Статті в журналах з теми "Unlimited vocabulary"

Changes in the meaning of words can occur because of the need to accommodate a concept that does not yet have a vocabulary or a concept that has the same component of meaning as a vocabulary that already existed. For example, the use of the word broadcast 'spread'. Originally the meaning of the word broadcast was synonymous with the function of radio, but now it is also used to define other transmissions such as broadcasting counterfeit money. The development of the vocabulary of a language can also show the socio-cultural development of its speakers. This development is unlimited: it will always develop as long as the speakers are still there and use Indonesian in everyday life.

Vocabulary is described as an essential element in second language learning. Having a good command over vocabulary helps in gaining unlimited access to latest information available at different platforms. Therefore, improving vocabulary through Vocabulary Learning Strategies (VLSs) will help the second language learners to become, academically and communicatively, more successful. The present study investigated the types of vocabulary learning strategies used by teacher trainees majoring in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) at the Institute for Teachers Education (ITEs) Darulaman Campus. Vocabulary learning strategies or skills are not directly taught to TESL teacher trainees during their training at ITEs. Teaching and learning vocabulary strategies are neglected by most of the teacher trainees. However, they need to make their teaching and learning processes more successful while learning a second language. This study was conducted based on the theories related to second language acquisition and used qualitative approach using the structured interviews of 14 TESL teacher trainees. The findings of the study were analysed based on Gu and Johnson’s (1996) and Schmitt (1996) categorisation of Vocabulary Learning Strategies and the results revealed TESL teacher trainees employed more metacognitive strategies in their vocabulary learning compared to other nine VLSs.

Abstract This study investigated the effects of word writing on vocabulary learning by comparing three conditions in which there was (a) limited time to write words, (b) unlimited time to write words, and (c) a non-writing word-picture pairs comparison. Non-native speakers studying English as a second language encountered 8 word-picture pairs in each condition and were administered a test measuring form recall and another measuring receptive knowledge of written form. The results indicated that there was little difference between scores on both tests when time on task was the same. However, when the participants had as much time as they needed to write and learn words they had higher scores on both dependent measures than when learning in the other two conditions. The findings suggest that an ecologically valid approach to word writing may facilitate vocabulary learning.

Summary This paper shows that in the 17th century various attempts were made to build fully automatic speaking devices resembling those exhibited in the late 18th-century in France and Germany. Through the analysis of writings by well-known 17th-century scientists, and a document hitherto unknown in the history of phonetics and speech synthesis, an excerpt from La Science universelle (1667[1641]) of the French writer Charles Sorel (1599–1674), it is argued that engineers and scientists of the Baroque period have to be credited with the first model of multilingual text-to-speech synthesis engines using unlimited vocabulary.

The paper addresses the ways of applying economy principle to the sublanguage of psychology. The authors identify the most productive term formation methods, which show the tendency of both languages to compression of nominal words and phrases. In the system of psychological terms of the English language, the most productive ways of linguistic compression are affixation and compounding. The English terminological system is rich, functional and economical because of its unlimited potential for compounding and affixation. The Russian terminological system is more likely to enrich the vocabulary through phonetic borrowings, semantic derivation and calque. It is argued that the borrowings acquired by the Russian terminological system account for the multitude of synonymous terms. On the other hand, phonetic borrowings and semantic calque have enriched the vocabulary without effort and redundancy. It is concluded that economy principle plays a fundamental role in the creation of new words and their adaptation to the English and Russian terminological systems.

Nowadays, the media is rapidly developing, and messaging processes are inexhaustible thanks to the Internet. Audiovisual content has become a separate form of communication and learning. This document analyzes the popular TED Talks platform, describes its use with interpretation students, and shows the research results of students using TED Talks on translation trends for public speaking. The document uses the potential of TED Talks as an unlimited source of knowledge, information, ideas, and inspiration. The use of speeches as methodologically sound and authentic English material has improved listening skills, as well as pronunciation and spelling through the ability to read active subtitles and scripts, and develop and enrich students' vocabulary.

The Internet offers a wealth of information and unlimited resources that teachers can use in order to expose students to authentic language use. Exposure, however, is not enough to trigger language acquisition. Students need to be involved in tasks that integrate the use of computers and enhance language acquisition. This paper outlines an instructional system designed to guide English as a Second Language (ESL) students through their exploration of the Internet and carry out projects that will ultimately help them improve their reading and writing skills and enrich their vocabulary. Through this instructional system the benefits of using the Internet for ESL purposes with different types of students in different educational environments can be maximised.

This study aims to see empirical evidence of the effect of unlimited learning on students’ vocabulary mastery. Researchers used experiments in class 1 MTs Darussalam Gapluk Purwosari Bojonegoro. It aims to increase students’ awareness by expanding their room from home and school to their everyday lives. Seamless learning allows for continuous learning experiences in a number of environments, such as school or home, while seamless learning is spread across multiple environments. Seamless learning is a flawless network where learning takes place anywhere and anytime. Some of the benefits of using a seamless approach include: 1) students can study classes and time without limits 2) students can study at any time, and anywhere 3) integrated learning between formal and non-formal education. Based on the outcome of the estimation of post-test, the average post-test score was 82.6667, while the pre-test average was 52000. This means that the average post-test is 52000. The score is higher than the pre-test.

The problem for developing a TTS (text-to-speech) is a very active field of research. As the Human-Computer Interfaces (HCI) come of age, the need for a more ergonomic and natural interface than the current one (keyboard, mouse, etc.) is being constantly felt. Talking of natural interfaces, what comes to mind, is sound (speech) and sight (vision). These form the basis of many intelligent systems research like robotics. Moreover, speech can also serve as an excellent interface for visually impaired , or people with motor neuron disorders. In this paper we attempt at developing a TTS system for Albanian Language. A lot of commercial systems are available for many foreign languages (mostly English), but there is yet to be a competitive system available for Albanian language. Although the task of building very high quality, unlimited vocabulary text-to-speech (TTS) system is still a difficult one, with many open research questions, we believe the building of reasonable quality voices for many tasks can serve our needs. Here we have worked with standard Albanian, the most commonly spoken. We hope to easily extend the system to other languages, since there are a lot of underlying similarities between languages. Albanian language being highly phonetic, result in simple letter-to-sound rules. We used the standard concatenative synthesis. The main problem faced by us was to make the synthesized speech sound natural. We investigated the reasons for the mechanical sounding speech and developed different synthesis models to overcome some of those problems. Moreover, we implemented some standard and also novel intonation and duration modification algorithms, which can be incorporated into the TTS at a later stage. Our main achievement was reasonably legible speech with an unlimited vocabulary. The following paper presents a brief overview of the main text-to-speech synthesis problem and its subproblems, and the initial work done in building a TTS for Albanian.

The article substantiates the relevance of the problem of forming a linguistic and cultural personality at a higher school, although this problem is not new. Obviously, the strategies used before were either ineffective or not very actively implemented into practice. A closer look at the problem allows actualizing it, finding those aspects that were obviously not taken into account, and, therefore, focusing on them. Emphasis is put on the subjects that have the strongest potential in the formation of a linguistic and cultural personality. It is emphasized that the majority of the citizens of our state and young people, including those who were formed by our secondary school and later become students of higher schools, unfortunately have a misconception about the functions of their native language: they believe that its main function is communicative, they do not sometimes know about others. Hence the lack of understanding of the role of language in the formation of consciousness, intelligence, and worldview in general, and these factors are of global importance for understanding the security, strategic, and nation-building significance of the native language. The common phenomenon of diglossia is emphasized, the reasons caused it are pointed out, and the features of a high-level linguistic and cultural personality that everyone can develop in themselves to avoid diglossic situations are characterized. Such phenomena as jargon and slang are widespread among young people, and most of those who use them are convinced that only Russian vocabulary can be used in these forms of language. The Ukrainian language, developing as a living organism, serves the needs of different strata of the population, has a rich vocabulary and virtually unlimited possibilities, can undoubtedly be used to create surzhik and slang concepts - this is a normal process of language development, indicating its versatility and unlimited capacity. Emphasis is placed on the formation of a linguistic and cultural personality while teaching technical disciplines.

This piece seeks to extend a conversation that Alvesson and Kärreman started in 2000 from the pages of Human Relations and are continuing in their 2011 article; a conversation that is of great interest well beyond management and organization studies. Through a linguistics perspective that is attentive to the peculiarities of the discourse vocabulary but also seeks to probe aspects of its conceptual import, I will explore the significance of understandings of discourse circulating within the social sciences. I will continue with reflections on select difficulties raised by ‘social construction-unlimited’ before highlighting some of the benefits of a social semiotic approach to ethnographic research centred on the concept of indexicality. I will conclude with an invitation to ‘bring the researcher back’, in an embodied engagement with the field that can help put discourse in ‘its right place’.

Due to the dynamic nature of the vocabulary, we can argue that any lexico-semantic field can be unlimited, has no rigid boundaries, which leads to difficulties in establishing semantic relationships between the constituent units of a semantic field, and the second problem arising from this phenomenon would be the establishment of the inventory of a semantic field. Thus, the system that is the objective of our research consists of the units of "inventory" (terms) and the relationships between its constituent elements, and the fluctuation of the boundaries of a semantic field that leads to difficulties in the limiting it and in the rigorous composition of the inventory semantically. Not all words in the vocabulary can be grouped into lexico-semantic fields, only those that are organized and stable. A semantic field also corresponds to a certain grammatical category - gender, number, time, aspect, mode, etc., and the oppositions between the members of a lexical-semantic field correspond to the oppositions of their grammatical categories. Therefore, in order to practically approach the structuring of a lexico-semantic field, a theoretical and methodological incursion in structural semantics is absolutely necessary. We consider that the reflections regarding the concept of lexical field are absolutely fundamental in order to be able to try to structure such linguistic fields in a certain field, in our case - in the editorial-polygraphic field.

At a certain stage of learning when students have an adequate supply of active and passive vocabulary, as well as they possess the appropriate skills of Russian speech, during classes you can organize role-playing games, which are considered to be a conditional reproduction, imitation, modeling of professional activity. On a variety of forms and types game tasks for work with a newspaper is difficult to compare with any other methods of learning, because in this case the teacher has an unlimited choice, allowing to individualize the training sessions, taking into account the level of language proficiency and features of the individual student. Our proposed gaming forms and types of work based on news material, in particular, in study of Russian as a foreign language, create a natural motivation for regional geographic and linguistic knowledge in the study of foreign languages. The relevance of the newspaper information, on the one hand, and its rapid “obsolescence”, on the other, forced to speak primarily about the methodological principles of educational work with newspapers, about its various forms and shapes, depending on the specific objectives and the learning conditions.

