in society and the role that they play in developing citizens of the future, it can be said the image presented has slivers of realism. In the real world, teachers must conform to society’s expectations, educational policies and codes of professionalism. Professional relationships with students do not encompass them in behave a student as a ‘personal project’, although catering to their needs is encouraged within the curriculum. It would be thought that if teachers did not encourage their students to be the best they can be, then they would not be doing their job. Many figures throughout our cultural history have been viewed as a mentor due to the role they play and how these roles align to societal beliefs and values. Thus, the portrayal of mentors and mentorship through a popular culture lens provides insight into our understanding about what mentorship is and how this may develop in the future. Both in the past and present, teachers are seen as inspirational figures and pillars of society, and are often considered a mentor by default. Films portray teachers in a variety of fashions, however there are many films that subtly position the teacher as a mentor to their students and it is this that this article has focused on. ReferencesAmbrosetti, Angelina, and John Dekkers. “The Interconnectedness of the Roles of Mentors and Mentees in Pre-Service Teacher Education Mentoring Relationships.” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 35.6 (2010): 42-55.Ambrosetti, Angelina, Bruce Allen Knight, and John Dekkers. “Maximizing the Potential of Mentoring: A Framework for Pre-Service Teacher Education.” Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 22.3 (2014): 224-39.Beach, Richard. A Teacher’s Response to Reader-Response Theories. Illinois: National Council Teachers of English, 1993.Blackboard Jungle. Directed by Richard Brooks. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955.Colley, Helen. “Righting Rewritings of the Myth of Mentor: A Critical Perspective on Career Guidance Mentoring.” British Journal of Guidance & Counselling 29.2 (2001): 177-197.Connell, Raewyn. “Teachers.” Education, Change and Society. Eds. Raewyn Connell, Anthony Welch, Margaret Vickers, Dennis Foley, Nigel Bagnall, Debra Hayes, Helen Proctor, Arathi Sriprakash, and Craig Campbell. South Melbourne: Oxford, 2013. 261-275.Dangerous Minds. Directed by John N. Smith. Hollywood Pictures/Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films/Via Rosa Productions, 1995.Dead Poets Society. Directed by Peter Weir. Touchstone Pictures/Silver Screen Partners IV, 1989.Delamater, Jeremy. “Avoiding Practice Shock: Using Teacher Movies to Realign Pre-Service Teachers’ Expectations of Teaching.” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 40.2 (2015): 1-14.Freedom Writers. Directed by Richard LaGravenese. Paramount Pictures, 2007.Goodbye Mr Chips. Directed by Sam Wood. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Denham Studios, 1939.Hall, Kendra M., Rani Jo Draper, Leigh K. Smith, and Robert V. Bullough. “More than a Place to Teach: Exploring the Perceptions of the Roles and Responsibilities of Mentor Teachers.” Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 16.3 (2008): 328-45.Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Directed by Chris Columbus. Heyday Films/1492 Pictures, 2001.Hay, Terence, Rod Gerber, and Victor Minichiello. “Mentorship: A Review of the Concept.” Unicorn 25.2 (1999): 84-95.Howell, Jennifer. Teaching and Learning: Building Effective Pedagogies. South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press, 2014.Lentz, Elizabeth, and Tammy D. Allen. “Reflections on Naturally Occurring Mentoring Relationships.” The Blackwell Handbook of Mentoring: A Multiple Perspectives Approach. Eds. Tammy D. Allen and Lillian T. Eby. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 159-162.Johnson, W. Brad, and Charles R. Ridley. The Elements of Mentoring. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Marsh, Colin. Becoming a Teacher: Knowledge Skills and Issues. 5th ed. Frenchs Forest Pearson, 2010.Parkay, Forrest W. Becoming a Teacher. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.Sundli, Liv. “Mentoring: A New Mantra for Education?” Teaching and Teacher Education 23 (2007): 201-14.To Sir with Love. Directed by James Clavell. Columbia British Productions, 1967.Willis, Paul. “Shop-Floor Culture, Masculinity and the Wage Form.” Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory. Eds. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007. 185-200.

