Lelia Green

It’s All about the Toys!

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 26-04-2023

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2974

Abstract: Toys: quintessentially the objects of childhood, their role in culture is anything but child’s play. Toys offer a site for young children to learn anything and everything from the commodification of time, through gendered and racial positioning of subjectivities (or the subversion of these positionings), through to social expectations around reading, sharing, and relative wealth and access. The importance of toys to children is vast, gauged by the nostalgia of many adults for their toys, and the role of the toy in popular culture, from Andy Pandy through to Toy Story and Chucky. As editors, we all approached the matter of ‘the toy’ from different but complementary trajectories. Tama Leaver brought critical analysis to the table, informed by his Chief Investigator (CI) role within the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, CE200100022. Lelia Green’s engagement with toys had been heightened by a comparatively new grandparenting role, but also as lead CI (after Donell Holloway’s retirement) of ARC Discovery Project DP180103922 – The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children. For Lelia, this M/C Journal issue was an opportunity to look at the woods and the trees, to locate Internet-connected toys within the wider sphere of childhood toys. Louise Kay was a key researcher within the EU-funded MakEY – Makerspaces in the Early Years: Enhancing Digital Literacy and Creativity project. Led by Jackie Marsh, also from the University of Sheffield, this Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) Scheme was part of the EU’s Horizon 2020 initiative. Both Louise and Jackie had also been Partner Investigators on the ARC Internet of Toys Discovery Project, alongside Bieke Zaman and Giovanna Mascheroni. Complementing the intersecting backgrounds of the editors, the M/C Journal ‘toys’ issue received a wide variety of submissions, including many from north America and some from Europe. Indeed, so many good responses were received that the call for articles has resulted in two separate issues: this one, keeping the thematic title ‘toys’ and a second issue in June under the banner ‘blocks’. In our feature article ‘Children’s Digital and Non-Digital Play Practices with Cozmo, the Toy Robot’, Louise Kay, Silke Brandsen, Carmen Jacques, Francesca Stocco, and Lorenzo Zaffaroni extrapolate from interviews with families across four different countries that included children playing with the toy robot Cozmo. Rather than limiting their imagination or types of play, the research uncovers a wide range of play types, noting that emotional connections with Cozmo were often at least as important, if not more, that learning coding skills, despite that being one of the main reasons parents buy the robot toy. That said, despite being a market leader, there are some real limitations that come from the way Cozmo is designed and interacts with young people, and the author conclude with notes for future development of Internet-connected toys. Aleesha Rodriguez and Amanda Levido in ‘“My Little Influencer”: A Toy Ringlight as Proxy to Media Practices and Technopanics’ examine the media panic that arose in response to a toy set featuring a wooden influencer-style ringlight. Despite being a lightning rod of concerns and caricatures about social media and influencers, Rodriguez and Levido argue that these wooden toys could actually be helpful building blocks in developing young people’s early media literacies. In their article ‘“The Internet of Life”: Enhancing the Everyday through Children’s Use of Digital Devices’, Kelly Jaunzems, Carmen Jacques, Lelia Green, and Silke Brandsen note that in their interviews with 6–12-year-old Australian children, many report that devices such as tablets have become important toys in their lives, whilst being equally aware that these devices have other functions too. Rather than cordoning off an ‘Internet of Toys’, the authors argue that the configuration of an ‘Internet of Life’ might better capture the broad potential uses, and pleasures, that many Internet-connected devices can bring for young people. In ‘Playing with Barbie: Teaching Inclusivity and Diversity through Play in Indonesia’, Indrati Kurniana, Hersinta, and Katie Ellis explore the role of dolls in creating positive perceptions of disabled people and those with physical impairments in children’s play in an Indonesian context. Catherine Archer and Kate Delmo use a case study approach and visual narrative analysis to analyse the Instagram accounts of two high-profile child social media influencers, eleven-year-old Australian Pixie Curtis and her eight-year-old brother, Hunter. They argue that this is an unregulated space and highlight key areas of concern on one of the world’s most popular platforms for children and teens, including privacy issues, commodification, and gendered and ‘stealth’ marketing of toys through ‘advertorials’. In ‘The Future Is Furby: Cute-Creepy Encounters with a Zoomorphic Robot’, Megan Catherine Rose addresses the cute-creepy, nostalgic, queer, and fan-reimagined text that is the Furby toy, morphing across the decades with advances in technology aligning with the advancing ages of the toy’s first – and still loyal – generation of fans. In ‘Toy, Vehicle, or Equipment? Parents’ and Children’s Constructions of the Bicycle in Childhood’, Erin Sharpe, Jocelyn Murtell, and Alex Stoikos address the different meanings that parents and children assign to bicycles. They note that understandings of the ‘toyness’ of a bicycle may reflect whether parents are present at the time their child is cycling. Sungyong Ahn, in ‘On That Toy-Being of Generative Art Toys’, addresses the ontology of what it is to be a toy, when the generative art in question is a software application that generates a visual aesthetic. Addressing the machine-learning elements of such creations, Sungyong Ahn suggests that there are parallels between generative art toys and kids’ slime games differentiating the ‘sticky slime’ of generative art algorithms from the less playful ‘mathematical sublime’. In ‘American Girl Dolls as Professionals: What Do They Teach about Professions and Professionalism?’, Natalia Rybas argues that the American Girl dolls offer a very particular idea of future professional opportunities for young girls, but that these opportunities are constrained within a very specific neoliberal model of which opportunities will be available, and which will not. In our final article, Lisa Hackett and Jo Coghlan examine the origins of Monopoly and how it came to be the world’s best-selling commercial board game. They discuss how, for many people, Monopoly is less than enjoyable, which begs the question: why do so many people own the game? The article also gives a fascinating overview of the history of the board game and how it has evolved over time. Acknowledgments The work on this special issue was partially supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council. Professor Lelia Green and Dr Louise Kay (together with Professors Bieke Zaman and Giovanna Mascheroni) were Investigators on the ARC Discovery Project DP180103922 – The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children (2018-22), and they acknowledge Dr Donell Holloway’s past leadership of this grant. Professors Tama Leaver and Lelia Green are both Chief Investigators in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child (CE200100022), which is led by QUT and also involves Curtin University, Deakin University, Edith Cowan University, University of Queensland, and University of Wollongong. The Centre of Excellence is funded through to the end of 2027. Tama would also like to thank his children for their input in to the design of the cover photo, and for letting their Lego figures be part of it!

Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 08-2005

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2379

Abstract: I can remember setting up the dish, all the excitement of assembling it [...] and then putting the motor on. And in the late afternoon, you position the dish and kind of turn it, to find the right spot, and all of a sudden on this blank television screen there was an image that came on. And it was shocking knowing that this noise and this thing would be there, and begin to infiltrate – because I see it as an infiltration, I see it as invasion – I’m not mad on television, very choosy really about what I watch – and I see it as an invasion, and there was GWN as well as the ABC. I just thought ‘by golly, I’m in the process of brain-washing people to accept stuff without thinking about it, like consciously considering either side of any case’ [...] The one thing that protected you from having it on at all times was the need to put on the generator in order to power it. I felt a bit sad actually. (Savannah Kingston, Female, 55+ – name changed – homestead respondent) This paper addresses the huge communications changes that occurred over the past fifty years in outback Western Australia. (What happened in WA also has parallels with equivalent events in the Northern Territory, Queensland, in the larger properties in western New South Wales and northern South Australia.) Although the ‘coming of television’ – associated in remote areas with using a satellite dish to scan for the incoming signal – is typically associated with a major shift in community and cultural life, the evidence suggests that the advent of the telephone had an equivalent or greater impact in remote areas. With the introduction of the telephone, the homestead family no longer had to tune into (or scan) the radio frequencies to check on predicted weather conditions, to respond to emergencies, to engage in roll call or to hold a ‘public meeting’. As the scanning of the radio frequencies ended, so the scanning of the satellite signals began. As Sandstone resident Grant Coleridge (pseudonym, male, 40-54) said, only half ironically, “We got the telephone and the telly at the same time, so civilisation sort of hit altogether actually.” The scale and importance of changes to the technological communications infrastructure in remote WA within a single life-time spans pre-2-way radio to video livestock auctions by satellite. It comes as a surprise to most Australians that these changes have occurred in the past generation. As recent viewers of the unexpectedly-successful Mongolian film The Story of the Weeping Camel (2004) would know, one of the themes of the Oscar-nominated movie is the coming of television and its impact upon a traditional rural life. The comparative availability of television outside the rural areas of Mongolia – and its attraction to, particularly, the younger family members in the Weeping Camel household – is a motif that is explored throughout the narrative, with an unspoken question about the price to be paid for including television in the cultural mix. It’s easy to construct this story as a fable about the ‘exotic other’, but the same theme was played out comparatively recently in remote Western Australia, where the domestic satellite service AUSSAT first made television an affordable option just under twenty years ago. This paper is about the people in remote Western Australia who started scanning for the satellite signal in 1986, and stopped scanning for the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio phone messages at about the same time. Savannah Kingston (name changed), who in 1989 generously agreed to an in-depth interview discussing the impact of satellite broadcasting upon her outback life, was a matriarch on a rural property with four grown children. She had clear views upon ways in which life had changed dramatically in the generation before the satellite allowed the scanning of the television signal. Her recollection of the weft and warp of the tapestry of life in outback WA started thirty-five years previously, with her arrival on the station as a young wife: When I went there [mid-1950s], we had a cook and we ate in the dining room. The cook and anyone who worked in the house ate in the kitchen and the men outside ate in the outside. So, with the progress of labour away from the bush, and the cost of labour becoming [prohibitive] for a lot of people, we got down to having governesses or house-girls. If the house-girls were white, they ate at the table with us and the governesses ate with us. If the house-girls were Aboriginal, they didn’t like eating with us, and they preferred to eat in the kitchen. The kids ate with them. Which wasn’t a good idea because two of my children have good manners and two of them have appalling manners. The availability of domestic help supported a culture of hospitality reminiscent of British between-the-wars country house parties, recreated in Agatha Christie novels and historically-based films such as The Remains of the Day (1993): In those early days, we still had lots of visitors [...] People visited a lot and stayed, so that you had people coming to stay for maybe two or three days, five days, a week, two weeks at a time and that required a lot of organisation. [int:] WHERE DID YOUR VISITORS COME FROM? City, or from the Eastern states, occasionally from overseas. [Int:] WOULD THEY BE RELATIVES? Sometimes relatives, friends or someone passing through who’d been, you know, someone would say ‘do visit’ and they’d say ‘they’d love to see you’. But it was lovely, it was good. It’s a way of learning what’s going on. (Savannah Kingston.) The ‘exotic other’ of the fabled hospitality of station life obscures the fact that visitors from the towns, cities and overseas were a major source of news and information in a society where radio broadcasts were unpredictable and there was no post or newspaper delivery. Visitors were supplemented by a busy calendar of social events that tied together a community of settlements in gymkhanas, cricket fixtures and golf tournaments (on a dirt course). Shifts in the communications environment – the introduction of television and telephone – followed a generation of social change witnessing the metamorphosis of the homestead from the hub of a gentrified lifestyle (with servants, governesses, polo and weekends away) to compact, efficient business-units, usually run by a skeleton staff with labour hired in at the peak times of year. Over the years between the 1960s-1980s isolation became a growing problem. Once Indigenous people won the fight for award-rate wages their (essentially) unpaid labour could no longer support the lifestyle of the station owners and the absence of support staff constrained opportunities for socialising off the property, and entertaining on it, and the communication environment became progressively poorer. Life on the homestead was conceived of as being more fragile than that in the city, and more economically vulnerable to a poor harvest or calamities such as wildfire. The differences wrought by the introduction of newer communication technologies were acknowledged by those in the country, but there was a clear resistance to city-dwellers constructing the changes as an attack upon the romance of the outback lifestyle. When the then Communications Minister Tony Staley suggested in 1979 that a satellite could help “dispel the distance – mental as well as geographical – between urban and regional dwellers, between the haves and the have-nots in a communication society”, he was buying into a discourse of rural life which effectively disempowered those who lived in rural and remote areas. He was also ignoring the reality of a situation where the Australian outback was provided with satellite communication a decade after it was made available to Canadians, and where the king-maker in the story – Kerry Packer – stood to reap a financial windfall. There was a mythological dimension to Australia (finally) having a domestic satellite. Cameron Hazelhurst’s article on ‘The Dawn of the Satellite Era in Australia’ includes a colourful account of Kerry Packer’s explanation to Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser of the capacity of domestic satellites to bring television, radio and telephone services to isolated communities in arctic Canada: And I [Packer] went and saw the Prime Minister and I explained to him my understanding of what was happening in those areas, and to his undying credit he grasped on to it immediately and said ‘Of course, it’s what we want. It’s exactly the sort of thing we need to stop the drift of people into urban areas. We can keep them informed. We can allow them to participate in whatever’s happening around the nation (Day 7, cited in Hazelhurst). Fraser here, as someone with experience of running a rural property in Victoria, propounds a pro-country rhetoric as a rationale for deployment of the satellite in terms of the Australian national policy agenda. (The desire of Packer to network his television stations and couple efficiency with reach is not addressed in this mythological reconstruction.) It is difficult, sometimes, to appreciate the level of isolation experienced on outback properties at the time. As Bryan Docker (male, 40-54), a resident of Broome at the time of the interviews, commented, “Telegrams, in those days, were the life-blood of the stations, through the Flying Doctor Service. But at certain times of the year the sun spots would interfere with the microwave links and we were still on morse from Broome to Derby during those periods.” Without reliable shortwave radio with no television, newspapers or telephone and with the demands of keeping the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio channel open for emergencies visitors were one of the ways in which station-dwellers could maintain an awareness of current events. Even at the time of the interviews, after the start of satellite broadcasting, I never travelled to an outback property without taking recent papers and offering to pick up post. (Many of the stations were over an hour’s journey from their nearest post office.) The RFDS 2-way radio service offered a social-lifeline as well as an emergency communication system: [Int:] DO YOU MISS THE ROYAL FLYING DOCTOR SERVICE AT ALL? Yes, I do actually. It’s – I think it’s probably more lonely now because you used to switch it on and – you know if you’re here on your own like I am a lot – and you’d hear voices talking, and you used to know what everybody was doing – sort of all their dramas and all their [...] Now you don’t know anything that’s going on and unless somebody rings you, you don’t have that communication, where before you used to just hop over to another channel and have a chat [...] I think it is lonelier on the telephone because it costs so much to ring up. (Felicity Rohrer, female, 40-54, homestead.) Coupled with the lack of privacy of 2-way radio communication, and the lack of broadcasting, was the particular dynamic of a traditional station family. Schooled at home, and integrated within their homestead lifestyle, station children spent most of their formative years in the company of one or other of their parents (or, in previous decades, the station staff). This all changed at secondary school age when the children of station-owners and managers tended to be sent away to boarding school in the city. Exposure of the next generation to the ways of city life was seen as a necessary background to future business competence, but the transitions from ‘all’ to ‘next-to-nothing’ in terms of children’s integration within family life had a huge socio-emotional cost which was aggravated, until the introduction of the phone service, by the lack of private communication channels. Public Relations and news theory talk about the importance of the ‘environmental scan’ to understand how current events are going to impact upon a business and a family: for many years in outback Australia the environmental scan occurred when families got together (typically in the social and sporting rounds), on the RFDS radio broadcasts and ‘meetings’, in infrequent visits to the closest towns and through the giving and receiving of hospitality. Felicity Rohrer, who commented (above) about how she missed the RFDS had noted earlier in her interview: “It’s made a big difference, telephone. That was the most isolating thing, especially when your children were away at school or your parents are getting older [...] That was the worst thing, not having a phone.” Further, in terms of the economics of running a property, Troy Bowen (male, 25-39, homestead respondent) noted that the phone had made commercial life much easier: I can carry out business on the phone without anyone else hearing [...] On the radio you can’t do it, you more or less have to say ‘well, have you got it – over’. ‘Yeah – over’. ‘Well, I’ll take it – over’. That’s all you can do [...] Say if I was chasing something [...] the cheapest I might get it down to might be [...] $900. Well I can go to the next bloke and I can tell him I got it down to $850. If you can’t do any better than that, you miss out. ‘oh, yes, alright $849, that’s the best I can do.’ So I’ll say ‘alright, I’ll take it’. But how can you do that on the radio and say that your best quote is [$850] when the whole district knows that ‘no, it isn’t’. You can’t very well do it, can you? This dynamic occurs because, for many homestead families prior to the telephone, the RFDS broadcasts were continuously monitored by the women of the station as a way of keeping a finger on the pulse of the community. Even – sometimes, especially – when they were not part of the on-air conversation, the broadcast could be received for as far as reception was possible. The introduction of the phone led to a new level of privacy, particularly appreciated by parents who had children away at school, but also introduced new problems. Fran Coleridge, (female, 40-54, Sandstone) predicted that: The phone will lead to isolation. There’s an old lady down here, she’s about 80, and she housekeeps for her brother and she’s still wearing – her mother died 50 years ago – but she’s still wearing her clothes. She is so encapsulated in her life. And she used to have her [RFDS] transceiver. Any time, Myrtle would know anything that’s going on. Anything. Birthday party at [local station], she’d know about it. She knew everything. Because she used to have the transceiver on all the time. And now there’s hardly any people on, and she’s a poor little old lonely lady that doesn’t hear anything now. Can you see that? Given the nuances of the introduction of the telephone (and the loss of the RFDS 2-way), what was the perceived impact of satellite broadcasting? Savannah Kingston again: Where previously we might have sat around the table and talked about things – at least the kids and I would – with television there is now more of a habit of coming in, showering and changing for dinner, putting on the motor and the men go and sit in front of the television during [...] six o’clock onwards, news programs and whatnot and um, I find myself still in the kitchen, getting the meal and then whoever was going to eat it, wanting to watch whatever was on the television. So it changed quite appreciably. Felicity Rohrer agrees: [Int:] DO YOU THINK THERE HAVE BEEN CHANGES IN THE TIME THAT YOU SPEND WITH EACH OTHER? Yes, I think so. They [the homestead household] come home and they – we all sit down here and look at the news and have a drink before tea whereas people used to be off doing their own tea. [Int] SO YOU THINK IT’S INCREASED THE AMOUNT OF TIME YOU SPEND TOGETHER? Yes, I think so – well, as a family. They all try and be home by 6 to see the [GWN] news. If they miss that, we look at the 7 o’clock [ABC], but they like the Golden West because it’s got country news in it. But the realities of everyday life, as experienced in domestic contexts, are sometimes ignored by commentators and analysts, except insofar as they are raised by interviewees. Thus the advent of the satellite might have made Savannah Kingston feel “a bit sad actually”, but it had its compensations: It was definitely a bit of a peace-maker. It sort of meant there wasn’t the stress that we had previously when going through [...] at least people sitting and watching something, you’re not so likely to get into arguments or [...] It definitely had value there. In fact, when I think about it, that might be one of its major applications, ’cos a lot of men in the bush tend to come in – if they drink to excess they start drinking in the evening, and that can make for very uncomfortable company. For film-makers like the Weeping Camel crew – and for audiences and readers of historical accounts of life in outback Australia – the changes heralded by the end of scanning the RFDS channels, and the start of scanning for satellite channels, may seem like the end of an era. In some ways the rhythms of broadcasting helped to homogenise life in the country with life in the city. For many families in remote homes, as well as the metropolis, the evening news became a cue for the domestic rituals of ‘after work’. A superficial evaluation of communications changes might lead to a consideration of how some areas of life were threatened by improved broadcasting, while others were strengthened, and how some of the uniqueness of a lifestyle had been compromised by an absorption into the communication patterns of urban life. It is unwise for commentators to construct the pre-television past as an uncomplicated romantic prior-time, however. Interviews with those who live such changes as their reality become a more revealing indicator of the nuances and complexities of communications environments than a quick scan from the perspective of the city-dweller. References Day, C. “Packer: The Man and the Message.” The Video Age (February 1983): 7 (cited in Hazelhurst). Hazelhurst, Cameron. “The Dawn of the Satellite Era.” Media Information Australia 58 (November 1990): 9-22. Staley, Tony. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates. Canberra: House of Representatives Hansard (18 October 1979): 2225, 2228-9. The Remains of the Day. 1993. The Story of the Weeping Camel. Thinkfilm and National Geographic, 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia. "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y') ? journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php . APA Style Green, L. (Aug. 2005) "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y') ? from journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php .

Transit officer training recommendations to improve safety in a high stress environment