The article is devoted to the structural-semantic analysis of the mobile communication term which is characterized by the presence of a stable invariant meaning and its variable meanings that are closely related to the words of common vocabulary. It is argued that in the process of analyzing the mobile communication terms it is necessary to take into account the abstract, generalized invariant feature in the language system and differential semantic features in the speech system that is the basis for the creation of an unlimited number of semantic concepts and in fact is the source of the word-forming potential of the term. The basis for the nomination of concepts in a special field is the invariant meaning of the term which remains unchanged in all contextual cases of its usage. In conclusion, it is noted that the mobile communication term due to the explication of its structural and semantic features represents in the professional language a stable unit of synthetic or analytical nomination, which is fixed by the relevant concept in the field of mobile communication and limited to a special field of usage.

A long-term research project toward Mandarin speech recognition techniques for very large vocabulary and unlimited text is considered. By carefully examining the special structures of Chinese language, the first-stage goal is set to be the design of efficient techniques to recognize the finals of Mandarin syllables. In this paper, three special approaches to do this are proposed. The Segmental Model Approach defines the final models by dividing the finals into several segments according to the acoustic structures of the speech signals. The Three-pass Approach uses three consecutive passes to classify the finals into small sets and improve the recognition efficiency. The Multi-section Vector Quantization (MSVQ) Approach, on the other hand, significantly reduces the necessary computation time by incorporating the branch-and-bound algorithm and common codebook concept with the MSVQ techniques. Extensive computer simulations are performed first to optimize each approach by choosing the best set of parameters then to compare the performance of the three approaches. It was found that all the three approaches are very efficient in terms of relatively high recognition rate and short computation time, and the MSVQ Approach provides the highest recognition rate at the shortest computation time, thus it is most attractive.

In a long-term research project, the recognition of Mandarin speech for very large vocabulary and unlimited text is considered. Its first stage goal is to recognize the Mandarin syllables. In a previous paper, an initial/final two-phase recognition approach to recognize these very confusing syllables was proposed, in which each syllable is divided into initial and final parts and recognized separately, and efficient recognition techniques for the finals were proposed and discussed. This paper serves as a continuation and proposes an efficient system to recognize the Mandarin initials. In this system, a classification procedure is first used to categorize the unknown initials into two groups C1 and C2; different approaches are then separately applied and independently optimized to recognize C1 and C2. It is found that Finite State Vector Quantization (FSVQ) is very useful, whose two modified versions, Modified FSVQ (MFSVQ) and the Second Order FSVQ (SOFSVQ), can provide the best recognition performance for C1 and C2 by carefully adjusting a design parameter called characteristic interval. Experimental results show that a recognition rate of 94.1% to 94.7% can be achieved using this system. Such a design is accomplished by carefully considering the special characteristics of Mandarin syllables and initials.

The article is devoted to the analysis of new forms of teaching foreign languages at the university in connection with the forced transition to distance learning in 2020, the mass digitalization of education and the speed of introduction of digital technologies in the educational process. The article focuses on increasing the level of motivation of students, the effectiveness and quality of knowledge obtained in the course of learning a foreign language using digital technologies. The authors present the results of their survey among 500 students of 1-5 courses of law school on the use of online platforms for self-study of a foreign language. The article emphasizes that these platforms not only provide users with unlimited opportunities to download and store information, but are also ideal for developing students ' writing skills, sharing information, commenting, and learning new vocabulary. The results of the survey also revealed a different degree of motivation among students. The data obtained as a result of the survey indicate that the development of a positive attitude to learning is largely facilitated by emotional motivation. The authors also describe their own experience in organizing distance learning at Saratov State Academy of Law, present modern educational platforms that help students in the process of learning a foreign language, motivating them to independent creative work.

Nonlinear dynamic processes are fundamental to the behavior of acoustic musical instruments, as is well explored in the case of sound production. Such processes may have profound and under-explored implications for how musicians interact with instruments, however. Although nonlinear dynamic processes are ubiquitous in acoustic instruments, they are present in digital musical tools only if explicitly implemented. Thus, an important resource with potentially major effects on how musicians interact with acoustic instruments is typically absent in the way musicians interact with digital instruments. Twenty-four interviews with free-improvising musicians were conducted to explore the role that nonlinear dynamics play in the participants' musical practices and to understand how such processes can afford distinctive methods of creative exploration. Thematic analysis of the interview data is used to demonstrate the potential for nonlinear dynamic processes to provide repeatable, learnable, controllable, and explorable interactions, and to establish a vocabulary for exploring nonlinear dynamic interactions. Two related approaches to engaging with nonlinear dynamic behaviors are elaborated: edge-like interaction, which involves the creative use of critical thresholds; and deep exploration, which involves exploring the virtually unlimited subtleties of a small control region. The elaboration of these approaches provides an important bridge that connects the concrete descriptions of interaction in musical practices, on the one hand, to the more-abstract mathematical formulation of nonlinear dynamic systems, on the other.

Language learners can now access language learning information anywhere and anytime with handheld mobile devices connected to unlimited online information. Searching the meaning of unknown language items encountered online may be the first step for language learning to take place. Making good use of e-dictionaries and dictionary apps is a key factor that affects learning efficiency. Using a survey questionnaire completed by more than 200 participants and examining both quantitative and qualitative data, this study investigated how Hong Kong university L2 learners make use of dictionary apps and probed into what dictionary functions they actually use and what functions they desire when they engage in MALL. Four categories of dictionary functions, including lexical information, extra resources, lexical tutors, and lexical tools, are used to describe all dictionary functions that students accessed or desired. The results show that dictionary apps have become essential tools for Hong Kong university students to learn an L2 as well as facilitate their academic studies; bilingual dictionaries with multiple functions and rich resources are meaning decoders that help students engage in learning both in their subject courses and English learning. Some discrepancies exist in learners' actual use and desired use of dictionary functions, which deserve the further attention of both app developers and language teachers to improve learners' efficiency of vocabulary learning. In addition, teachers play an important role in guiding students' lexical learning. Based on the findings, a framework for understanding Hong Kong university students' choice and use of dictionary apps is provided, based on which implications are offered and discussed.

The objective of the article is to find out the specifics of using multilevel means of communication to indicate the emotional states of users in English-language social networks. Methods. The main scientific results were obtained using a set of general scientific and special research methods, namely: analysis, generalization and systematization of scientific and educational literature on literary studies, psychology, and linguistics; theoretical generalization, analysis and synthesis, as well as comparative, descriptive and analytical. Results. The authors note that the features of virtual communication are: dialogic, emotional, special authorial nature, the ratio of categories reader-author or speaker-listener, removal of restrictions in time and space, the status of participants is usually equal, the general picture of the world, unlimited choice of language. Emotionality is a linguistic characteristic of the text that can cause an emotional effect. It is the result of the transmission of human emotions through language. Accordingly, any verbal means of expression either convey neutral emotions, or positively or negatively colored. The study found that emotions could be expressed at any level of language. If the sentence has a neutral emotional tone, it can be enhanced by the use of lexical items with a positive meaning. The best indicator of positive emotions in statements is the words. Investigated that common language means of expressing positive emotions are tokens. Among the vocabulary that expresses positive emotions, a special place is occupied by exclamations. The study of utterances found that all exclamations were used in sentences with a positive emotional tone. Positive emotions are also reflected using vocabulary, the meaning of which has a pleasant effect on the audience. At the stylistic level, the authors of Internet texts used anaphora, epiphora, antithesis, gradation, alliteration, etc. Grammatical and syntactic means such as adverbs, exclamatory sentences are often used to express positive emotions in Internet discourse. Speaking of the negative tone of emotionality, it should be noted that the linguistic means of expression of negative emotions are often lexical items. The most common indicator is obscene language, which helps to express the feelings of the speaker. The syntactic level is important for expressing negative emotions. Authors often use the second or third type of conditional sentences to convey feelings of sadness, emphasizing the unreality of the situation and the inability to change circumstances.

The article shows that lexico-semantic innovations in the Ukrainian language system of proper names which are characterized by a specific neurophysiological mechanism of formation require in-depth study. The relevance of the article lies in the fact that lexico-semantic word formation used to be mainly considered in the diachronic aspect, which led to little attention to ergonyms and pragmonyms as relevant classes of proper names. The article aims to analyze lexico-semantic innovations in the context of ergonyms and pragmonyms and determine their role in word formation in the system of naming-related tools in the modern Ukrainian language. Research methods include observations, analogies, analysis, synthesis, linguistic description, component analysis, structural-semantic analysis, statistical methods. The article proves that lexico-semantic word formation is the most active and productive way of replenishing the fund of ergonyms and pragmonyms in the Ukrainian language under the conditions of a transition economy. The main types of lexico-semantic word formation are derivational metaphor and derivational metonymy. They enable the formation of both simple and compound lexico-semantic innovations mostly represented by binary word combinations. Including all layers of vocabulary in the scope of such a type of word formation can bring unlimited prospects of its functioning in the future. The international value of the research implies clarifying the role of lexico-semantic word formation in the naming system of modern Ukrainian, describing important fragments of the lexical structure of the Ukrainian language, systematizing modern lexico-semantic naming models, and determining the ways of activating lexico-semantic substitution. For the first time in Ukrainian linguistics, the research analyzes peripheral classes of proper names in various ways, classifies ergonyms by thematic groups and motivational features underlying the naming unit and reveals the specifics of different semantic groups of Ukrainian pragmonyms.

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the language of law as a special direction of human communication. It has been noted that in the modern world, the connection between law and language appears at a sufficiently deep level and is a sufficiently complex and fundamental expression of their interaction. The research draws attention to the similarities and differences inherent in linguistics and jurisprudence. Attention has been focused on the fact that legal language is usually perceived somewhat specifically by ordinary citizens and society as a whole, as it looks specialized, elevated and technical, especially its written form. This is, in particular, due to the fact that constructions containing legal terminology, specialized legal terms, legal vocabulary are used to write a legal text, which leads to the fact that the language of law becomes incomprehensible to non-lawyers. Attention has been drawn to the peculiarities of the use of legal linguistics in the Anglo-Saxon law systems and in German-speaking countries. The approaches of researchers advocating for the simplification of the language of law have been considered, since, in their opinion, the language of law as a certain means of communication is characterized by “grandiloquence and verbosity”, which makes it difficult for the average citizen to understand it and does not allow them to fully familiarize themselves with normative documents and court decisions. The study also has raised the issue of gender equality when using the language of law in the modern world. Attention has been drawn to the fact that in foreign political and legal opinion, the statement is gaining more and more strength that if the goal of the law is really unlimited access of citizens to their constitutional rights to information and non-degradation of any gender, then the simplification of legal communication and gender-neutral writing should be its main goal.