Introduction While individuals from marginalised and vulnerable communities have long been confronted with the task of developing coping strategies, COVID-19 lockdowns intensified the conditions under which resilience and wellbeing were/are negotiated, not only for marginalised communities but for people from all walks of life. In particular, the pandemic has highlighted in simple terms the stark divide between the “haves” and “have nots”, and how pre-existing physical conditions and material resources (or lack thereof), including adequate income, living circumstances, and access to digital and other resources, have created different conditions for people to be able to physically isolate, avoid working in conditions that put them at greater risk of exposure to the virus, and maintain up-to-date information. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live, and its conditions have tested our capacity for resilience to varying degrees. Poor mental health has become an increasingly urgent concern, with almost one in ten people contemplating suicide during Victoria’s second wave and prolonged lockdown in 2020 (Ali et al.; Czeisler & Rajaratnam; Paul). The question of what enables people to cope and adapt to physical distancing is critical for building a more resilient post-pandemic society. With the understanding that resilience is comprised of an intersection of material and immaterial resources, this project takes as its focus the material dimensions of everyday resilience. Specifically, “Objects for Everyday Resilience” explores the intersection of material objects and everyday resilience, focussing on the things that have supported mental and physical health of different sections of the community in Melbourne, Australia, during the pandemic. People in the Victorian city of Melbourne, Australia – including the research team authors of this article – experienced 262 days of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than any other city in the world. The infection rate was high, as was the death rate. Hospitals were in crisis attempting to deal with the influx (McReadie). During lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, all movement in the city was restricted, with 9 pm to 5 am curfews and a five-kilometre travel limit. Workplaces, schools, businesses, sports and leisure clubs were closed. One person per household could shop. Masks were mandatory at all times. PCR testing was extensive. People stayed in their homes, with no visitors. The city limits were closed by roadblocks. Rare instances of air travel required a hard-to-get exemption. Vaccines were delayed. The state government provided financial support for most workers who lost income from their regular work due to the restrictions. However, the financial assistance criteria rejected many casual workers, including foreign students who normally supported themselves through casual employment (McReadie). The mental health toll of protracted lockdowns on Melbourne residents was high (Klein, Tyler-Parker, and Bastian). Yet people developed measures of resilience that helped them cope with lockdown isolation (Gerrand). While studies of resilience have been undertaken during the pandemic, including increased attention towards the affordances of online platforms in lockdown, relatively little attention has been paid to whether and how material objects support everyday resilience. The significant amount of literature on objects and things (e.g. Whitlock) offers a wide range of potential applications when brought to bear on the material conditions of resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic as it continues to unfold. As ethnographer Paula Zuccotti notes in her study of objects that people used in lockdowns around the world, “Future Archeology of a Global Lockdown”, the everyday items we use tell us stories about how we exist (Zuccotti). Paying attention to the intersection of objects with resilience in everyday contexts can enable us to view resilience as a potential practice that can shape the conditions of social life that produce adversity in the first place (Chalmers). By studying relationships between material objects and people in conditions of adversity, this project aims to enhance and extend emerging understandings of multisystemic resilience (Ungar). Objects have been central to human history, culture, and life. According to Maurizio Ferraris, objects are characterised by four qualities: sensory-ness, manipulability, ordinariness, and relationality. “Unlike the three spheres of biological life – the mineral, the vegetable and the animal – objects and things have been customarily considered dependent on humans’ agency and presence” (Bartoloni). In everyday life, objects can enhance resilience when they are mobilised in strategies of resourcefulness and “making do” (de Certeau). Objects may also support the performance of identity and enable inter-subjective relations that create a sense of agency and of being at home, wherever one is located (Ahmed et al.; Gerrand). From an existential perspective, the experience of being confined in lockdown, “stuck” in one place, challenges cosmopolitan connectedness and sense of belonging. It also bears some similarities to the experiences of migrants and refugees who have endured great uncertainty, distance, and immobility due to detention or vintage of migration (Yi-Neumann et al.). It is possible that certain objects, although facilitating resilience, might also trigger mixed feelings in the individuals who relied on them during the lockdown (Svašek). From domestic accoutrements to digital objects, what kinds of things supported