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 04-2014

DOI: 10.5172/IJTR.2014.12.1.16

Fear, Anxiety and the State of Terror

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 03-02-2010

DOI: 10.1080/10576100903555796

How Australian Muslims Construct Western Fear of the Muslim Other

Publisher: BRILL

Date: 2011

DOI: 10.1163/9789401206877_005

FireWatch: Creative Responses to Bushfire Catastrophes

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 19-03-2013

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.599

Abstract: IntroductionBushfires have taken numerous lives and destroyed communities throughout Australia over many years. Catastrophic fire weather alerts have occurred during the Australian summer of 2012–13, and long-term forecasts predict increased bushfire events throughout several areas of Australia. This article highlights how organisational and in idual responses to bushfire in Australia often entail creative responses—either improvised responses at the time of bushfire emergencies or innovative (organisational, strategic, or technological) changes which help protect the community from, or mitigate against, future bushfire catastrophes. These improvised or innovative responses include emergency communications systems, practices, and devices. This article reports on findings from a research project funded by the Australian Research Council titled Using Community Engagement and Enhanced Visual Information to Promote FireWatch Satellite Communications as a Support for Collaborative Decision-making. FireWatch is a Web-based public information product based on near real time satellite data produced by the West Australian (WA) Government entity, Landgate. The project researches ways in which remote and regional publics can be engaged and mobilised through the development of a more user-friendly FireWatch site to make fire information accessible and usable, allowing a community-focused response to risk.The significance of the research project is evident both in how it addresses the important and life-threatening challenge of bushfires and also in how Australia’s increasingly hot, dry, long summers are adding to historically-established risks. This innovative project uses an iterative, participatory design process incorporating action-research practices. This will ensure that the new Firewatch interface is redesigned, tested, observed, and reflected upon multiple times—and will incorporate the collective creativity of users, designers, and researchers.The qualitative findings reported on in this article are based on 19 interviews with community members in the town of Kununurra in the remote Kimberley region of WA. The findings are positioned within a reconceptualised framework in which creativity is viewed as an essential component of successful emergency responses. This includes, we argue, two critical aspects of creativity: improvisation during a catastrophic event and ongoing innovation to improve future responses to catastrophes—including communication practices and technologies. This shifts the discourse within the literature in relation to the effective management and community responses to the changing phenomenon of fire catastrophes. Findings from the first round of interviews, and results of enquiries into previous bushfires in Australia, are used to highlight how these elements of creativity often entail a collective creativity on the part of emergency responders or the community in general. An additional focus is on the importance of the critical use of communication during a bushfire event.ImprovisationThe notion of "improvisation" is often associated with artistic performance. Nonetheless, improvisation is also integral to making effectual responses during natural catastrophes. “Extreme events present unforeseen conditions and problems, requiring a need for adaptation, creativity, and improvisation while demanding efficient and rapid delivery of services under extreme conditions” (Harrald 257).Catastrophes present us with unexpected scenarios and require rapid, on the spot problem solving and “even if you plan for a bushfire it is not going to go to plan. When the wind changes direction there has to be a new plan” (Jeff. Personal Interview. 2012). Jazz musicians or improvisational actors “work to build their knowledge across a range of fields, and this knowledge provides the elements for each improvisational outcome” (Kendra and Wachendorf 2). Similarly, emergency responders’ knowledge and preparation can be drawn “upon in the ambiguous and dynamic conditions of a disaster where not every need has been anticipated or accounted for” (Kendra and Wachtendorf 2). In iduals and community organisations not associated with emergency services also improvise in a creative and intuitive manner in the way they respond to catastrophes (Webb and Chevreau). For ex le, during the 9/11 terrorism catastrophe in the USA an assorted group of boat owners rapidly self-organised to evacuate Lower Manhattan. On their return trips, they carried emergency personnel and supplies to the area (Kendra and Wachendorf 5). An interviewee in our study also recalls bush fire incidents where creative problem solving and intuitive decision-making are called for. “It’s like in a fire, you have to be thinking fast. You need to be semi self-sufficient until help arrives. But without doing anything stupid and creating a worse situation” (Kelly. Personal Interview. 2012). Kelly then describes the rapid community response she witnessed during a recent fire on the outskirts of Kununurra, WA.Everyone had to be accounted for, moving cars, getting the tractors out, protecting the bores because you need the water. It happens really fast and it is a matter of rustling everyone up with the machinery. (2012)In this sense, the strength of communities in responding to catastrophes or disasters “results largely from the abilities of [both] in iduals and organisations to adapt and improvise under conditions of uncertainty” (Webb and Chevreau 67). These improvised responses frequently involve a collective creativity—where groups of neighbours or emergency workers act in response to the unforseen, often in a unified and self-organising manner. InnovationCatastrophes also stimulate change and innovation for the future. Disasters create a new environment that must be explored, assessed, and comprehended. Disasters change the physical and social landscape, and thereby require a period of exploration, learning, and the development of new approaches. (Kendra and Wachtendorf 6)These new approaches can include organisational change, new response strategies, and technologies and communication improvements. Celebrated inventor Benjamin Franklin, for instance, facilitated the formation of the first Volunteer Fire department in the 1850s as a response to previous urban fire catastrophes in the USA (Mumford 258). This organisational innovation continues to play an instrumental part in modern fire fighting practices. Indeed, people living in rural and remote areas of Australia are heavily reliant on volunteer groups, due to the sparse population and vast distances that need to be covered.As with most inventions and innovations, new endeavours aimed at improving responses to catastrophes do not occur in a vacuum. They “are not just accidents, nor the inscrutable products of sporadic genius, but have abundant and clear causes in prior scientific and technological development” (Gifillian 61). Likewise, the development of our user-friendly and publically available FireWatch site relies on the accumulation of preceding inventions and innovations. This includes the many years spent developing the existing FireWatch site, a site dense in information of significant value to scientists, foresters, land managers, and fire experts.CommunicationsOften overlooked in discussions regarding emergency communications is the microgeographical exchanges that occur in response to the threat of natural disasters. This is where neighbours fill the critical period before emergency service responders can appear on site. In this situation, it is often local knowledge that underpins improvised grassroots communication networks that inform and organise the neighbourhood. During a recent bushfire on peri-rural blocks on the outskirts of Kununurra, neighbours went into action before emergency services volunteers could respond.We phoned around and someone would phone and call in. Instead of 000 being rung ten times, make sure that one person rang it in. 40 channel [CB Radio] was handy – two-way communication, four wheelers – knocking on doors making sure everyone is out of the house, just in case. (Jane. Personal Interview. 2012) Similarly, in iduals and community groups have been able to inform and assist each other on a larger scale via social network technologies (SNTs). This creative application of SNTs began after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 when in iduals created wikis in order to find missing persons (Palen and Lui). Twitter has experienced considerable growth and was used freely during the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Australia. Studies of tweeting activity during these fires indicate that “tweets made during Black Saturday are laden with actionable factual information which contrasts with earlier claims that tweets are of no value made of mere random personal notes” (Sinnappan et al. n.p.).Traditionally, official alerts and warnings have been provided to the public via television and radio. However, several inquiries into the recent bushfires within Australia show concern “with the way in which fire agencies deliver information to community members during a bushfire...[and in order to] improve community safety from bushfire, systems need to be implemented that enable community members to communicate information to fire agencies, making use of local knowledge” (Elsworth et al. 8).Technological and social developments over the last decade mean the public no longer relies on a single source of official information (Sorensen and Sorensen). Therefore, SNTs such as Twitter and Facebook are being used by the media and emergency authorities to make information available to the public. These SNTs are dynamic, in that there can be a two-way flow of information between the public and emergency organisations. Nonetheless, there has been limited use of SNTs by emergency agencies to source information posted by in situ residents, in order to help in decision-making (Freeman). Organisational use of multiple communication channels and platforms to inform citizens about bushfire emergencies ensures a greater degree of coverage—in case of communication systems breakdowns or difficulties—as in the telephone alert system breakdown in Kelmscott-Roleystone, WA or a recent fire in Warrnambool, Victoria which took out the regional telephone exchange making telephone calls, mobiles, landlines, and the Internet non-operational (Johnson). The new FireWatch site will provide an additional information option for rural and remote Australians who, often rely on visual sightings and on word-of-mouth to be informed about fires in their region. “The neighbour came over and said - there is a fire, we’d better get our act together because it is going to hit us. No sooner than I turned around, I thought shit, here it comes” (Richard. Personal Interview. 2012). The FireWatch ProjectThe FireWatch project involves the redevelopment of an existing FireWatch website to extend the usability of the product from experts to ordinary users in order to facilitate community-based decision-making and action both before and during bushfire emergencies. To this purpose, the project has been broken down to two distinct, yet interdependent, strands. The community strand involves collaboration within a community (in this case the Kununurra community) in order to carry out a community-centred approach to further development of the site. The design strand involves the development of an intuitive and accessible Web presentation of complex information in clear, unambiguous ways to inform action in stressful circumstances. At this stage, a first round of 19 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders has been conducted in Kununurra to determine fire-related information-seeking behaviours, attitudes to mediated information services in the region, as well as user feedback on a prototype website developed in the design strand of the project. Stakeholders included emergency services personnel (payed and volunteer), shire representatives, tourism operators, small business operators (including tourism operators), a forest manager, a mango farmer, an Indigenous ranger team manager as well as general community members. Interviewees reported dissatisfaction with current information systems. They gave positive feedback about the website prototype. “It’s very much, very easy to follow” (David. Personal Interview. 2012). “It looks so much better than [the old site]. You couldn’t get in that close on [the other site]. It is fantastic” (Lance. Personal Interview. 2012). They also added thought-provoking contributions to the design of the website (to be discussed later).Residents of Kununurra who were interviewed for this research project found bushfire warning communications unsatisfactory, especially during a recent fire on the outskirts of town. People who called 000 had difficulties passing the information on, having to explain exactly where Kununurra was and the location of fires to operators not familiar with the area. When asked how the Kununurra community gets their fire information a Shire representative explained: That is not very good at the moment. The only other way we can think about it is perhaps more updates on things like Facebook, perhaps on a website, but with this current fire there really wasn’t a lot of information and a lot of people didn’t know what was going on. We [the shire] knew because we were talking to the [fire] brigades and to FESA [Fire and Emergency Services Authority] but most residents didn’t have any idea and it looks pretty bad. (Ginny. Personal Interview. 2012) All being well, the new user-friendly FireWatch site will add another platform through which fire information messages are transmitted. Community members will be offered continuously streamed bushfire location information, which is independent of any emergency services communication systems. In particular, rural and remote areas of Australia will have fire information at the ready.The participatory methodology used in the design of the new FireWatch website makes use of collaborative creativity, whereby users’ vision of the website and context are incorporated. This iterative process “creates an equal evolving participatory process between user and designer towards sharing values and knowledge and creating new domains of collective creativity” (Park 2012). The rich and sometimes contradictory suggestions made by interviewees in this project often reflected in idual visions of the tasks and information required, and in idual preferences regarding the delivery of this information. “I have been thinking about how could this really work for me? I can give you feedback on what has happened in the past but how could it work for me in the future?” (Keith. Personal Interview. 2012). Keith and other community members interviewed in Kununurra indicated a variety of extra functions on the site not expected by the product designers. Some of these unexpected functions were common to most interviewees such as the great importance placed on the inclusion of a satellite view option on the site map (ex le shown in Figure 1). Jeremy, a member of an Indigenous ranger unit in the Kununurra area, was very keen to incorporate the satellite view options on the site. He explained that some of the older rangers:can’t use GPSs and don’t know time zones or what zones to put in, so they’ll use a satellite-style view. We’ll have Google Earth up on one [screen], and also our [own] imagery up on another [screen] and go that way. Be scrolling in and see – we’ve got a huge fire scar for 2011 around here another guy will be on another computer zoning in and say, I think it is here. It’s quite simplistic but it works. (Personal Interview. 2012) In the case above, where rangers are already switching between computer screens to incorporate a satellite view into their planning, the importance of a satellite view layer on the FireWatch website makes user context an essential part of the design process. Incorporating many layers on one screen, as recommended by participants also ensures a more elegant solution to an existing problem.Figure 1: Satellite view in the Kununurra area showing features such as gorges, rivers, escarpments and dry riverbedsThis research project will involve further consultation with participants (both online and offline) regarding bushfire safety communications in their region, as well as the further design of the site. The website will be available over multiple devices (for ex le desktops, smart phones, and hand held tablet devices) and will be launched late this year. Further work will also be carried out to determine if social media is appropriate for this community of users in order to build awareness and share information regarding the site.Conclusion Community members improvise and self-organise when communicating fire information and organising help for each other. This can happen at a microgeographical (neighbourhood) level or on a wider level via social networking sites. Organisations also develop innovative communication systems or devices as a response to the threat of bushfires. Communication innovations, such as the use of Twitter and Facebook by fire emergency services, have been appropriated and fine-tuned by these organisations. Other innovations such as the user-friendly Firewatch site rely on previous technological developments in satellite-delivered imagery—as well as community input regarding the design and use of the site.Our early research into community members’ fire-related information-seeking behaviours and attitudes to mediated information services in the region of Kununurra has found unexpectedly creative responses, which range from collective creativity on the part of emergency responders or the community in general during events to creative use of existing information and communication networks. We intend to utilise this creativity in re-purposing FireWatch alongside the creative work of the designers in the project.Although it is commonplace to think of graphic design and new technology as incorporating creativity, it is rarely acknowledged how frequently these innovations harness everyday perspectives from non-professionals. In the case of the FireWatch developments, the creativity of designers and technologists has been informed by the creative responses of members of the public who are best placed to understand the challenges posed by restricted information flows on the ground in times of crisis. In these situations, people respond not only with new ideas for the future but with innovative responses in the present as they communicate with each other to deal with the challenge of a fast-moving and unpredictable situation. Such improvisation, honed through close awareness of the contours and parameters of both community and communication, are one of the ways through which people help keep themselves and each other safe in the face of dramatic developments.ReferencesElsworth, G., and K. Stevens, J. Gilbert, H. Goodman, A Rhodes. "Evaluating the Community Safety Approach to Bushfires in Australia: Towards an Assessment of What Works and How." Biennial Conference of the Eupopean Evaluation Society, Lisbon, Oct. 2008. Freeman, Mark. "Fire, Wind and Water: Social Networks in Natural Disasters." Journal of Cases on Information Technology (JCIT) 13.2 (2011): 69–79.Gilfillan, S. Colum. The Sociology of Invention. Chicago: Follett Publishing, 1935.Harrald, John R. "Agility and Discipline: Critical Success Factors for Disaster Response." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604.1 (2006): 256–72.Johnson, Peter. "Australia Unprepared for Bushfire”. Australian Broadcasting Corporation 17 Dec. 2012. 3 Jan. 2013 ‹www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2012/12/17/3654075.htm›.Keelty, Mick J. "A Shared Responsibility: the Report of the Perth Hills Bushfires February 2011". Department of Premier and Cabinet, Government of Western Australia, Perth.Kendra, James, and Tricia Wachtendorf. "Improvisation, Creativity, and the Art of Emergency Management." NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Understanding and Responding to Terrorism: A Multi-Dimensional Approach. Washington, DC, 8-9 Sep. 2006.———. "Creativity in Emergency Response after the World Trade Centre Attack". Amud Conference of the International Emergency Management Society. University of Delaware. 14-17 May 2002. Mumford, Michael D. "Social Innovation: Ten Cases from Benjamin Franklin." Creativity Research Journal 14.2 (2002): 253–66.Palen, Leysia, and Sophia.B. Liu. "Citizen Communications in Crisis: Anticipating a Future of ICT-Supported Public Participation." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. San Jose, 28 Apr. - 3 May 2007.Park, Ji Yong. "Design Process Excludes Users: The Co-Creation Activities between User and Designer." Digital Creativity 23.1 (2012): 79–92. Sinnappan, Suku, Cathy Farrell, and Elizabeth Stewart. "Priceless Tweets! A Study on Twitter Messages Posted During Crisis: Black Saturday." Proceedings of 21st Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2010). Brisbane, Australia, 1-3 Dec 2010.Sorensen, John H., and Barbara Vogt Sorensen. "Community Processes: Warning and Evacuation." Handbook of Disaster Research. Eds. Havidán Rodríguez, Enrico Louis Quarantelli, and Russell Rowe Dynes. New York: Springer, 2007. 183–99.Webb, Gary R., and Francois-Regis Chevreau. "Planning to Improvise: The Importance of Creativity and Flexibility in Crisis Response." International Journal of Emergency Management 3.1 (2006): 66–72.

Research Outputs in the Creative and Performing Arts: ‘Australianising’ an International Debate

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 02-2006

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X0611800103

Abstract: This paper positions current Australian discussions about practice-led research within international, national, historical and policy contexts and relates them to the developing pedagogical debate around performing and creative arts doctorates. Arguing that the creative industries offer benefits across the economy, it suggests that recognition for the research methodology specific to practice-led disciplines and the creative industries is overdue. The discussions in this paper, and in this theme issue of MIA, are all the more critical as a result of their articulation with the imminent introduction of the Research Quality Framework (RQF), which will allow nuanced, rigorous and internationally benchmarked evaluation of the quality and impact of research outputs. The RQF and the proposed research assessment panel for ‘creative arts, design and built environment’ herald the way for wider acceptance of practice-led outputs in the Australian research environment.

Contextualizing children’s problematic situations online

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Date: 2014

DOI: 10.1515/COMMUN-2014-0109

Pengpu Night Market Informal Urban Street Markets As More- Than- Human Assemblages In Shanghai

Publisher: Routledge

Date: 05-12-2014

DOI: 10.4324/9781315756431

Is big brother more at risk than little sister? The sibling factor in online risk and opportunity

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 16-02-2017

DOI: 10.1177/1461444817691531

Abstract: This article uses data from the 25,142-child study EU Kids Online to investigate the impact of sibling status on a child’s experience of online risk and opportunities. In general, the effects associated with having a sibling appear to be comparatively small. The presence of older siblings slightly increases use and skills, while younger siblings are associated with slight reductions. These dynamics are particularly visible in the use of social networking sites. Older siblings have the effect of increasing the range and number of online activities pursued by their younger siblings. Patterns around concerning exposure to risk and possible harm are not straightforward but younger children with an older sibling are not at an increased risk. Where younger aged children have even younger siblings, this is associated with a slight reduction in risk, whereas older-aged children with a younger sibling, and only children, appear to experience slight increases in risk.

What is New, Here? Locating an Art Form Within the Western Australian New Music Archive

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 09-2017

DOI: 10.1080/24750158.2017.1355422

National Contexts for the Risk of Harm Being Done to Children by Access to Online Sexual Content

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Date: 2020

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-46436-3_11

Refugees’ Dreams of the Past, Projected into the Future

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 18-03-2020

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.1638

Abstract: This article is about refugees’ and migrants’ dreams of home and family and stems from an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, “A Hand Up: Disrupting the Communication of Intergenerational Welfare Dependency” (LP140100935), with Partner Organisation St Vincent de Paul Society (WA) Inc. (Vinnies). A Vinnies-supported refugee and migrant support centre was chosen as one of the hubs for interviewee recruitment, given that many refugee families experience persistent and chronic economic disadvantage. The de-identified name for the drop-in language-teaching and learning social facility is the Migrant and Refugee Homebase (MARH). At the time of the research, in 2018, refugee and forced migrant families from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan constituted MARH’s primary membership base. MARH provided English language classes alongside other educational and financial support. It could also organise provision of emergency food and was a conduit for furniture donated by Australian families. Crucially, MARH operated as a space in which members could come together to build shared community.As part of her role, the researcher was introduced to Sara (de-identified), a mother-tongue Arabic speaker and the centre’s coordinator. Sara had personal experience of being a refugee, as well as being MARH’s manager, and she became both a point of contact for the researcher team, an interpreter/translator, and an empathetic listener as refugees shared their stories. Dreams of home and family emerged throughout the interviews as a vital part of participants’ everyday lives. These dreams and hopes were developed in the face of what was, for some, a nightmare of adversity. Underpinning participants’ sense of agency, subjectivity and resilience, Badiou argues (93, as noted in Jackson, 241) that hope can appear as a basic form of patience or perseverance rather than a dream for justice. Instead of imagining an improvement in personal circumstances, the dream is one of simply moving forward rather than backward. While dreams of being reunited with family are rooted in the past and project a vision of a family which no longer exists, these dreams help fashion a future which once again contains a range of possibilities.Although Sara volunteered her time on the research project as part of her commitment to Vinnies, she was well-known to interviewees as a MARH staff member and, in many cases, a friend and confidante. While Sara’s manager role implies an imbalance of power, with Sara powerful and participants comparatively less so, the majority of the information explored in the interviews pertained to refugees’ experiences of life outside the sphere in which MARH is engaged, so there was limited risk of the data being sanitised to reflect positively upon MARH. The specialist information and understandings that the interviewees shared positions them as experts, and as co-creators of knowledge.Recruitment and Methodological ApproachThe project researcher (Jaunzems) met potential contributors at MARH when its members gathered for a coffee morning. With Sara’s assistance, the researcher invited MARH members to take part in the research project, giving those present the opportunity to ask and have answered any questions they deemed important. Coffee morning attendees were under no obligation to take part, and about half chose not to do so, while the remainder volunteered to participate. Sara scheduled the interviews at times to suit the families participating. A parent and child from each volunteer family was interviewed, separately. In all cases it was the mother who volunteered to take part, and all interviewees chose to be interviewed in their homes. Each set of interviews was digitally recorded and lasted no longer than 90 minutes. This article includes extracts from interviews with three mothers from refugee families who escaped war-torn homelands for a new life in Australia, sometimes via interim refugee c s.The project researcher conducted the in-depth interviews with Sara’s crucial interpreting/translating assistance. The interviews followed a traditional approach, except that the researcher deferred to Sara as being more important in the interview exchange than she was. This reflects the premise that meaning is socially constructed, and that what people do and say makes visible the meanings that underpin their actions and statements within a wider social context (Burr). Conceptualising knowledge as socially constructed privileges the role of the decoder in receiving, understanding and communicating such knowledge (Crotty). Respecting the role of the interpreter/translator signified to the participants that their views, opinions and their overall cultural context were valued.Once complete, the interviews were sent for translation and transcription by a trusted bi-lingual transcriber, where both the English and Arabic exchanges were transcribed. This was deemed essential by the researchers, to ensure both the authenticity of the data collected and to demonstrate “trust, understanding, respect, and a caring connection” (Valibhoy, Kaplan, and Szwarc, 23) with the participants. Upon completion of the interviews with volunteer members of the MARH community, and at the beginning of the analysis phase, researchers recognised the need for the adoption of an interpretive framework. The interpretive approach seeks to understand an in idual’s view of the world through the contexts of time, place and culture. The knowledge produced is contextualised and differs from one person to another as a result of in idual subjectivities such as age, race and ethnicity, even within a shared social context (Guba and Lincoln). Accordingly, a mother-tongue Arabic speaker, who identifies as a refugee (Al-Hameed), was added to the project. All authors were involved in writing up the article while authors two, three and four took responsibility for transcript coding and analysis. In the transcripts that follow, words originally spoken in Arabic are in intalics, with non-italcised words originally spoken in English.Discrimination and BelongingAya initially fled from her home in Syria into neighbouring Jordan. She didn’t feel welcomed or supported there.[00:55:06] Aya: …in Jordan, refugees didn’t have rights, and the Jordanian schools refused to teach them [the children…] We were put aside.[00:55:49] Interpreter, Sara (to Researcher): And then she said they push us aside like you’re a zero on the left, yeah this is unfortunately the reality of our countries, I want to cry now.[00:56:10] Aya: You’re not allowed to cry because we’ll all cry.Some refugees and migrant communities suffer discrimination based on their ethnicity and perceived legitimacy as members of the host society. Although Australian refugees may have had searing experiences prior to their acceptance by Australia, migrant community members in Australia can also feel themselves “constructed in the public and political spheres as less legitimately Australian than others” (Green and Aly). Jackson argues that both refugees and migrants experiencethe impossibility of ever bridging the gap between one’s natal ties to the place one left because life was insupportable there, and the demands of the nation to which one has travelled, legally or illegally, in search of a better life. And this tension between belonging and not belonging, between a place where one has rights and a place where one does not, implies an unresolved relationship between one’s natural identity as a human being and one’s social identity as ‘undocumented migrant,’ a ‘resident alien,’ an ‘ethnic minority,’ or ‘the wretched of the earth,’ whose plight remains a stigma of radical alterity even though it inspires our compassion and moves us to political action. (223)The tension Jackson refers to, where the migrant is haunted by belonging and not belonging, is an area of much research focus. Moreover, the label of “asylum seeker” can contribute to systemic “exclusion of a marginalised and abject group of people, precisely by employing a term that emphasises the suspended recognition of a community” (Nyers). Unsurprisingly, many refugees in Australia long for the connectedness of the lives they left behind relocated in the safe spaces where they live now.Eades focuses on an emic approach to understanding refugee/migrant distress, or trauma, which seeks to incorporate the worldview of the people in distress: essentially replicating the interpretive perspective taken in the research. This emic framing is adopted in place of the etic approach that seeks to understand the distress through a Western biomedical lens that is positioned outside the social/cultural system in which the distress is taking place. Eades argues: “developing an emic approach is to engage in intercultural dialogue, raise dilemmas, test assumptions, document hopes and beliefs and explore their implications”. Furthermore, Eades sees the challenge for service providers working with refugee/migrants in distress as being able to move beyond “harm minimisation” models of care “to recognition of a facilitative, productive community of people who are in a transitional phase between homelands”. This opens the door for studies concerning the notions of attachment to place and its links to resilience and a refugee’s ability to “settle in” (for ex le, Myers’s ground-breaking place-making work in Plymouth).Resilient PrecariousnessChaima: We feel […] good here, we’re safe, but when we sit together, we remember what we went through how my kids screamed when the bombs came, and we went out in the car. My son was 12 and I was pregnant, every time I remember it, I go back.Alongside the dreams that migrants have possible futures are the nightmares that threaten to destabilise their daily lives. As per the work of Xavier and Rosaldo, post-migration social life is recreated in two ways: the first through participation and presence in localised events the second by developing relationships with absent others (family and friends) across the globe through media. These relationships, both distanced and at a distance, are dispersed through time and space. In light of this, C ays and Said suggest that places of past experiences and rituals for meaning are commonly recreated or reproduced as new places of attachment abroad similarly, other recollections and experience can trigger a sense of fragility when “we remember what we went through”. Gupta and Ferguson suggest that resilience is defined by the migrant/refugee capacity to “reimagine and re-materialise” their lost heritage in their new home. This involves a sense of connection to the good things in the past, while leaving the bad things behind.Resilience has also been linked to the migrant’s/refugee’s capacity “to manage their responses to adverse circumstances in an interpersonal community through the networks of relationships” (Eades). Resilience in this case is seen through an intersubjective lens. Joseph reminds us that there is danger in romanticising community. Local communities may not only be hostile toward different national and ethnic groups, they may actively display a level of hostility toward them (Boswell). However, Gill maintains that “the reciprocal relations found in communities are crucially important to their [migrant/refugee] well-being”. This is because inclusion in a given community allows migrants/refugees to shrug off the outsider label, and the feeling of being at risk, and provides the opportunity for them to become known as families and friends. One of MAHR’s central aims was to help bridge the cultural ide between MARH users and the broader Australian community.Hope[01:06: 10] Sara (to interviewee, Aya): What’s the key to your success here in Australia?[01:06:12] Aya: The people, and how they treat us.[01:06:15] Sara (to Researcher): People and how they deal with us.[01:06:21] Aya: It’s the best thing when you look around, and see people who don’t understand your language but they help you.[01:06:28] Sara (to Researcher): She said – this is nice. I want to cry also. She said the best thing when I see people, they don’t understand your language, and I don’t understand theirs but they still smile in your face.[01:06:43] Aya: It’s the best.[01:06:45] Sara (to Aya): yes, yes, people here are angels. This is the best thing about Australia.Here, Sara is possibly shown to be taking liberties with the translation offered to the researcher, talking about how Australians “smile in your face”, when (according to the translator) Aya talked about how Australians “help”. Even so, the capacity for social connection and other aspects of sociality have been linked to a person’s ability to turn a negative experience into a positive cultural resource (Wilson). Resilience is understood in these cases as a strength-based practice where families, communities and in iduals are viewed in terms of their capabilities and possibilities, instead of their deficiencies or disorders (Graybeal and Saleeby in Eades). According to Fozdar and Torezani, there is an “apparent paradox between high-levels of discrimination experienced by humanitarian migrants to Australia in the labour market and everyday life” (30) on the one hand, and their reporting of positive well-being on the other. That disparity includes accounts such as the one offered by Aya.As Wilson and Arvanitakis suggest,the interaction between negative experiences of discrimination and reports of wellbeing suggested a counter-intuitive propensity among refugees to adapt to and make sense of their migration experiences in unique, resourceful and life-affirming ways. Such response patterns among refugees and trauma survivors indicate a similar resilience-related capacity to positively interpret and derive meaning from negative migration experiences and associated emotions. … However, resilience is not expressed or employed uniformly among in iduals or communities. Some respond in a resilient manner, while others collapse. On this point, an argument could be made that collapse and breakdown is a built-in aspect of resilience, and necessary for renewal and ongoing growth.Using this approach, Wilson and Arvanitakis have linked resilience to hope, as a “present- and future-oriented mode of situated defence against adversity”. They argue that the term “hope” is often utilised in a tokenistic way “as a strategic instrument in increasingly empty domestic and international political vocabularies”. Nonetheless, Wilson and Arvanitakis believe hope to be of vital academic interest due to the prevalence of war and suffering throughout the world. In the research reported here, the authors found that participants’ hopes were interwoven with dreams of being reunited with their families in a place of safety. This is a common longing. As Jackson states,so it is that migrants travel abroad in pursuit of utopia, but having found that place, which is also no-place (ou-topos), they are haunted by the thought that utopia actually lies in the past. It is the family they left behind. That is where they properly belong. Though the family broke up long ago and is now scattered to the four winds, they imagine a reunion in which they are together again. (223)There is a sense here that with their hopes and dreams lying in the past, refugees/migrants are living forward while looking backwards (a Kierkegaardian concept). If hope is thought to be key to resilience (Wilson and Arvanitakis), and key to an in idual’s ability to live with a sense of well-being, then perhaps a refugee’s past relations (familial) impact both their present relations (social/community), and their ability to transform negative experiences into positive experiences. And yet, there is no readily accessible way in which migrants and refugees can recreate the connections that sustained them in the past. As Jackson suggests,the irreversibility of time is intimately connected with the irreversibility of one’s place of origin, and this entwined movement through time and across space proves perplexing to many migrants, who, in imagining themselves one day returning to the place from where they started out, forget that there is no transport which will convey them back into the past. … Often it is only by going home that is becomes starkly and disconcertingly clear that one’s natal village is no longer the same and that one has also changed. (221)The dream of home and family, therefore and the hope that this might somehow be recreated in the safety of the here and now, becomes a paradoxical loss and longing even as it is a constant companion for many on their refugee journey.Esma’s DreamAccording to author three, personal dreams are not generally discussed in Arab culture, even though dreams themselves may form part of the rich tradition of Arabic folklore and storytelling. Alongside issues of mental wellbeing, dreams are constructed as something private, and it generally breaks social taboos to describe them publicly. However, in personal discussions with other refugee women and men, and echoing Jackson’s finding, a recurring dream is “to meet my family in a safe place and not be worried about my safety or theirs”. As a refugee, the third author shares this dream. This is also the perspective articulated by Esma, who had recently had a fifth child and was very much missing her extended family who had died, been scattered as refugees, or were still living in a conflict zone. The researcher asked Sara to ask Esma about the best aspect of her current life:[01:17:03] Esma: The thing that comforts me here is nature, it’s beautiful.[01:17:15] Sara (to the Researcher): The nature.[01:17:16] Esma: And feeling safe.[01:17:19] Sara (to the Researcher): The safety. ...[01:17:45] Esma: Life’s beautiful here.[01:17:47] Sara (to the Researcher): Life is beautiful here.[01:17:49] Esma: But I want to know people, speak the language, have friends, life is beautiful here even if I don’t have my family here.[01:17:56] Sara (to the Researcher): Life is so pretty you only need to improve the language and have friends, she said I love my life here even though I don’t have any family or community here. (To Esma:) I am your family.[01:18:12] Esma: Bring me my siblings here.[01:18:14] Sara (to Esma): I just want my brothers here and my sisters.[01:18:17] Esma: It’s a dream.[01:18:18] Sara (to Esma): it’s a dream, one day it will become true.Here Esma uses the term dream metaphorically, to describe an imagined utopia: a dream world. In supporting Esma, who is mourning the absence of her family, Sara finds herself reacting and emoting around their shared experience of leaving siblings behind. In doing so, she affirms the younger woman, but also offers a hope for the future. Esma had previously made a suggestion, absorbed into her larger dream, but more achievable in the short term, “to know people, speak the language, have friends”. The implication here is that Esma is keen to find a way to connect with Australians. She sees this as a means of compensating for the loss of family, a realistic hope rather than an impossible dream.ConclusionInterviews with refugee families in a Perth-based migrant support centre reveals both the nightmare pasts and the dreamed-of futures of people whose lives have experienced a radical disruption due to war, conflict and other life-threatening events. Jackson’s work with migrants provides a context for understanding the power of the dream in helping to resolve issues around the irreversibility of time and circumstance, while Wilson and Arvanitakis point to the importance of hope and resilience in supporting the building of a positive future. Within this mix of the longed for and the impossible, both the refugee informants and the academic literature suggest that participation in local events, and authentic engagement with the broader community, help make a difference in supporting a migrant’s transition from dreaming to reality.AcknowledgmentsThis article arises from an ARC Linkage Project, ‘A Hand Up: Disrupting the Communication of Intergenerational Welfare Dependency’ (LP140100935), supported by the Australian Research Council, Partner Organisation St Vincent de Paul Society (WA) Inc., and Edith Cowan University. The authors are grateful to the anonymous staff and member of Vinnies’ Migrant and Refugee Homebase for their trust in and support of this project, and for their contributions to it.ReferencesBadiou, Alan. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003.Boswell, Christina. “Burden-Sharing in the European Union: Lessons from the German and UK Experience.” Journal of Refugee Studies 16.3 (2003): 316–35.Burr, Vivien. Social Constructionism. 2nd ed. Hove, UK & New York, NY: Routledge, 2003.C ays, Philippe, and Vioula Said. “Re-Imagine.” M/C Journal 20.4 (2017). Aug. 2017 journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1250 .Crotty, Michael. The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998.Eades, David. “Resilience and Refugees: From In idualised Trauma to Post Traumatic Growth.” M/C Journal 16.5 (2013). Aug. 2013 journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/700 .Fozdar, Farida, and Silvia Torezani. “Discrimination and Well-Being: Perceptions of Refugees in Western Australia.” The International Migration Review 42.1 (2008): 1–34.Gill, Nicholas. “Longing for Stillness: The Forced Movement of Asylum Seekers.” M/C Journal 12.1 (2009). Mar. 2009 journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/123 .Graybeal, Clay. “Strengths-Based Social Work Assessment: Transforming the Dominant Paradigm.” Families in Society 82.3 (2001): 233–42.Green, Lelia, and Anne Aly. “Bastard Immigrants: Asylum Seekers Who Arrive by Boat and the Illegitimate Fear of the Other.” M/C Journal 17.5 (2014). Oct. 2014 journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/896 .Guba, Egon G., and Yvonna S. Lincoln. "Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research." Handbook of Qualitative Research 2 (1994): 163-194.Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants. Ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2006. 72-79.Jackson, Michael. The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Well-Being. California: U of California P, 2013.Joseph, Miranda. Against the Romance of Community. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.Myers, Misha. “Situations for Living: Performing Emplacement." Research in Drama Education 13.2 (2008): 171-180. DOI: 10.1080/13569780802054828.Nyers, Peter. “Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement.” Third World Quarterly 24.6 (2003): 1069–93.Saleeby, Dennis. “The Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice: Extensions and Cautions.” Social Work 41.3 (1996): 296–305.Valibhoy, Madeleine C., Ida Kaplan, and Josef Szwarc. “‘It Comes Down to Just How Human Someone Can Be’: A Qualitative Study with Young People from Refugee Backgrounds about Their Experiences of Australian Mental Health Services.” Transcultural Psychiatry 54.1 (2017): 23-45.Wilson, Michael. Accumulating Resilience: An Investigation of the Migration and Resettlement Experiences of Young Sudanese People in the Western Sydney Area. Sydney: University of Western Sydney, 2012.Wilson, Michael John, and James Arvanitakis. “The Resilience Complex.” M/C Journal 16.5 (2013). journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/741 .Xavier, Johnathon, and Renato Rosaldo. “Thinking the Global.” The Anthropology of Globalisation. Eds. Johnathon Xavier and Renato Rosaldo. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2002.