Abstract: Mankind is currently living in the age of industrialization and development in all its forms and manifestations because of its effects in all everyday life. This is because the technology has left a clear impact on human thoughts in general and architectural thoughts in particular. As the architecture is the embodiment of the thought of society that was produced, so the architecture must also be affected. This can be seen in the transition from the stone building and the limited narrow spaces to New Horizons across time. Thus the obvious diversity of forms, the widening of spaces and their sequencing in unlimited forms. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution At the beginning of the twentieth century, its invasion of the world and its profound influence in various fields and among the architecture has reduced the focus on traditional forms design language and fantasy became more realistic by using computer modeling, its impact on architecture swept through the new forms of industrialization and the folding of cognitive and spatial distances, thus demonstrating uniqueness, creativity and expressing the self-identity and the time features that . It was born, from here the problem of research has arisen, which provides for "inadequate knowledge about the role of industrialization and mass production and its impact on producing Architectural forms that are unique, creative. This corresponds to the changes in human need but in contrary to the classical architecture language that came from. The research follows a series of actions to solve the research problem after the formula of the research hypothesis became as "The process of manufacturing and digital production affects the process of producing architectural forms positively or passively depending on nature, function, and the extent of repetition of the project". The most important conclusions and recommendations that demonstrated the architects quest to take advantage of all the possibilities of industrialization and the short-time production and increase the creative imagination of the designer with regard to architectural design is to create new languages and vocabulary for the architectural formation that is suited to the spirit of the times, and the pattern of existing buildings and installations of all types and functions, and the way they perform these various functions, is changed.

Лексический состав чувашского языка, находящегося в каждодневном взаимо-действии с русским языком, постоянно обогащается новыми словами. В условиях научно-технического прогресса и появления новых понятий и явлений чувашский язык неограниченно заимствует новые термины. Сторонники чистоты родного языка против каких-либо заимствований из русского языка и выступают за использование исконных слов, а при отсутствии таковых зачастую заменяют слова-русизмы словосочетаниями, а иногда целыми фразами, прибегая к методу описания новых понятий или явлений. Всем известно, что русизмы, в большинстве своем интернационализмы, отвечают требованиям краткости при дефиниции новых понятий и явлений. Квалитативный и квантитативный анализ а-анлаутных русизмов, взятых методом сплошной выборки из русско-чувашского словаря под редакцией И. А. Андреева и Н. П. Петрова, и разбор их этимологии позволили нам определить квантитативный состав а-анлаутных русизмов и тем самым ответить на вопрос о неизбежности проникновения русизмов в чувашский язык во благо развития его словарного состава. Русизмы адаптируются к правилам чувашского языка и являются источником образования новых слов. Степень адаптации заимствований видна при формировании новых слов из имеющихся путем использования исконных суффиксов или словосложения. The lexical composition of the Chuvash language being in daily interaction with the Russian language is constantly enriched with new words. In the conditions of scientific and technological progress and the emergence of new concepts and phenomena, the Chuvash language borrows new terms unlimitedly. Purists of the Chuvash language are against any borrowings from the Russian language and speak out for the use of native words, and in the absence of such, they replace Russicisms by word combinations and sometimes by phrases, resorting to the method of description of a new concept or phenomenon. Everyone knows that Russicisms (most of them being internationalisms) meet the requirements of brevity in defining new concepts and phenomena. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of a-anlaut Russicisms taken by the method of continuous sampling from the Russian-Chuvash dictionary edited by I. A. Andreeva and N. P. Petrov and the analysis of their origin made it possible to determine the quantitative origin composition of a-anlaut Russicisms and thereby answer the question of the inevitability of entering Russicisms into the Chuvash language for the benefit of the development of the vocabulary of the Chuvash language. Russicisms are adapted to the rules of the Chuvash language and are the source of the formation of new words. The degree of adaptation of Russian borrowings can be seen when new words are formed from the existing ones by using native suffixes or word composition.

For teachers the newspaper offers a special attraction. It has been called the living textbook and it lives up to that name. The newspaper can be used to enhance skills in reading. Critical thinking is the natural outgrowth of using a newspaper to learn. Unlike textbooks, which are several years outdated by the time they get into students' hands, the newspaper comes alive with information. The newspaper expands the curriculum with an unlimited amount of information to use as background for learning activities. These activities will help students improve their reading skills. These skills are how to find the main idea, how to increase vocabulary, how to find detail, how to make inference and how to find reference. They will employ many critical thinking skills as they are required to interact with the authentic material found in the newspaper.

Newspaper has been acknowledged as one useful learning resource in EFL classrooms. In this digital era teachers as well as learners can access unlimited resources on the internet; one of the resources available for free and at all times is online news. However, nowadays some students are not really keen on reading news and reading it in English is even more challenging. For this reason this study aims to bridge this gap. This research tries to find out in what way reading news on the same topics in both the Indonesian and English versions benefits EFL learners in terms of content and vocabulary. There were 98 Indonesian freshmen from three Reading classes taking part in this study. They read both the Indonesian and English news on the same topics as their reading assignment during the semester. At the end of the semester an online survey was conducted to find out the benefits of the assignment. A focused group interview was conducted to gain more information on the subjects’ responses in the survey. The findings show that reading both the Indonesian and English news on the same topics enhance the subjects’ understanding of the content of the English news as well as help them better guess the meaning of unknown English words and increase their vocabulary knowledge. Keywords: online news, learning resource, EFL classrooms

Insects are possibly the most taxonomically and ecologically diverse class of multicellular organisms on Earth. Consequently, they provide nearly unlimited opportunities to develop and test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses. Currently, however, large-scale studies of insect ecology, behavior, and trait evolution are impeded by the difficulty in obtaining and analyzing data derived from natural history observations of insects. These data are typically highly heterogeneous and widely scattered among many sources, which makes developing robust information systems to aggregate and disseminate them a significant challenge. As a step towards this goal, we report initial results of a new effort to develop a standardized vocabulary and ontology for insect natural history data. In particular, we describe a new database of representative insect natural history data derived from multiple sources (but focused on data from specimens in biological collections), an analysis of the abstract conceptual areas required for a comprehensive ontology of insect natural history data, and a database of use cases and competency questions to guide the development of data systems for insect natural history data. We also discuss data modeling and technology-related challenges that must be overcome to implement robust integration of insect natural history data.

This study aimed to determine the dimension of text. The use of vocabulary and grammar is not independent, there are micro, meso, and macro context that connect to the text in which makes certain practices and objectives a writer. This research aimed to clarify the meaning of the social criticism lyrics “2019 Ganti Presiden” and struggle for social values. This research used qualitative approach by analysis of discourse methods and critical paradigms. The result showed that social criticism of the song “2019 Ganti Presiden” represented awarness and an invitation to unlimited solidarity to learn about humanity, justice, help the lower classes such as laborers and hawkers. The lyrics of “2019 Ganti Presiden” also represented marginalization and personal opinion. “2019 Ganti Presiden” was produced in 2018 according to the typical situation of Indonesia that regarding the economy, political conditions in Indonesia which resulted in unemployment and corruption. The lyrics of the song "2019 Ganti Presiden" are spread massively and become a new political discourse in Indonesian history

An unlimited vocabulary text-to-speech synthesis by diphones system is used to generate Modern Standard Arabic speech: the system is the PSOLA algorithm; the diphones are obtained from the permutation of 44 phones (phonemes and allophones). The diphonic combinations were introduced in carrier words and recorded by a selected speaker. A dictionary of diphones was established by means of a process of segmentation that abided by certain rules. Evaluation of the system was undertaken to assess the accuracy on word and sentence levels. The results showed high perception levels. استُخدم نظام "تركيب الكلام من النص بواسطة ثنائيات الأصوات" لإنتاج كلام باللغة العربية الحديثة دون حدود للمفردات: النظام هو برمجيات PSOLA وحصلنا على ثنائيات الأصوات من تباديل 44 صوتا مختلفا. أدخلت هذه الأزواج على كلمات "ناقلة" وسجلت بصوت قارئ مختار، ومن ثم تم تجزئة هذه التسجيلات حسب قواعد محددة للحصول على "قاموس" من ثنائيات الأصوات. قُيِّم هذا النظام على مستويين: دقة الكلمة ودقة الجملة. دلت النتائج على درجة عالية من الوضوح.

<p>Teaching speaking to EFL learners is tremendously<br />challenging. Having learned English for years at school and<br />acquired sufficient vocabulary and grammatical features,<br />students remain struggling to speak English effortlessly. For<br />that matter, employing digital tools in teaching speaking can<br />be regarded as a prospective solution since some of which are<br />particularly designed for English language learning. These<br />tools equip teachers with unlimited and up-to-date resources<br />as well as facilitate students to be a lot more involved in the<br />learning activities and are expected to better perform their<br />speaking ability. Accordingly, researcher utilized some digital<br />tools to teach students speaking skill to figure out the impact<br />on their learning growth. This research employed quantitative<br />approach to portray in detail the statistic descriptive of<br />students’ scores which reflects students’ speaking proficiency<br />progress and their perspective and attitude regarding the<br />electronic devices use. From this data, further, it could be<br />considered the benefits, disadvantages and follow up steps to<br />escalate the potential application of such tools in teaching<br />speaking.</p>

The article examines the dramaturgy of stage ballroom choreography in the context of staging a ballet-musical - an independent type of choreographic work in which the main features of a musical are combined, and the content is conveyed through the use of images and means of expression typical of choreographic art. The study of the dramaturgy of stage ballroom choreography in the context of the specifics of a ballet-musical production revealed that in the process of synthesizing classical ballet, musicals as a special type of musical theater production, and stage ballroom choreography, thanks to the separation and organic combination of the elements of the compositional structure of ballet and musical dramaturgy with stylistic with the choreographic principles of ballroom choreography, a unique stylistic dance structure of ballet-musical was formed. It has been established that the compositional structure of the ballet-musical is distinguished from other choreographic performances by specific features that require the use of appropriate dance vocabulary, drawing and scenographic design. It has been found that, appealing to all the organs of human feeling, the synthesis of the types of arts involved in the process of creating a ballet-musical is a determining factor of their relevance at the current stage of the development of the cultural and artistic space and provides unlimited opportunities for the choreographic representation of integral and multifaceted cultural layers of the past and contemporary ballroom dances. It was concluded that as the dominant expressive means of ballet-musical, choreography involves a careful selection of lexical means, highlighting the necessary steps, movements and figures for the most reliable transmission of artistic and spatial images.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the current state of the language of the Ukrainian media as an indicator of the linguistic culture of modern society. Research methodology. The interdisciplinary nature of the study led to the use of general scientific methods, in particular, unstructured systematic observation and descriptive technique. The scientific novelty lies in the generalization of linguistic trends in modern media, in explaining the reasons for linguistic shifts in recent decades. The article notes the dominant position in the stylistic system of our time of the language of the media, which has become the main factor in the productive functioning of the Ukrainian language, a factor that determines its cultural, historical, and historical and linguistic originality. In addition, the language of the media plays the role of a kind of model of the national language in the information society, largely shaping literary norms, language tastes, and preferences, influencing the perception of politics, art, literature, and the like. Hence the urgent need to comply with the language of the media literary norms. Conclusions. The conclusions note that one of the most important areas of studying the cultural aspect of the language of the media is to find out how the latter affects culture. The essence of this influence lies in the fact that the language of the media, which covers practically unlimited topics, significantly affects the literary language, and through it, the culture. The language of the media enriches the literary language, saturating it with evaluative turns, forming a refined language, developing techniques, and methods of discussion and polemics. Developing a literary language, the language of the media also contributes to the development of culture due to, for example, the qualities of speech such as flexibility, wealth, and a variety of functions. It is emphasized that the power and advantage of journalism plays an important role in the language of the media - in the direct impact on the addressee, the audience. Therefore, the mission of a journalist is to positively influence the mass audience, to correct its motivation, behavior, and worldview. It is concluded that the language of the media should be exemplary in terms of the competent use of linguistic ethics, correct word usage, the richness of vocabulary, expressive word-formation. Attention is drawn to the fact that the role of neological vocabulary in the media, which reflects the current processes in society, remains a problem in media speech. Further research is also required by the question of the characteristics of the media language and the prospects for its development.