wellbeing in situations of confinement? Multisystemic Resilience in Lockdown It is especially useful to consider the material dimensions of resilience when working with people who have experienced trauma, marginalisation, or mental health challenges during the pandemic, as working with objects enables interaction beyond language barriers and enables alternatives to the re-telling of experiences. Resilience has been theorised as a social process supported (or inhibited) by a range of “everyday” intersecting external and contextual factors at individual, family, social, institutional, and economic resource levels (Ungar; Sherrieb et al.; Southwick et al.). The socio-ecological approach to resilience demonstrates that aspects of individual, family, and community resilience can be learned and reinforced (Bonanno), but they can also be eroded or weakened, depending on the dynamic interplay of various forces and influences in the social ecology of an individual or a group. This means that while factors at the level of the individual, family, community, or institutions may strengthen resistance to harms or the ability to overcome adversity in one context, the same factors can promote vulnerability and erode coping abilities in others (Rutter). Our project asked to what extent this social-ecological understanding of resilience might be further enhanced by attending to nonhuman materialities that can contribute or erode resilience within human relations. We were particularly interested in understanding the potential of the exhibition for creating an inclusive and welcoming space for individuals who had experienced long COVID lockdowns to safely reflect on the material conditions that supported their resilience. The aim of this exercise was not to provide answers to a problem, but to draw attention to complexity, and generate additional questions and uncertainties, as encouraged by Barone and Eisner. The exhibition, through its juxtaposition of (lockdown-induced) loneliness with the conviviality of the public exhibition format, enabled an exploration of the tension between the neoliberal imperative to physically isolate oneself and the public messaging concerning the welfare of the general populace. Our project emerged from insights collected on the issue of mental health during “Living Lab” Roundtables undertaken in 2020 by our Centre For Resilient and Inclusive Societies, convened as part of the Foundation Project (Lam et al.). In particular, we deployed an object-based analysis to investigate the art- and object-based methodology in the aftermath of a potentially traumatising lockdown, particularly for individuals who may not respond as well to traditional research methods. This approach contributes to the emerging body of work exploring the affordances of visual and material methods for capturing feelings and responses generated between people and objects during the pandemic (Watson et al.). “Objects for Everyday Resilience” sought to facilitate greater openness to objects’ vitality (Bennett) in order to produce new encounters that further understandings of multisystemic resilience. Such insights are critically tied to human mental health and physical wellbeing. They also enabled us to develop shared resources (as described below) that support such resilience during the period of recovery from the pandemic and beyond. Arts and Objects as Research The COVID-19 pandemic provoked not only a global health response, but also a reorientation of the ways COVID-related research is conducted and disseminated. Javakhishvili et al. describe the necessity of “a complex, trauma-informed psycho-socio-political response” in the aftermath of “cultural/societal trauma” occurring at a society-wide scale, pointing out the prevalence of mental health issues following previous epidemics (1). As they note, an awareness of such trauma is necessary “to avoid re-traumatization and to facilitate recovery”, with “safety, trustworthiness, transparency, collaboration and peer support, empowerment, choice” among the key principles of trauma-informed policies, strategies, and practices (3). Our project received funding from the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS) in July 2021, and ethics approval in November 2021. Centring materiality, in November 2021 we circulated a “call for objects” through CRIS’ and the research team’s social media channels, and collected over 40 objects from participants of all ages for this pilot study. Our participants comprised 33 women and 10 men. Following is a breakdown of the self-described cultural background of some participants: Five Australian (including one ‘6th generation Australian’); four Vietnamese; two Caucasian; one Anglo-Australian; one Asian; one Brazilian; one British; one Caucasian/English Australian; one Filipino; one Filipino-Australian; one German/Portuguese/US; one Greek Australian; one Iranian; one Irish and Welsh; one Israeli; one Half German, Half Middle Eastern; one Middle Eastern; one Singaporean; one White British. Participants’ objects and stories were analysed by the team both in