Communicative Ecologies and the Value of MyFireWatch to the Community of Kununurra

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Date: 2016

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-50109-3_8

Finding a new kind of knowledge on the HeartNET website

Publisher: Wiley

Date: 14-11-2007

DOI: 10.1111/J.1471-1842.2007.00742.X

Abstract: A website developed by the National Heart Foundation (WA Division) and Edith Cowan University, with the help of an Australian Research Council-Linkage grant, provides insight into the sense of isolation experienced by many heart patients which prompts them to engage in a relentless search to answer the fundamental question: why me? To discover whether an online community for people with heart conditions may help instill a sense of sharing a journey with others, and to assess the impact of this shared experience. The qualitative data constituted 50 in-depth interviews with heart patients using the HeartNET website. This website, with its 600+ membership, also provides Discussion Board data to add depth to the analysis. Patients describe how their unsatisfactory search for information in one 'place' (the Internet) led them to discover a new 'place' (an online community) where they could 'ask difficult questions', and 'gain support and wisdom' from others. This paper suggests that, when anxious patients seek health-related information, for ex le in a library, they may benefit from being given contact points to communicate with others who find themselves in similar situations. Internet-based social software (Web 2.0) can provide this kind of communication.

The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children

Publisher: Routledge

Date: 27-10-2020

DOI: 10.4324/9781351004107

Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 11-2004

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2442

Abstract: The Harry Potter (HP) Fan Fiction (FF) phenomenon offers an opportunity to explore the nature of fame and the work of fans (including the second author, a participant observer) in creating and circulating cultural products within fan communities. Matt Hills comments (xi) that “fandom is not simply a ‘thing’ that can be picked over analytically. It is also always performative by which I mean that it is an identity which is (dis-)claimed, and which performs cultural work”. This paper explores the cultural work of fandom in relation to FF and fame. The global HP phenomenon – in which FF lists are a small part – has made creator J K Rowling richer than the Queen of England, according to the 2003 ‘Sunday Times Rich List’. The books (five so far) and the films (three) continue to accelerate the growth in Rowling’s fortune, which quadrupled from 2001-3: an incredible success for an author unknown before the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997. Even the on-screen HP lead actor, Daniel Radcliffe, is now Britain’s second wealthiest teenager (after England’s Prince Harry). There are other globally successful books, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Narnia collection, but neither of these series has experienced the momentum of the HP rise to fame. (See Endnote for an indication of the scale of fan involvement with HP FF, compared with Lord of the Rings.) Contemporary ‘Fame’ has been critically defined in relation to the western mass media’s requirement for ‘entertaining’ content, and the production and circulation of celebrity as opposed to ‘hard news’(Turner, Bonner and Marshall). The current perception is that an army of publicists and spin doctors are usually necessary, but not sufficient, to create and nurture global fame. Yet the HP phenomenon started out with no greater publicity investment than that garnered by any other promising first novelist: and given the status of HP as children’s publishing, it was probably less hyped than equivalent adult-audience publications. So are there particular characteristics of HP and his creator that predisposed the series and its author to become famous? And how does the fame status relate to fans’ incorporation of these cultural materials into their lives? Accepting that it is no more possible to predict the future fame of an author or (fictional) character than it is to predict the future financial success of a book, film or album, there is a range of features of the HP phenomenon that, in hindsight, helped accelerate the fame momentum, creating what has become in hindsight an unparalleled global media property. J K Rowling’s personal story – in the hands of her publicity machine – itself constituted a magical myth: the struggling single mother writing away (in longhand) in a Scottish café, snatching odd moments to construct the first book while her infant daughter slept. (Comparatively little attention was paid by the marketers to the author’s professional training and status as a teacher, or to Rowling’s own admission that the first book, and the outline for the series, took five years to write.) Rowling’s name itself, with no self-evident gender attribution, was also indicative of ambiguity and mystery. The back-story to HP, therefore, became one of a quintessentially romantic endeavour – the struggle to write against the odds. Publicity relating to the ‘starving in a garret’ background is not sufficient to explain the HP/Rowling grip on the popular imagination, however. Instead it is arguable that the growth of HP fame and fandom is directly related to the growth of the Internet and to the middle class readers’ Internet access. If the production of celebrity is a major project of the conventional mass media, the HP phenomenon is a harbinger of the hyper-fame that can be generated through the combined efforts of the mass media and online fan communities. The implication of this – evident in new online viral marketing techniques (Kirby), is that publicists need to pique cyber-interest as well as work with the mass media in the construction of celebrity. As the cheer-leaders for online viral marketing make the argument, the technique “provides the missing link between the [bottom-up] word-of-mouth approach and the top-down, advertainment approach”. Which is not to say that the initial HP success was a function of online viral marketing: rather, the marketers learned their trade by analysing the magnifier impact that the online fan communities had upon the exponential growth of the HP phenomenon. This cyber-impact is based both on enhanced connectivity – the bottom-up, word-of-mouth dynamic, and on the in idual’s need to assume an identity (albeit fluid) to participate effectively in online community. Critiquing the notion that the computer is an identity machine, Streeter focuses upon (649) “identities that people have brought to computers from the culture at large”. He does not deal in any depth with FF, but suggests (651) that “what the Internet is and will come to be, then, is partly a matter of who we expect to be when we sit down to use it”. What happens when fans sit down to use the Internet, and is there a particular reason why the Internet should be of importance to the rise and rise of HP fame? From the point of view of one of us, HP was born at more or less the same time as she was. Eleven years old in the first book, published in 1997, Potter’s putative birth year might be set in 1986 – in line with many of the original HP readership, and the publisher’s target market. At the point that this cohort was first spellbound by Potter, 1998-9, they were also on the brink of discovering the Internet. In Australia and many western nations, over half of (two-parent) families with school-aged children were online by the end of 2000 (ABS). Potter would notionally have been 14: his fans a little younger but well primed for the ‘teeny-bopper’ years. Arguably, the only thing more famous than HP for that age-group, at that time, was the Internet itself. As knowledge of the Internet grew stories about it constituted both news and entertainment and circulated widely in the mass media: the uncertainty concerning new media, and their impact upon existing social structures, has – over time – precipitated a succession of moral panics … Established commercial media are not noted for their generosity to competitors, and it is unsurprising that many of the moral panics circulating about pornography on the Net, Internet stalking, Web addiction, hate sites etc are promulgated in the older media. (Green xxvii) Although the mass media may have successfully scared the impressionable, the Internet was not solely constructed as a site of moral panic. Prior to the general pervasiveness of the Internet in domestic space, P. David Marshall discusses multiple constructions of the computer – seen by parents as an educational tool which could help future-proof their children but which their children were more like to conceptualise as a games machine, or (this was the greater fear) use for hacking. As the computer was to become a site for the battle ground between education, entertainment and power, so too the Internet was poised to be colonised by teenagers for a variety of purposes their parents would have preferred to prevent: chat, pornography, game-playing (among others). Fan communities thrive on the power of the in idual fan to project themselves and their fan identity as part of an ongoing conversation. Further, in constructing the reasons behind what has happened in the HP narrative, and in speculating what is to come, fans are presenting themselves as identities with whom others might agree (positive affirmation) or disagree (offering the chance for engagement through exchange). The genuinely insightful fans, who apparently predict the plots before they’re published, may even be credited in their communities with inspiring J K Rowling’s muse. (The FF mythology is that J K Rowling dare not look at the FF sites in case she finds herself influenced.) Nancy Baym, commenting on a soap opera fan Usenet group (Usenet was an early 1990s precursor to discussion groups) notes that: The viewers’ relationship with characters, the viewers’ understanding of socioemotional experience, and soap opera’s narrative structure, in which moments of maximal suspense are always followed by temporal gaps, work together to ensure that fans will use the gaps during and between shows to discuss with one another possible outcomes and possible interpretations of what has been seen. (143) In HP terms the The Philosopher’s Stone constructed a fan knowledge that J K Rowling’s project entailed at least seven books (one for each year at Hogwarts School) and this offered plentiful opportunities to speculate upon the future direction and evolution of the HP characters. With each speculation, each posting, the in idual fan can refine and extend their identity as a member of the FF community. The temporal gaps between the books and the films – coupled with the expanding possibilities of Internet communication – mean that fans can feel both creative and connected while circulating the cultural materials derived from their engagement with the HP ‘canon’. Canon is used to describe the HP oeuvre as approved by Rowling, her publishers, and her copyright assignees (for ex le, Warner Bros). In contrast, ‘fanon’ is the name used by fans to refer the body of work that results from their creative/subversive interactions with the core texts, such as “slash” (homo-erotic/romance) fiction. Differentiation between the two terms acknowledges the likelihood that J K Rowling or her assignees might not approve of fanon. The constructed identities of fans who deal solely with canon differ significantly from those who are engaged in fanon. The implicit (romantic) or explicit (full-action descriptions) sexualisation of HP FF is part of a complex identity play on behalf of both the writers and readers of FF. Further, given that the online communities are often nurtured and enriched by offline face to face exchanges with other participants, what an in idual is prepared to read or not to read, or write or not write, says as much about that person’s public persona as does another’s overt consumption of pornography or diet of art house films, in contrast to someone else’s enthusiasm for Friends. Hearn, Mandeville and Anthony argue that a “central assertion of postmodern views of consumption is that social identity can be interpreted as a function of consumption” (106), and few would disagree with them: herein lies the power of the brand. Noting that consumer culture centrally focuses upon harnessing ‘the desire to desire’, Streeter’s work (654, on the opening up of Internet connectivity) suggests a continuum from ‘desire provoked’ through anticipation, ‘excitement based on what people imagined would happen’ to a sense of ‘possibility’. All this was made more tantalising in terms of the ‘unpredictability’ of how cyberspace would eventually resolve itself (657). Thus a progression is posited from desire through to the thrill of comparing future possibilities with eventual outcomes. These forces clearly influence the HP FF phenomenon, where a section of HP fans have become impatient with the pace of the ‘official’/canon HP text. J K Rowling’s writing has slowed down to the point that Harry’s initial readership has overtaken him by several years. He’s about to enter his sixth year (of seven) at secondary school – his erstwhile-contemporaries have already left school or are about to graduate to University. HP is yet to have ‘a relationship’: his fans are engaged in some well-informed speculation as to a range of sexual possibilities which would likely take J K Rowling some light years from her marketers’ core readership. So the story is progressing more slowly than many fans would choose and with less spice than many would like (from the evidence of the web, at least). As indicated in the Endnote, the productivity of the fans, as they ‘fill in the gaps’ while waiting for the official narrative to resume, is prodigious. It may be that as the fans outstrip HP in their own social and emotional development they find his reactions in later books increasingly unbelievable, and/or out of character with the HP they felt they knew. Thus they develop an alternative ‘Harry’ in fanon. Some FF authors identify in advance which books they accept as canon, and which they have decided to ignore. For ex le, popular FF author Midnight Blue gives the setting of her evolving FF The Mirror of Maybe as “after Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and as an alternative to the events detailed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, [this] is a Slash story involving Harry Potter and Severus Snape”. Some fans, tired of waiting for Rowling to get Harry grown up, ‘are doin’ it for themselves’. Alternatively, it may be that as they get older the first groups of HP fans are unwilling to relinquish their investment in the HP phenomenon, but are equally unwilling to align themselves uncritically with the anodyne story of the canon. Harry Potter, as Warner Bros licensed him, may be OK for pre-teens, but less cool for the older adolescent. The range of identities that can be constructed using the many online HP FF genres, however, permits wide scope for FF members to identify with dissident constructions of the HP narrative and helps to add to the momentum with which his fame increases. Latterly there is evidence that custodians of canon may be making subtle overtures to creators of fanon. Here, the viral marketers have a particular challenge – to embrace the huge market represented by fanon, while not disturbing those whose HP fandom is based upon the purity of canon. Some elements of fanon feel their discourses have been recognised within the evolving approved narrative . This sense within the fan community – that the holders of the canon have complimented them through an intertextual reference – is much prized and builds the momentum of the fame engagement (as has been demonstrated by Watson, with respect to the band ‘phish’). Specifically, Harry/Draco slash fans have delighted in the hint of a blown kiss from Draco Malfoy to Harry (as Draco sends Harry an origami bird/graffiti message in a Defence against the Dark Arts Class in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as an acknowledgement of their cultural contribution to the development of the HP phenomenon. Streeter credits Raymond’s essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as offering a model for the incorporation of voluntary labour into the marketplace. Although Streeter’s ex le concerns the Open Source movement, derived from hacker culture, it has parallels with the prodigious creativity (and productivity) of the HP FF communities. Discussing the decision by Netscape to throw open the source code of its software in 1998, allowing those who use it to modify and improve it, Streeter comments that (659) “the core trope is to portray Linux-style software development like a bazaar, a real-life competitive marketplace”. The bazaar features a world of competing, yet complementary, small traders each displaying their skills and their wares for evaluation in terms of the product on offer. In contrast, “Microsoft-style software production is portrayed as hierarchical and centralised – and thus inefficient – like a cathedral”. Raymond identifies “ego satisfaction and reputation among other [peers]” as a specific socio-emotional benefit for volunteer participants (in Open Source development), going on to note: “Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon [… for ex le] science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized ‘egoboo’ (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity”. This may also be a prime mover for FF engagement. Where fans have outgrown the anodyne canon they get added value through using the raw materials of the HP stories to construct fanon: establishing and building in idual identities and communities through HP consumption practices in parallel with, but different from, those deemed acceptable for younger, more innocent, fans. The fame implicit in HP fandom is not only that of HP, the HP lead actor Daniel Radcliffe and HP’s creator J K Rowling for some fans the famed ‘state or quality of being widely honoured and acclaimed’ can be realised through their participation in online fan culture – fans become famous and recognised within their own community for the quality of their work and the generosity of their sharing with others. The cultural capital circulated on the FF sites is both canon and fanon, a matter of some anxiety for the corporations that typically buy into and foster these mega-media products. As Jim Ward, Vice-President of Marketing for Lucasfilm comments about Star Wars fans (cited in Murray 11): “We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact someone is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that’s not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.” Slash fans would beg to differ, and for many FF readers and writers, the joy of engagement, and a significant engine for the growth of HP fame, is partly located in the creativity offered for readers and writers to fill in the gaps. Endnote HP FF ranges from posts on general FF sites (such as fanfiction.net books, where HP has 147,067 stories [on 4,490 pages of hotlinks] posted, compared with its nearest ‘rival’ Lord of the rings: with 33,189 FF stories). General FF sites exclude adult content, much of which is corralled into 18+ FF sites, such as Restrictedsection.org, set up when core material was expelled from general sites. As an ex le of one adult site, the Potter Slash Archive is selective (unlike fanfiction.net, for ex le) which means that only stories liked by the site team are displayed. Authors submitting work are asked to abide by a list of ‘compulsory parameters’, but ‘warnings’ fall under the category of ‘optional parameters’: “Please put a warning if your story contains content that may be offensive to some authors [sic], such as m/m sex, graphic sex or violence, violent sex, character death, major angst, BDSM, non-con (rape) etc”. Adult-content FF readers/writers embrace a range of unexpected genres – such as Twincest (incest within either of the two sets of twin characters in HP) and Weasleycest (incest within the Weasley clan) – in addition to mainstream romance/homo-erotica pairings, such as that between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. (NB: within the time frame 16 August – 4 October, Harry Potter FF writers had posted an additional 9,196 stories on the fanfiction.net site alone.) References ABS. 8147.0 Use of the Internet by Householders, Australia. www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ e8ae5488b598839cca25682000131612/ ae8e67619446db22ca2568a9001393f8!OpenDocument, 2001, 2001 . Baym, Nancy. “The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication.” CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. S. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. 138-63. Blue, Midnight. “The Mirror of Maybe.” www.greyblue.net/MidnightBlue/Mirror/default.htm . Coates, Laura. “Muggle Kids Battle for Domain Name Rights. Irish Computer. omaingame2.html . Fanfiction.net. “Category: Books” at/202/ . Green, Lelia. Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hearn, Greg, Tom Mandeville and David Anthony. The Communication Superhighway: Social and Economic Change in the Digital Age. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. Houghton Mifflin. “Potlatch.” Encyclopedia of North American Indians. istory/readerscomp/naind/html/ na_030900_potlatch.htm . Kirby, Justin. “Brand Papers: Getting the Bug.” Brand Strategy July-August 2004. www.dmc.co.uk df/BrandStrategy07-0804.pdf . Marshall, P. David. “Technophobia: Video Games, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics.” Media International Australia 85 (Nov. 1997): 70-8. Murray, Simone. “Celebrating the Story the Way It Is: Cultural Studies, Corporate Media and the Contested Utility of Fandom.” Continuum 18.1 (2004): 7-25. Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 2000. www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html . Streeter, Thomas. The Romantic Self and the Politics of Internet Commercialization. Cultural Studies 17.5 (2003): 648-68. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge UP. Watson, Nessim. “Why We Argue about Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.net Fan Community.” Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. Ed. Steven G. Jones. London: Sage, 1997. 102-32. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia, and Carmen Guinery. "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y') ? journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php . APA Style Green, L., and C. Guinery. (Nov. 2004) "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y') ? from journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php .

Young People Online

Publisher: Wiley

Date: 31-01-2013

DOI: 10.1002/9781118321607.CH33

Affect and an Effective Online Therapeutic Community

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 12-2005

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2448

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

Tox and Detox

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 06-06-2022

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2888

Abstract: Introduction The public sphere includes a range of credible discourses asserting that a proportion of teenagers (“teens”) has an unhealthy dependence upon continuous connection with media devices, and especially smartphones. A review of media discourse (Jaunzems et al.) in Australia, and a critical review of public discourse in Australia and Belgium (Zaman et al.), reveal both positive and negative commentary around screentime. Despite the “emotionally laden, opposing views” expressed in the media, there appears to be a groundswell of concern around young people’s dependence upon digital devices (Zaman et al. 120). Concerns about ‘addiction’ to and dependency on digital media first emerged with the Internet and have been continually represented as technology evolves. One recent ex le is the 2020 multi-part Massey Lecture series which hooked audiences with the provocative title: “we need to reclaim our lives from our phones” (Deibert). In Sydney, a psychology-based “outpatient addiction treatment centre” offers specialised recovery programs for “Internet addiction”, noting that addicts include school-aged teens, as well as adults (Cabin). Such discourse reflects well-established social anxieties around the disruptive impacts of new technologies upon society (Marvin), while focussing such concern disproportionately upon the lives, priorities, and activities of young people (Tsaliki and Chronaki). While a growing peer-reviewed evidence base suggests some young people have problematic relationships with digital media (e.g. Odgers and Robb Donald et al. Gaspard Tóth-Király et al. Boer et al.), there are also opposing views (e.g. Vuorre et al.) Ben Light, for instance, highlights the notion of disconnection as a set of practices that include using some platforms and not others, unfriending, and selective anonymity (Light). We argue that this version of disconnection and what we refer to as ‘detox’ are two different practices. Detox, as we use it, is the regular removal of elements of lived experience (such as food consumption) that may be enjoyable but which potentially have negative consequences over time, before (potentially) reintroducing the element or pratice. The aims of a detox include ensuring greater control over the enjoyable experience while, at the same time, reducing exposure to possible harm. There is a lack of specific research that unequivocally asserts young people’s unhealthy dependence upon smartphones. Nonetheless, there appears to be a growing public belief in the efficacy of “the detox” (Beyond Blue) or “unplugging” (Shlain). We argue that a teen’s commitment to regular smartphone abstinence is non-fungible with ‘as and when’ smartphone use. In other words, there is a significant, ineluctable and non-trivial difference between the practice of regularly disconnecting from a smartphone at a certain point of the day, or for a specified period in the week, compared with the same amount of time ‘off’ the device which is a haphazard, as and when, doing something else, type of practice. We posit that recurrent periods of smartphone abstinence, equating to a regular detox, might support more balanced, healthy and empowered smartphone use. Repeated abstinence in this case differs from the notion of the disconnected holiday, where a person might engage in irregular smartphone withdrawal during an annual holiday, for ex le (Traveltalk Hoving Stäheli and Stoltenberg). Such abstinence does have widespread historical and cultural resonance, however, as in the fasting practices of Islam (the month of Ramadan), the Christian season of Lent, and the holy Hindu month of Śravaṇa. Where prolonged periods of fasting are supplemented by weekly or holy-day fasts, they may be reprised with a regularity that brings the practice closer to the scheduled pattern of abstinence that we see as non-fungible with an unstructured as-and-when approach. An extreme ex le of the long fast and intermittent fast days is offered by the traditional practices of the Greek Orthodox church, whose teachings recommend fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays as well as on religious holy days. With the inclusion of Lent, Greek Orthodox fasting practices can comprise 180 fast days per year: that’s about half of available days. As yet, there is no coherent evidence base supporting the benefits of regular intermittent disconnection. The Australian mental health Website Beyond Blue, which asserts the value of digital detox, cannot find a stronger authority to underpin a practice of withdrawal than “Research from Deloitte’s annual Mobile Consumer Survey report” which indicates that “44 per cent of people in Australia think their phone use is a problem and are trying to reduce how much time they spend on it” (Beyond Blue). Academic literature that addresses these areas by drawing on more than personal experience and anecdote is scarce to non-existent. Insofar as such studies exist over the past decade, from Maushart to Leonowicz-Bukała et al., they are irregular experiments which do not commit to repeated periods of disconnection. This article is a call to investigate the possibly non-fungible benefits of teens’ regularly practicing smartphone disconnection. It argues that there is actual evidence which is yet to be collected. New knowledge in this area may provide a compelling dataset that suggests verifiable benefits for the non-fungible practice of regular smartphone disconnection. We believe that there are teenagers, parents and communities willing to trial appropriate interventions over a significant period of time to establish ‘before’ and ‘after’ case studies. The evidence for these opinions is laid out in the sections that follow. Teens’ Experiences of Media, Smartphone, and Other Cultural Dis/connection In 2018, the Pew Research Center in the US surveyed teens about their experiences of social media, updating elements of an earlier study from 2014-15. They found that almost all (95%) the 743 teens in the study, aged between 13 and 17 when they were surveyed in March-April 2018, had or had access to a smartphone (Anderson and Jiang). A more recent report from 2021 notes that 88% of US teenagers, aged 13-18, have their own smartphone (Common Sense Media 22). What is more, this media use survey indicates that American teens have increased their screen entertainment time from 7 hours, 22 minutes per day in 2019 to 8 hours, 39 minutes per day in 2021 (Common Sense Media 3). Lee argues that, on average, mobile phone users in Australia touch their phones 2,617 times a day. In Sweden, a 2019 study of youth aged 15-24 noted a pervasive concern regarding the logical assumption “that offline time is influenced and adapted when people spend an increasing amount of time online” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 41). These authors critique the overarching theory of young people comprising a homogenous group of ‘digital natives’ by identifying different categories of light, medium, and heavy users of ICT. They say that the “variation in use is large, indicating that responses to ubiquitous ICT access are highly erse rather than homogenously determined” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 48). The practice or otherwise of regular periods of smartphone disconnection is a further potential differentiator of teens’ digital experiences. Any investigation into these areas of difference should help indicate ways in which teens may or may not achieve comparatively more or less control over their smartphone use. Lee argues that in Australia “teens who spend five or more hours per day on their devices have a 71% higher risk factor for suicide”. Twenge and C bell (311) used “three large surveys of adolescents in two countries (n = 221,096)” to explore differences between ‘light users’ of digital media ( hour per day) and ‘heavy users’ (5+ hours per day). They use their data to argue that “heavy users (vs. light) of digital media were 48% to 171% more likely to be unhappy, to be low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or past suicide attempts” (Twenge and C bell 311). Notably, Livingstone among others argues that emotive assertions such as these tend to ignore the nuance of significant bodies of research (Livingstone, about Twenge). Even so, it is plausible that teens’ online activities interpolate both positively and negatively upon their offline activities. The capacity to disconnect, however, to disengage from smartphone use at will, potentially allows a teen more opportunity for in idual choice impacting both positive and negative experiences. As boyd argued in 2014: “it’s complicated”. The Pew findings from 2018 indicate that teens’ positive comments about social media use include: 81% “feel more connected to their friends” 69% “think it helps [them] interact with a more erse group of people” and 68% “feel as if they have people who will support them through tough times.” (Anderson and Jiang) The most numerous negative comments address how of all teens: 45% “feel overwhelmed by all the drama there” 43% “feel pressure to only post content that makes them look good to others” and 37% “feel pressure to post content that will get a lot of likes and comments.” (Anderson and Jiang) It is notable that these three latter points relate to teens’ vulnerabilities around others’ opinions of themselves and the associated rollercoaster of emotions these opinions may cause. They resonate with Ciarrochi et al.’s argument that different kinds of Internet activity impact different issues of control, with more social forms of digital media associated with young females’ higher “compulsive internet use […] and worse mental health than males” (276). What is not known, because it has never been investigated, is whether any benefits flowing from regular smartphone disconnection might have a gendered dimension. If there is specific value in a capacity to disconnect regularly, separating that experience from haphazard episodes of connection and disconnection, regular disconnection may also enhance the quality of smartphone engagement. Potentially, the power to turn off their smartphone when the going got tough might allow young people to feel greater control over their media use while being less susceptible to the drama and compulsion of digital engagement. As one 17-year-old told the Pew researchers, possibly ruefully, “[teens] would rather go scrolling on their phones instead of doing their homework, and it’s so easy to do so. It’s just a huge distraction” (Anderson and Jiang). Few cultural contexts support teens’ regular and repeated disengagement from smartphones, but Icelandic society, Orthodox Judaism and the comparatively common practice of overnight disconnection from smartphone use may offer helpful indications of possible benefits. Cross-Cultural and Religious Interventions in Smartphone Use Concern around teens’ smartphone use, as described above, is typically applied to young people whose smartphone use constitutes an integral part of everyday life. The untangling of such interconnection would benefit from being both comparative and experimental. Our suggestions follow. Iceland has, in the past, adopted what Karlsson and Broddason term “a paternalistic cultural conservatism” (1). Legislators concerned about the social impacts of television deferred the introduction of Icelandic broadcasting for many years, beyond the time that most other European nations offered television services. Program offerings were expanded in a gradual way after the 1966 beginnings of Iceland’s public television broadcasting. As Karlsson and Broddason note, “initially the transmission hours were limited to only a few hours in the evening, three days a week and a television-free month in July. The number of transmission days was increased to six within a few years, still with a television-free month in July until 1983 and television-free Thursdays until 1987” (6). Interestingly, the nation is still open to social experimentation on a grand scale. In the 1990s, for ex le, in response to significant substance abuse by Icelandic teens, the country implemented an interventionist whole-of-Iceland public health program: the Icelandic Prevention Model (Kristjansson et al.). Social experimentation on a smaller scale remains part of the Icelandic cultural fabric. More recently, between 2015 and 2019, Iceland ran a successful social experiment whereby 1% of the working population worked a shorter work week for full time pay. The test was deemed successful because “workers were able to work less, get paid the same, while maintaining productivity and improving personal well-being” (Lau and Sigurdardottir). A number of self-governing Icelandic villages operate a particularly inclusive form of consultative local democracy enabling widespread buy-in for social experiments. Two or more such communities are likely to be interested in trialling an intervention study if there is a plausible reason to believe that the intervention may make a positive difference to teens’ (and others’) experiences of smartphone use. Those plausible reasons might be indicated by observational data from other people’s everyday practices. One comparatively common everyday practice which has yet to be systematically investigated from the perspective of evaluating the possible impacts of regular disconnection is that practiced by families who leave connected media outside the bedroom at night-time. These families are in the habit of putting their phones on to charge, usually in a shared space such as a kitchen or lounge room, and not referring to them again until a key point in the morning: when they are dressed, for ex le, or ready to leave the house. It is plausible to believe that such families might feel they have greater control over smartphone use than a family who didn’t adopt a regular practice of smartphone disconnection. According to social researchers in the Nordic nations, including co-authors Kjartan Ólafsson and Elisabeth Staksrud, it is likely that an Icelandic community will be keen to trial this experience of regular smartphone disconnection for a period of six months or more, if that trial went hand in hand with a rigorous evaluation of impact. Some religious communities offer a less common exemplar for teens’ regular disconnection from their smartphone. Young people in these communities may suspend their smartphone (and other media use) for just over a full day per week to focus on deepening their engagement with family and friends, and to support their spiritual development. Notable among such ex les are teenagers who identify as members of the Orthodox Jewish faith. Their religious practices include withdrawing from technological engagement as part of the observance of Shabbat (the Sabbath): at least, that’s the theory. For the past ten years or so in Australia there has been a growing concern over some otherwise-Orthodox Jewish teens’ practice of the “half-Shabbat,” in which an estimated 17-50% of this cohort secretly use digital media for some time during their 25 hours of mandated abstinence. As one teacher from an Orthodox high school argues, “to not have access to the phone, it’s like choking off their air” (Telushikin). Interestingly, many Jewish teens who privately admit practicing half-Shabbat envision themselves as moving towards full observance in adulthood: they can see benefits in a wholehearted commitment to disengagement, even if it’s hard to disengage fully at this point in their lives. Hadlington et al.’s article “I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]” similarly evokes a broader community crisis around children’s dependence on digital media, noting that many children aged 8-12 have a tablet of their own before moving onto smartphone ownership in their teens (Common Sense Media 22). We appreciate that not every society has children and young people who are highly networked and integrated within digital dataflows. Nonetheless, while constant smartphone connectivity might appear to be a ‘first world problem’, preparing teens to be adults with optimal choice over their smartphone use includes identifying and promoting support for conscious disengagement from media as and when a young person wishes. Such a perspective aligns with promoting young people’s rights in digital contexts by interrogating the possible benefits of regularly disconnecting from digital media. Those putative benefits may be indicated by investigating perspectives around smartphone use held by Orthodox Jewish teenagers and comparing them with those held by teens who follow a liberal Jewish faith: liberal Jewish teens use smartphones in ways that resonate with broader community teens. A comparison of these two groups, suggests co-author Lynne Cohen, may indicate differences that can (in part) be attributed to Orthodox Jewish practices of digital disconnection, compared with liberal Jewish practices that don’t include disconnection. If smartphone disconnection has the potential to offer non-fungible benefits, it is incumbent upon researchers to investigate the possible advantages and drawbacks of such practices. That can be done through the comparative investigation of current practice as outlined above, and via an experimental intervention for approximately six months with a second Icelandic/Nordic community. The Potential Value of Investigating the (Non-)Fungibility of Digital Engagement and Digital Inactivity The overarching hypothesis addressed in this article is that a lived experience of regular smartphone disconnection may offer teenagers the opportunity to feel more in control of their personal technologies. Such a perspective aligns with many established media theories. These theories include the domestication of technology and its integration into daily life, helping to explain the struggle teens experience in detaching from digital media once they have become a fundamental element of their routine. Domestication theory asserts that technology moves from novelty to an integral aspect of everyday experience (Berker et al.). Displacement theory asserts that young people whose lives are replete with digital media may have substituted that media use for other activities enjoyed by the generations that grew up before them, while boyd offers an alternative suggestion that digital media add to, rather than displace, teens’ activities in daily contexts. Borrowing inputs from other disciplinary traditions, theories around mindfulness are increasingly robust and evidence-based, asserting that “attentiveness to what is present appears to yield corrective and curative benefits in its own right” (Brown et al. 1). Constant attention to digital media may be a distraction from mindful engagement with the lived environment. A detailed study of the non-fungible character of smartphone disconnection practices might offer an evidence base to support suggestions, such as those proffered by Beyond Blue, that a digital detox benefits mental health, resilience, and sociality. Such information might support initiatives by schools and other organisations central to the lives of teenagers to institute regular digital disconnection regimes, akin to Iceland’s experiments with television-free Thursdays. These innovations could build upon aligned social initiatives such as “no email Fridays” (Horng), which have been trialled in business contexts. Further, studies such as those outlined above could add authority to recommendations for parents, educators, and caregivers such as those recommendations contained in papers on the Common Sense Media site, for ex le, including Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health (Odgers and Robb) and Device-Free Dinners (Robb). Relevantly, the results from such observational and intervention studies would address the post-COVID era when parents and others will be considering how best to support a generation of children who went online earlier, and more often, than any generation before them. These results might also align with work towards early-stage adoption of the United Nations’ General Comment No. 25 on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment (UNCRC). 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Thorisdottir, John P. Allegrante, and Inga Dora Sigfusdottir. “Development and Guiding Principles of the Icelandic Model for Preventing Adolescent Substance Use.” Health Promotion Practice 21.1 (Jan. 2020): 62–69. .1177/1524839919849032 . Lau, Virginia, and Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir. “The Shorter Work Week Really Worked in Iceland: Here’s How.” Time, 2021. /shorter-work-week-iceland/ . Lee, James. “16 Smartphone Statistics Australia Should Take Note Of (2021).” Smartphone Statistics Australia, 2022. whatasleep.com.au/blog/smartphone-statistics-australia/ . Leonowicz-Bukała, Iwona, Anna Martens, and Barbara Przywara. "Digital Natives Disconnected. The Qualitative Research on Mediatized Life of Polish and International Students in Rzeszow and Warsaw, Poland." Przegląd Badań Edukacyjnych (Educational Studies Review) 35.2 (2021): 69-96. Light, Ben. Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Livingstone, Sonia. "iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood." Journal of Children and Media, 12.1 (2018): 118–123. .1080/17482798.2017.1417091 . Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New : Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford UP, 1990. Maushart, Susan. The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale. Penguin, 2011. Odgers, Candice L., and Michael Robb. “Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health: Coming of Age in an Increasingly Digital, Uncertain, and Unequal World.” Common Sense Media, 2020. esearch/tweens-teens-tech-and-mental-health . Robb, Michael. “Why Device-Free Dinners Are a Healthy Choice.” Common Sense Media, 4 Aug. 2016. log/why-device-free-dinners-are-a-healthy-choice . Shlain, Tiffany. “Tech’s Best Feature: The Off Switch.” Harvard Business Review, 1 Mar. 2013. /03/techs-best-feature-the-off-swi . Stäheli, Urs, and Luise Stoltenberg. “Digital Detox Tourism: Practices of Analogization.” New Media & Society (Jan. 2022). .1177/14614448211072808 . Telushikin, Shira. “Modern Orthodox Teens Can’t Put Down Their Phones on Shabbat.” Tablet Magazine, 12 Sep. 2014. ections/belief/articles/shabbat-phones . Thulin, Eva, and Bertil Vilhelmson. “More at Home, More Alone? Youth, Digital Media and the Everyday Use of Time and Space.” Geoforum 100 (Mar. 2019): 41–50. .1016/j.geoforum.2019.02.010 . Tóth-Király, István, Alexandre J.S. Morin, Lauri Hietajärvi, and Katariina Salmela‐Aro. “Longitudinal Trajectories, Social and In idual Antecedents, and Outcomes of Problematic Internet Use among Late Adolescents.” Child Development 92.4 (2021): e653–73. .1111/cdev.13525 . Traveltalk. “The Rise of Digital Detox Holidays and Tech-Free Tourism.” Traveltalk, 2018. www.traveltalkmag.com.au/blog/articles/the-rise-of-digital-detox-holidays-and-tech-free-tourism . Tsaliki, Liza, and Despina Chronaki. Discourses of Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across Cultures. 1st ed. Springer International Publishing, 2020. .1007/978-3-030-46436-3 . Twenge, Jean M. iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood – and What That Means for the Rest of Us. Simon and Schuster, 2017. Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith C bell. “Media Use Is Linked to Lower Psychological Well-Being: Evidence from Three Datasets.” The Psychiatric Quarterly 90.2 (2019): 311-331. .1007/s11126-019-09630-7 . UNCRC. "General Comment No. 25 (2021) on Children's Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment." United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2 Mar. 2021. n/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-25-2021-childrens-rights-relation . Vuorre, Matti, Amy Orben, and Andrew K. Przybylski. “There Is No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents’ Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased.” Clinical Psychological Science 9.5 (Sep. 2021): 823–35. .1177/2167702621994549 . Zaman, Bieke, Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, Kelly Jaunzems, and Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe. “Opposing Narratives about Children’s Digital Media Use: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Online Public Advice Given to Parents in Australia and Belgium:” Media International Australia (May 2020). .1177/1329878X20916950 .