Introduction This article situates the dark as a liminal and creative space of experimentation where tensions are generative and people tinker with emerging technologies to create alternative futures. Darkness need not mean chaos and fear of violence – it can mean privacy and protection. We define dark as an experimental space based upon uncertainties rather than computational knowns (Bridle) and then demonstrate via a case study of cryptocurrencies the contribution of dark and liminal social spaces to future(s)-making. Cryptocurrencies are digital cash systems that use decentralised (peer-to-peer) networking to enable irreversible payments (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz). Cryptocurrencies are often clones or variations on the ‘original’ Bitcoin payment systems protocol (Trump et al.) that was shared with the cryptographic community through a pseudonymous and still unknown author(s) (Nakamoto), creating a founder mystery. Due to the open creation process, a new cryptocurrency is relatively easy to make. However, many of them are based on speculative bubbles that mirror Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ICOs’ wealth creation. Examples of cryptocurrencies now largely used for speculation due to their volatility in holding value are rampant, with online clearing houses competing to trade hundreds of different assets from AAVE to ZIL. Many of these altcoins have little to no following or trading volume, leading to their obsolescence. Others enjoy immense popularity among dedicated communities of backers and investors. Consequently, while many cryptocurrency experiments fail or lack adoption and drop from the purview of history, their constant variation also contributes to the undertow of the future that pulls against more visible surface waves of computational progress. The article is structured to first define how we understand and leverage ‘dark’ against computational cultures. We then apply thematic and analytical tactics to articulate future-making socio-technical experiments in the dark. Based on past empirical work of the authors (Maddox "Netnography") we focus on crypto-cultures’ complex emancipatory and normative tensions via themes of construction, disruption, contention, redirection, obsolescence, and iteration. Through these themes we illustrate the mutation and absorption of dark experimental spaces into larger social structures. The themes we identify are not meant as a complete or necessarily serial set of occurrences, but nonetheless contribute a new vocabulary for students of technology and media to see into and grapple with the dark. Embracing the Dark: Prework & Analytical Tactics for Outside the Known To frame discussion of the dark here as creative space for alternative futures, we focus on scholars who have deeply engaged with notions of socio-technical darkness. This allows us to explore outside the blinders of computational light and, with a nod to Sassen, dig in the shadows of known categories to evolve the analytical tactics required for the study of emerging socio-technical conditions. We understand the Dark Web to usher shifting and multiple definitions of darkness, from a moral darkness to a technical one (Gehl). From this work, we draw the observation of how technologies that obfuscate digital tracking create novel capacities for digital cultures in spaces defined by anonymity for both publisher and user. Darknets accomplish this by overlaying open internet protocols (e.g. TCP/IP) with non-standard protocols that encrypt and anonymise information (Pace). Pace traces concepts of darknets to networks in the 1970s that were 'insulated’ from the internet’s predecessor ARPANET by air gap, and then reemerged as software protocols similarly insulated from cultural norms around intellectual property. ‘Darknets’ can also be considered in ternary as opposed to binary terms (Gehl and McKelvey) that push to make private that which is supposed to be public infrastructure, and push private platforms (e.g. a Personal Computer) to make public networks via common bandwidth. In this way, darknets feed new possibilities of communication from both common infrastructures and individual’s platforms. Enabling new potentials of community online and out of sight serves to signal what the dark accomplishes for the social when measured against an otherwise unending light of computational society. To this point, a new dark age can be welcomed insofar it allows an undecided future outside of computational logics that continually define and refine the possible and probable (Bridle). This argument takes von Neumann’s 1945 declaration that “all stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control” (in Bridle 21) as a founding statement for computational thought and indicative of current society. The hope expressed by Bridle is not an absence of knowledge, but an absence of knowing the future. Past the computational prison of total information awareness within an accelerating information age (Castells) is the promise of new formations of as yet unknowable life. Thus, from Bridle’s perspective, and ours, darkness can be a place of freedom and possibility, where the equality of being in the dark, together, is not as threatening as current privileged ways of thinking would suggest (Bridle 15). The consequences of living in a constant glaring light lead to data hierarchies “leaching” (Bridle) into everything, including social relationships, where our data are relationalised while our relations are datafied (Maddox and Heemsbergen) by enforcing computational thinking upon them. Darkness becomes a refuge that acknowledges the power of unknowing, and a return to potential for social, equitable, and reciprocal relations. This is not to say that we envision a utopian life without the shadow of hierarchy, but rather an encouragement to dig into those shadows made visible only by the brightest of lights. The idea of digging in the shadows is borrowed from Saskia Sassen, who asks us to consider the ‘master categories’ that blind us to alternatives. According to Sassen (402), while master categories have the power to illuminate, their blinding power keeps us from seeing other presences in the landscape: “they produce, then, a vast penumbra around that center of light. It is in that penumbra that we need to go digging”. We see darkness in the age of digital ubiquity as rejecting the blinding ‘master category’ of computational thought. Computational thought defines social/economic/political life via what is static enough to predict or unstable enough to render a need to control. Otherwise, the observable, computable, knowable, and possible all follow in line. Our dig in the shadows posits a penumbra of protocols – both of computational code and human practice – that circle the blinding light of known digital communications. We use the remainder of this short article to describe these themes found in the dark that offer new ways to understand the movements and moments of potential futures that remain largely unseen. Thematic Resonances in the Dark This section considers cryptocultures of the dark. We build from a thematic vocabulary that has been previously introduced from empirical examples of the crypto-market communities which tinker with and through the darkness provided by encryption and privacy technologies (Maddox "Netnography"). Here we refine these future-making themes through their application to events surrounding community-generated technology aimed at disrupting centralised banking systems: cryptocurrencies (Maddox, Singh, et al.). Given the overlaps in collective values and technologies between crypto-communities, we find it useful to test the relevance of these themes to the experimental dynamics surrounding cryptocurrencies. We unpack these dynamics as construction, rupture and disruption, redirection, and the flip-sided relationship between obsolescence and iteration leading to mutation and absorption. This section provides a working example for how these themes adapt in application to a community dwelling at the edge of experimental technological possibilities. The theme of construction is both a beginning and a materialisation of a value field. It originates within the cyberlibertarians’ ideological stance towards using technological innovations to ‘create a new world in the shell of the old’ (van de Sande) which has been previously expressed through the concept of constructive activism (Maddox, Barratt, et al.). This libertarian ideology is also to be found in the early cultures that gave rise to cryptocurrencies. Through their interest in the potential of cryptography technologies related to social and political change, the Cypherpunks mailing list formed in 1992 (Swartz). The socio-cultural field surrounding cryptocurrencies, however, has always consisted of a diverse ecosystem of vested interests building collaborations from “goldbugs, hippies, anarchists, cyberpunks, cryptographers, payment systems experts, currency activists, commodity traders, and the curious” (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz 262). Through the theme of construction we can consider architectures of collaboration, cooperation, and coordination developed by technically savvy populations. Cryptocurrencies are often developed as code by teams who build in mechanisms for issuance (e.g. ‘mining’) and other controls (Conway). Thus, construction and making of cryptocurrencies tend to be collective yet decentralised. Cryptocurrencies arose during a time of increasing levels of distrust in governments and global financial instability from the Global Financial Crisis (2008-2013), whilst gaining traction through their usefulness in engaging in illicit trade (Saiedi, Broström, and Ruiz). It was through this rupture in the certainties of ‘the old system’ that this technology, and the community developing it, sought to disrupt the financial system (Maddox, Singh, et al.; Nelms et al.). Here we see the utility of the second theme of rupture and disruption to illustrate creative experimentation in the liminal and emergent spaces cryptocurrencies afford. While current crypto crazes (e.g. NFTs, ICOs) have their detractors, Cohen suggests, somewhat ironically, that the momentum for change of the crypto current was “driven by the grassroots, and technologically empowered, movement to confront the ills perceived to be powered and exacerbated by market-based capitalism, such as climate change and income inequality” (Cohen 739). Here we can start to envision how subterranean currents that emerge from creative experimentations in the dark impact global social forces in multifaceted ways – even as they are dragged into the light. Within a disrupted environment characterised by rupture, contention and redirection is rife (Maddox "Disrupting"). Contention and redirection illustrate how competing agendas bump and grind to create a generative tension around a deep collective desire for social change. Contention often emerges within an environment of hacks and scams, of which there are many stories in the cryptocurrency world (see Bartlett for an example of OneCoin, for instance; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis). Other aspects of contention emerge around how the technology works to produce (mint) cryptocurrencies, including concern over the environmental impact of producing cryptocurrencies (Goodkind, Jones, and Berrens) and the production of non-fungible tokens for the sale of digital assets (Howson). Contention also arises through the gendered social dynamics of brogramming culture skewing inclusive and diverse engagement (Bowles). Shifting from the ideal of inclusion to the actual practice of crypto-communities begs the question of whose futures are being made. Contention and redirections are also evidenced by ‘hard forks’ in cryptocurrency. The founder mystery resulted in the gifting of this technology to a decentralised and leaderless community, materialised through the distributed consensus processes to approve software updates to a cryptocurrency. This consensus system consequently holds within it the seeds for governance failures (Trump et al.), the first of which occurred with the ‘hard forking’ of Bitcoin into Bitcoin cash in 2017 (Webb). Hard forks occur when developers and miners no longer agree on a proposed change to the software: one group upgraded to the new software while the others operated on the old rules. The resulting two separate blockchains and digital currencies concretised the tensions and disagreements within the community. This forking resulted initially in a shock to the market value of, and trust in, the Bitcoin network, and the dilution of adoption networks across the two cryptocurrencies. The ongoing hard forks of Bitcoin Cash illustrate the continued contention occurring within the community as crypto-personalities pit against each other (Hankin; Li). As these examples show, not all experiments in cryptocurrencies are successful; some become obsolete through iteration (Arnold). Iteration engenders mutations in the cultural framing of socio-technical experiments. These mutations of meaning and signification then facilitate their absorption into novel futures, showing the ternary nature of how what happens in the dark works with what is known by the light. As a rhetorical device, cryptocurrencies have been referred to as a currency (a payment system) or a commodity (an investment or speculation vehicle; Nelms et al. 21). However, new potential applications for the underlying technologies continue emerge. For example, Ethereum, the second-most dominant cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, now offers smart contract technology (decentralised autonomous organisations, DAO; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis) and is iterating technology to dramatically reduce the energy consumption required to mine and mint the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) associated with crypto art (Wintermeyer). Here we can see how these rhetorical framings may represent iterative shifts and meaning-mutation that is as pragmatic as it is cultural. While we have considered here the themes of obsolescence and iteration threaded through the technological differentiations amongst cryptocurrencies, what should we make of these rhetorical or cultural mutations? This cultural mutation, we argue, can be seen most clearly in the resurgence of Dogecoin. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency launched in 2013 that takes its name and logo from a Shiba Inu meme that was popular several years ago (Potts and Berg). We can consider Dogecoin as a playful infrastructure (Rennie) and cultural product that was initially designed to provide a low bar for entry into the market. Its affordability is kept in place by the ability for miners to mint an unlimited number of coins. Dogecoin had a large resurgence of value and interest just after the meme-centric Reddit community Wallstreetbets managed to drive the share price of video game retailer GameStop to gain 1,500% (Potts and Berg). In this instance we see the mutation of a cryptocurrency into memecoin, or cultural product, for which the value is a prism to the wild fluctuations of internet culture itself, linking cultural bubbles to financial ones. In this case, technologies iterated in the dark mutated and surfaced as cultural bubbles through playful infrastructures that intersected with financial systems. The story of dogecoin articulates how cultural mutation articulates the absorption of emerging techno-potentials into larger structures. Conclusion From creative experiments digging in the dark shadows of global socio-economic forces, we can see how the future is formed beneath the surface of computational light. Yet as we write, cryptocurrencies are being absorbed by centralising and powerful entities to integrate them into global economies. Examples of large institutions hoarding Bitcoin include the crypto-counterbalancing between the Chinese state through its digital currency DCEP (Vincent) and Facebook through the Libra project. Vincent observes that the state-backed DCEP project is the antithesis of the decentralised community agenda for cryptocurrencies to enact the separation of state and money. Meanwhile, Facebook’s centralised computational control of platforms used by 2.8 billion humans provide a similarly perverse addition to cryptocurrency cultures. The penumbra fades as computational logic shifts its gaze. Our thematic exploration of cryptocurrencies highlights that it is only in their emergent forms that such radical creative experiments can dwell in the dark. They do not stay in the dark forever, as their absorption into larger systems becomes part of the future-making process. The cold, inextricable, and always impending computational logic of the current age suffocates creative experimentations that flourish in the dark. Therefore, it is crucial to tend to the uncertainties within the warm, damp, and dark liminal spaces of socio-technical experimentation. References Arnold, Michael. "On the Phenomenology of Technology: The 'Janus-Faces' of Mobile Phones." Information and Organization 13.4 (2003): 231-56. Bartlett, Jamie. 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‘Complex(ity)’ is currently fashionable in the humanities. Fashions come and go, but in this article I argue that the interest in complexity connects with something deeper, an intellectual revolution that began before complexity became trendy, and will continue after the spotlight passes on. Yet to make this case, and understand and advance this revolution, we need a better take on ‘complexity’. ‘Complex’ is of course complex. In common use it refers to something ‘composed of many interrelated parts’, or problems ‘so complicated or intricate as to be hard to deal with’. I will call this popular meaning, with its positive and negative values, complexity-1. In science it has a more negative sense, complexity-2, referring to the presenting complexity of problems, which science will strip down to underlying simplicity. But recently it has developed positive meanings in both science and humanities. Complexity-3 marks a revolutionarily more positive attitude to complexity in science that does seek to be reductive. Humanities-style complexity-4, which acknowledges and celebrates the inherent complexity of texts and meanings, is basic in contemporary Media and Cultural studies (MaC for short). The underlying root of complex is plico bend or fold, plus con- together, via complector grasp (something), encompass an idea, or person. The double of ‘complex’ is ‘simple’, from Latin simplex, which less obviously also comes from plico, plus semel once, at the same time. ‘Simple’ and ‘complex’ are closer than people think: only a fold or two apart. A key idea is that these elements are interdependent, parts of a single underlying form. ‘Simple(x)’ is another modality of ‘complex’, dialectically related, different in degree not kind, not absolutely opposite. The idea of ‘holding together’ is stronger in Latin complex, the idea of difficulty more prominent in modern usage, yet the term still includes both. The concept ‘complex’ is untenable apart from ‘simple’. This figure maps the basic structures in ‘complexity’. This complexity contains both positive and negative values, science and non-science, academic and popular meanings, with folds/differences and relationships so dynamically related that no aspect is totally independent. This complex field is the minimum context in which to explore claims about a ‘complexity revolution’. Complexity in Science and Humanities In spite of the apparent similarities between Complexity-3 (sciences) and 4 (humanities), in practice a gulf separates them, policed from both sides. If these sides do not talk to each other, as they often do not, the result is not a complex meaning for ‘complex’, but a semantic war-zone. These two forms of complexity connect and collide because they reach into a new space where discourses of science and non-science are interacting more than they have for many years. For many, in both academic communities, a strong, taken-for-granted mindset declares the difference between them is absolute. They assume that if ‘complexity’ exists in science, it must mean something completely different from what it means in humanities or everyday discourse, so different as to be incomprehensible or unusable by humanists. This terrified defence of the traditional gulf between sciences and humanities is not the clinching argument these critics think. On the contrary, it symptomises what needs to be challenged, via the concept complex. One influential critic of this split was Lord Snow, who talked of ‘two cultures’. Writing in class-conscious post-war Britain he regretted the ignorance of humanities-trained ruling elites about basic science, and scientists’ ignorance of humanities. No-one then or now doubts there is a problem. Most MaC students have a science-light education, and feel vulnerable to critiques which say they do not need to know any science or maths, including complexity science, and could not understand it anyway. To understand how this has happened I go back to the 17th century rise of ‘modern science’. The Royal Society then included the poet Dryden as well as the scientist Newton, but already the fissure between science and humanities was emerging in the elite, re-enforcing existing gaps between both these and technology. The three forms of knowledge and their communities continued to develop over the next 400 years, producing the education system which formed most of us, the structure of academic knowledges in which culture, technology and science form distinct fields. Complexity has been implicated in this three-way split. Influenced by Newton’s wonderful achievement, explaining so much (movements of earthly and heavenly bodies) with so little (three elegant laws of motion, one brief formula), science defined itself as a reductive practice, in which complexity was a challenge. Simplicity was the sign of a successful solution, altering the older reciprocity between simplicity and complexity. The paradox was ignored that proof involved highly complex mathematics, as anyone who reads Newton knows. What science held onto was the outcome, a simplicity then retrospectively attributed to the universe itself, as its true nature. Simplicity became a core quality in the ontology of science, with complexity-2 the imperfection which challenged and provoked science to eliminate it. Humanities remained a refuge for a complexity ontology, in which both problems and solutions were irreducibly complex. Because of the dominance of science as a form of knowing, the social sciences developed a reductivist approach opposing traditional humanities. They also waged bitter struggles against anti-reductionists who emerged in what was called ‘social theory’. Complexity-4 in humanities is often associated with ‘post-structuralism’, as in Derrida, who emphasises the irreducible complexity of every text and process of meaning, or ‘postmodernism’, as in Lyotard’s controversial, influential polemic. Lyotard attempted to take the pulse of contemporary Western thought. Among trends he noted were new forms of science, new relationships between science and humanities, and a new kind of logic pervading all branches of knowledge. Not all Lyotard’s claims have worn well, but his claim that something really important is happening in the relationship between kinds and institutions of knowledge, especially between sciences and humanities, is worth serious attention. Even classic sociologists like Durkheim recognised that the modern world is highly complex. Contemporary sociologists agree that ‘globalisation’ introduces new levels of complexity in its root sense, interconnections on a scale never seen before. Urry argues that the hyper-complexity of the global world requires a complexity approach, combining complexity-3 and 4. Lyotard’s ‘postmodernism’ has too much baggage, including dogmatic hostility to science. Humanities complexity-4 has lost touch with the sceptical side of popular complexity-1, and lacks a dialectic relationship with simplicity. ‘Complexity’, incorporating Complexity-1 and 3, popular and scientific, made more complex by incorporating humanities complexity-4, may prove a better concept for thinking creatively and productively about these momentous changes. Only complex complexity in the approach, flexible and interdisciplinary, can comprehend these highly complex new objects of knowledge. Complexity and the New Condition of Science Some important changes in the way science is done are driven not from above, by new theories or discoveries, but by new developments in social contexts. Gibbons and Nowottny identify new forms of knowledge and practice, which they call ‘mode-2 knowledge’, emerging alongside older forms. Mode-1 is traditional academic knowledge, based in universities, organised in disciplines, relating to real-life problems at one remove, as experts to clients or consultants to employers. Mode-2 is orientated to real life problems, interdisciplinary and collaborative, producing provisional, emergent knowledge. Gibbons and Nowottny do not reference postmodernism but are looking at Lyotard’s trends as they were emerging in practice 10 years later. They do not emphasise complexity, but the new objects of knowledge they address are fluid, dynamic and highly complex. They emphasise a new scale of interdisciplinarity, in collaborations between academics across all disciplines, in science, technology, social sciences and humanities, though they do not see a strong role for humanities. This approach confronts and welcomes irreducible complexity in object and methods. It takes for granted that real-life problems will always be too complex (with too many factors, interrelated in too many ways) to be reduced to the sort of problem that isolated disciplines could handle. The complexity of objects requires equivalent complexity in responses; teamwork, using networks, drawing on relevant knowledge wherever it is to be found. Lyotard famously and foolishly predicted the death of the ‘grand narrative’ of science, but Gibbons and Nowottny offer a more complex picture in which modes-1 and 2 will continue alongside each other in productive dialectic. The linear form of science Lyotard attacked is stronger than ever in some ways, as ‘Big Science’, which delivers wealth and prestige to disciplinary scientists, accessing huge funds to solve highly complex problems with a reductionist mindset. But governments also like the idea of mode-2 knowledge, under whatever name, and try to fund it despite resistance from powerful mode-1 academics. Moreover, non-reductionist science in practice has always been more common than the dominant ideology allowed, whether or not its exponents, some of them eminent scientists, chose to call it ‘complexity’ science. Quantum physics, called ‘the new physics’, consciously departed from the linear, reductionist assumptions of Newtonian physics to project an irreducibly complex picture of the quantum world. Different movements, labelled ‘catastrophe theory’, ‘chaos theory’ and ‘complexity science’, emerged, not a single coherent movement replacing the older reductionist model, but loosely linked by new attitudes to complexity. Instead of seeing chaos and complexity as problems to be removed by analysis, chaos and complexity play a more ambiguous role, as ontologically primary. Disorder and complexity are not later regrettable lapses from underlying essential simplicity and order, but potentially creative resources, to be understood and harnessed, not feared, controlled, eliminated. As a taste of exciting ideas on complexity, barred from humanities MaC students by the general prohibition on ‘consorting with the enemy’ (science), I will outline three ideas, originally developed in complexity-3, which can be described in ways requiring no specialist knowledge or vocabulary, beyond a Mode-2 openness to dynamic, interdisciplinary engagement. Fractals, a term coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, are so popular as striking shapes produced by computer-graphics, circulated on T-shirts, that they may seem superficial, unscientific, trendy. They exist at an intersection between science, media and culture, and their complexity includes transactions across that folded space. The name comes from Latin fractus, broken: irregular shapes like broken shards, which however have their own pattern. Mandelbrot claims that in nature, many such patterns partly repeat on different scales. When this happens, he says, objects on any one scale will have equivalent complexity. Part of this idea is contained in Blake’s famous line: ‘To see the world in a grain of sand’. The importance of the principle is that it fundamentally challenges reductiveness. Nor is it as unscientific as it may sound. Geologists indeed see grains of sand under a microscope as highly complex. In sociology, instead of individuals (literal meaning ‘cannot be divided’) being the minimally simple unit of analysis, individuals can be understood to be as complex (e.g. with multiple identities, linked with many other social beings) as groups, classes or nations. There is no level where complexity