terms of their ‘people, place, and things’ affordances – enhancing participants’ reflections of life in the pandemic – and through the prism of their vibrancy, drawing on object-oriented ontology and materiality as method (Ravn). Our participants were encouraged to consider how their chosen object(s) supported their resilience during the pandemic. For example, some objects enabled linking with memories that assist in elaborating experiences of loss or grief (Trimingham Jack and Devereux). To guide those submitting objects, we asked about: 1) their relationship to the object, 2) the meaning of the object, and 3) which features of resilience are mobilised by the object. From an analysis of our data, we have developed a working typology of objects to understand their particular relationship role to features of resilience (social capital, temporality) and to thematise our data in relation to emerging priorities in research in multisystemic resilience, materiality, and mental health. Things on Display Whilst we were initially unable to gather in person, we built an online Instagram gallery (@objectsforeverydayresilience) of submitted objects, with accompanying stories from research participants. Relevant hashtags in several languages were added to each post by the research team to ensure their widest possible visibility. This gallery features objects such as a female participant’s jigsaw puzzle which “helped me to pass the downtime in an enjoyable way”. Unlike much of her life in lockdown that was consumed by chores that “did not necessarily make me feel content or happy”, jigsaw puzzles made this participant “happy for that time I was doing them, transport[ing] me out of the confines of the lockdown with landscapes and images from across the globe”. Another female participant submitted a picture of her worn sneakers, which she used to go on what she called her “sanity walks”. To counteract the overwhelm of “being in the house all the time with 3 (autistic) children who were doing home learning and needed a lot of support”, while attempting to work on her PhD, going for walks every day helped clear my mind, get some fresh air, keep active and have some much needed quiet / me time. I ordered these shoes online because we couldn’t go to the shops and wore them almost daily during the extended lockdowns. Books were also popular. During lockdowns, according to a female participant, reading helped me connect with the outside world and be able to entertain myself without unhealthy coping mechanisms such as scrolling endlessly through TikTok. It also helped me feel less alone during the pandemic. Another female participant found that her son’s reading gave her time to work. Olfactory objects provided comfort for a participant who mourned the loss of smell due to mask wearing: perfumes were my sensory transport during this time – they could evoke memories of places I’d travelled to, seasons, people, feelings and even colours. I could go to far-off places in my mind through scent even though my body was largely stationary within my home. (Female participant) Through scent objects, this participant was “able to bring the world to meet me when I was unable to go out to meet the world”. Other participants sought to retreat from the world through homely objects: throughout lockdown I felt that my bed became an important object to my sanity. When I felt overwhelmed, I would come to bed and take a nap which helped me feel less out of control with everything going on in the world. (Female participant) For an essential worker who injured her leg whilst working in a hospital, an Ikea couch enabled recovery: “the couch saved my throbbing leg for many months. It served as a place to eat, paint and rest.” (Female participant) While pets were not included as objects within this project, several participants submitted their pets’ accoutrements. A female participant who submitted a photograph of her cat’s collar and tree movingly recounts how while I was working online in lockdown, this cat tree kept my cat entertained. She was so enthusiastic while scratching (covered in her fur) she somehow managed to remove her collar. I call Bouny my Emotional support cat … . She really stepped up her treatments of me during the pandemic. My mother had advanced dementia and multiple lockdowns [which] meant I could not see her in the weeks leading up to her death. These objects highlight the ways in which this participant found comfort during lockdown at a time of deep grief. For other participants, blankets and shawls provided sources of comfort “since much of lockdown was either in cool weather or deepest winter”. I found myself taking [my shawl] whenever I went out for any of the permitted activities and I also went to bed with it at night. The soft texture and the warmth against my face, neck and shoulders relaxed my body and I felt comforted and safe. (Female participant) Another used a calming blanket during lockdown “for time-outs on my bed (I was confined to a tiny flat at the time and separated from my family). It gave me a safe space”. (Female participant) In a