Being a Bad Vegan

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 24-04-2019

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.1512

Abstract: According to The Betoota Advocate (Parker), a CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) paper has recently established that “it takes roughly seven minutes on average for a vegan to tell you that they’re vegan” (qtd. in Harrington et al. 135). For such a statement to have currency as a joke means that it is grounded in a shared experience of being vegan on the one hand, and of encountering vegans on the other. Why should vegans feel such a need to justify themselves? I recognise the observation as being true of me, and this article is one way to explore this perspective: writing to find out what I currently only intuit. As Richardson notes (516), writing is “a way of ‘knowing’—a method of discovery and analysis. By writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable” (qtd. in Wall 151).Autoethnography, the qualitative research methodology used for this article, is etymologically derived from Greek to indicate a process for exploring the self (autos) and the cultural (“ethno” from ethnos—nation, tribe, people, class) using a shared, understood, approach (“graphy” from graphia, writing). It relies upon critical engagement with and synthesising of the personal. In Wall’s words, this methodological analysis of human experience “says that what I know matters” (148). The autoethnographic investigation (Riggins Sparkes) reported here interrogates the experience of “being judged” as a vegan: firstly, by myself secondly, by other vegans and ultimately by the wider society. As Ellis notes, autoethnography is “research, writing, story and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political. Autoethnographic forms feature concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection” (xix).Introspection is important because researchers’ stories of their observations are interwoven with self-reflexive critique and analysis: “illustrative materials are meant to give a sense of what the observed world is really like, while the researcher’s interpretations are meant to represent a more detached conceptualization of that reality” (Strauss and Corbin 22). Leaving aside Gans’s view that this form of enquiry represents the “climax of the preoccupation with self […] an autobiography written by sociologists” (542), an autoethnography generally has the added advantage of protecting against Glendon and Stanton’s concern that interpretive studies “are often of too short a duration to be able to provide sufficiently large s les of behaviour” (209). In my case, I have twelve years of experience of identifying as a vegan to draw upon.My experience is that being vegan is a contested activity with a significant range of variation that partly reflects the different initial motivations for adopting this increasingly mainstream identity. Greenebaum notes that “ethical vegans differentiate between those who ‘eat’ vegan (health vegans) and those who ‘live’ vegan (ethical vegans)”, going on to suggest that these differences create “hierarchies and boundaries between vegans” (131). As Greenebaum acknowledges, there is sometimes a need to balance competing priorities: “an environmental vegan […] may purchase leather products over polyvinyl chloride (PVC), thinking that leather is a better choice for the environment” (130). Harrington et al. similarly critique vegan motivations as encompassing “a selfless pursuit for those who cared for other beings (animals)” to “a concern about impacts that affect all humans (environment), and an interest mostly in the self (in idual health …)” (144). Wright identifies a fourth group of vegans: those searching for a means of dietary inclusivity (2). I have known Orthodox Jewish households that have adopted veganism because it is compatible with keeping Kosher, while many strict Hindus are vegan and some observant Muslims may also follow suit, to avoid meat that is not Halal certified.The Challenge of the EverydayAlthough my initial vegan promptings were firmly at the selfish end of an altruism spectrum, my experience is that motivation is not static. Being a vegan for any reason increasingly primes awareness of more altruistic motivations “at the intersection of a ersity of concerns [… promoting] a spread and expansion of meaning to view food choices holistically” (Harrington et al. 144). Even so, everyday life offers a range of temptations and challenges that require constant juggling and, sometimes, a string of justifications: to oneself, and to others. I identify as a bit of a bad vegan, and not simply because I embrace the possibility that “honey is a gray area” (Greenebaum, quoting her participant Jason, 139). I’m also flexible around wine, for ex le, and don’t ask too many questions about whether the wine I drink is refined using milk, or egg-shells or even (yuk!) fish bladders. The point is, there are an infinite number of acid tests as to what constitutes “a real vegan”, encouraging inter-vegan judgmentality. Some slight definitional slippage aligns with Singer and Mason’s argument, however, that vegans should avoid worrying about “trivial infractions of the ethical guidelines […] Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is. Giving people the impression that it is virtually impossible to be vegan doesn’t help animals at all” (Singer and Mason 258–9).If I were to accept a definition of non-vegan, possibly because I have a leather handbag among other infractions, that would feel inauthentic. The term “vegan” helpfully labels my approach to food and drink. Others also find it useful as a shorthand for dietary preferences (except for the small but significant minority who muddle veganism with being gluten free). From the point of view of dietary prohibitions I’m a particularly strict vegan, apart from honey. I know people who make exceptions for line-caught fish, or the eggs from garden-roaming happy chooks, but I don’t. I increasingly understand the perspectives of those who have a more radical conception of veganism than I do, however: whose vision and understanding is that “behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The ‘absent referent’ is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product [… keeping] something from being seen as having been someone” (Adams 14). The concept of the global suffering of animals inherent in the figures: “31.1 billion each year, 85.2 million each day, 3.5 million each hour, 59,170 each minute” (Adams dedication) is appalling as well as being an under-representation of the current situation since the globe has had almost two further decades of population growth and rising “living standards”.Whatever the motivations, it’s easy to imagine that the different branches of veganism have more in common than ides them. Being a vegan of any kind helps someone identify with other variations upon the theme. For ex le, even though my views on animal rights did not motivate my choice to become vegan, once I stopped seeing other sentient creatures as a handy food source I began to construct them differently. I gradually realised that, as a species, we were committing the most extraordinary atrocities on a global scale in treating animals as disposable commodities without rights or feelings. The large-scale production of what we like to term “meat and poultry” is almost unadulterated animal suffering, whereas the by-catch (“waste products”) of commercial fishing represents an extraordinary disregard of the rights to life of other creatures and, as Cole and Morgan note, “The number of aquatic animals slaughtered is not recorded, their in idual deaths being subsumed by aggregate weight statistics” (135). Even if we did accept that humans have the right to consume some animals some of the time, should the netting of a given weight of edible fish really entail the death of many, many time more weight of living creatures that will be “wasted”: the so-called by-catch? Such wanton destruction has increasingly visible impacts upon complex food chains, and the ecosystems that sustain us all.The Vegan Threat to the Status QuoExamining the evidence for the broader community being biased against vegetarians and vegans, MacInnis and Hodson identify that these groups are “clear targets of relatively more negative attitudes” (727) towards them than other minority groups. Indeed, “only drug addicts were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians and vegans” (726). While “vegans were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians” (732), there was a hierarchy in negative evaluations according to the underlying motivation for someone adopting veganism or vegetarianism. People motivated by personal health received the least negative evaluations from the general population followed by those who were motivated by the environment. The greatest opprobrium was reserved for vegans who were motivated by animal rights (732). MacInnis and Hodson reason that this antipathy is because “vegetarians and vegans represent strong threats to the status quo, given that prevailing cultural norms favour meat-eating” (722). Also implied here is that fact that eating meat is itself a cultural norm associated with masculinity (Rothgerber).Adams’s work links the unthinking, normative exploitation of animals to the unthinking, normative exploitation of women, a situation so aligned that it is often expressed through the use of a common metaphor: “‘meat’ becomes a term to express women’s oppression, used equally by patriarchy and feminists, who say that women are ‘pieces of meat’” (2002, 59). Rothberger further interrogates the relationship between masculinity and meat by exploring gender in relation to strategies for “meat eating justification”, reflecting a 1992 United States study that showed, of all people reporting that they were vegetarian, 68% were women and 32% men (Smart, 1995). Rothberger’s argument is that:Following a vegetarian diet or deliberately reducing meat intake violates the spirit of Western hegemonic masculinity, with its socially prescribed norms of stoicism, practicality, seeking dominance, and being powerful, strong, tough, robust and invulnerable […] Such in iduals have basically cast aside a relatively hidden male privilege—the freedom and ability to eat without criticism and scrutiny, something that studies have shown women lack. (371)Noting that “to raise concerns about the injustices of factory farming and to feel compelled by them would seem emotional, weak and sensitive—feminine characteristics” (366), Rothberger sets the scene for me to note two items of popular culture which achieved cut-through in my personal life. The evidence for this is, in terms of all the pro-vegan materials I encounter, these were two of a small number that I shared on social media. In line with Rothberger’s observations, both are oppositional to hegemonic masculinity:one represents a feminised, mother and child exchange that captures the moment when a child realises the “absent referent” of the dead animal in the octopus on his plate—atch?v=SrU03da2arE while the other is a sentimentalised and sympathetic recording of cattle luxuriating in their first taste of pastureland after a long period of confinement—atch?v=huT5__BqY_U.Seeing cows behaving like pets does call attention to the artificial distinction between “companion animals” and other animals. As Cole and Stewart note, “the naming of other animals is useful for human beings, while it is dangerous, and frequently lethal, for other animals. This is because the words we use to name other animals are saturated with common sense knowledge claims about those animals that legitimate their habitual use for humans” (13). Thus a cat, in Western culture, has a very different life trajectory to a cow. Adams notes the contrary case where the companion animal is used as a referent for a threatened human:Child sexual abusers often use threats and/or violence against companion animals to achieve compliance from their victims. Batterers harm or kill a companion animal as a warning to their partner that she could be next as a way of further separating her from meaningful relationships to demonstrate his power and her powerlessness. (Adams 57)For children who are still at a stage where animals are creatures of fascination and potential friends, who may be growing up with Charlotte’s Web (White) or Peter Rabbit (Potter), the mental gymnastics of suspending identification with these fellow creatures are harder because empathy and imagination are more active and the ingrained habit of eating without thinking has not had so long to develop. Indeed, children often understand domestic animals as “members of the family”, as illustrated by an interview with Kani, a 10-year old participant in one of my research projects. “In the absence of her extended family overseas, Kani adds her pets to [the list of] those with whom she shares her family life: ‘And my mum and my uncle and then our cat Dobby. I named it [for Harry Potter’s house elf] ...and the goldfish. The goldfish are Twinkle, Glitter, Glow and Bobby’” (Green and Stevenson). Such perceptions may well filter through to children having a different understanding of animals-as-food, even though Cole and Stewart note that “children enter into an adult culture habituated to [the] banal conceptualization of other animals according to their (dis)utilities” (21).Evidence-Based VeganismThose M/C Journal readers who know me personally will understand that one reason why I embrace the “bad vegan” label, is that I’m no more obviously a pin-up for healthy veganism than I am for ethical or environmental veganism. In particular, my BMI (Body Mass Index) is significantly outside the “healthy” range. Even so, I attribute a dramatic change in my capacity for stamina-based activity to my embrace of veganism. A high-speed recap of the evidence would include: in 2009 I embarked on a week-long 500km Great Vic bike ride in 2012 I successfully completed a Machu Picchu trek at high altitude by 2013 I was ready for my first half marathon (reprised in 2014, and 2017) in 2014 I cycled from Surfers’ Paradise to Noosa—somewhat less successfully than in my 2009 venture, but even so in 2016 I completed the Oxfam 50km in 24 hours (plus a half hour, if I’m honest) and in 2017 I completed the 227km Portuguese Camino in 2018 I jogged an average of over 3km per day, every day, up until 20 September... Apart from indicating that I live an extremely fortunate life, these activities seem to me to demonstrate that becoming vegan in 2007 has conferred a huge health benefit. In particular, I cannot identify similar metamorphoses in the lives of my 50-to-60-something year-old empty-nester friends. My most notable physical feat pre-veganism was the irregular completion of Perth’s annual 12km City-to-Surf fun run.Although I’m a vegan for health reasons, I didn’t suddenly wake up one day and decide that this was now my future: I had to be coaxed and cajoled into looking at my food preferences very differently. This process entailed my enrolling in a night school-type evening course, the Coronary Health Improvement Program: 16 x 3 hour sessions over eight weeks. Its sibling course is now available online as the Complete Health Improvement Program. The first lesson of the eight weeks convincingly demonstrated that what is good for coronary health is also good for health in general, which I found persuasive and reassuring given the propensity to cancer evident in my family tree. In the generation above me, my parents each had three siblings so I have a s le of eight immediate family to draw upon. Six of these either have cancer at the moment, or have died from cancer, with the cancers concerned including breast (1), prostate (2), lung (1), pancreas (1) and brain (1). A seventh close relative passed away before her health service could deliver a diagnosis for her extraordinarily elevated eosinophil levels (100x normal rates of that particular kind of white blood cell: potentially a blood cancer, I think). The eighth relative in that generation is my “bad vegan” uncle who has been mainly plant-based in his dietary choices since 2004. At 73, he is still working three days per week as a dentist and planning a 240 km trek in Italy as his main 2019 holiday. That’s the kind of future I’m hoping for too, when I grow up.And yet, one can read volumes of health literature without stumbling upon Professor T. Colin C bell’s early research findings via his work on rodents and rodent cells that: “nutrition [was] far more important in controlling cancer promotion than the dose of the initiating carcinogen” and that “nutrients from animal-based foods increased tumor development while nutrients from plant-based foods decreased tumor development” (66, italics in original). Plant was already an eminent scientist at the point where she developed breast cancer, but she noted her amazement at learning “precisely how much has been discovered already [that] has not filtered through to the public” (18). The reason for the lack of visible research in this area is not so much its absence, but more likely its political sensitivity in an era of Big Food. As Harrington et al.’s respondent Samantha noted, “I think the meat lobby’s much bigger than the vegetable lobby” (147). These arguments are addressed in greater depth in Green et al.My initiating research question—Why do I feel the need to justify being vegan?—can clearly be answered in a wide variety of ways. Veganism disrupts the status quo: it questions both the appropriateness of humanity’s systematic torturing of other species for food, and the risks that those animal-based foods pose for the long-term health of human populations. It offends many vested interests from Big Food to accepted notions of animal welfare to the conventional teachings of the health industry. Identifying as a vegan represents an outcome of one or more of a wide range of motivations, some of which are more clearly self-serving (read “bad”) while others are more easily identified as altruistic (read “good”). After a decade or more of personal experimentation in this space, I’m proud to identify as a “bad vegan”. It’s been a great choice personally and, I hope, for some other creatures whose planet I share.ReferencesAdams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990.C bell, T. Colin, and Thomas M. Cambell. The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2005.Cole, Matthew, and Karen Morgan. “Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspaper.” British Journal of Sociology 62 (2011): 134–53.———, and Kate Stewart. Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2004.Gans, Herbert J. “Participant Observation in the Era of ‘Ethnography’.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28.5 (1999): 540–48.Glendon, A. Ian, and Neville Stanton. “Perspectives on Safety Culture.” Safety Science 34.1-3 (2000): 193–214.Green, Lelia, Leesa Costello, and Julie Dare. “Veganism, Health Expectancy, and the Communication of Sustainability.” Australian Journal of Communication 37.3 (2010): 87–102.———, and Kylie Stevenson. “A Ten-Year-Old’s Use of Creative Content to Construct an Alternative Future for Herself.” M/C Journal 20.1 (2017). 13 Apr. 2019 journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1211 .Greenebaum, Jessica. (2012). “Veganism, Identity and the Quest for Authenticity.” Food, Culture and Society 15.1 (2012): 129–44.Harrington, Stephen, Christie Collis, and OzgurDedehayir. “It’s Not (Just) about the F-ckin’ Animals: Why Veganism Is Changing, and Why That Matters.” Alternative Food Politics: From the Margins to the Mainstream. Eds. Michelle Phillipov and Katherine Kirkwood. New York: Routledge, 2019. 135–50.MacInnes, Cara. C., and Gordon Hodson. “It Ain’t Easy Eating Greens: Evidence of Bias Toward Vegetarians and Vegans from Both Source and Target.” Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 20.6 (2015): 721–44.Parker, Errol. “Study Finds the Easiest Way to Tell If Someone Is Vegan Is to Wait until They Inevitably Tell You.” The Betoota Advocate 2017. 10 Apr. 2019 umans-of-betoota/study-finds-easiest-way-tell-someone-vegan-wait-inevitably-tell/ .Plant, Jane A. Your Life in Your Hands: Understand, Prevent and Overcome Breast Cancer and Ovarian Cancer. 4th ed. London: Virgin Books, 2007.Potter, Beatrix. The Tale of Peter Rabbit. London: Frederick Warne and Co, 1902.Richardson, Laurel. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K. Denzon and Yvonne S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994. 516–29.Riggins, Stephen Harold. “Fieldwork in the Living Room: An Autoethnographic Essay.” The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects. Ed. Stephen Harold Riggins. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994. 101–50.Rothgerber, Hank. “Real Men Don’t Eat (Vegetable) Quiche: Masculinity and the Justification of Meat Consumption.” Psychology of Men and Masculinity 14 (1994): 363–75.Singer, Peter, and Jim Mason. The Ethics of What We Eat. Melbourne: Text Publishing Company.Smart, Joanne. “The Gender Gap.” Vegetarian Times 210 (1995): 74–81.Sparkes, Andrew C. “Autoethnography: ‘Self-Indulgence or Something More?’” Ethnographically Speaking: Auto-Ethnography, Literature and Aesthetics. Eds. Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn C. Ellis. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2002. 209–32.Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. London: Sage, 1990.Wall, Sarah. “An Autoethnography on Learning about Autoethnography.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5 (2006): 146–60.White, Elwyn B. Charlotte’s Web. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952.Wright, Laura. The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals and Gender in the Age of Terror. Athens: U of Georgia Press, 2015.

Biological Metaphor of “Natural History” for Internet Use: The Child–Adult Social Maturation Journey

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 12-2013

DOI: 10.1177/1326365X13517187

Abstract: Using a metaphor borrowed from the biological sciences, this article discusses a “natural history” of internet use. As “digital natives” many of today’s teenagers and young people have grown up and matured interacting with the internet from an early age. Research about young people’s internet use tends, however, to focus on the protection of minors. Young people, 16 years or older, are often excluded from non-commercial research about how young people grow into more mature patterns of internet use. This article highlights how parents with teenagers are building dynamic models of their children’s engagement with the internet as they mature. Parents reported changes in the level of their children’s internet use as they age and they envisage further changes as their children mature. We also identify the variety of ways in which parents support their children’s developing internet skills that anticipate and respond to internet risks and excessive internet use.

The Global Flow of Information: Legal, Social and Cultural Perspectives

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 12-2012

DOI: 10.1177/0267323112470769B

Symbolic Interactionism in Safety Communication in the Workplace

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Date: 2013

DOI: 10.1108/S0163-2396(2013)0000040011

The Internet of toys

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 10-2016

DOI: 10.1080/22041451.2016.1266124

Narratives in Research and Interventions on Cyberbullying among Young People

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Date: 2019

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04960-7

Confident, capable and world changing: teenagers and digital citizenship

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 02-01-2020

DOI: 10.1080/22041451.2020.1732589

Do Australian children trust their parents more than peers when seeking support for online activities?

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 15-11-2013

DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2013.854866

“Judge Me, Or Be There For Me”: How Can Narratives Be Used to Encourage Action and Intervention by Parents, Schools, the Police, Policymakers, and Other Children?

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Date: 2019

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04960-7_14

“Arguments online, but in school we always act normal”: The embeddedness of early adolescent negative peer interactions within the whole of their offline and online peer interactions

Publisher: Elsevier BV

Date: 02-2018

DOI: 10.1016/J.CHILDYOUTH.2018.01.007

Opposing narratives about children’s digital media use: a critical discourse analysis of online public advice given to parents in Australia and Belgium

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 05-05-2020

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X20916950

Abstract: What are the public discourses about parental guidance of children’s digital media use in Australia and Belgium? The findings of a multi-method interpretive content analysis suggest that both risks and opportunities are made significant, (re-)claiming power for parents to decide what is realistic. Belgian critical-optimistic commentary suggests that it is normal to see a variety of parenting practices in society, encouraging parents to make informed decisions considering the child’s developmental age and mutual trust. Australian public commentary features emotionally laden, opposing views, whereby restriction seems the golden rule for guiding young children’s engagement with digital media. Across the 30 months of the dataset, however, Australian pieces began to give voice to experts who embrace more relaxed rules. The study illuminates how public narratives are sites of political manoeuvring, revealing ideological stances relating to parental mediation and children’s media use, sensitive to and reflective of situated meanings bound by space and time.