disappears. A second concept is ‘fuzzy logic’, invented by an engineer, Zadeh. The basic idea is not unlike the literary critic Empson’s ‘ambiguity’, the sometimes inexhaustible complexity of meanings in great literature. Zadeh’s contribution was to praise the inherent ambiguity and ambiguity of natural languages as a resource for scientists and engineers, making them better, not worse, for programming control systems. Across this apparently simple bridge have flowed many fuzzy machines, more effective than their over-precise brothers. Zadeh crystallised this wisdom in his ‘Principle of incompatibility’: As the complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet significant statements about its behaviour decreases until a threshold is reached beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become almost mutually exclusive characteristics (28) Something along these lines is common wisdom in complexity-1. For instance, under the headline “Law is too complex for juries to understand, says judge” (Dick 4), the Chief Justice of Australia, Murray Gleeson, noted a paradox of complexity, that attempts to improve a system by increasing its complexity make it worse (meaningless or irrelevant, as Zadeh said). The system loses its complexity in another sense, that it no longer holds together. My third concept is the ‘Butterfly Effect’, a name coined by Lorenz. The butterfly was this scientist’s poetic fantasy, an imagined butterfly that flaps its wings somewhere on the Andes, and introduces a small change in the weather system that triggers a hurricane in Montana, or Beijing. This idea is another riff on the idea that complex situations are not reducible to component elements. Every cause is so complex that we can never know in advance just what factor will operate in a given situation, or what its effects might be across a highly complex system. Travels in Complexity I will now explore these issues with reference to a single example, or rather, a nested set of examples, each (as in fractal theory) equivalently complex, yet none identical at any scale. I was travelling in a train from Penrith to Sydney in New South Wales in early 2006 when I read a publicity text from NSW State Rail which asked me: ‘Did you know that delays at Sydenham affect trains to Parramatta? Or that a sick passenger on a train at Berowra can affect trains to Penrith?’ No, I did not know that. As a typical commuter I was impressed, and even more so as an untypical commuter who knows about complexity science. Without ostentatious reference to sources in popular science, NSW Rail was illustrating Lorenz’s ‘butterfly effect’. A sick passenger is prosaic, a realistic illustration of the basic point, that in a highly complex system, a small change in one part, so small that no-one could predict it would matter, can produce a massive, apparently unrelated change in another part. This text was part of a publicity campaign with a scientific complexity-3 subtext, which ran in a variety of forms, in their website, in notices in carriages, on the back of tickets. I will use a complexity framework to suggest different kinds of analysis and project which might interest MaC students, applicable to objects that may not refer to be complexity-3. The text does two distinct things. It describes a planning process, and is part of a publicity program. The first, simplifying movement of Mode-1 analysis would see this difference as projecting two separate objects for two different specialists: a transport expert for the planning, a MaC analyst for the publicity, including the image. Unfortunately, as Zadeh warned, in complex conditions simplification carries an explanatory cost, producing descriptions that are meaningless or irrelevant, even though common sense (complexity-1) says otherwise. What do MaC specialists know about rail systems? What do engineers know about publicity? But collaboration in a mode-2 framework does not need extensive specialist knowledge, only enough to communicate with others. MaC specialists have a fuzzy knowledge of their own and other areas of knowledge, attuned by Humanities complexity-4 to tolerate uncertainty. According to the butterfly principle it would be foolish to wish our University education had equipped us with the necessary other knowledges. We could never predict what precise items of knowledge would be handy from our formal and informal education. The complexity of most mode-2 problems is so great that we cannot predict in advance what we will need to know. MaC is already a complex field, in which ‘Media’ and ‘Culture’ are fuzzy terms which interact in different ways. Media and other organisations we might work with are often imbued with linear forms of thought (complexity-2), and want simple answers to simple questions about complex systems. For instance, MaC researchers might be asked as consultants to determine the effect of this message on typical commuters. That form of analysis is no longer respectable in complexity-4 MaC studies. Old-style (complexity-2) effects-research modelled Senders, Messages and Receivers to measure effects. Standard research methods of complexity-2 social sciences might test effects of the message by a survey instrument, with a large sample to allow statistically significant results. Using this, researchers could claim to know whether the publicity campaign had its desired effect on its targeted demographic: presumably inspiring confidence in NSW Rail. However, each of these elements is complex, and interactions between them, and others that don’t enter into the analysis, create further levels of complexity. To manage this complexity, MaC analysts often draw on Foucault’s authority to use ‘discourse’ to simplify analysis. This does not betray the principle of complexity. Complexity-4 needs a simplicity-complexity dialectic. In this case I propose a ‘complexity discourse’ to encapsulate the complex relations between Senders, Receivers and Messages into a single word, which can then be related to other such elements (e.g. ‘publicity discourse’). In this case complexity-3 can also be produced by attending to details of elements in the S-M-R chain, combining Derridean ‘deconstruction’ with expert knowledge of the situation. This Sender may be some combination of engineers and planners, managers who commissioned the advertisement, media professionals who carried it out. The message likewise loses its unity as its different parts decompose into separate messages, leaving the transaction a fraught, unpredictable encounter between multiple messages and many kinds of reader and sender. Alongside its celebration of complexity-3, this short text runs another message: ‘untangling our complex rail network’. This is complexity-2 from science and engineering, where complexity is only a problem to be removed. A fuller text on the web-site expands this second strand, using bullet points and other signals of a linear approach. In this text, there are 5 uses of ‘reliable’, 6 uses of words for problems of complexity (‘bottlenecks’, ‘delays’, ‘congestion’), and 6 uses of words for the new system (‘simpler’, ‘independent’). ‘Complex’ is used twice, both times negatively. In spite of the impression given by references to complexity-3, this text mostly has a reductionist attitude to complexity. Complexity is the enemy. Then there is the image. Each line is a different colour, and they loop in an attractive way, seeming to celebrate graceful complexity-2. Yet this part of the image is what is going to be eliminated by the new program’s complexity-2. The interesting complexity of the upper part of the image is what the text declares is the problem. What are commuters meant to think? And Railcorp? This media analysis identifies a fissure in the message, which reflects a fissure in the Sender-complex. It also throws up a problem in the culture that produced such interesting allusions to complexity science, but has linear, reductionist attitudes to complexity in its practice. We can ask: where does this cultural problem go, in the organisation, in the interconnected system and bureaucracy it manages? Is this culture implicated in the problems the program is meant to address? These questions are more productive if asked in a collaborative mode-2 framework, with an organisation open to such questions, with complex researchers able to move between different identities, as media analyst, cultural analyst, and commuter, interested in issues of organisation and logistics, engaged with complexity in all senses. I will continue my imaginary mode-2 collaboration with Railcorp by offering them another example of fractal analysis, looking at another instant, captured in a brief media text. On Wednesday 14 March, 2007, two weeks before a State government election, a very small cause triggered a systems failure in the Sydney network. A small carbon strip worth $44 which was not properly attached properly threw Sydney’s transport network into chaos on Wednesday night, causing thousands of commuters to be trapped in trains for hours. (Baker and Davies 7) This is an excellent example of a butterfly effect, but it is not labelled as such, nor regarded positively in this complexity-1 framework. ‘Chaos’ signifies something no-one wants in a transport system. This is popular not scientific reductionism. The article goes on to tell the story of one passenger, Mark MacCauley, a quadriplegic left without power or electricity in a train because the lift was not working. He rang City Rail, and was told that “someone would be in touch in 3 to 5 days” (Baker and Davies 7). He then rang emergency OOO, and was finally rescued by contractors “who happened to be installing a lift at North Sydney” (Baker and Davies 7). My new friends at NSW Rail would be very unhappy with this story. It would not help much to tell them that this is a standard ‘human interest’ article, nor that it is more complex than it looks. For instance, MacCauley is not typical of standard passengers who usually concern complexity-2 planners of rail networks. He is another butterfly, whose specific needs would be hard to predict or cater for. His rescue is similarly unpredictable. Who would have predicted that these contractors, with their specialist equipment, would be in the right place at the right time to rescue him? Complexity provided both problem and solution. The media’s double attitude to complexity, positive and negative, complexity-1 with a touch of complexity-3, is a resource which NSW Rail might learn to use, even though it is presented with such hostility here. One lesson of the complexity is that a tight, linear framing of systems and problems creates or exacerbates problems, and closes off possible solutions. In the problem, different systems didn’t connect: social and material systems, road and rail, which are all ‘media’ in McLuhan’s highly fuzzy sense. NSW Rail communication systems were cumbrously linear, slow (3 to 5 days) and narrow. In the solution, communication cut across institutional divisions, mediated by responsive, fuzzy complex humans. If the problem came from a highly complex system, the solution is a complex response on many fronts: planning, engineering, social and communication systems open to unpredictable input from other surrounding systems. As NSW Rail would have been well aware, the story responded to another context. The page was headed ‘Battle for NSW’, referring to an election in 2 weeks, in which this newspaper editorialised that the incumbent government should be thrown out. This political context is clearly part of the complexity of the newspaper message, which tries to link not just the carbon strip and ‘chaos’, but science and politics, this strip and the government’s credibility. Yet the government was returned with a substantial though reduced majority, not the swingeing defeat that might have been predicted by linear logic (rail chaos = electoral defeat) or by some interpretations of the butterfly effect. But complexity-3 does not say that every small cause produces catastrophic effects. On the contrary, it says that causal situations can be so complex that we can never be entirely sure what effects will follow from any given case. The political situation in all its complexity is an inseparable part of the minimal complex situation which NSW Rail must take into account as it considers how to reform its operations. It must make complexity in all its senses a friend and ally, not just a source of nasty surprises. My relationship with NSW Rail at the moment is purely imaginary, but illustrates positive and negative aspects of complexity as an organising principle for MaC researchers today. The unlimited complexity of Humanities’ complexity-4, Derridean and Foucauldian, can be liberating alongside the sometimes excessive scepticism of Complexity-2, but needs to keep in touch with the ambivalence of popular complexity-1. Complexity-3 connects with complexity-2 and 4 to hold the bundle together, in a more complex, cohesive, yet still unstable dynamic structure. It is this total sprawling, inchoate, contradictory (‘complex’) brand of complexity that I believe will play a key role in the up-coming intellectual revolution. But only time will tell. References Baker, Jordan, and Anne Davies. “Carbon Strip Caused Train Chaos.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Mar. 2007: 7. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976. Dick, Tim. “Law Is Now Too Complex for Juries to Understand, Says Judge.” Sydney Morning Herald 26 Mar. 2007: 4. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” In Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. Gibbons, Michael. The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage, 1994. Lorenz, Edward. The Essence of Chaos. London: University College, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London: Routledge, 1964. Mandelbrot, Benoit. “The Fractal Geometry of Nature.” In Nina Hall, ed. The New Scientist Guide to Chaos. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Nowottny, Henry. Rethinking Science. London: Polity, 2001. Snow, Charles Percy. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. London: Faber 1959. Urry, John. Global Complexity. London: Sage, 2003. Zadeh, Lotfi Asker. “Outline of a New Approach to the Analysis of Complex Systems and Decision Processes.” ILEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 3.1 (1973): 28-44. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hodge, Bob. "The Complexity Revolution." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>. APA Style Hodge, B. (Jun. 2007) "The Complexity Revolution," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>.