similar vein, journalling provided several participants with “a safe space to explore thoughts and make them more tangible, acting as a consistent mindful practice I could always turn to”. The journal provided consistency throughout the ever-changing lockdown conditions and a strong sense of stability. Recording thoughts daily allowed me to not only process adversity, but draw attention to the areas in my life which I was grateful for … even from home. (Female participant) In addition to fostering mindfulness, the creative practice of journalling enabled this participant to exercise her imagination: writing from the perspectives of other people, from friends to strangers, also allowed me to reflect on the different experiences others had during lockdown. I found this fostered empathy and motivated me to reach out and check in on others, which in turn also benefited my own mental health. (Female participant) Creative practices were critical to sustaining many participants of this study. The Norman family, for example, submitted an acrylic on canvas artwork, Surviving COVID in Port Melbourne (2021), as their object of resilience: this work represents the sentiments and experiences of our family after a year of successive COVID lockdowns. Each section of the canvas has been completed a member of our family – 2 parents and a 21, 18 and 14 year-old. (Norman family) Likewise, musical instruments and sound objects – whether through analogue or digital means – helped participants to stay sane in long lockdowns: wen I didn’t know what to do with myself I always turned to the guitar. (Male participant) Music was so important to us throughout the lockdowns. It helped us express and diffuse big feelings. We played happy songs to amplify nice moments, funny songs to cheer each other up, angry songs to dance out rage. (Family participants) Curating the Lockdown Lounge To enhance the capacity of our project’s connections to the wider community, and respond to the need we felt to gather in person to reflect on what it meant for each of us to endure long lockdowns, we held an in-person exhibition after COVID-19 restrictions had eased in Melbourne in November 2022. The decision to curate the “Lockdown Lounge” art and research exhibition featuring objects submitted by research participants was consistent with a trauma-informed approach to research as described above. According to Crowther, art exhibits have the potential to redirect viewers’ attention from “aesthetic critique” to emotional connection. They can facilitate what Moon describes as “relational aesthetics”, whereby viewers may connect with the art and artists, and enhance their awareness of the self, artist, and the world. As a form of “guided relational viewing” (Potash), art exhibits are non-coercive in that they invite responses, discussion, and emotional involvement while placing no expectation on viewers to engage with or respond to the exhibition in a particular way. When considering such questions, our immersive in-person exhibition featured a range of object-based installations including audio-visual and sound objects, available for viewing in our Zine, The Lockdown Lounge (Walimunige et al.). The living room design was inspired by French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira’s immersive living room installation, “Dreams Don’t Have Titles”, at the 59th Venice Art Biennale’s French pavilion (Sedira), attended by project co-lead Vivian Gerrand in June 2022. The project team curated the gallery space together, which was located at Deakin University’s city conference venue, “Deakin Downtown”, in Melbourne, Australia. Fig. 1: The Lockdown Lounge, living room. “What Got You through Lockdown?” research exhibition and experience, Deakin Downtown, Melbourne, 21-25 November 2022. In the centre of the Lockdown Lounge’s living room (see fig. 1), for example, a television screen played a looped collection of popular YouTube videos, many of which had gone viral in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, admonishing Victorians to avoid non-essential activities through the example of an illicit dinner party held that resulted in a spike in coronavirus cases in March 2020 (ABC News). This short video excerpt of the Premier’s press conference concluded with his advice not to “get on the beers”. While not on display in this instance, many visitors would have been familiar with the TikTok video remix made later in the pandemic that featured the same press conference, with Premier Andrews’s words spliced to encourage listeners to “get on the beers!” (Kutcher). We recalled the ways in which such videos provided light relief through humour at a time of grave illness and trauma: when army trucks were being summoned to carry the deceased from Northern Italian hospitals to makeshift gravesites, those of us privileged to be at home, at a remove from the ravages of the virus, shared videos of Italian mayors shouting at their constituents to “vai a casa!” (Go home!). Or of Italians walking fake dogs to have an excuse to go outside. We finished the loop with a reproduction