Fractures between an online and offline community (and the ethical responses)

Publisher: Inderscience Publishers

Date: 2009

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2009.025219

Virtual Reality Training for Workers in High-Risk Occupations

Publisher: BRILL

Date: 28-09-2020

DOI: 10.1163/9789004438392_014

Imagining Rural Audiences in Remote Western Australia

Publisher: Linkoping University Electronic Press

Date: 11-06-2010

DOI: 10.3384/CU.2000.1525.1029131

Abstract: In 1979, Australia’s then-Communication Minister Tony Staley commented that the introduction of satellite communications to the bush would “dispel the distance – mental as well as geographical – between urban and regional dwellers, between the haves and the have-nots in a communication society” (Staley 1979: 2225, 2228-9). In saying this, Staley imagined a marginalised and disadvantaged audience of “have-nots”, paying for their isolation in terms of their mental distance from the networked communications of the core. This paper uses ethnographic audience studies surveys and interviews (1986-9) to examine the validity of Staley’s imaginations in terms of four communication technologies: the telephone, broadcast radio, 2-way radio and the satellite. The notion of a mental difference is highly problematic for the remote audience. Inso-far as a perception of lack and of difference is accepted, it is taken to reflect the perspective and the product of the urban policy-maker. Far from accepting the “distance” promulgated from the core, remote audiences see such statements as indicating an ignorance of the complexity and sophistication of communications in an environment where the stakes are higher and the options fewer. This is not to say that remote people were not keen to acquire satellite services – they were – it is to say that when they imagined such services it was in terms of equity and interconnections, rather than the “dispelling of distance”.

Disadvantaged Children’s Creative Visualisation of Possible Futures

Publisher: BRILL

Date: 28-09-2020

DOI: 10.1163/9789004438392_012

Digitods: Toddlers, Touch Screens and Australian Family Life

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 20-08-2015

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.1024

Abstract: Introduction Children are beginning to use digital technologies at younger and younger ages. The emerging trend of very young children (babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers) using Internet connected devices, especially touch screen tablets and smartphones, has elicited polarising opinions from early childhood experts. At present there is little actual research about the risks or benefits of tablet and smartphone use by very young children. Current usage recommendations, based on research into passive television watching which claims that screen time is detrimental, is in conflict with advice from education experts and app developers who commend interactive screen time as engaging and educational. Guidelines from the health professions typically advise strict time limits on very young children’s screen-time. Based for the most part on policy developed by the American Academy of Paediatrics, it is usually recommended that children under two have no screen time at all (Brown), and children over this age have no more than two hours a day (Strasburger, et al.). On the other hand, early childhood education guidelines promote the development of digital literacy skills (Department of Education). Further, education-based research indicates that access to computers and the Internet in the preschool years is associated with overall educational achievement (Bittman et al. Cavanaugh et al Judge et al Neumann). The US based National Association for Education of Young Children’s position statement on technology for zero to eight year-olds declares that “when used intentionally and appropriately, technology and interactive media are effective tools to support learning and development” (NAEYC). This article discusses the notion of Digitods—a name for those children born since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 who have ready access to touchscreen technologies since birth. It reports on the limited availability of evidence-based research about these children’s ICT use concluding that current research and recommendations are not grounded in the everyday life of very young children and their families. The article then reports on the beginnings of a research project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled Toddlers and Tablets: exploring the risks and benefits 0-5s face online. This research project recognises that at this stage it is parents who “are the real experts in their toddlers’ use of screen technologies. Accordingly, the project’s methodological approach draws on parents, pre-schoolers and their families as communities of practice in the construction of social meaning around toddlers’ use of touch screen technology. Digitods In 2000 Bill Gates introduced the notion of Generation I to describe the first cohort of children raised with the Internet as a reality in their lives. They are those born after the 1990s and will, in most cases have no memory of life without the Net. [...] Generation I will be able to conceive of the Internet’s possibilities far more profoundly than we can today. This new generation will become agents of change as the limits of the Internet expand to include educational, scientific, and business applications that we cannot even imagine. (Gates)Digitods, on the other hand, is a term that has been used in education literature (Leathers et al.) to describe those children born after the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. These children often begin their lives with ready access to the Internet via easily usable touch screen devices, which could have been designed with toddlers’ touch and swipe movements in mind. Not only are they the youngest group of children to actively engage with the Internet they are the first group to grow up with a range of mobile Internet devices (Leathers et al.). The difference between Digitods and Gates’s Generation I is that Digitods are the first pre-verbal, non-ambulant infants to have ready access to digital technologies. Somewhere around the age of 10 months to fourteen months a baby learns to point with his or her forefinger. At this stage the child is ready to swipe and tap a touch screen (Leathers et al.). This is in contrast to laptops and PCs given that very young children often need assistance to use a mouse or keyboard. The mobility of touch screen devices allows very young children to play at the kitchen table, in the bedroom or on a car trip. These mobile devices have, of course, a myriad of mobile apps to go with them. These apps create an immediacy of access for infants and pre-schoolers who do not need to open a web browser to find their favourite sites. In the lives of these children it seems that it has always been possible to touch and swipe their way into games, books and creative and communicative experiences (Holloway et al. 149). The interactivity of most pre-school apps, as opposed to more passive screen activities such as watching television shows or videos (both offline or online), requires toddlers and pre-schoolers to pay careful attention, think about things and act purposefully (Leathers et al.). It is this interactivity which is the main point of difference, one which holds the potential to engage and educate our youngest children. It should be noted within this discussion about Digitods that, while the trope Digital Natives tends to homogenise an entire generation, the authors do not assume that all children born today are Digitods by default. Many children do not have the same privileged opportunities as others, or the (parental) cultural capital, to enable access, ease of use and digital skill development. In addition to this it is not implied that Digitods will be more tech savvy than their older siblings. The term is used more to describe and distinguish those children who have digital access almost since birth—in order to differentiate or tease out everyday family practices around these children’s ICT use and the possible risks and benefits this access affords babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers. While the term Digital Native has also been criticised as being a white middle class phenomenon this is not necessarily the case with Digitods. In the Southeast Asia and the Pacific region developed countries like Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Singapore have extremely high rates of touchscreen use by very young children (Child Sciences Jie Goh Unantenne). Other countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia have moved to a high smart phone usage by very young children while at the same time have only nascent ICT access and instruction within their education systems (Unantenne). The Digitod Parent Parents of Digitods are usually experienced Internet users themselves, and many are comfortable with their children using these child-friendly touch screen devices (Findahl). Digital technologies are integral to their everyday lives, often making daily life easier and improving communication with family and friends, even during the high pressure parenting years of raising toddlers and pre-schoolers. Even though many parents and caregivers are enabling very young children’s use of touch screen technologies, they are also concerned about the changes they are making. This is because very young children’s use of touch screen devices “has become another area where they fear possible criticism and in which their parental practices risk negative evaluation by others” (Holloway et al). The tensions between expert advice regarding young children’s screen-time and parents’ and caregivers’ own judgments are also being played out online. Parenting blogs, online magazines and discussion groups are all joining in the debate: On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them. Parents end up treating tablets like precision surgical instruments, gadgets that might perform miracles for their child’s IQ and help him win some nifty robotics competition—but only if they are used just so. (Rosin)Thus, with over 80 000 children’s apps marketed as educational in the Apple App Store alone, parents can find it difficult to choose apps that are worth purchasing (Yelland). Nonetheless, recent research regarding Australian children shows that three to five year olds who access touch screen devices will typically have five or more specific apps to choose from (5.23 on average) (Neumann). With little credible evidence or considered debate, parents have been left to make their own choices about the pros and cons of their young children’s access to touch screens. Nonetheless, one immediate benefit that comes to mind is toddlers and pre-schoolers video chatting with dispersed family member—due to increased globalisation, guest worker arrangements, FIFO (fly-in fly-out) workforces and family separation or orce. Such clear benefits around sociability and youngsters’ connection with significant others make previous screen-related guidelines out of date and no longer contextually relevant. Little Research Attention Family ownership of tablet devices as well as touch screen phones has risen dramatically in the last five years. With very young children being loaned these technologies by mum or dad, and a tendency in Australia to rely on market-orientated research regarding ownership and usage, there is very little knowledge about touch screen usage rates for very young Australian children. UK and US usage figures indicate that over the last few years there has been a five-fold increase in tablet uptake by zero to eight year olds (Ofcom Rideout). Although large scale, comparative Australian data is not available, previous research regarding older children indicates that Australia is similar to high use countries like some Scandinavian nations and the UK (Green et al.). In addition to this, two small research projects in Australia, with under 160 participant families each, indicate that two thirds of these children (0-5) use touchscreen devices (Neumann Coenenna et. al.). Beyond usage figures, there is also very limited evidence-based research about very young children’s app use. Interactive technologies available via touch screen technologies have been available domestically for a very short time. Consequently, “valid scientific research has not been completed and replicated due to [the lack of] available time” (Leathers el al. 129) and longitudinal studies which rely on an intervention group (in this case exposure to children’s apps) and a control group (no exposure) are even fewer and more time-consuming. Interestingly, researchers have revisited the issue of passive screen viewing. A recent 2015 review of previous 2007 research, which linked babies watching videos with poor language development, has found that there was statistical and methodological issues with the 2007 study and that there are no strong inferences to be drawn between media exposure and language development (Ferguson and Donellan). Thus, there seems to be no conclusive evidence-based research on which to inform parents and educators about the possible downside or benefits of touch screen use. Nonetheless, early childhood experts have been quick to weigh in on the possible effects of screen usage, some providing restrictive guidelines and recommendations, with others advocating the use of interactive apps for very young children for their educational value. This knowledge-gap disguises what is actually happening in the lives of real Australian families. Due to the lack of local data, as well as worldwide research, it is essential that Australian researchers obtain a comprehensive understanding about actual behaviour around touch screen use in the lives of children aged between zero and five and their families. Beginning Research While research into very young children’s touch screen use is beginning to take place, few results have been published. When researching two to three year olds’ learning from interactive versus non-interactive videos Kirkorian, Choi and Pempek found that “toddlers may learn more from interactive media than from non-interactive video” (Kirkorian et al). This means that the use of interactive apps on touch screen devices may hold a greater potential for learning than passive video or television viewing for children in this age range. Another study considered the degree to which the young children could navigate to and use apps on touch screen devices by observing and analysing YouTube videos of infants and young children using touch screens (Hourcade et al.). It was found that between the ages of 12 months and 17 months the children filmed seemed to begin to “make meaningful use of the tablets [and] more than 90 per cent of children aged two [had] reached this level of ability” (1923). The kind of research mentioned above, usually the preserve of psychologists, paediatricians and some educators, does not, however, ground very young children’s use in their domestic context—in the spaces and with those people with whom most touch screen usage takes place. With funding from the Australian Research Council Australian, Irish and UK researchers are about to adopt a media studies (domestication) approach to comprehensively investigate digital media use in the everyday lives of very young children. This Australian-based research project positions very young children’s touch screen use within the family and will help provide an understanding of the everyday knowledge and strategies that this cohort of technology users (very young children and their parents) have already developed—in the knowledge vacuum left by the swift appropriation and incorporation of these new media technologies into the lives of families with very young children. Whilst using a conventional social constructionist perspective, the project will also adopt a co-creation of knowledge approach. The co-creation of knowledge approach (Fong) has links with the communities of practice literature (Wegner) and recognises that parents, care-givers and the children themselves are the current experts in this field in terms of the everyday uses of these technologies by very young children. Families’ everyday discourse and practices regarding their children’s touch screen use do not necessarily work through obvious power hierarchies (via expert opinions), but rather through a process of meaning making where they shape their own understandings and attitudes through experience and shared talk within their own everyday family communities of practice. This Toddlers and Tablets research is innovative in many ways. It seeks to capture the enthusiasm of young children’s digital interactions and to pioneer new ways of ‘beginnings’ researching with very young children, as well as with their parents. The researchers will work with parents and children in their broad domestic contexts (including in and out-of-home activities, and grandparental and wider-family involvement) to co-create knowledge about young children’s digital technologies and the social contexts in which these technologies are used. Aspects of these interactions, such as interviews and observations of everyday digital interactions will be recorded (audio and video respectively). In addition to this, data collected from media commentary, policy debates, research publications and learned articles from other disciplinary traditions will be interrogated to see if there are correlations, contrasts, trends or synergies between parents’ construction of meaning, public commentary and current research. Critical discourse tools and methods (Chouliaraki and Fairclough) will be used to analyse verbatim transcripts, video, and all written materials. Conclusion Very young children are uniquely dependent upon others for the basic necessities of life and for the tools they need, and will need to develop, to claim their place in the world. Given the ubiquitous role played by digital media in the lives of their parents and other caregivers it would be a distortion of everyday life for children to be excluded from the technologies that are routinely used to connect with other people and with information. In the same way that adults use digital media to renew and strengthen social and emotional bonds across distance, so young children delight in ‘Facetime’ and other technologies that connect them audio-visually with friends and family members who are not physically co-present. Similarly, a very short time spent in the company of toddlers using touch screens is sufficient to demonstrate the sheer delight that these young infants have in developing their sense of agency and autonomy (atch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk). Media, communications and cultural studies are beginning to claim a space for evidence based policy drawn from everyday activities in real life contexts. Research into the beginnings of digital life, with families who are beginning to find a way to introduce these technologies to the youngest generation, integrating them within social and emotional repertoires, may prove to be the start of new understandings into the communication skills of the preverbal and preliterate young people whose technology preferences will drive future development – with their parents likely trying to keep pace. Acknowledgment This research is supported under Australia Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP150104734). References Bittman, Michael, et al. "Digital Natives? New and Old Media and Children's Outcomes." Australian Journal of Education 55.2 (2011): 161-75. Brown, Ari. "Media Use by Children Younger than 2 Years." Pediatrics 128.5 (2011): 1040-45. Burr, Vivien. Social Constructionism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2003. Cavanaugh, Cathy, et al. "The Effects of Distance Education on K–12 Student Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis." Naperville, Ill.: Learning Point Associates, 2004. 5 Mar. 2009 ‹ech/distance/index.html›. Child Sciences and Parenting Research Office. Survey of Media Use by Children and Parents (Summary). Tokyo: Benesse Educational Research and Development Institute, 2014. Coenena, Pieter, Erin Howiea, Amity C bella, and Leon Strakera. Mobile Touch Screen Device Use among Young Australian Children–First Results from a National Survey. Proceedings 19th Triennial Congress of the IEA. 2015. Chouliaraki, Lilie and Norman Fairclough. Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. Department of Education. "Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia." Australian Government, 2009. Ferguson, Christopher J., and M. Brent Donnellan. "Is the Association between Children’s Baby Video Viewing and Poor Language Development Robust? A Reanalysis of Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff (2007)." Developmental Psychology 50.1 (2014): 129. Findahl, Olle. Swedes and the Internet 2013. Stockholm: The Internet Infrastructure Foundation, 2013. Fong, Patrick S.W. "Co-Creation of Knowledge by Multidisciplinary Project Teams." Management of Knowledge in Project Environments. Eds. E. Love, P. Fong, and Z. Irani. Burlington, MA: Elsevier, 2005. 41-56. Gates, Bill. "Enter 'Generation I': The Responsibility to Provide Access for All to the Most Incredible Learning Tool Ever Created." Instructor 109.6 (2000): 98. Goh, Wendy W.L., Susanna Bay, and Vivian Hsueh-Hua Chen. "Young School Children’s Use of Digital Devices and Parental Rules." Telematics and Informatics 32.4 (2015): 787-95. Green, Lelia, et al. "Risks and Safety for Australian Children on the Internet: Full Findings from the AU Kids Online Survey of 9-16 Year Olds and Their Parents." Cultural Science Journal 4.1 (2011): 1-73. Holloway, Donell, Lelia Green, and Carlie Love. "'It's All about the Apps': Parental Mediation of Pre-Schoolers' Digital Lives." Media International Australia 153 (2014): 148-56. Hourcade, Juan Pablo, Sarah Mascher, David Wu, and Luiza Pantoja. Look, My Baby Is Using an iPad! An Analysis of YouTube Videos of Infants and Toddlers Using Tablets. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2015. Jie S.H. "ICT Use Statistics of Households and In iduals in Korea." 10th World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Meeting (WTIM-12). Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA), 25-7 Sep. 2012.Judge, Sharon, Kathleen Puckett, and Sherry Mee Bell. "Closing the Digital Divide: Update from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study." The Journal of Educational Research 100.1 (2006): 52-60. Kirkorian, H., K. Choi, and Pempek. "Toddlers' Word Learning from Contingent and Non-Contingent Video on Touchscreens." Child Development (in press). Leathers, Heather, Patti Summers, and Desollar. Toddlers on Technology: A Parents' Guide. Illinois: AuthorHouse, 2013. NAEYC. Technology and Interactive Media as Tools in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8 [Position Statement]. Washington: National Association for the Education of Young Children, the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College, 2012. Neumann, Michelle M. "An Examination of Touch Screen Tablets and Emergent Literacy in Australian Pre-School Children." Australian Journal of Education 58.2 (2014): 109-22. Ofcom. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report. London, 2013. Rideout, Victoria. Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America 2013. San Francisco: Common Sense Media, 2013. Rosin, Hanna. "The Touch-Screen Generation." The Atlantic, 20 Apr. 2013. Strasburger, Victor C., et al. "Children, Adolescents, and the Media." Pediatrics 132.5 (2013): 958-61. Unantenne, Nalika. Mobile Device Usage among Young Kids: A Southeast Asia Study. Singapore: The Asian Parent and Samsung Kids Time, 2014. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wenger, Etienne. "Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems." Organization 7.2 (2000): 225-46. Yelland, Nicola. "Which Apps Are Educational and Why? It’s in the Eye of the Beholder." The Conversation 13 July 2015. 16 Aug. 2015 ‹hich-apps-are-educational-and-why-its-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-37968›.

Room to View

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 2008

DOI: 10.1177/1527476407307230

Abstract: Although Australian media consumption follows general Western trends toward increasingly media rich households, there seems to be a distinctly regional response to how media technologies are incorporated into the Australian home. Although a majority of Australian families with children have a second (and many a third) television set, few choose to locate these technologies in children's bedrooms. Thus, Australia's high level of screen entertainment media is not associated with a high level of children's bedroom access, as would generally be expected. When family conflict does arise regarding television viewing, it is just as likely to be about “where to watch” as “what to watch.” Through the use of an audience ethnography approach, this article explores how Australian parents and their children make sense of their television viewing in the home environment, highlighting how new and multiple media technologies are integrated into the spatial geography of the antipodean family home.

“The Internet of Life”