One of the greatest joys in watching Foxtel is to see all the crazy people who run talk shows. Judgement, ridicule and generalisations slip from their tongues like overcooked lamb off a bone. From Oprah to Rikki, from Jerry to Mother Love, the posterior of pop culture claims a world-wide audience. Recently, a new talk diva was added to the pay television stable. Dr Laura Schlessinger, the Mother of Morals, prowls the soundstage. attacking 'selfish acts' such as divorce, de facto relationships and voting Democrat. On April 11, 2001, a show aired in Australia that added a new demon to the decadence of the age. Dr Laura had been told that a disgusting video clip, called 'Rock DJ', had been televised at 2:30pm on MTV. Children could have been watching. The footage that so troubled our doyenne of daytime featured the British performer Robbie Williams not only stripping in front of disinterested women, but then removing skin, muscle and tissue in a desperate attempt to claim their gaze. This was too much for Dr Laura. She was horrified: her strident tone became piercing. She screeched, "this is si-ee-ck." . My paper is drawn to this sick masculinity, not to judge - but to laugh and theorise. Robbie Williams, the deity of levity, holds a pivotal role in theorising the contemporary 'crisis' of manhood. To paraphrase Austin Powers, Williams returned the ger to singer. But Williams also triumphed in a captivatingly original way. He is one of the few members of a boy band who created a successful solo career without regurgitating the middle of the road mantras of boys, girls, love, loss and whining about it. Williams' journey through post-war popular music, encompassing influences from both Sinatra and Sonique, forms a functional collage, rather than patchwork, of masculinity. He has been prepared to not only age in public, but to discuss the crevices and cracks in the facade. He strips, smokes, plays football, wears interesting underwear and drinks too much. My short paper trails behind this combustible masculinity, focussing on his sorties with both masculine modalities and the rock discourse. My words attack the gap between text and readership, beat and ear, music and men. The aim is to reveal how this 'sick masculinity' problematises the conservative rendering of men's crisis. Come follow me I'm an honorary Sean Connery, born '74 There's only one of me … Press be asking do I care for sodomy I don't know, yeah, probably I've been looking for serial monogamy Not some bird that looks like Billy Connolly But for now I'm down for ornithology Grab your binoculars, come follow me. 'Kids,' Robbie Williams Robbie Williams is a man for our age. Between dating supermodels and Geri 'Lost Spice' Halliwell [1], he has time to "love … his mum and a pint," (Ansen 85) but also subvert the Oasis cock(rock)tail by frocking up for a television appearance. Williams is important to theories of masculine representation. As a masculinity to think with, he creates popular culture with a history. In an era where Madonna practices yoga and wears cowboy boots, it is no surprise that by June 2000, Robbie Williams was voted the world's sexist man [2]. A few months later, in the October edition of Vogue, he posed in a British flag bikini. It is reassuring in an era where a 12 year old boy states that "You aren't a man until you shoot at something," (Issac in Mendel 19) that positive male role models exist who are prepared to both wear a frock and strip on national television. Reading Robbie Williams is like dipping into the most convincing but draining of intellectual texts. He is masculinity in motion, conveying foreignness, transgression and corruption, bartering in the polymorphous economies of sex, colonialism, race, gender and nation. His career has spanned the boy bands, try-hard rock, video star and hybrid pop performer. There are obvious resonances between the changes to Williams and alterations in masculinity. In 1988, Suzanne Moore described (the artist still known as) Prince as "the pimp of postmodernism." (165-166) Over a decade later, the simulacra has a new tour guide. Williams revels in the potency of representation. He rarely sings about love or romance, as was his sonic fodder in Take That. Instead, his performance is fixated on becoming a better man, glancing an analytical eye over other modes of masculinity. Notions of masculine crisis and sickness have punctuated this era. Men's studies is a boom area of cultural studies, dislodging the assumed structures of popular culture [3]. William Pollack's Real Boys has created a culture of changing expectations for men. The greater question arising from his concerns is why these problems, traumas and difficulties are emerging in our present. Pollack's argument is that boys and young men invest energy and time "disguising their deepest and most vulnerable feelings." (15) This masking is difficult to discern within dance and popular music. Through lyrics and dancing, videos and choreography, masculinity is revealed as convoluted, complex and fragmented. While rock music is legitimised by dominant ideologies, marginalised groups frequently use disempowered genres - like country, dance and rap genres - to present oppositional messages. These competing representations expose seamless interpretations of competent masculinity. Particular skills are necessary to rip the metaphoric pacifier out of the masculine mouth of popular culture. Patriarchal pop revels in the paradoxes of everyday life. Frequently these are nostalgic visions, which Kimmel described as a "retreat to a bygone era." (87) It is the recognition of a shared, simpler past that provides reinforcement to heteronormativity. Williams, as a gaffer tape masculinity, pulls apart the gaps and crevices in representation. Theorists must open the interpretative space encircling popular culture, disrupting normalising criteria. Multiple nodes of assessment allow a ranking of competent masculinity. From sport to business, drinking to sex, masculinity is transformed into a wired site of ranking, judgement and determination. Popular music swims in the spectacle of maleness. From David Lee Roth's skied splits to Eminem's beanie, young men are interpellated as subjects in patriarchy. Robbie Williams is a history lesson in post war masculinity. This nostalgia is conservative in nature. The ironic pastiche within his music videos features motor racing, heavy metal and Bond films. 'Rock DJ', the 'sick text' that vexed Doctor Laura, is Williams' most elaborate video. Set in a rollerdrome with female skaters encircling a central podium, the object of fascination and fetish is a male stripper. This strip is different though, as it disrupts the power held by men in phallocentralism. After being confronted by Williams' naked body, the observing women are both bored and disappointed at the lack-lustre deployment of masculine genitalia. After this display, Williams appears embarrassed, confused and humiliated. As Buchbinder realised, "No actual penis could every really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus." (49) To render this banal experience of male nudity ridiculous, Williams then proceeds to remove skin and muscle. He finally becomes an object of attraction for the female DJ only in skeletal form. By 'going all the way,' the strip confirms the predictability of masculinity and the ordinariness of the male body. For literate listeners though, a higher level of connotation is revealed. The song itself is based on Barry White's melody for 'It's ecstasy (when you lay down next to me).' Such intertextuality accesses the meta-racist excesses of a licentious black male sexuality. A white boy dancer must deliver an impotent, but ironic, rendering of White's (love unlimited) orchestration of potent sexuality. Williams' iconography and soundtrack is refreshing, emerging from an era of "men who cling … tightly to their illusions." (Faludi 14) When the ideological drapery is cut away, the male body is a major disappointment. Masculinity is an anxious performance. Fascinatingly, this deconstructive video has been demeaned through its labelling as pornography [4]. Oddly, a man who is prepared to - literally - shave the skin of masculinity is rendered offensive. Men's studies, like feminism, has been defrocking masculinity for some time. Robinson for example, expressed little sympathy for "whiny men jumping on the victimisation bandwagon or playing cowboys and Indians at warrior weekends and beating drums in sweat lodges." (6) By grating men's identity back to the body, the link between surface and depth - or identity and self - is forged. 'Rock DJ' attacks the new subjectivities of the male body by not only generating self-surveillance, but humour through the removal of clothes, skin and muscle. He continues this play with the symbols of masculine performance throughout the album Sing when you're winning. Featuring soccer photographs of players, coaches and fans, closer inspection of the images reveal that Robbie Williams is actually every character, in every role. His live show also enfolds diverse performances. Singing a version of 'My Way,' with cigarette in tow, he remixes Frank Sinatra into a replaying and recutting of masculine fabric. He follows one dominating masculinity with another: the Bond-inspired 'Millennium.' Some say that we are players Some say that we are pawns But we've been making money Since the day we were born Robbie Williams is comfortably located in a long history of post-Sinatra popular music. He mocks the rock ethos by combining guitars and drums with a gleaming brass section, hailing the lounge act of Dean Martin, while also using rap and dance samples. Although carrying fifty year's of crooner baggage, the spicy scent of homosexuality has also danced around Robbie Williams' career. Much of this ideology can be traced back to the Take That years. As Gary Barlow and Jason Orange commented at the time, Jason: So the rumour is we're all gay now are we? Gary: Am I gay? I am? Why? Oh good. Just as long as we know. Howard: Does anyone think I'm gay? Jason: No, you're the only one people think is straight. Howard: Why aren't I gay? What's wrong with me? Jason: It's because you're such a fine figure of macho manhood.