of the viral Kitten Zoom Filter Mishap, in which in online American courtroom defendant Rod Ponton mistakenly dons a cat filter while telling the judge, ‘I am not a cat’. The extraordinary nature of living in lockdown initially appeared as an opportunity to slow down, and this pandemic induced immobility appeared to prompt a kind of “degrowth” as industries the world over paused operation and pollution levels plummeted (Gerrand). In reflection of this, we included videos in our YouTube playlist of wild animals returning to big cities, and of the waters of Venice appearing to be clear. These videos recalled how the pandemic has necessitated greater appreciation of the power of things. The spread of the novel coronavirus’s invisible variants has permanently altered the conditions and perceptions of human life on the planet, forcing us to dwell on the vitality intrinsic to materiality, and renewing awareness of human lives as taking place within a broader ecology of life forms (Bennett). Within this posthuman perspective, distinctions between life and matter are blurred, and humans are displaced from a hierarchical ontological centre. In an essay titled “The Go Slow Party”, anthropologist Michael Taussig theorises a “mastery of non-mastery” that yields to the life of the object. This yielding – a necessary response to the conditions of the pandemic – can enable greater attentiveness to the interconnectedness and enmeshment of all things, leading to broader understandings of self and of resilience. To understand how participants responded to the exhibition, we asked them to respond to the following questions in the form of open-ended comments: What if anything affected you most? Did any of the objects resonate with you? Did the exhibition provide a safe environment for you to reflect on your sense of resilience during the pandemic? Fig. 2: Research exhibition participant standing beside artwork by the Norman family: Surviving COVID in Port Melbourne, acrylic on canvas (2021), The Lockdown Lounge. Through curating the art exhibition, we engaged in what Wang et al. describe as “art as research”, whereby the artist-researcher aims to “gain a deeper understanding of what art, art creation, or an artistic installation can do or activate … either in terms of personal experiences or environmental circumstances” (15). As Wang et al. write, “the act of creating is simultaneously the act of researching”, neither of which can be distinguished from one another (15). Accordingly, the process of curating the gallery space triggered memories of living in lockdown for members of our team, including one male youth researcher who remembers: as the space gradually began to be populated with object submissions … the objects began to find their place … . We slowly developed an understanding of the specific configurations of objects and the feelings that these combinations potentially could invoke. As we negotiated where my object might be placed, I felt an odd sense of melancholy seeing my record player and guitar at the exhibition, reminiscing about the music that I used to play and listen to with my family when we were all in lockdown … . As my Bon Iver record spun, and the familiar melodies rung out into the space, I felt as if I was sharing an intimate memory with others … . It also reminded me of the times when I had felt the most uplifted, when I was with family, near and far, knowing that we all were a unit. Another of our youth researcher team members served as an assistant curator and agreed to monitor the gallery space by being there for most of the five days of the exhibition’s opening to the public. She describes her work in the gallery thus: my role involved general exhibition upkeep – setup, answering visitor inquiries and monitoring the space – which meant being in the exhibition space for around 7.5 hours a day. Although it cannot be fully compared to living through Melbourne’s lockdowns, being in a space meant to mimic that time meant that comparisons naturally arose. I can see similarities between the things that supported my resilience during the lockdowns and the things that made my time at the gallery enjoyable. Through engaging with the gallery, this researcher was reminded of how spending time engaging in hands-on tasks made physical distancing more manageable. Spending time in the exhibition space also facilitated her experience of the lockdowns and the material conditions supporting resilience. She reflects that the hands-on, creative tasks of setting up the exhibition space and helping design a brochure reminded me of how I turned to baking so I could create something using my hands … . In the beginning, I approached my time at the gallery as a requirement of my work in this project … . Looking back now, I believe I understand both the person I was those years ago, and resilience itself, a little bit better. Fig. 3: Research exhibition participant wearing an Oculus virtual reality headset, watching the film Melbourne Locked Down (van Leeuwen), The Lockdown Lounge, November 2022. As these examples demonstrate, complex assemblages