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 25-04-2023

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2954

Abstract: Introduction Exploring the ways in which children merge education, play and connection in their digital device use, this article critiques the established definitions of the Internet of Things and the Internet of Toys and suggests an alternative. Using evidence emerging from The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children, we deconstruct these traditional terms, and advocate for a revised terminology. Such a reconsideration helps frame children’s use of digital devices and the important roles these play in children’s everyday lives. The Internet of Things is defined by Mascheroni and Holloway as “physical objects that are embedded with electronics, sensors, software and connectivity that support the exchange of data”. These objects have become omnipresent in Western society, resulting in different subsets of the Internet of Things, such as the Internet of Toys. Such connected toys are physical toys that are (just as the Internet of Things is) connected to the Internet through Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi (Mascheroni and Holloway). The features of such toys include network connectivity, sensors and voice/image recognition software, and controllability and programmability via apps on smartphones or tablets (Holloway and Green). CogniToys Dino, Fisher-Price Smart Toy Bear, Skylanders, Hello Barbie, Cloudpets, and Wiggy Piggy Bank are just a few ex les of these connected playthings (Ihamäki and Heljakka Mascheroni and Holloway Shasha et al.). The ‘Internet of Toys’ category can thus be understood as physical toys with digital features (Ihamäki and Heljakka). However, Ling et al. argue that, “if the item is to be included in the IoT[hings] devices and … if the object is also used for play, then despite its designed purpose, this internet connected item becomes a member of the subset of the IoToys” (Ling et al.). Therefore, the conceptualisation of toys should not be limited to products designed for play. This raises questions about the concept of the Internet of Toys, and whether the distinction between the Internet of Things and the Internet of Toys is (still) relevant. We argue that there is no longer a meaningful distinction to be made between the Internet of Toys and the Internet of Things: instead, all such phrases indicate fragmentary attention to the Internet of Life. The Internet of Life can be defined as: devices which encompass all facets of online connectivity and technological management, and the interpolation of the digital with the everyday. The Research Project In 2018, the Australian Research Council funded a Discovery grant investigating The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children. Initially the project gave each household involved in the case study a Cozmo robot, to see how the toy was used and integrated into the household. The project foundered somewhat as the robot was initially played with but after a short while the children stopped engaging with Cozmo. Researchers believed this was due to novelty, Internet connectivity issues and the overly complicated nature of the toy. Parents had hoped their children would learn to code through using the robot but were not always willing to or capable of helping the child to navigate this aspect of the toy. In this regard Cozmo failed their expectations. After a short hiatus on the project, it was stripped back to its original purpose, to explore how households define Internet-connected toys, and the risks and benefits of playing with them. The qualitative data forming the basis of this article come from the second iteration of the project and interviews conducted in 2021 and 2022. The academics working on this research are increasingly questioning the relevance of these terms in today’s world. Ethnographic (Rinaldo and Guhin) one-on-one interviews with Australian children aged 6–12 have revealed just how erse the digital technologies they play with have become. Those conversations and technology tours (Plowman) demonstrate the extent to which these digital devices are seamlessly integrated into children’s daily lives. Referring to many digital devices (such as the iPad and other tablets) as “toys”, children appear unaware of the distinction made by adults. Indeed, children mobilise elements of education, communication, self-actualisation, curiosity, and play within all their digital engagements. While parents may still be encouraged to distinguish between the educational use of digital devices and children’s use of such technology for entertainment, the boundary between the two is becoming more and more blurred. The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies that have been implemented within many Australian, English, and American schools expose children to digital devices within multiple contexts, frameworks, and environments, encouraging ubiquity of use. Laptops and tablets originally provided for school and educational purposes are also used for play. Seiter suggested that parents believe that a computer should be used by their children for serious matters such as learning or “purposeful” play, but children’s use patterns convert the tool into the toy. This elision of purpose may be referred to as “edutainment”, or the “toyification of education”, which suggests that education is increasingly reinforced by, and benefits from, “toyish” elements or dimensions (Ihamäki and Heljakka). Tablets offer children a erse range of digital play options. Touch and swipe technology means that, from before their first birthday, “children are no longer only observants of digital technologies, but they are players and users, with tablets becoming the digital toy of choice” (Fróes 43). This is reinforced in much recent academic literature, with Brito et al., Healey et al., and Nixon and Hateley, for ex le, referring to tablets as “toys”. This is in line with the evolution of these devices from computer to educational tool to child-friendly toy. Fróes argues that the tablet supports “playful literacy”: “the ability to use, interact, relate, communicate, create, have fun with and challenge digital tools through playful behavior”. Having fun encourages and reassures children while they learn about, and become familiar with, these technologies. This, in turn, supports the valuable skill-building and scaffolding (Verenikina, citing Vygotsky) necessary for when a child begins using a tablet in an educational context once they start school. The omnipresence of screens challenges parents who believe that to be a good parent is to mediate their child’s digital engagement (Page Jeffery). Although the focus on “screen time” (the amount of time that children spend on their screens) is increasingly critiqued (e.g. Livingstone and Blum-Ross), some research suggests that, on average, parents underestimate their child’s daily screen time by more than 60 minutes (Radesky et al.). This conflicts with other research that argues that parents' preferred approach to mediation is setting clear rules regarding media usage, particularly in terms of time spent in device use (Valcke et al. Brito et al.). Ironically, even though parents voice concern regarding their children’s technology use and digital footprints (Buchanan, Southgate, and Smith), they feel a “necessary culture of care” (Leaver) that may incite them to use their own technology to monitor their children’s data and behaviour. Such strategies can lead to “intimate surveillance” becoming a normalised parenting practice (Mascheroni and Holloway), while modelling to children their caregivers’ own reliance on devices. Hadlington et al. state that tablets may offer a barrier against the offline, “real” world. Children may become immersed in digital engagement, losing awareness of their surroundings, or they may actively use the tablet as a barrier between themselves and their environment. Parents may feel concern that their child is cutting themselves off from the family, potentially undermining family relationships and delaying the development of social skills (Radesky et al.). In contrast, Desjarlais and Willoughby’s article describes how children’s digital activities, for ex le chatting with friends, can be a useful starting point for social relationships. Hietajarvi et al. could not identify significant negative effects from using chat functions whilst studying, and suggest that digital engagement has a negligible effect on academic progress. While it is possible to characterise tablets and other digital devices as “toys”, this fails to capture the full contribution of such technology in children’s daily lives. Tablets, such as the iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy’s Tab range, function as a significant bridge that connects both children’s and adults’ everyday lives. The Internet of Life While the suggestion of an Internet of Life may require further investigation and refinement, this article proposes to define the term as follows: devices which encompass all facets of online connectivity and technological management, and the interpolation of the digital with the everyday. We argue that there is no longer a meaningful distinction to be made between the Internet of Toys and the Internet of Things: all such phrases indicate fragmentary attention to the Internet of Life. Digital devices cannot be bound by narrow definitions and distinctions between “things” and “toys”. Instead, these devices transcend the boundaries of “toys” and “things”, becoming relevant to all facets of people’s everyday lives. This is increasingly evident in lives of young children, as demonstrated by the one-on-one interviews with Australian child participants (aged 6–12). When asked if they could show the researcher some of their toys, every child produced their tablet, or spoke about it, if it was not within their reach at that time. Defining their tablets as toys, children nonetheless described myriad ways in which they were used: for leisure and entertainment, education, sociality, self-expression, and to satisfy their curiosity amongst others. Parents sometimes wondered at how children navigated technology without seeming to need assistance and noted that children could easily outstrip their parents’ skill level. Even so, parents described their struggle to “allow” their children screen time, finding it difficult to believe that it’s okay for their child to use a device for extended periods of time. Interestingly, when parents were asked if they were willing to model the behaviour they expected of their children—time limits on devices, going outside and playing—they struggled to imagine themselves doing so. As one parent said: “everything's there [on the device]. It's just so hard because everything I do, and need, is there”. This perspective reinforces our assertion that digital devices are inherently and instinctively interwoven within daily life: not toys, not things. Maybe the concept of the Internet of Life will support parents’, educators’, policy-makers’, and academics’ richer appreciation of the multitude of ways in which children use devices. It may also recognise how device use includes the acquisition of life skills, in both digital and IRL (“in real life”) domains. A reframing of digital devices may aid recognition of the benefits and experiences they offer the young (and old). Such a perspective might assuage significant parental guilt and take the sting out of increasingly frequent debates around screen time quality versus quantity (Livingstone and Pothong). This article now addresses some parents’ and children’s comments relating to their engagement with the Internet of Life. Parents’ Perspectives Seeking to explain what parents understand by the concept of play, Hayes (a father of three) suggested: “children entertaining themselves hopefully positively … . [They’re] doing something either physical or educational or it’s benefitting them in some way and having fun and relaxing”, while the mum from a different family, Farida, feels that play is “something that brings about joy, really” (a mother of two). Parents experience challenges in assigning different regulations around digital device usage to children in the same family, reflecting their different circumstances. Thus Bethany, mother to Aiden (11, below) and older sibling Sophie (13), differentiates her approach to regulating her children’s play in digital spaces: With him [Aiden] I don’t feel so bad when he – having a downtime because I know he’s quite active whereas [Sophie] my daughter’s not, she’s the complete opposite and she will sit on there usually, ‘cause she’s chatting to her friend Gemma who’s over east but, she’ll try and sit on there for two or three hours just doing really mundane boring stuff. (Mum, Bethany) Interestingly, for both Sophie and Aiden, their use of digital devices is a reassuring opportunity to retreat. One of the many advantages of chatting online to a distant friend is that it’s a space separate from the everyday contexts of classroom politics. Mum to Bryce (8, male), Farida identifies specific benefits in her son’s digital device use across a range of skills and competencies. [He] has actually improved significantly with his communication skills and his maths skills like his problem-solving and reasoning. Like he’s trying to, for instance, work out how much money he’s got to scam off me to get the things that he wants, adds it all up, works out his amount of money that he’s got to ask for so he can buy all the stuff that he’s looking for. So that has really improved. (Farida) Some parents might see games that teach children how to calculate what they need to achieve what they want as an annoyance due to a trivial extra expense, but Bryce has a range of learning challenges. Consequently, Farida is delighted with the progress she sees: “his trajectory has actually been quite astounding, and I do think that a lot of it is to do with the fact that he’s built up so many of these other skills from his hand eye co-ordination, his communication skills and stuff from digital play”. Children’s Perspectives Children’s own perspectives on their use of digital devices were varied but speak to the development of in idual competencies and the managing of important friend- and family-based relationships. So, Aiden (11) characterised his use of such digital media as “calming. Since there’s nothing to really lose in the game or anything, it’s not like ‘oh you stuffed something up, you have to restart the whole thing’.” He adds, as if this is a significant benefit, “it’s more if you stuff something up it’s fine, you can just get it back again”. Aiden is in a children’s elite sport squad and explains “I do football for four hours. Then I have piano lesson for 30 minutes. I’m really tired”. His digital sphere is a welcoming place of safety and relaxation where there are no consequences when things go wrong. For Lisa, also 11, her digital device is for communicating. Explaining that she has “Snapchat, Messages and TikTok and I think that’s it”, Lisa says that she and her friend from school “normally just chat to each other and we’ll chat about what we’re doing”. She adds that sometimes “we’ll roleplay”. As Lisa continues there’s an implicit acknowledgement of the risks around collaborating with others in play spaces. Speaking of her friend, she notes “she used to play this game, Brook Game, and she doesn’t really do it anymore. In Brooking Gaming you roleplay with people and you can do jobs and stuff”. Digital play and device use may be a place of relaxation, but it’s also a place of negotiation and of learning to compromise as a price of sharing experiences with friends. Killian’s (12 years old, male) ex le of gaming implicates the ways he negotiates autonomy and connection with his older brother. Explaining that “I talk to my friends over Discord which is a social thing and that”, Killian explains how (older brother) “Xander helped me set up the safety settings”. The boys worked together to find a means through which their toys and games allowed them to bypass technical barriers preventing full service on their mobile devices. They had originally thought: “we could text each other” but because their devices were set so they “won’t allow us—Xander had Discord on his phone and—he did. I could text him via that”. A variety of remote communication strategies support Killian’s and Xander’s connected play in different spaces. The interviewer notes, “so you prefer playing in idually like that because you just have that one screen to yourself, that solo experience, but still playing together?”, allowing Killian to add “Yes, and also Xander doesn’t hit me every time I do something that Xander doesn’t like”. Killian subsequently identifies himself as something of negotiator, working out the different rules and settings for the different areas in his life. Saying he uses his iPad “kust for stuff I’m interested in, or something that I found out is good, that I want”, he also says he has a workaround for if “the website’s blocked or then—stuff like that—or, I want to watch it at home”. One of the implications of these ex les is that parents tend to develop over-arching narratives about their children’s digital device use and compartmentalise concerns, differentiating them from positive aspects of children’s online activities. Children’s experiences, however, speak to lessons around learning skills, managing relationships and conflicts, negotiating autonomy, absence, and different rules in different spaces. In these respects, children’s multifaceted use of digital devices is indeed creating an Internet of Life. Reimagining Children’s Digital Activity Engagement with digital devices and online activities has become a core part of childhood development (Borisova). The reimagining of the concepts of the Internet of Things and the Internet of Toys as the Internet of Life allows children, parents, researchers, and policy-makers to broaden their understanding of what it means to grow up in a digital world. Defining an Internet of Life and conceptualising digital devices as an inherent part of the everyday, allows greater understanding and appreciation of how, what, and why children use such devices, and the potential benefits (and risks) they may afford. This perspective also empowers children’s understandings of what digital devices are, and how the digital environment relates to them, and their daily lives. This article argues for a need to widen understandings of children’s digital device use, including the role that Internet-connected toys play in fostering social and digital literacies, to explore the multifaceted and ubiquitous nature of tablets and other digital devices (Ihamäki and Heljakka). Previous research on children’s digital engagement, along with a large portion of public reporting, has focussed on the risks and harms that children are exposed to, rather than the potential benefits of digital engagement, along with the rights of a child to digital access (CRC Odgers and Jensen Third et al.). The Internet of Life recognises that children’s digital engagement includes some exposure to risks, but also reflects the potential benefits that this exposure can have in terms of helping navigate these risks and problem-solving. It allows digital engagement to be reframed as a normal part of daily life and everyday routines, expanding understandings of how children engage with digital devices. Parents and children alike spoke about their tablets and the myriad of ways in which they used them: as a toy, for leisure, entertainment, formal education, sociality, and to satisfy their own curiosities to name but a few. Not only do these devices satisfy parental expectations, in that children can navigate them without assistance, but children can also outstrip a parent’s skill level rapidly. This is pleasing to some parents who do not possess such skills to teach their child. However, parents still struggle to “allow” their children screentime and justify to themselves that it is okay for their child to be on their own device for extended periods of time. The distinction between the overarching Internet of Things and the subset of the Internet of Toys, as well as the categorisation of these devices as “education-only” or “entertainment-only”, does not accurately represent children’s engagement with and use of digital devices. Children’s multi-faceted and multi-layered digital activities offer a complex interplay of motivations and intentions, pleasures and challenges, intrinsic and extrinsic. The Internet of Life encompasses all aspects of digital engagement, allowing a more natural and nuanced understanding of how these devices are used, and the benefits that digital engagement can afford. Acknowledgment This research was funded by ARC Discovery Project DP180103922 – The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children. The Chief Investigators were Dr Donell Holloway and Professor Lelia Green, working with International Partner Investigators Dr Louise Kay, and Professors Jackie Marsh, Giovanna Mascheroni, and Bieke Zaman. Drs Kelly Jaunzems, Carmen Jacques, and Silke Brandsen all worked as Research Officers on this grant. References Borisova, I. Learning through Play: Strengthening Learning through Play in Early Childhood Education Programmes. LEGO Foundation, 2018. ites/default/files/2018-12/UNICEF-Lego-Foundation-Learning-through-Play.pdf . Brito, R., R. Francisco, P. Dias, and S. Chaudron. “Family Dynamics in Digital Homes: The Role Played by Parental Mediation in Young Children’s Digital Practices around 14 European Countries.” Contemporary Family Therapy 39.4 (2017): 271–280. DOI: 10.1007/s10591-017-9431-0. Buchanan, R., E. Southgate, and S.P. Smith. “‘The Whole World’s Watching Really’: Parental and Educator Perspectives on Managing Children’s Digital Lives.” Global Studies of Childhood 9.2 (2019): 167-180. .1177/20436106198463 . UNICEF. Convention on the Rights of the Child: General Comment No. 25 (2021) on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment. United Nations, 2 Mar. 2021. n/ohchr_homepage . Desjarlais, M., and T. Willoughby. “A Longitudinal Study of the Relation between Adolescent Boys and Girls’ Computer Use with Friends and Friendship Quality: Support for the Social Compensation or the Rich-Get-Richer Hypothesis?”. Computers in Human Behavior 26.5 (2010): 896-905. .1016/j.chb.2010.02.004 . Erat Nergiz, M., N. Çaylan, S.S. Yalçin, A., Oflu, Ö. Tezol, D. Foto Özdemir, D., Ş. Çiçek, and D. Yıldız. “Excessive Screen Time Is Associated with Maternal Rejection Behaviours in Pre‐School Children”. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health 56.7 (2020): 1077–1082. .1111/jpc.14821 . Fróes., I. “Once upon a Tablet: A School Toy in the Making.” Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) 9177 (2015): 43–53. .1007/978-3-319-20684-4_5 . Hadlington, L., H. White, and S. Curtis. “’I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]’: Children’s Experiences of Using Tablet Technology within the Home”. Computers in Human Behavior 94 (2019): 19–24. .1016/j.chb.2018.12.043 . Holloway, D., and L. Green. “The Internet of Toys.” Communication Research and Practice 2.4 (2016): 506–519. Ihamaki, P., and K. Heljakka. “The Internet of Toys, Connectedness, and Character-Based Play in Early Education.” Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference 880 (2019): 1079-1096. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-02686-8_80. Leaver, T. “Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online.” Social Media + Society 3.2 (2017). .1177/2056305117707192 . Ling, L., N. Yelland, M., Hatzigianni, and C. Dickson-Deane. “Toward a Conceptualization of the Internet of Toys.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 46.3 (2021): 249–262. .1177/18369391211007327 . Livingstone, S., and K. Pothong. “Beyond Screen Time: Rethinking Children’s Play in a Digital World”. Journal of Health Visiting 10.1 (2022): 32–38. .12968/johv.2022.10.1.32 . Livingstone, S., and A. Blum-Ross. Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children's Lives. Oxford University Press, 2020. Mascheroni, G., and D. Holloway. The Internet of Toys: Practices, Affordances and the Political Economy of Children’s Smart Play. Springer, 2019. .1007/978-3-030-10898-4 . Odgers, C.L., and M.B. Robb. Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health: Coming of Age in an Increasingly Digital, Uncertain, and Unequal World. Common Sense Media, 2020. www.commonsensemedia.org . Page Jeffery, C. “’It’s Really Difficult. We’ve Only Got Each Other to Talk To’: Monitoring, Mediation, and Good Parenting in Australia in the Digital Age.” Journal of Children and Media 15.2 (2021) : 202-217. .1080/17482798.2020.1744458 . Plowman, L. “Researching Young Children's Everyday Uses of Technology in the Family Home.” Interacting with Computers, 27.1 (2015): 36-46. .1093/iwc/iwu031 . Radesky, J.S., J. Schumacher, and B. Zuckerman. “Mobile and Interactive Media Use by Young Children: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown.” Pediatrics 135.1 (2015): 1–3. .1542 eds.2014-2251 . Radesky, J.S., H.M. Weeks, R. Ball, A. Schaller, S. Yeo, J. Durnez, M. Tamayo-Rios, M. Epstein, H. Kirkorian, S., Coyne, and R. Barr. “Young Children's Use of Smartphones and Tablets.” Pediatrics146.1 (2020): e20193518. .1542 eds.2019-3518 . Rinaldo, R., and J. Guhin. “How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-Level Public Culture.” Sociological Methods & Research 51.1 (2022): 34-67. doi/10.1177/0049124119882471 . Seiter, E. “The Internet Playground.” Toys, Games, and Media, eds. J. Goldstein, D. Buckingham, and G. Brougère. 2004. 105–120. .4324/9781410611000 . Shasha, S., M., Mahmoud, M. Mannan, and A. Youssef. “Playing with Danger: A Taxonomy and Evaluation of Threats to Smart Toys.” IEEE Internet of Things Journal 6.2 (2019): 2986–3002. DOI: 10.1109/jiot.2018.2877749. Third, A., et al. “Young and Online: Children’s Perspectives on Life in the Digital Age.” State of the World’s Children 2017 Companion Report. 2017. .4225/35/5A1B885F6D4DB . Valcke, M., S. Bonte, B. De Wever, and I. Rots. “Internet Parenting Styles and the Impact on Internet Use of Primary School Children.” Computers & Education 55.2 (2010): 454–464. DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2010.02.009. Verenikina, I. “Scaffolding and Learning: Its Role in Nurturing New Learners.” Learning and the Learner: Exploring Learning for New Times, eds. P. Kell, W. Vialle, D. Konza, and G. Vogl. 2008.

The parent-child-app learning assemblage: Scaffolding early childhood learning through app use in the family home

Publisher: Unpublished

Date: 2018

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.14973.87520

The power of the individual voice: interrogating continuity at a time when the open communication of research is disrupted by unruly speakers and publics

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 10-2020

DOI: 10.1080/22041451.2020.1880484

Migration, Diaspora and Information Technology in Global Societies

Publisher: Routledge

Date: 03-2013

DOI: 10.4324/9780203148600

Mediated memory making: The virtual family photograph album

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Date: 2017

DOI: 10.1515/COMMUN-2017-0033

Abstract: Domestic photography and the family photograph album hold significance as artefacts “communicating an ideal familial image and reifying the familial bonds, and also preserving a memory of a specific time” (Sarvas and Frohlich, 2011, p. 148). However, today’s practice of domestic photography is generally relocated to social media (Sarvas and Frohlich, 2011). Photographs previously found in the family photograph album are now likely to be located on the screens of phones and tablets. Using a Domestication of Technology framework, this article discusses how families are using Facebook to create, curate, share and archive family memories. It shows how families go through the phases of appropriation, incorporation, objectification and conversion when they adopt Facebook as the family photograph album. The authors also explore ways in which virtual family photograph albums can result in parental tension around domestic tasks of sharing and archiving family memories online, along with the possible implications of creating a potentially embarrassing, unauthorized digital footprint for their children.

Using Ethnography to Understand Everyday Media Practices in Australian Family Life

Publisher: Wiley

Date: 28-12-2012

DOI: 10.1002/9781444361506.WBIEMS097

Abstract: This chapter discusses the use of ethnography within a media and cultural studies framework to investigate media practices within Australian families. It begins by outlining the theory and practice informing audience ethnography research, and then it provides an overview of audience studies research in Australia over the past quarter‐century. The chapter then draws specifically upon the authors' audience ethnographies, to illuminate how complex behaviors such as those associated with media consumption are best investigated from a suite of different perspectives: participant observation, interview, field notes, and an engagement with a number of informants within each household. The production of cultural value through engagement with such media as the television and the Internet crosses the boundary between the household and the wider world and requires self‐reflection and analysis on the part of interviewees. In addition to this, media practices within the family are both an indication of and a constituent influence upon the family's social and cultural norms. Issues about “who lets whom use what and when” are major sites of negotiation for autonomy and independence as children mature within the family context. Thus, by studying media audiences via ethnography, researchers are offered a privileged insight into people's everyday lives.

Framing Technology: Society, choice and change edited by Lelia Green and Roger Guinery (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994) pp. xxxvii + 214, $22.95, ISBN 1–86373–525–9

Publisher: Pluto Journals

Date: 06-1995

DOI: 10.1080/08109029508629202

The internet: an introduction to new media

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 29-11-2011

DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2011.621531

Review: In This Issue: Yes Means Yes: Getting Explicit about Heterosex

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 02-2004

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X0411000115

‘Own your narrative’: teenagers as producers and consumers of porn in Netflix’s Sex Education

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 24-10-2021

DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1988130

Screening Language Acquisition Skills in a Mediated Childhood

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Date: 2021

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-65916-5_8

11 September

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 03-2003

DOI: 10.1080/1030431022000049056

Introduction: Problematising the treatment of children’s data

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 02-2019

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X19829241

A Ten-Year-Old’s Use of Creative Content to Construct an Alternative Future for Herself

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 15-03-2017

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.1211

Abstract: The ProjectThe Hand Up Linkage project focuses on the family as a communication context through which to explore the dynamics of intergenerational welfare dependency. In particular, it explores ways that creative life-course interventions might allow children in welfare dependent families to construct alternative realities for themselves and alternative views of their future. Formed through an alliance between a key Western Australian social welfare not-for-profit organisation, St Vincent de Paul WA (SVDPWA and also, in the context of volunteers, ‘Vinnies’), and Edith Cowan University, the project aims to address the organisation’s vision to provide “a hand up” (St Vincent 1) rather than ‘a hand out’, so that people can move forward with their lives without becoming dependent upon welfare. Prior to the start of the research, SVDPWA already had a whole of family focus in its outreach to poverty-impacted families including offering homework clubs and school holiday children’s c s run by their youth services ision. Selected families supported by SVDPWA have been invited to participate in an in-depth interview for the project (Seidman), partly so that researchers can help identify “turning points” (King et al.) that might disrupt the communication of welfare dependency and inform more generalised intervention strategies but also in order to explore the response to creative interventions within the children’s daily lives, including investigation of how strategies the child (and family) employed might help them to imagine alternative realities and futures for themselves. This paper closely examines the way that one 10 year old child from a non-English-speaking background family has employed alternative ways of viewing her life, through the c program provided by the Linkage Partner St Vincent de Paul WA, and through reading novels such as Harry Potter and the Lemony Snicket Unfortunate Incidents series. Such activities help fuel hope for a different future which, in Snyder’s view has “two main components: the ability to plan pathways to desired goals despite obstacles, and agency or motivation to use those pathways” (Carr 96).The FamilyKani is a 10 year old girl living in a migrant sole parent family. The parents had moved to Australia from Bangladesh on student visas when Kani was 5 years old, however due to domestic violence the mother had recently separated from her husband, first into a women’s refuge then into private rental accommodation. The mother is in protracted negotiations with the Department of Immigration for permanent residency, which she had to recommence due to her separation. There are also family court negotiations for child custody and which restrict her leaving Australia. She receives no government benefits and minimal child support, works fulltime and pays full childcare fees for Kani’s 3 year old brother Adil and full primary school fees for Kani at a local religious school, given that Kani had experienced bullying and social aggression in previous schools. Kani was referred to SVDPWA by the women’s refuge and she began attending SVDPWA Kids’ C s thereafter. (NB: Whilst the relevant specifics of this description are accurate, non-relevant material has been added or changed to protect the child’s and family’s identity.)Creative Life-Course InterventionsThe creative engagement that Kani experienced in the Hand Up project is constructed as one component in a larger model of creativity which includes “intrapersonal insights and interpretations, which often live only within the person who created them,” (Kaufman and Beghetto 4). Such an approach also acknowledges Csikszentmihalyi’s work on the concept of “flow”, whereby optimal experiences can result from positive absorption in a creative activity. Relevant Australian research such as the YouthWorx project has identified participatory engagement in creativity as one means of engaging with young people at risk (Hopkins Podkalicka). The creative interventions in the Hand Up project take two forms one is the predesigned and participatory creative activities delivered as part of the SVDPWA Kids’ C program. The second is a personalised intervention, identified by way of an in-depth interview with the child and parent, and is wholly dependent on the interests expressed by the child, the ability for the family to engage in that activity, and the budget restraints of the project.Reading as an Alternative RealityA key creative intervention embedded in the Hand Up Linkage project is determined by the interests expressed by the child during their in-depth interview. Also taken into account is the ability for the family to engage in that activity. For ex le, Kani’s mother works fulltime at a location which is an hour by public transport from home and does not have a car or driver’s license, so the choice of creative opportunity was restricted to a home-based activity or a weekend activity accessible by public transport. A further restriction is the limited budget available for this intervention in the project, along with an imperative that such interventions should be equitable between families and within families, and be of benefit to all the children in addition to the interviewed child. Fortunately, transport was not an issue because Kani expressed her interest very emphatically as books and reading. When asked what she liked doing most in life, Kani replied: “Reading. I like reading like big books, like really thick books and stuff. I have like 30 in my room. Like those really big books. And I'm starting to read Harry Potter now. Okay, the books that I like reading is Harry Potter, the entire set Roald Dahl books and the Baudelaire Orphans by Lemony Snicket. I like reading David Walliams. I like Little Women” (Kani). Her excitement in listing these books further animated the interview and was immediately emphasised because Kani took the interviewer (second author) and her mother into her room to demonstrate the truth of her statement. When asked again at the close of the interview “what’s a favourite thing that makes you feel good inside?” Kani’s answer was “Family and reading”. The energy and enthusiasm with which Kani talked about her reading and books made these the obvious choice as her creative intervention. However, participation in book-related courses or after-school activities was restricted by Kani’s mother’s transportation limitations. Taking into account how the financial constraints of her sole parent family impacted upon their capacity to buy books, and the joy that Kani clearly experienced from having books of her own, it was decided that a book voucher would be provided for her at a local bookstore easily accessible by bus. The research team negotiated with the bookstore to try to ensure that Kani could choose a book a month until the funds were expended so that the intervention would last most of the coming six months.What Kani was expressing in her love of books was partly related to the raw material they provide that help her to imagine the alternative reality of the fictional worlds she loved reading about. Kani’s passionate engagement in these alternative realities reflects theories of narrative immersion in one’s chosen medium: “One key element of an enjoyable media experience is that it takes in iduals away from their mundane reality and into a story world. We call the process of becoming fully engaged in a story transportation into a narrative world” (Green et al. 311–12). Kani said: “Reading is everything, yeah. Like getting more books and like those kind of things and making me read more... ‘cause I really love reading, it’s like watching a movie. Do you know ... have you watched Harry Potter? … the book is nothing like the movie, nothing, they’ve missed so many parts so the book is more enjoyable than the movie. That’s why I like reading more. ‘Cause like I have my own adventures in my head.” This process of imagining her own adventures in her head echoes Green and Brock’s explanation of the process of being transported into alternative realities through reading as a result of “an integrative melding of attention, imagery, and feelings” (701).Constructing Alternative Realities for Herself and an Alternative Possible FutureLike many 10 year olds, Kani has a challenging time at school, exacerbated by the many school moves brought about by changes in her family circumstances. Even though she is in a school which supports her family’s faith, her experience is one of being made to feel an outsider: “all the boys and the girls in our class are like friends, they’re like ... it’s a group. But I’m not in their group. I have my friends in other classes and they’re [my classmates are] not happy with it, that’s why they tease me and stuff. And like whenever I play with my friends they’re like ... yeah”. The interviewer asked her what she liked about her special friends. “They’re fun. Creative like, enjoyable, yeah, those kind of things …they have lots of cool ideas like plans and stuff like that.” As Hawkins et al. argue, the capacity to develop and maintain good relationships with peers (and parents) is a key factor in helping children be resilient. It is likely that Kani also shares her creativity, ideas and plans with her friendship group as part of her shared contribution to its existence.A domestication of technology framework (Silverstone et al.) can be useful as part of the explanation for Kani’s use of imaginative experience in building her social relationships. Silverstone et al. argue that technology is domesticated via four interlocking activities: ‘appropriation’ (where it embraced, purchased, taken into the household), ‘objectification’ (where a physical space is found for it), ‘incorporation’ (the spaces through which it is inserted into the everyday activities of the household or users) and ‘conversion’ (whereby the experience and fact of the technology use – or lack of use – becomes material through which family members express themselves and their priorities to the social world beyond the home). Arguably, Kani ‘converts’ her engagement with books and associated imaginative experiences into social currency through which she builds relationships with the like-minded children with whom she makes friends. At the same time, those children feed into her ideas of what constitutes a creative approach to life and help energise her plans for the future.Kani’s views of her future (at the age of 10) are influenced by the traditional occupations favoured by high achieving students, and by the fact that her parents are themselves educational high achievers, entering Australia on student visas. “I want to be a doctor … my cousin wants to be a doctor too. Mum said lawyer but we want to be a doctors anywhere. We want to be a ...me and my cousin want to be doctors like ...we like being doctors and like helping people.” Noting the pressures on the household of the possible fees and costs of high school, Kani adds “I need to work even harder so I get a scholarship. ‘Cause like my mum can’t pay for like four terms, you know how much money that will be? Yeah.” Kani’s follow-on statement, partly to justify why she wants “a big house”, adds some poignancy to her reference to a cousin (one of many), who still lives in Bangladesh and whom Kani hasn’t seen since 2011. “Like I want to live with my mum and like yeah and like I live with my cousin too because like I have a cousin ... she’s a girl, yeah? And like yeah, she’s in Bangladesh, I haven’t seen her for very long time so yeah.” In the absence of her extended family overseas, Kani adds her pets to those with whom she shares her family life: “And my mum and my uncle and then our cat Dobby. I named it [for Harry Potter’s house elf] ...and the goldfish. The goldfish are Twinkle, Glitter, Glow and Bobby.”Kani’s mum notes the importance of an opportunity to dream a future into existence: “maybe she’s too young or she hasn’t really kind of made up her mind as yet as to what she wants to do in life but just going out and just you know doing stuff and just giving them the opportunity”. The SVDPWA Kids’ C is an important part of this “they [the refuge] kind of told us like ‘there’s this child c ’. … I was like yeah, sure, why not?” Providing Alternative Spaces at the SVDPWA Kids’ C The SVDPWA Kids’ C s themselves constitute a creative intervention in offering visions of alternative realities to their young participants. Their benefit is delivered via anticipation, as well as the reality of the c experience. As Kani said “I forget all about the things that’s just past, like all the hard things, you know like I go through and stuff and it just makes me forget it and it makes me like think about c , things we’re going to do at c ”. The Kids’ C s take place three times a year and are open to children aged between 8 and 13, with follow-on Teen C s for older age groups. Once a child is part of the program she or he can continue to participate in successive c s while they are in the target age group. Consisting of a four day activity-based experience in a natural setting, conducted by Vinnies Youth and staffed by key SVDPWA employees and Youth volunteers, the c s offer children a varied schedule of activities in a safe and supported environment, with at least one volunteer for every two child participants. The c s are specifically made available to children from disadvantaged families and are provided virtually free to participants. (A nominal $10 enrolment fee is applied per child). Kani was initially reticent about attending her first c . She explained: “I was shy, scared because I sleep with my mum so it’s different sleeping without Mum. I know it’s kind of embarrassing ‘cause, sleeping with my mum like, but I just get scared at night”. Kani went on to explain how the c facilitators were able to allay her fears “I knew I was safe. And I had people I could talk to so yeah ...like the leader”. As one Vinnies Youth volunteer explains, the potential of offering children like Kani time out from the pressures of everyday life is demonstrated when “towards the end of every c we always see that progression of, they came out of their shell … So I think it’s really just a journey for everyone and it’s understandable if they did feel stuck. It’s about what we can do to help them progress forward” (VY1). Kani was empowered to envision an alternative idea of herself at c , one which was unexpectedly intuited by the research interviewer.When the interviewer closed the interview by expressing that it had been lovely to talk to Kani as she was “such a bundle of energy”, Kani grinned and replied “Do you know the warm fuzzies, yeah? [When positive thoughts about others are exchanged at the SVDPWA Kids’ C ]. The bundle ... all the leaders say I’m a bundle of happiness”. The Kids’ C provided Kani with a fun and positive alternative reality to the one she experienced as a child handling the considerable challenges experienced by social isolation, domestic violence and parental separation, including the loss of her home, diminished connection to her overseas extended family, legal custody issues, and several school changes. Taking the role of cultural intermediary, by offering the possibility of alternative realities via their c , SVDPWA offered Kani a chance that supported her work on creating a range of enticing possible futures for herself. This was in contrast to some commercial holiday c experiences which might more centrally use their “cultural authority as shapers of taste and … new consumerist dispositions” (Nixon and Du Gay 497). Even so, Kani’s interview made clear that her experience with the SVDPWA Kids’ C s were only part of the ways in which she was crafting a range of possible visions for her adult life, adding to this her love of books and reading, her fun, creative friends, and her vision for a successful future which would reunite her with her distant cousin and offer security to her mother. ConclusionUnderstandably, Kani at 10 lacks the critical insight required to interpret how her imaginative and creative life provides the raw materials from which she crafts her visions for the future. Further, the interviewer is careful not to introduce words like ‘creative’ into her work with the participant families, so that when Kani used it to talk about her friends she did so drawing upon her own store of descriptions and not as a result of having recently been reminded of creativity as a desirable attribute. The interview with this young person indicates, however, how greatly she values the imaginative and cultural inputs into her life and how she converts them in ways which help ensure access to further such creative currency. Apart from referencing her reading in the naming of her cat, Kani’s vision for herself reflects both the conventional idea of success (“a doctor”) and a very specific idea of her future living as an adult in house large enough to include her mum and her cousin.Kani’s love of reading, her pleasure in books, her choice of friends and her aspirations to scholarly excellence all offer her ways to escape the restricted options available to families who seek support from organisations such as SVDPWA. At the same time the Kids’ C s themselves, like Kani’s books, provide an escape from the difficulties of the present. Kani’s appropriation of the cultural raw materials that she draws into her life, and her conversion of these inputs into a creative, social currency, offers her an opportunity to anticipate a better future, and some tools she can use to help bring it into existence.ReferencesCarr, A. Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and Human Strengths. 2nd ed. Hove, UK: Routledge, 2011.Csikszentmihalyi, M. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.Green, M., and T. Brock. “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives.”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (2000): 701–21.———, T. Brock, and G. Kaufman. “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds." Communication Theory 14.4 (2004): 311–27.Hawkins, J.D., R. Kosterman, R.F. Catalano, K.G. Hill, and R.D. Abbott. “Promoting Positive Adult Functioning through Social Development Intervention in Childhood: Long-Term Effects from the Seattle Social Development Project.” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine 159.1 (2005): 25. Hopkins, L. “YouthWorx: Increasing Youth Participation through Media Production.” Journal of Sociology 47.2 (2011): 181–197. doi: 10.1177/1440783310386827.Kani. In-depth interview, de-identified, 2016.Kaufman, J. C., and R.A. Beghetto. “Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity.” Review of General Psychology 13.1 (2009): 1–12. .1037/a0013688 . King, G., T. Cathers, E. Brown, J.A. Specht, C. Willoughby, J.M. Polgar, and L. Havens. “Turning Points and Protective Processes in the Lives of People with Chronic Disabilities.” Qualitative Health Research 13.2 (2003): 184–206.Nixon, S., and P. Du Gay. “Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries?” Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 495–500.Podkalicka, A. “Young Listening: An Ethnography of YouthWorx Media’s Radio Project.” Continuum 23.4 (2009): 561–72.St Vincent de Paul Society (WA). St Vincent de Paul Society, Annual Report 2013. Perth, WA: St Vincent de Paul Society (WA), 2013. 5 Jan 2017 www.vinnies.org.au/icms_docs/169819_Vinnies_WA_2012_Annual_Report.pdf .Seidman, I. Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2006.Silverstone, R., E. Hirsch, and D. Morley. “Information and Communication Technologies and the Moral Economy of the Household.” Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. Eds. R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch. London: Routledge, 1992. 9–17.Snyder, C.R. Handbook of Hope. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 2000.VY1. In-depth interview with Vinnies Youth volunteer, de-identified, 2016.