(Kadis 17) For those not literate in the Take That discourse, it should come as no surprise that Howard was the TT equivalent of The Beatle's Ringo Starr or Duran Duran's Andy Taylor. Every boy band requires the ugly, shy member to make the others appear taller and more attractive. The inference of this dialogue is that the other members of the group are simply too handsome to be heterosexual. This ambiguous sexuality has followed Williams into his solo career, becoming fodder for those lads too unappealing to be homosexual: Oasis. Born to be mild I seem to spend my life Just waiting for the chorus 'Cause the verse is never nearly Good enough Robbie Williams "Singing for the lonely." Robbie Williams accesses a bigger, brighter and bolder future than Britpop. While the Gallagher brothers emulate and worship the icons of 1960s British music - from the Beatles' haircuts to the Stones' psychedelia - Williams' songs, videos and persona are chattering in a broader cultural field. From Noel Cowardesque allusions to the ordinariness of pub culture, Williams is much more than a pretty-boy singer. He has become an icon of English masculinity, enclosing all the complexity that these two terms convey. Williams' solo success from 1999-2001 occurred at the time of much parochial concern that British acts were not performing well in the American charts. It is bemusing to read Billboard over this period. The obvious quality of Britney Spears is seen to dwarf the mediocrity of British performers. The calibre of Fatboy Slim, carrying a smiley backpack stuffed with reflexive dance culture, is neither admitted nor discussed. It is becoming increasing strange to monitor the excessive fame of Williams in Britain, Europe, Asia and the Pacific when compared to his patchy career in the United States. Even some American magazines are trying to grasp the disparity. The swaggering king of Britpop sold a relatively measly 600,000 copies of his U.S. debut album, The ego has landed … Maybe Americans didn't appreciate his songs about being famous. (Ask Dr. Hip 72) In the first few years of the 2000s, it has been difficult to discuss a unified Anglo-American musical formation. Divergent discursive frameworks have emerged through this British evasion. There is no longer an agreed centre to the musical model. Throughout 1990s Britain, blackness jutted out of dance floor mixes, from reggae to dub, jazz and jungle. Plied with the coldness of techno was an almost too hot hip hop. Yet both were alternate trajectories to Cool Britannia. London once more became swinging, or as Vanity Fair declared, "the nerve centre of pop's most cohesive scene since the Pacific Northwest grunge explosion of 1991." (Kamp 102) Through Britpop, the clock turned back to the 1960s, a simpler time before race became 'a problem' for the nation. An affiliation was made between a New Labour, formed by the 1997 British election, and the rebirth of a Swinging London [5]. This style-driven empire supposedly - again - made London the centre of the world. Britpop was itself a misnaming. It was a strong sense of Englishness that permeated the lyrics, iconography and accent. Englishness requires a Britishness to invoke a sense of bigness and greatness. The contradictions and excesses of Blur, Oasis and Pulp resonate in the gap between centre and periphery, imperial core and colonised other. Slicing through the arrogance and anger of the Gallaghers is a yearning for colonial simplicity, when the pink portions of the map were the stable subjects of geography lessons, rather than the volatile embodiment of postcolonial theory. Simon Gikandi argues that "the central moments of English cultural identity were driven by doubts and disputes about the perimeters of the values that defined Englishness." (x) The reason that Britpop could not 'make it big' in the United States is because it was recycling an exhausted colonial dreaming. Two old Englands were duelling for ascendancy: the Oasis-inflected Manchester working class fought Blur-inspired London art school chic. This insular understanding of difference had serious social and cultural consequences. The only possible representation of white, British youth was a tabloidisation of Oasis's behaviour through swearing, drug excess and violence. Simon Reynolds realised that by returning to the three minute pop tune that the milkman can whistle, reinvoking parochial England with no black people, Britpop has turned its back defiantly on the future. (members.aol.com/blissout/Britpop.html) Fortunately, another future had already happened. The beats per minute were pulsating with an urgent affirmation of change, hybridity and difference. Hip hop and techno mapped a careful cartography of race. While rock was colonialisation by other means, hip hop enacted a decolonial imperative. Electronic dance music provided a unique rendering of identity throughout the 1990s. It was a mode of musical communication that moved across national and linguistic boundaries, far beyond Britpop or Stateside rock music. While the Anglo American military alliance was matched and shadowed by postwar popular culture, Brit-pop signalled the end of this hegemonic formation. From this point, English pop and American rock would not sail as smoothly over the Atlantic. While 1995 was the year of Wonderwall, by 1996 the Britpop bubble corroded the faces of the Gallagher brothers. Oasis was unable to complete the American tour. Yet other cultural forces were already active. 1996 was also the year of Trainspotting, with "Born Slippy" being the soundtrack for a blissful journey under the radar. This was a cultural force that no longer required America as a reference point [6]. Robbie Williams was able to integrate the histories of Britpop and dance culture, instigating a complex dialogue between the two. Still, concern peppered music and entertainment journals that British performers were not accessing 'America.' As Sharon Swart stated Britpop acts, on the other hand, are finding it less easy to crack the U.S. market. The Spice Girls may have made some early headway, but fellow purveyors of pop, such as Robbie Williams, can't seem to get satisfaction from American fans. (35 British performers had numerous cultural forces working against them. Flat global sales, the strength of the sterling and the slow response to the new technological opportunities of DVD, all caused problems. While Britpop "cleaned house," (Boehm 89) it was uncertain which cultural formation would replace this colonising force. Because of the complex dialogues between the rock discourse and dance culture, time and space were unable to align into a unified market. American critics simply could not grasp Robbie Williams' history, motives or iconography. It's Robbie's world, we just buy tickets for it. Unless, of course you're American and you don't know jack about soccer. That's the first mistake Williams makes - if indeed one of his goals is to break big in the U.S. (and I can't believe someone so ambitious would settle for less.) … Americans, it seems, are most fascinated by British pop when it presents a mirror image of American pop. (Woods 98 There is little sense that an entirely different musical economy now circulates, where making it big in the United States is not the singular marker of credibility. Williams' demonstrates commitment to the international market, focussing on MTV Asia, MTV online, New Zealand and Australian audiences [7]. The Gallagher brothers spent much of the 1990s trying to be John Lennon. While Noel, at times, knocked at the door of rock legends through "Wonderwall," he snubbed Williams' penchant for pop glory, describing him as a "fat dancer." (Gallagher in Orecklin 101) Dancing should not be decried so summarily. It conveys subtle nodes of bodily knowledge about men, women, sex and desire. While men are validated for bodily movement through sport, women's dancing remains a performance of voyeuristic attention. Such a divide is highly repressive of men who dance, with gayness infiltrating the metaphoric masculine dancefloor [8]. Too often the binary of male and female is enmeshed into the divide of rock and dance. Actually, these categories slide elegantly over each other. The male pop singers are located in a significant semiotic space. Robbie Williams carries these contradictions and controversy. NO! Robbie didn't go on NME's cover in a 'desperate' attempt to seduce nine-year old knickerwetters … YES! He used to be teenybopper fodder. SO WHAT?! So did the Beatles the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, etc blah blah pseudohistoricalrockbollocks. NO! Making music that gurlz like is NOT a crime! (Wells 62) There remains an uncertainty in his performance of masculinity and at times, a deliberate ambivalence. He grafts subversiveness into a specific lineage of English pop music. The aim for critics of popular music is to find a way to create a rhythm of resistance, rather than melody of credible meanings. In summoning an archaeology of the archive, we begin to write a popular music history. Suzanne Moore asked why men should "be interested in a sexual politics based on the frightfully old-fashioned ideas of truth, identity and history?" (175) The reason is now obvious. Femininity is no longer alone on the simulacra. It is impossible to separate real men from the representations of masculinity that dress the corporeal form. Popular music is pivotal, not for collapsing the representation into the real, but for making the space between these states livable, and pleasurable. Like all semiotic sicknesses, the damaged, beaten and bandaged masculinity of contemporary music swaddles a healing pedagogic formation. Robbie Williams enables the writing of a critical history of post Anglo-American music [9]. Popular music captures such stories of place and identity. Significantly though, it also opens out spaces of knowing. There is an investment in rhythm that transgresses national histories of music. While Williams has produced albums, singles, video and endless newspaper copy, his most important revelations are volatile and ephemeral in their impact. He increases the popular cultural vocabulary of masculinity. [1] The fame of both Williams and Halliwell was at such a level that it was reported in the generally conservative, pages of Marketing. The piece was titled "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing, August 2000: 17. [2] For poll results, please refer to "Winners and Losers," Time International, Vol. 155, Issue 23, June 12, 2000, 9 [3] For a discussion of this growth in academic discourse on masculinity, please refer to Paul Smith's "Introduction," in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. [4] Steve Futterman described Rock DJ as the "least alluring porn video on MTV," in "The best and worst: honour roll," Entertainment Weekly 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. [5] Michael Bracewell stated that "pop provides an unofficial cartography of its host culture, charting the national mood, marking the crossroads between the major social trends and the tunnels of the zeitgeist," in "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman .(February 21 1997): 36. [6] It is important to make my point clear. The 'America' that I am summoning here is a popular cultural formation, which possesses little connection with the territory, institution or defence initiatives of the United States. Simon Frith made this distinction clear, when he stated that "the question becomes whether 'America' can continue to be the mythical locale of popular culture as it has been through most of this century. As I've suggested, there are reasons now to suppose that 'America' itself, as a pop cultural myth, no longer bears much resemblance to the USA as a real place even in the myth." This statement was made in "Anglo-America and its discontents," Cultural Studies 5 1991: 268. [7] To observe the scale of attention paid to the Asian and Pacific markets, please refer to http://robbiewilliams.com/july13scroll.html, http://robbiewilliams.com/july19scroll.html and http://robbiewilliams.com/july24scroll.html, accessed on March 3, 2001 [8] At its most naïve, J. Michael Bailey and Michael Oberschneider asked, "Why are gay men so motivated to dance? One hypothesis is that gay men dance in order to be feminine. In other words, gay men dance because women do. An alternative hypothesis is that gay men and women share a common factor in their emotional make-up that makes dancing especially enjoyable," from "Sexual orientation in professional dance," Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997). Such an interpretation is particularly ludicrous when considering the pre-rock and roll masculine dancing rituals in the jive, Charleston and jitterbug. Once more, the history of rock music is obscuring the history of dance both before the mid 1950s and after acid house. [9] Women, gay men and black communities through much of the twentieth century have used these popular spaces. For example, Lynne Segal, in Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990, stated that "through dancing, athletic and erotic performance, but most powerfully through music, Black men could express something about the body and its physicality, about emotions and their cosmic reach, rarely found in white culture - least of all in white male culture,": 191 References Ansen, D., Giles, J., Kroll, J., Gates, D. and Schoemer, K. "What's a handsome lad to do?" Newsweek 133.19 (May 10, 1999): 85. "Ask Dr. Hip." U.S. News and World Report 129.16 (October 23, 2000): 72. Bailey, J. Michael., and Oberschneider, Michael. 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