of people, places, and things during the COVID-19 pandemic were, and are, “suffused with multisensory and affective feelings”; exploring the ways affect is distributed through socio-spatialities of human experience enables researchers to better unpack individuals’ COVID experiences in ways that include their surroundings (Lupton). This was further evident in the feedback received from participants who attended the exhibition. Exhibition Feedback Feedback from participants suggested that the public exhibition format enabled them to explore this tension between isolation and orientation to the greater good in a safe and inclusive way (e.g. fig. 2). For Harry (29/m/Argentinian/New Zealand), interacting with the exhibition “reminded me that I wasn’t the only one that went through it”, while Sam (40/m/Chinese Australian) resonated with “many … people’s testimonials” of how objects helped support their resilience during long periods of confinement. Sam further added that participating in the exhibition was a “pleasant, friendly experience”, and that “everyone found something to do”, speaking to the convivial and inclusive nature of the exhibition. This resonates with Chaplin’s observation that “the production and reception of visual art works are social processes” that cannot be understood with reference to aesthetic factors alone (161-2). In the quotes above, it is evident that participants’ experience of the exhibition was inherently entwined with the sociality of the exhibition, evoking a sense of connection to others who had experienced the pandemic (in Harry’s case), and other exhibition attendees, whom he observed “all found something to do”. Additionally, participants’ responses highlighted the crucial role of the “artist researcher”, whom Wang et al. describe as qualitative researchers who use “artistically inspired methods or approaches” to blend research and art to connect with participants (10). In particular, the curation of the exhibition was something participants highlighted as key to facilitating their recollections of the pandemic in ways that were relatable. Nala (19/f/East-African Australian) commented that “the room’s layout allowed for this the most”: “the room was curated so well, it encaptured [sic] all the various stages of COVID lockdown – it made me feel like I was 16 again”. Returning to Wang et al.’s description of “art as research” as a means through which artist researchers can “gain a deeper understanding of what art, art creation, or an artistic installation can do or activate” (15), participant responses suggest that the curation of Lockdown Lounge as a trauma-informed art exhibition allowed participants to re-experience the pandemic lockdowns in ways that did not re-traumatise, but enabled the past and present to coexist safely and meaningfully for participants. Conclusion: Object-Oriented Wellbeing From different sections of the community, “Objects for Everyday Resilience” collected things that tell stories about how people coped in long lockdowns. Displaying the objects and practices that sustained us through the peak of the COVID-19 health crisis helped our participants to safely reflect on their experiences of living through long lockdowns. The variety of objects submitted and displayed draws our attention to the complex nuances of resilience and its material and immaterial intersections. These contributions composed, as fig. 1 illustrates, an almost accidentally curated diorama of a typical lockdown scene, imitating not only the materiality of living room itself but something also, through the very process of contribution, of the strange collectivity that the city of Melbourne experienced during lockdown periods. Precisely partitioned within domestic zones (with important differences for many “essential workers”, residents of public housing high-rises, and other exceptions), lockdowns enforced a different and necessarily unifying rhythm: attention to daily briefings on COVID numbers, affective responses to the heaves and sighs of infection rates, mourning over a new and untameable cause of loss of life, and routine check-ins on newly isolated friends and family. In hindsight, as the city has regained – perhaps redoubled, a sign of impatience with earlier governmental languages of austerity and moderation? – its economic and hedonistic pulse, there are also signs that any lockdown collectivity – which we also acknowledge was always partial and differentiated – has dispersed into the fragmentation of social interests and differences typical of late capitalism. The fascination with “public” objects – the Northface jacket of the state premier, COVID masks and testing kits, even toilet paper rolls, serving metonymically for a shared panic over scarcity – has receded. To the point, less than two years on, of this media attention being a scarcely remembered dream. The Lockdown Lounge is an example of a regathering of experiences through a process that, through its methods, also serves as a reminder of a common sociality integral to resilience. 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