Book review

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 12-10-2010

DOI: 10.1080/1360080X.2010.511124

Reviewing the Scourge of Self-Plagiarism

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 10-2005

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2426

Abstract: The task of the unpaid reviewer in academic publishing has always been a taxing one. Although the notion is one of blind peer review, the selection of reviewers is far from random. Journals try to balance a prospective reviewer’s expertise with their availability, and with their track record of returning a useful review on time. Ideally, the reviewer should have a specific (reasonably expert) knowledge of the paper’s topic, but should also retain enough in common with the interested, but jargon-averse, academic reader to empathise with non-specialist journal subscribers. Reviewers should be able to judge the quality of the argument, of the writing, and of the contribution of the article to the field. It’s a tough ask, and now there is a further layer of concern: will the reviewer – having satisfied all the foregoing – be able to spot ‘self-plagiarism’? Self-plagiarism is a relatively new evil – at least, few people in the author’s circle appear aware of it. Googling the term results in some 8,000 hits (whereas plagiarism scores 3,150,000). At first blush, the usual interpretation of plagiarism – the pinching of some one else’s intellectual property without acknowledgement – seems to rule out the possibility of self-plagiarism. Surely, if the ideas and words are your own, a little judicious re-purposing is all grist to the mill? Indeed, most of the anti-plagiarism sites, for ex le: What is Plagiarism? (Georgetown University), don’t include the term at all. Instead, the site offers ex les of five types of plagiarism, most of them familiar to seasoned markers of student work, which are sufficiently rigorous to include “the ‘apt phrase’”, defined as the lifting of a part sentence. Their comment on the ex le they give for ‘apt phrase’ plagiarism involves four words in an original paragraph: “This passage is almost entirely original, but the phrase ‘dissolved into a conglomeration’ is taken directly from Arendt [the ex le used for illustration]. Even though this is a short phrase, it must be footnoted. Only phrases that have truly become part of general usage can be used without citation.” Georgetown University, then, sees plagiarism predominantly as a matter of correct attribution of authorship. Most journals have a requirement that no work offered to them for review should previously have been published, and that concurrent submissions to multiple journals are not permitted. The issue here, it seems, is that a journal’s reputation is built upon the originality and usefulness of its contents. Journal editors like to feel that they are ‘advancing the field’ with each edition and they are building a readership that can count upon learning something new (or, at least, provocative) for each hour invested in consuming their journal. Where papers have appeared in other forms (based, for ex le, on a presentation recorded in conference proceedings) this may be acceptable to the journal, provided it is acknowledged, and experienced editors will often check that papers developed from conference presentations have not previously been posted on the web. If two journals in ignorance each accept and publish the same paper at the same time then that reflects very poorly on the academic who failed to deal honestly with the editors. The issue here is one of resources – the printed page, in particular, is expensive – and of the reviewers’ time. Given the unpaid and voluntary labour of reviewers, and the amount of time and energy that goes into deciding which papers to accept or reject, journals think very poorly of someone who ‘withdraws’ a paper after acceptance on the grounds that s/he has got a better offer/earlier publication elsewhere. Most journals would not welcome future papers from that author. If self-plagiarism were a simple matter of passing off published paper A as published paper B (say, by changing the title and offering it elsewhere), then it would be seen to be deceitful and perpetrators would receive little respect from their peers. But these extreme cases are not (generally) the kind of self-plagiarism against which authors are warned. So what is the authorship problem widely referred to as ‘self-plagiarism’? The SPlaT website (SPlaT) is happy to explain: Self-plagiarism occurs when an author reuses portions of their previous writings in subsequent research papers. Occasionally, the derived paper is simply a re-titled and reformatted version of the original one, but more frequently it is assembled from bits and pieces of previous work. … It is our belief that self-plagiarism is detrimental to scientific progress and bad for our academic community. Flooding conferences and journals with near-identical papers makes searching for information relevant to a particular topic harder than it has to be. It also rewards those authors who are able to break down their results into overlapping least-publishable-units over those who publish each result only once. Finally, whenever a self-plagiarised paper is allowed to be published, another, more deserving paper, is not. Among the more chilling ex les of self-plagiarism identified by the developers of SPlaT is “cryptomnesia (reusing one’s own previously published text while unaware of its existence)” (SPlaT). The avoidance of cryptomnesia is one reason why authors are encouraged to use the SPlaT tool. Academic and journal reviewers are also regarded as potential users, and the software is designed to work in three modes – ‘reviewer’s workbench’, ‘author’ and ‘web spider’. It is indeed a crypromnesiac’s concern that the ‘apt phrase’ that came so creatively to the author in an earlier paper might appear again, unwittingly, in the guise of an original composition. However, the injunction to use SPlaT as a ‘reviewer’s workbench’ (where “SPlaT compares a paper under review to a record of the author’s previously published articles extracted from their web site and online article repositories” [SPlaT]) begs the question as to how a review may remain blind – in the sense of not identifying the author of the work to be reviewed – if the ‘workbench’ and/or ‘web spider’ modes of SPlaT are pressed into service. Might it be the case, notwithstanding the foregoing, that the problem of self-plagiarism is as authentic as ‘social anxiety disorder’ (SAD), incidences of which multiplied dramatically once a drug, Paxil, had been shown effective in treating it? In a Washington Post article (Vedantam), the journalist-author comments: “according to a marketing newsletter, media accounts of social anxiety rose from just 50 stories in 1997 and 1998 to more than 1 billion references in 1999 alone” and goes on to say, “The education and advertising c aigns have raised concerns that pharmaceutical companies, traditionally in the business of finding new drugs for existing disorders, are increasingly in the business of seeking new disorders for existing drugs”. Prior to the publicity about SAD, Paxil was an anti-depressant with sales languishing way behind Prozac and Zoloft. The identification (and treatment) of social anxiety disorder did wonders for its marketing. Could it be that self-plagiarism has only come into existence as a major concern for academia now that there is a tool for its detection? Social anxiety disorder may be an authentic scourge – as may self-plagiarism – and the fact that it has been publicised in concert with its cure (or detection) does not mean that the remedy serves no useful purpose. On the contrary, once a population of professionals is attuned to a new way of viewing symptoms and practices then valuable advances may result. However, such advances are only possible when the community concerned has had a chance to consider the matter and discuss the ramifications. At the present, we run the risk of allowing the designers of anti-self-plagiarism software to be the judges and the jury of this new way to commit academic crime. One way to avoid charges of self-plagiarism is self-citation. Leaving aside crytomnesia, it is perfectly possible to cite the already-published reference when an author is aware of reusing a previously-published phrase or idea. Unfortunately, this remedy is also generally frowned upon in many academic circles. The practice undermines the principle of blind peer review – since the identity of the author soon becomes clear in such repeated instances – while readers may become irritated, suspecting that self-citation is a clumsy ruse to improve the citation index ratings of the originally-published article. The issue is of concern to more than journal editors: it also relates to text- and reference-book editors and publishers. One ‘for instance’ was discussed a year ago by the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) who conducted a hypothetical on “self-plagiarism of textbook chapters” and threw the discussion open to the members’ list. The initial self-plagiarism case-study situation was complicated by the supposition that Author A (of Book A) had self-plagiarised a previously-published chapter which had been jointly authored by Author A and Author B (Book B). Notwithstanding this complication, the WAME Ethics Committee addressed themselves to four questions: Is [Does] reuse of a person’s writings in another textbook, but authored by the same person, meet the definition of plagiarism? If so, what degree of identical components needs to be present for this definition to be met? Is it appropriate for authors to write for different textbooks in the same field? If so, can they write on the same topic? If not, what are the potential infringements on the author’s rights to pursue their career/income? Should the editors of these textbooks agree to exclude authors that write for one another’s textbooks? Or is that unfair restraint of trade? For ex le, if all four textbooks were to agree to limit or completely avoid any overlap among authors, it could effectively deny entry of another textbook into that market. For book A, the author had a co-author. Since this shared work was used for book B, what is the author’s responsibility to the original co-author? (WAME) These are good questions and they are the kinds of questions we should be asking ourselves about self-plagiarism in our own ‘media and culture’ academic circles. In particular, in the case of textbooks, it is precisely because an author has a standing in the field, and has published on equivalent matters, that editors seek them out and ask them to contribute chapters. Whilst all reputable writers would expect to originate a new chapter according to the specific brief given, it is possible (some might even say likely) that there is an overlap in approach and phraseology. In the case of Books A and B, the overlap stretched the bounds of coincidence in that: “One table is essentially identical, although other tables in the two chapters are different. In addition, there are some passages that contain identical phrases. Most of these appear to have been reworded, but many identifiable words and phrases are identical between the two chapters. There are also areas where the text is completely different” (WAME). However, this hypothetical case is clearly not a situation where the same authorial product was disguised with a new title. Although the whole debate is worth reading, the general consensus of the Ethics Committee was along the lines of (specifically citing one response): I do not see a problem with the author reusing his own material to write a chapter in another textbook (readers of textbooks as opposed to research articles are not expecting originality). The problem is that he should have done this with the concurrence of the two editors and if he signed over his copyright the permission of publisher of textbook A. He should of course also have consulted with his co-author. I think the editors should inform the publishers and his employer of the facts and let them decide what course of action to take. (WAME) The references to re-using the material transparently, and the editors of the textbooks informing the author’s employer, are a constant refrain from a number of contributors to the discussion. Some WAME list discussants offer defences to the charge of self-plagiarism: “the main problem here is not whether the same, or very similar, information can or should be published in more than one place” commented Frank Davidoff, “that sort of thing is done all the time, and can serve important functions. After all, different people read different textbooks, and if it’s important for the information to get out there, why shouldn’t it be made as widely available as possible?” Andrew Herxheimer thought the readers’ perspective had not been given sufficient consideration: “If I were keenly interested in the contents of the chapter in textbook B, I might well wish to know how they had developed, and to look at earlier versions of the material, and to understand why the contents and emphases etc had changed in the way they had.” “The choice of an author for a review monograph or textbook chapter is based always on perusal of the existing reviews and chapters, hoping that the new publication can contain something just as good” argued Rick Nelson, going on to say, “that obligates the author to produce something as similar to his previous publication as possible, and yet different – an impossible task even if such writing were a priority endeavor, which it never is.” (WAME). Irving Hexham, of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, appears to have been substantially ahead of the game in discussing self-plagiarism in the 1990s. His consideration of the issue is generally more sympathetic than SPlaT’s, or WAME’s. For ex le, “Self-plagiarism must be distinguished from the recycling of one’s work that to a greater or lesser extent everyone does legitimately”, and: Academics are expected to republish revised versions of their Ph.D. thesis. They also often develop different aspects of an argument in several papers that require the repetition of certain key passages. This is not self-plagiarism if the complete work develops new insights. It is self-plagiarism if the argument, ex les, evidence, and conclusion remain the same in two works that only differ in their appearance. (Hexham) It appears that Hexham and SPlaT have very different ideas of what constitutes self-plagiarism. Their different perspectives may be influenced by disciplinary perspectives and wider contexts – journal article or textbook chapter, a cannibalised conference paper or thesis – and by whether or not they have authored software to catch the offending behaviour. At least one Australian academic (not in M/C – Media and Culture) has been asked by their University to justify their publications against a charge of self-plagiarism, however, which is how the topic has become visible and why the need for debate has become urgent. Incidentally, the opening sentence of the opening paragraph to the Introduction of the paper on “Splat: A System for Self-Plagiarism Detection” is almost identical to the Abstract for a paper published two years later as “Self-Plagiarism in Computer Science”, viz: “We are all too aware of the ravages of scientific misconduct in the academic community. Students submit assignments inherited from the [sic] their friends who took the course the year before, on-line paper-mills allow students to browse for term papers on popular topics, and occasionally researchers are found out when falsifying data or publishing the work of others as their own.” (Collburg et al.) “We are all too aware of the ravages of misconduct in the academic community. Students submit assignments inherited from their friends, online papermills provide term papers on popular topics, and occasionally researchers are found falsifying data or publishing the work of others as their own.” (Collburg & Kubourov) Further, in these two papers there is a difference in authorship line-up, as with the WAME ex le… So what of the reviewers in all this? The Journal of Optical Networking, published by the Optical Society of America, comments that “self-plagiarism causes duplicate papers in the scientific literature, violates copyright agreements, and unduly burdens reviewers, editors, and the scientific publishing enterprise.” (JON). In an environment of blind peer review, where the reviewer does not know the author’s identity and is not in a position to check the body of their published work, the acid test becomes whether (in the reviewer’s opinion) the article advances the debate by offering something new. The submission should also repay the time and effort expended in reading and considering the contents. Other than that, issues of in/valid repurposing, repackaging, recycling and redeveloping arguments and findings require debate and determination at a discipline-wide level, rather than at the coalface of reviewers’ practice. References Collburg, Christian, and Stephen Kobourov. “Self-Plagiarism in Computer Science”, Communications of the ACM, 48.4 (April 2005): 88-94. Collburg, Christian, Stephen Kobourov, Joshua Louie, and Thomas Slattery. “SPlaT: A System for Self-Plagiarism Detection” IADIS International Conference WWW/INTERNET, Algarve, Portugal 5-8 November 2003. 09 Oct 2005 cwi_plag.pdf . Georgetown University. What Is Plagiarism?, Georgetown University Honor Council, Georgetown University, n.d. 9 Oct. 2005 onor lagiarism.html . Hexham, Irving. The Plague of Plagiarism, Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, 1999 published on University of Missouri Kansas City, Douglas E Cowan Website. 9 Oct. 2005 owande lague.htm#self . JON. “From the Board of Editors: On Plagiarism”, Journal of Optical Networking, Optical Society of America, 4.3 (2005): 142-3, 9 Oct. 2005 bstract.cfm?URI=JON-4-3-142 . Vedantam, Shankar. “Drug Ads Hyping Anxiety Make Some Uneasy”, Washington Post 16 July (2001): p. A01 also published in PR in the News, Council of Public Relations Firms, 9 Oct. 2005 esources/news/drug071601.asp . SPlaT. SPlaT Website, Computer Science Department, University of Arizona, March 2005. 9 Oct. 2005 splat.cs.arizona.edu/ . WAME. “Self-Plagiarism of Textbook Chapters”, World Association of Medical Editors, Ethics Committee and list discussants, October 2004. 9 Oct. 2005 elfplag.htm . Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia. "Reviewing the Scourge of Self-Plagiarism." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y') ? journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/07-green.php . APA Style Green, L. (Oct. 2005) "Reviewing the Scourge of Self-Plagiarism," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y') ? from journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/07-green.php .

Ways of Depicting: The Presentation of One’s Self as a Brand

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 16-08-2017

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.1257

Abstract: Ways of Seeing"Images … define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate." (Berger 33)"Different skins, you know, different ways of seeing the world." (Morrison)The research question animating this article is: 'How does an in idual creative worker re-present themselves as a contemporary - and evolving - brand?' Berger notes that the "principal aim has been to start a process of questioning" (5), and the raw material energising this exploration is the life's work of Richard Morrison, the creative director and artist who is the key moving force behind The Morrison Studio collective of designers, film makers and visual effects artists, working globally but based in London. The challenge of maintaining currency in this visually creative marketplace includes seeing what is unique about your potential contribution to a larger project, and communicating it in such a way that this forms an integral part of an evolving brand - on trend, bleeding edge, but reliably professional. One of the classic outputs of Morrison's oeuvre, for ex le, is the title sequence for Terry Gilliam's Brazil.Passion cannot be seen yet Morrison conceives it as the central engine that harnesses skills, information and innovative ways of working to deliver the unexpected and the unforgettable. Morrison's perception is that the design itself can come after the creative artist has really seen and understood the client's perspective. As he says: "What some clients are interested in is 'How can we make money from what we're doing?'" Seeing the client, and the client's motivating needs, is central to Morrison's presentation of self as a brand: "the broader your outlook as a creative, the more chance you have of getting it right". Jones and Warren draw attention to one aspect of this dynamic: "Wealthy and private actors, both private and state, historically saw creative practice as something that money was spent on - commissioning a painting or a sculpture, giving salaries to composers to produce new works and so forth. Today, creativity has been reimagined as something that should directly or indirectly make money" (293). As Berger notes, "We never look at just one thing we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves…The world-as-it-is is more than pure objective fact, it includes consciousness" (9, 11). What is our consciousness around the creative image?In iduality is central to Berger's vision of the image in the "specific vision of the image-maker…the result of an increasing consciousness of in iduality, accompanying an increasing awareness of history" (10). Yet, as Berger argues "although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing" (10). Later, Berger links the meanings viewers attribute to images as indicating the "historical experience of our relation to the past…the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives" (33). The seeing and the seeking go hand in hand, and constitute a key reason for Berger's assertion that "the entire art of the past has now become a political issue" (33). This partly reflects the ways in which it is seen, and in which it is presented for view, by whom, where and in which circumstances.The creation of stand-out images in the visually-saturated 21st century demands a nuanced understanding of ways in which an idea can be re-presented for consumption in a manner that makes it fresh and arresting. The focus on the in idual also entails an understanding of the ways in which others are valuable, or vital, in completing a coherent package of skills to address the creative challenge to hand. It is self-evident that other people see things differently, and can thus enrich the broadened outlook identified as important for "getting it right". Morrison talks about "little core teams, there's four or five of you in a hub… [sometimes] spread all round the world, but because of the Internet and the way things work you can still all be connected". Team work and members' in idual personalities are consequently combined, in Morrison's view, with the core requirement of passion. As Morrison argues, "personality will carry you a long way in the creative field".Morrison's key collaborator, senior designer and creative partner/art director Dean Wares lives in Valencia, Spain whereas Morrison is London-based and their clients are globally-dispersed. Although Morrison sees the Internet as a key technology for collaboratively visualising the ways in which to make a visual impact, Berger points to the role of the camera in relation to the quintessential pre-mechanical image: the painting. It is worth acknowledging here that Berger explicitly credits Walter Benjamin, including the use of his image (34), as the foundation for many of Berger's ideas, specifically referencing Benjamin's essay "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction". Noting that, prior to the invention of the camera, a painting could never be seen in more than one place at a time, Berger suggests that the camera foments a revolutionary transformation: "its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings" (19). This disruption is further fractured once that camera-facilitated image is viewed on a screen, ubiquitous to Morrison's stock in trade, but in Berger's day (1972) particularly associated with the television:The painting enters each viewer's house. There it is surrounded by his wallpaper, his furniture, his mementoes. It enters the atmosphere of his family. It becomes their talking point. It lends its meaning to their meaning. At the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen in a different context. Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator, rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is ersified. (Berger, 19-20)Even so, that image, travelling through space and time is seen on the screen in a sequential and temporal context: "because a film unfolds in time and a painting does not. In a film the way one image follows another, their succession constructs an argument which becomes irreversible. In a painting all its elements are there to be seen simultaneously." Both these dynamics, the still and the sequence, are key to the work of a visual artist such as Morrison responsible for branding a film, television series or event. But the works also create an unfolding sequence which tells a different story to each recipient according to the perceptions of the viewer/reader. For ex le, instead of valorising Gilliam's Brazil, Morrison's studio could have been tagged with Annaud's Enemy at the Gates or, even, the contemporary Sky series, Niel Jordan's Riviera. Knowing this sequence, and that the back catalogue begins with The Who's Quadrophenia (1979), changes the way we see what the Morrison Studio is doing now.Ways of WorkingRichard Morrison harnesses an evolutionary metaphor to explain his continuing contribution to the industry: "I've adapted, and not been a dinosaur who's just sunk in the mud". He argues that there is a need to explore where "the next niche is and be prepared for change 'cause the only constant thing in life is change. So as a creative you need to have that known." Effectively, adaptation and embracing innovation has become a key part of the Morrison Studio's brand. It is trumpeted in the decision that Morrison and Ware made when they decided to continue their work together, even after Ware moved to Spain. This demonstrated, in an age of faxes and landlines, that the Morrison Studio could make cross country collaboration work: the multiple locations ch ioned the fact that they were open for business "without boundaries".There was travel, too, and in those early pre-Internet days of remote location Morrison was a frequent visitor to the United States. "I'd be working in Los Angeles and he'd be wherever he was […] we'd use snail mail to actually get stuff across, literally post it by FedEx […]." The intercontinental (as opposed to inter-Europe) collaboration had the added value of offering interlocking working days: "I'd go to sleep, he wakes up […] We were actually doubling our capacity." If anything, these dynamics are more entrenched with better communications. Currah argues that Hollywood attempts to manage the disruptive potential of the internet by "seeking to create a 'closed' sphere of innovation on a global scale […] legitimated, enacted and performed within relational networks" (359). The Morrison Studio's own dispersed existence is one element of these relational networks.The specific challenge of technological vulnerability was always present, however, long before the Internet: "We'd have a case full of D1 tapes" - the professional standard video tape (1986-96) - "and we'd carefully make sure they'd go through the airport so they don't get rubbed […] what we were doing is we were fitting ourselves up for the new change". At the same time, although the communication technologies change, there are constants in the ways that people use them. Throughout Morrison's career, "when I'm working for Americans, which I'm doing a lot, they expect me to be on the telephone at midnight [because of time zones]. […] They think 'Oh I want to speak to Richard now. Oh it's midnight, so what?' They still phone up. That's constant, that never goes away." He argues that American clients are more complex to communicate with than his Scandinavian clients, giving the ex le that people assume a UK-US consistency because they share the English language. But "although you think they're talking in a tongue that's the same, their meaning and understanding can sometimes be quite a bit different." He uses the ex le of the A4 sheet of paper. It has different dimensions in the US than in the UK, illustrating those different ways of seeing.Morrison believes that there are four key constants in his company's continuing success: deadlines the capacity to scope a job so that you know who and how many people to pull in to it to meet the deadline librarian skills and insecurity. The deadlines have always been imposed on creative organisations by their clients, but being able to deliver to deadlines involves networks and self-knowledge: "If you can't do it yourself find a friend, find somebody that's good at adding up, find somebody that's good at admin. You know, don't try and take on what you can't do. Put your hand up straight away, call in somebody that can help you". Chapain and Comunian's work on creative and cultural industries (CCIs) also highlights the importance of "a new centrality to the role of in iduals and their social networks in understanding the practice of CCIs" (718).Franklin et al. suggest that this approach, adopted by The Morrison Studio, is a microcosm of the independent film sector as a whole. They argue that "the lifecycle of a film is segmented into sequential stages, moving through development, financing, production, sales, distribution and exhibition stages to final consumption. Different companies, each with specialized project tasks, take on responsibility and relative financial risk and reward at each stage" (323). The importance that Morrison places on social networks, however, highlights the importance of flexibility within relationships of trust - to the point where it might be as valid to engage someone on the basis of a history of working with that person as on the basis of that person's prior experience. As Cristopherson notes, "many creative workers are in vaguely defined and rapidly changing fields, seemingly making up their careers as they go along" (543).The skills underlying Morrison's approach to creative collaboration, however, include a clear understanding of one's own strength and weaknesses and a cool evaluation of others, "just quietly research people". This people-based research includes both the capabilities of potential colleagues, in order to deliver the required product in the specified time frame, along with research into creative people whose work is admired and who might provide a blueprint for how to arrive at an in idual's dream role. Morrison gives the ex le of Quentin Tarantino's trajectory to directing: "he started in a video rental and all he did is watch lots and lots of films, particularly westerns and Japanese samurai films and decided 'I can do that'". One of his great pleasures now is to mentor young designers to help them find their way in the industry. That's a strategy that may pay idends into the future, via Storper and Scott's "traded and untraded interdependencies" which are, according to Gornostaeva, "expressed as the multiple economic and social transactions that the participants ought to conduct if they wish to perpetuate their existence" (39).As for the library skills, he says that they are crucial but a bit comical:It's a bit like being a constant librarian in old-fashioned terms, you know, 'Where is that stuff stored?' Because it's not stored in a plan chest anymore where you open the drawer and there it is. It's now stored in, you know, big computers, in a cloud. 'Where did we put that file? Did we dump it down? Have we marked it up? […] Where's it gone? What did we do it on?'While juggling the demands of technology, people and product The Morrison brand involves both huge confidence and chronic insecurity. The confidence is evident in the low opinion Morrison has of the opportunities offered by professional disruptor sites such as 99designs: "I can't bear anything like that. I can see why it's happening but I think what you're doing is devaluing yourself even before you start […] it would destroy your self-belief in what you're doing". At the same time, Morrison says, his security is his own insecurity: "I'm always out hunting to see what could be next […] the job you finish could be your last job."Ways of BrandingChristopherson argues that there is "considerable variation in the occupational identities of new media workers among advanced economies. In some economies, new media work is evolving in a form that is closer to that of the professional [in contrast to economies where it is] an entrepreneurial activity in which new media workers sell skills and services in a market" (543). For The Morrison Studio, its breadth, history and experience supports their desire to be branded as professional, but their working patterns entirely resonate with, and are integrated within, the entrepreneurial. Seeing their activity in this way is a juxtaposition with the proposition advanced by Berger that:The existing social conditions make the in idual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, among other things, the overthrow of capitalism or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams (148).The role of the brand, and its publicity, is implicated by Berger in both the tension between what an in idual is and what s/he would like to be and in the creation of an envy that subjugates people. For Berger, the brand is about publicity and the commodifying of the future. Referring to publicity images, Berger argues that "they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future". Brands are created and marketed by such publicity images that are often, these days, incorporated within social media and websites. At the same time, Berger argues that "Publicity is about social relationships, not objects [or experiences]. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour." It is the dual pressure from the perception of the gap between the in idual's actual and potential life, and the daydreaming and envy of that future, that helps construct Berger's powerless in idual.Morrison's view, fashioned in part by his success at adapting, at not being a dinosaur that sinks into the mud, is that the authenticity lies in the congruence of the brand and the belief. "A personal brand can help you straight away but as long as you believe it […] You have to be true to what you're about and then it works. And then the thing becomes you [… you] just go for it and, you know, don't worry about failure. Failure will happen anyway".Berger's commentary on publicity is partially ergent from branding. Publicity is generally a managed message, on that is paid for and promoted by the person or entity concerned. A brand is a more holistic construction and is implicated in ways of seeing in that different people will have very different perceptions of the same brand. Morrison's view of his personal brand, and the brand of the Morrison Studio, is that it encompasses much more than design expertise and technical know-how. He lionises the role of passion and talks about the importance of ways of managing deadlines, interlocking skills sets, creative elements and the insecurity of uncertainty.For the producers who hire Morrison, and help build his brand, Berger's observation of the importance of history and the promise for the future remains key to their hiring decisions. Although carefully crafted, creative images are central to the Morrison Studio's work, it is not the surface presentation of those images that determines the way their work is perceived by people in the film industry, it is the labour and networks that underpin those images. While Morrison's outputs form part of the visual environment critiqued in Ways of Seeing, it is informed by the dynamics of international capitalism via global networks and mobility. Although one of myriad small businesses that help make the film industry the complex and productive creative sphere that it is, Morrison Studios does not so much seek to create a public brand as to be known and valued by the small group of industry players upon whom the Studio relies for its existence. Their continued future depends upon the ways in which they are seen.ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. United States of America, 1969.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Brazil. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures. 1985. Film. Chapain, Caroline, and Roberta Comunian. "Enabling and Inhibiting the Creative Economy: The Role of the Local and Regional Dimensions in England." Regional Studies 44.6 (2010): 717-734. Christopherson, Susan. "The Divergent Worlds of New Media: How Policy Shapes Work in the Creative Economy." Review of Policy Research 21.4 (2004): 543-558. Currah, Andrew. "Hollywood, the Internet and the World: A Geography of Disruptive Innovation." Industry and Innovation 14.4 (2007): 359-384. Enemies at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. Paramount. 2001. FilmFranklin, Michael, et al. "Innovation in the Application of Digital Tools for Managing Uncertainty: The Case of UK Independent Film." Creativity and Innovation Management 22.3 (2013): 320-333. Gornostaeva, Galina. "The Wolves and Lambs of the Creative City: The Sustainability of Film and Television Producers in London." Geographical Review (2009): 37-60. Jones, Phil, and Saskia Warren. "Time, Rhythm and the Creative Economy." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41.3 (2016): 286-296. Morrison, Richard. Personal Interview. 13 Oct 2016.The Morrison Studio. The Morrison Studio, 2017. 16 June 2017 themorrisonstudio.com/ .Quadrophenia. Dir. Franc Roddam. Brent Walker Film Distributing. 1979. Film.Riviera. Dir. Neil Jordan. Sky Atlantic HD. 2017. Film.Storper, Michael, and Scott, Allen. "The Geographical Foundations and Social Regulation of Flexible Production Complexes". The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life. Eds. Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear. New York: Routledge, 1989. 21-40.

Blocks

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 27-06-2023

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2984

Abstract: Children's engagement with blocks is a vital and joyful aspect of childhood shared across the world. While the physical manipulation of blocks is a core part of children's development (i.e., LEGO), there are also online platforms and apps available that provide virtual play experiences with blocks (i.e., digital building apps, virtual worlds). The open-ended nature of block play allows children to explore their creativity, experiment with different designs, and learn from trial and error. Furthermore, this type of play promotes imagination, encourages independent thinking, and enhances communication and collaboration as children engage in shared building experiences. The hands-on and interactive nature of block play also enables researchers to utilise this medium with children to learn about their perceptions and experiences in a participatory and active way. On a different front, blocks can also refer to different forms of stopping, including lies. Due to the wide variety of excellent responses to the initial call for papers focussing on ‘toys’, this issue complements the previous 'toys' issue by focussing further on children’s engagement with play forms and artefacts, specifically blocks (both physical and digital). The editorial team drew on a range of complementary knowledge and experience to put together the ‘blocks’ issue. Louise Kay was a key researcher within the EU-funded MakEY – Makerspaces in the Early Years: Enhancing Digital Literacy and Creativity project. She is currently working on the Maker{Futures} project at the University of Sheffield, which supports schools, museums, libraries, and community spaces to set up makerspaces, providing playful and creative ways to develop digital and STEM skills through a STEAM approach that integrates science, technology, engineering, and mathematics with the arts. Lelia Green is a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, and lead CI (after Donell Holloway’s retirement) on the ARC Discovery Project DP180103922 – The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children. For Lelia, the ‘blocks’ issue raises matters of concern that might, could, or (possibly) should raise issues around consent, ethics, and children’s data flows. Essentially, the questions asked by this ‘blocks’ collection include whether the balance of risk and benefit relating to certain toys might give parents cause to pause, blocking access to some younger children’s (under 13) engagement with connected toys. Tama Leaver brought critical analysis to the table, informed by his Chief Investigator (CI) role within the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. In addition, Tama’s personal interest in LEGO is shared with his children, and they collaborated on the cover image for this issue. In our feature article “The Toy Brick as a Communicative Device for Amplifying Children’s Voices in Research”, Kylie Stevenson, Emma Jayakumar, and Harrison See document the use of the LEGO brick toy as part of participatory play-based methods in the research project Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables, conducted with industry-partner the LEGO Group, Edith Cowan University, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. The use of multiple play-based, child-friendly participatory methods is explored, and how children’s views about digital safety and citizenship in India, Korea, and Australia were collected and conveyed. The article explains how such toy play is an empowering communicative strategy that gives children agency so that they can creatively interject their voices into ongoing discussions about children’s digital citizenship. In “Platform Rhetoric and Fan Labour as the Building Blocks of LEGO Ideas”, Travis Holland and Beck Wise examine the LEGO Ideas platform and its Guidelines as ways of positioning and constructing the relationship between the LEGO Group and fan builders, especially adult fans of LEGO. The combined infrastructures of the Ideas platform and other LEGO online properties is argued to provide the LEGO group with significant data about LEGO fans and users that the LEGO group can exploit commercially. Aligned with many studies of fan cultures, Holland and Wise see fan labour and the infrastructures around it as extracting commercial value from fans, even while fans take pleasure in this labour. Along similar lines, in “LEGO and the Infrastructural Limits of Open Play” Nick Taylor explores the impact of the LEGO Group buying the Bricklink Website and platform, housing the largest LEGO adult fan community and their significant aftermarket trade of LEGO bricks, parts, and minifigs. Taylor argues that the LEGO Group is exercising a form of platform logic whereby it can utilise this digital infrastructure to impose and police ideological boundaries of what LEGO’s values are, and how these values should be enacted in both official and fan spaces. While the patents that protect LEGO’s monopoly on interlocking bricks have long since expired, purchasing Bricklink has solidified the LEGO Group’s material and digital reach, reifying the point that “LEGO encourages connection, openness, and creativity—so long as we use its platform, and its platform exclusively, to do so”. Gemma Blackwood in "Roblox and Meta Verch: A Case Study of Walmart’s Roblox Games" examines the two Walmart Roblox games (Walmart Land and Walmart Universe of Play) through an analysis of their gameplay, focussing on the ways that both games are incentivising play and how they link to in-game purchases and the Walmart brand. She argues that the games are designed to link gameplay with a highly personalised shopping experience, which blurs the boundaries between games and branded advertising. Issues are raised that link to broader debates regarding the commodification of, and impact on, children’s gaming experiences. Finally, Jo Ann Oravec’s article “Promoting Honesty in Children, or Fostering Pathological Behavior? Emerging Varieties of Lie Detection Toys and Games” problematises the process which constructs lie detector technology as the stuff of children’s games. Noting that these toys typically use physiological cues that regulate human responses to stress – generally beyond conscious control – the article asks about the ethics of children learning to lie. It speculates that such lie detector ‘play’ might be constructed as teaching children to lie more effectively. Are children learning to block their stress symptoms, or might parents and children choose instead to block out the possibility that such games are appropriate ‘child’s play’? Whether blocking stress, or blocking as lying, this article wraps this issue with a novel exploration of blocks. Acknowledgments The work on this special issue was partially supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council. Professor Lelia Green and Dr Louise Kay (together with Professors Bieke Zaman and Giovanna Mascheroni) were Investigators on the ARC Discovery Project DP180103922 – The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children (2018-22), and they acknowledge Dr Donell Holloway’s past leadership of this grant. Professors Tama Leaver and Lelia Green are both Chief Investigators in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child (CE200100022), which is led by QUT and also involves Curtin University, Deakin University, Edith Cowan University, University of Queensland, and University of Wollongong. The Centre of Excellence is funded through to the end of 2027. Tama would also like to thank his children for their input in to the design of the cover photo, and for letting their Lego figures be part of it!

What Porn?

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 10-2004

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2381

Abstract: The negative implications of children’s use of the Internet, particularly their loss of innocence through access to pornography, is a topic frequently addressed in public discussions and debate. These debates often take on a technologically determinist point of view and assume that technology directly influences children, usually in a harmful fashion. But what is really happening in the Australian family home? Are parents fearful of these risks, and if so what are they doing about it? A recent exploration of the everyday Internet lives of Australian families indicates that families manage these perceived risks in a variety of ways and are not overly troubled about this issue. Findings from the research project indicate that Australian parents are more concerned about some children’s excessive use of the Internet than about pornography. They construct the Internet as interfering with time available to carry out homework, chores, getting adequate sleep or participating in outdoor (fresh air) activities. This disparity, between public discourse regarding the protection of children in the online environment and the actual significance of this issue in the everyday lives of Australian families, reflects the domestic dynamics within the “moral economy of the household” (Silverstone et al. 15) whereby family relationships and household practices inform the manner in which technology is consumed within any given household. The research project described here (Family Internet: Theorising Domestic Internet Consumption, Production and Use Within Australian Families) is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant and investigates Internet use within Australian homes with specific reference to families with school-aged children. It explores how in idual family members make sense of their family’s engagement with the Internet and investigates ways in which the Internet is integrated within Australian family life. Public Debates The relationship between children and technology is often addressed in public debates regarding children’s health, safety, social and educational development. Within these debates technology is usually held responsible for a variety of harmful consequences to children. These technological ‘effects’ range from the decline of children’s social relationships (with both peers and family) through sedentary lifestyles which impinge on fitness levels and the weight (body mass index) of children to the corruption of children (and their loss of innocence) through access to unsuitable materials. These unsuitable texts include “soft and hardcore porn, Neo Nazi groups, paedophiles, racial and ethnic hatred” (Valentine et al. 157). Other digital technologies, such as computer and video games, are sometimes seen as exacerbating these problems and raise the spectre of the ‘Nintendo kid’, friendless and withdrawn (Marshall 73), lacking in social skills and unable to relate to others except through multi-player games – although this caricature appears far removed from children’s normal experience of computer gaming (Aisbett: Durkin and Aisbett). Such debates about the negative implications of the Internet and video games run simultaneously alongside government, educational and commercial promotion of these technologies, and the positioning of digital skills and connectivity as the key to children’s future education and employment. In this pro-technology discourse the family: …is being constructed as an entry point for the development of new computer-related literacies and social practices in young people … what is discursively produced within the global cultural economy as digital fun and games for young people, is simultaneously constructed as serious business for parents (Nixon 23). Thus, two conflicting discourses about children’s Internet use exist simultaneously whereby children are considered both “technically competent and at risk from their technical skills” (Valentine et al. 157). This anxiety is further exacerbated by the fear that parents are losing control of their children’s Internet activities because their own (the parents’) technical competencies are being surpassed by their children. Such fear may well be based on misleading information, particularly in the Australian context. The Australian Broadcasting Authority’s 2001 Internet@ home report “challenges the popular belief that parents lag behind their children in their interest and proficiency with online technology. Most often the household Internet ‘expert’ is an adult” (Aisbett 4). Nonetheless, this public anxiety is underscored by a concern that parents may not be sufficiently Internet-savvy to prevent their children’s access to pornography and other undesirable Internet content. This leads to the fundamental anxiety that parents’ natural power base will be diminished (Valentine et al. 157). In the case of children’s access to Internet porn it may well be that: although parents still occupy the role of initiated with regard to sexuality, if they are uninitiated technologically then they lose the power base from which to set the markers for progressive socialisation (Evans and Butkus 68). These popular fears do not take into consideration the context of Internet use in the real world—of children’s and parents’ actual experiences with and uses of the Internet. Parents have developed a variety of ways to manage these perceived risks in the home and are not usually overly concerned about their children’s exposure to unsuitable or inappropriate content on the Internet. Families’ everyday experiences of Internet consumption The home Internet is one site where most parents exercise some degree of care and control of their children, supervising both the quantity and quality of their children’s Internet experiences. When supervising their children’s access to particular Internet sites, parents in this study use a variety of strategies and approaches. These approaches range from a child-empowering ‘autonomous’ approach (which recognises children’s autonomy and competencies) to more authoritarian approaches (with the use of more direct supervision in order to restrict and protect children). At the same time children may use the Internet to affirm their autonomy or independence from their parents, as parents in this study affirm: He used to let me see the [onscreen] conversations but he won’t let me see them now. But that’s fine. If I come up and talk to him, he clicks the button and takes the screen off. (Kathy, pseudonyms used for interviewee contributions) Parents who tend to favour a child-empowering approach recognise their children’s autonomy, while at the same time having relatively high expectations of their children’s psychosocial competence and ability to handle a variety of media texts in a relatively sophisticated manner. When asked about her son’s access to adult Internet content, single mum Lisa indicated that Henry (17) had openly accessed Internet pornography a few years earlier. She expected (and allowed for) some exploration by her son. At the same time, she was not overly concerned that these materials would corrupt or harm him as she expected these explorations to be a transitory phase in his life: It doesn’t bother me at all. If he wants to do that then he can do it because he’ll get sick of it and I think initially it was ‘let’s see what we can do’. I remember once, he called me in and says ‘Mum, come and look at her boobs’ and I looked at it and I said ‘it’s disgusting’ or something and walked away and he laughed his head off. But I’ve never come in [lately] and found him looking at that stuff … It’s just not something that I’m … really worried about. It’s up to him (Lisa). As with this exchange, families often use media texts as tools in the socialisation of children. The provision of shared topics of conversation allows for discussions between generations: Such materials serve an agenda-setting role … [playing] an important role in providing a socioemotional context for the household within which learning takes place. Technoculture is consequently a critical tool for socialisation … ICTs also construct a framework on/with which to differentiate one member from another, to differentiate between generations, and to differentiate ways in which power and control can be asserted (Green 58). In this case, Lisa’s comment to her teenage son (‘it’s disgusting’) and her actions (in walking away) doubtlessly provided Henry with a social cue, an alternative attitude to his choice of online content. Further, in initiating this exchange with his mother, Henry is likely to have been making a statement about his own autonomy and transition into (heterosexual) manhood. In his interview, Henry openly acknowledged his earlier exploration of adult porn sites but (as his mother anticipated) he seems to have moved on from this particular phase. When asked whether he visited adult sites on the Internet Henry responded in his own succinct manner: Henry: Like porn and stuff? Not really. I probably did when I was a bit younger but it’s not really very exciting. Interviewer: That was when you first got it [the Internet] or when? Henry: Yeah, [two to three years earlier] all your friends come around and you check out the sites. It’s nothing exciting anymore. Sexual experiences and knowledge are an important currency within teenage boy culture (Holland et al. 1998) and like other teenage boys, Henry and his friends are likely to have used this technology in order to “negotiate their masculinity within the heterosexual economy of [their] peer group social relations”(Valentine et al. 160). In this case, it seemed to be a transitory stage within Henry’s peer (or community of interest) group and became less important as the teenagers grew into maturity. Many children and young people are also exploring the social world of Internet chat, with the potential risk of unwanted (and unsafe) face-to-face contact. Leonie, mother of teenage girls, explained her daughters’ ability to negotiate these potentially unsafe contacts: I suppose you just get a bit concerned about the chat lines and who they’re talking to sometimes but really they usually tell me … [to 17-year old daughter in the room] Like on the chat lines you, when, had that idiot … that one that was going to come over here. Just some idiots on there. A lot of the kids are teenagers. I know Shani’s [14] gotten on there a few times on the chat line and there’s been obviously someone asking them lewd questions and she’s usually blocked them and cut them off …(Leonie). Daughter Shani also discusses her experiences with unsafe (unwanted) Internet contact: “They go on about stuff that you don’t really want to talk about and it’s just ‘No, I don’t think so’” (Shani, 14). Shani went on to explain that she now prefers to use instant messaging with known (offline) friends—a preference now taken up by many teenagers (Holloway and Green: Livingstone and Bober). Electronic media play an important role in children’s transition to adulthood. The ubiquitousness of the World Wide Web, however, makes restriction and protection of children increasingly difficult to realise (Buckingham 84-5). Instead, many parents in this study are placing more importance on openness, consultation and discussion with their children about the media texts they encounter, rather than imposing restriction and regulation which these parents believe may well be “counter-productive” (Nightingale et al. 19). Of greater disquiet to many parents in this study than their children’s access to unsuitable online content is concern about their children’s possible excessive use of the Internet. Parents were typically more concerned about the amount of time some of their children were spending chatting to friends and playing online games. One mother explains: They [my daughters] started to use MSN whilst they were doing school work and obviously kids are able to listen to music, watch television, do a project. They can multi-task without all the confusion that I [would have] but we actually now, they’re not able to do MSN during the school week at all … so we now said to them, “if you want to ring somebody, give them a call, that’s fine, we don’t mind, but during the week no MSN” … we’ve actually restricted them (Stephanie). Parental concern about children’s excessive use of the Internet was most marked for parents of teenage children: adolescence being a time when “rules about media consumption can be an early site of resistance for young adults keen to take more power for themselves and their own lives” (Green 30). Father of two, Xavier, expressed his concern about (what he perceived as) his teenage son’s excessive use of the Internet: Well I think there’s far too much time … Gavin’ll spend a whole day on it. I try to get him to come to the footy on Sunday. No. He’s available for friends [for online gaming and chat on the Internet]. He’ll spend all day on the computer (Xavier). Son Gavin (16), in a separate interview, anticipated that this criticism had been made and felt compelled to counter it: Well he [dad] makes comments like saying I’m not fit enough ‘cause I spent too much time on the computer but I play soccer a lot. Like, I do sport perhaps everyday at school … I mean, I think, such a piece of crap (Gavin). Thus, the incorporation of the Internet into the domestic sphere often sees previously established boundaries (who uses what, when, where and for how long) redefined, challenged, resisted and defended by various family members. In this way the Internet (and other new media) helps shape (and is shaped by) the temporal and spatial boundaries within the home. Conclusion While all parents in the Family Internet study construct the Internet as a site which requires some level of care and control over their children’s online use, they use a variety of approaches when carrying out this supervisory role. Some parents tend to allow for children’s free exploration of the Internet and are relatively confident that their children are able to negotiate adult texts such as pornography in a comparatively sophisticated manner. Other parents, those inclined to protect their children from the dangers of adult content and unsafe Internet contact, choose to monitor and restrict their children’s access to the Internet to varying degrees. More consistent is parental concern about excessive use of the Internet, and the assumption that this displaces constructive use of children’s time. Public anxieties about children’s use of the Internet make assumptions about children’s media practices. Children (and their families) are often assumed to be less able to differentiate between suitable and unsuitable Internet texts and to deal with these potential dangers in a sensible manner. These fears presuppose a variety of negative impacts on children’s and young peoples’ lives which may have little to do with daily reality. Our exploration of families’ everyday experiences of Internet consumption highlights the disparity between public anxieties about Internet use and the importance of these anxieties in the everyday lives of families. The major concern of families – ill-disciplined and excessive Internet use – barely registers on the same scale as the public moral panic over children’s possible access to online pornography. These findings say less about the Internet as a locale in cyberspace than they do about the domestic dynamics of the household, parenting styles, relationships between parent(s) and children, and the sociocultural context of family life. References Aisbett, Kate. The Internet at Home: A Report on Internet Use in the Home. Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Authority, 2001. Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000. Durkin, Kevin and Kate Aisbett. Computer Games and Australians Today. Sydney: Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1999. Evans, Mark and Clarice Butkus. “Regulating the Emergent: Cyberporn and the Traditional Media.” Media International Australia 85 (1997): 62-9. Green, Lelia. Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex. Crows Nest Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2002. Holland, Janet and Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson. The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power. London: Tufnell Press, 1998. Holloway, Donell and Lelia Green. “Home Is Where You Hang Your @: Australian Women on the Net.” Communications Research Forum. Canberra: Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, 2003. Livingstone, Sonia and Magdalena Bober. UK Children Go Online: Listening to Young People’s Experiences. London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2003. Marshall, P. David. “Technophobia: Video Games, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics.” Media International Australia 85 (1997): 70-8. Nightingale, Virginia, Dianne Dickenson and Catherine Griff. “Harm: Children’s Views About Media Harm and Program Classification.” Forum. Sydney, Australia, 2000. Nixon, Helen. “Fun and Games Are Serious Business.” Digital Diversions: Youth Culture in the Age of Multi-Media. Ed. J Sefton-Green. London: UCL Press, 1998. Silverstone, Roger, Eric Hirsch and David Morley. “Information and Communication and the Moral Economy of the Household.” Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. Eds. Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch. London: Routledge, 1992. 17-31. Valentine, Gill, Sarah Holloway and Nick Bingham. “Transforming Cyberspace: Children’s Interventions in the New Public Sphere.” Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning. Eds. Sarah L. Holloway and Gill Valentine. London: Routledge, 2000. 156 – 93. MLA Style Holloway, Donell, Lelia Green & Robyn Quin. "What Porn?: Children and the Family Internet." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 www.media-culture.org.au/0410/02_children.php . APA Style Holloway, D., Green, L. & Quin, R. (2004 Oct 11). What Porn?: Children and the Family Internet, M/C Journal, 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from www.media-culture.org.au/0410/02_children.php

No Taste for Health: How Tastes are Being Manipulated to Favour Foods that are not Conducive to Health and Wellbeing

Publisher: Queensland University of Technology

Date: 17-03-2014

DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.785

Abstract: Background “The sense of taste,” write Nelson and colleagues in a 2002 issue of Nature, “provides animals with valuable information about the nature and quality of food. Mammals can recognize and respond to a erse repertoire of chemical entities, including sugars, salts, acids and a wide range of toxic substances” (199). The authors go on to argue that several amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—taste delicious to humans and that “having a taste pathway dedicated to their detection probably had significant evolutionary implications”. They imply, but do not specify, that the evolutionary implications are positive. This may be the case with some amino acids, but contemporary tastes, and changes in them, are far from universally beneficial. Indeed, this article argues that modern food production shapes and distorts human taste with significant implications for health and wellbeing. Take the western taste for fried chipped potatoes, for ex le. According to Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, “In 1960, the typical American ate eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and about four pounds of frozen french fries. Today [2002] the typical American eats about forty-nine pounds of fresh potatoes every year—and more than thirty pounds of frozen french fries” (115). Nine-tenths of these chips are consumed in fast food restaurants which use mass-manufactured potato-based frozen products to provide this major “foodservice item” more quickly and cheaply than the equivalent dish prepared from raw ingredients. These choices, informed by human taste buds, have negative evolutionary implications, as does the apparently long-lasting consumer preference for fried goods cooked in trans-fats. “Numerous foods acquire their elastic properties (i.e., snap, mouth-feel, and hardness) from the colloidal fat crystal network comprised primarily of trans- and saturated fats. These hardstock fats contribute, along with numerous other factors, to the global epidemics related to metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease,” argues Michael A. Rogers (747). Policy makers and public health organisations continue to compare notes internationally about the best ways in which to persuade manufacturers and fast food purveyors to reduce the use of these trans-fats in their products (L’Abbé et al.), however, most manufacturers resist. Hank Cardello, a former fast food executive, argues that “many products are designed for ‘high hedonic value’, with carefully balanced combinations of salt, sugar and fat that, experience has shown, induce people to eat more” (quoted, Trivedi 41). Fortunately for the manufactured food industry, salt and sugar also help to preserve food, effectively prolonging the shelf life of pre-prepared and packaged goods. Physiological Factors As Glanz et al. discovered when surveying 2,967 adult Americans, “taste is the most important influence on their food choices, followed by cost” (1118). A person’s taste is to some extent an in idual response to food stimuli, but the tongue’s taste buds respond to five basic categories of food: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. ‘Umami’ is a Japanese word indicating “delicious savoury taste” (Coughlan 11) and it is triggered by the amino acid glutamate. Japanese professor Kikunae Ikeda identified glutamate while investigating the taste of a particular seaweed which he believed was neither sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. When Ikeda combined the glutamate taste essence with sodium he formed the food additive sodium glutamate, which was patented in 1908 and subsequently went into commercial production (Japan Patent Office). Although in idual, a person’s taste preferences are by no means fixed. There is le evidence that people’s tastes are being distorted by modern food marketing practices that process foods to make them increasingly appealing to the average palate. In particular, this industrialisation of food promotes the growth of a snack market driven by salty and sugary foods, popularly constructed as posing a threat to health and wellbeing. “[E]xpanding waistlines [are] fuelled by a boom in fast food and a decline in physical activity” writes Stark, who reports upon the 2008 launch of a study into Australia’s future ‘fat bomb’. As Deborah Lupton notes, such reports were a particular feature of the mid 2000s when: intense concern about the ‘obesity epidemic’ intensified and peaked. Time magazine named 2004 ‘The Year of Obesity’. That year the World Health Organization’s Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health was released and the [US] Centers for Disease Control predicted that a poor diet and lack of exercise would soon claim more lives than tobacco-related disease in the United States. (4) The American Heart Association recommends eating no more than 1500mg of salt per day (Hamzelou 11) but salt consumption in the USA averages more than twice this quantity, at 3500mg per day (Bernstein and Willett 1178). In the UK, a sustained c aign and public health-driven engagement with food manufacturers by CASH—Consensus Action on Salt and Health—resulted in a reduction of between 30 and 40 percent of added salt in processed foods between 2001 and 2011, with a knock-on 15 percent decline in the UK population’s salt intake overall. This is the largest reduction achieved by any developed nation (Brinsden et al.). “According to the [UK’s] National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), this will have reduced [UK] stroke and heart attack deaths by a minimum of 9,000 per year, with a saving in health care costs of at least £1.5bn a year” (MacGregor and Pombo). Whereas there has been some success over the past decade in reducing the amount of salt consumed, in the Western world the consumption of sugar continues to rise, as a graph cited in the New Scientist indicates (O’Callaghan). Regular warnings that sugar is associated with a range of health threats and delivers empty calories devoid of nutrition have failed to halt the increase in sugar consumption. Further, although some sugar is a natural product, processed foods tend to use a form invented in 1957: high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). “HFCS is a gloopy solution of glucose and fructose” writes O’Callaghan, adding that it is “as sweet as table sugar but has typically been about 30% cheaper”. She cites Serge Ahmed, a French neuroscientist, as arguing that in a world of food sufficiency people do not need to consume more, so they need to be enticed to overeat by making food more pleasurable. Ahmed was part of a team that ran an experiment with cocaine-addicted rats, offering them a mutually exclusive choice between highly-sweetened water and cocaine: Our findings clearly indicate that intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward, even in drug-sensitized and -addicted in iduals. We speculate that the addictive potential of intense sweetness results from an inborn hypersensitivity to sweet tastants. In most mammals, including rats and humans, sweet receptors evolved in ancestral environments poor in sugars and are thus not adapted to high concentrations of sweet tastants. The supranormal stimulation of these receptors by sugar-rich diets, such as those now widely available in modern societies, would generate a supranormal reward signal in the brain, with the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus lead to addiction. (Lenoir et al.) The Tongue and the Brain One of the implications of this research about the mammalian desire for sugar is that our taste for food is about more than how these foods actually taste in the mouth on our tongues. It is also about the neural response to the food we eat. The taste of French fries thus also includes that “snap, mouth-feel, and hardness” and the “colloidal fat crystal network” (Rogers, “Novel Structuring” 747). While there is no taste receptor for fats, these nutrients have important effects upon the brain. Wang et al. offered rats a highly fatty, but palatable, diet and allowed them to eat freely. 33 percent of the calories in the food were delivered via fat, compared with 21 percent in a normal diet. The animals almost doubled their usual calorific intake, both because the food had a 37 percent increased calorific content and also because the rats ate 47 percent more than was standard (2786). The research team discovered that in as little as three days the rats “had already lost almost all of their ability to respond to leptin” (Martindale 27). Leptin is a hormone that acts on the brain to communicate feelings of fullness, and is thus important in assisting animals to maintain a healthy body weight. The rats had also become insulin resistant. “Severe resistance to the metabolic effects of both leptin and insulin ensued after just 3 days of overfeeding” (Wang et al. 2786). Fast food restaurants typically offer highly palatable, high fat, high sugar, high salt, calorific foods which can deliver 130 percent of a day’s recommended fat intake, and almost a day’s worth of an adult man’s calories, in one meal. The impacts of maintaining such a diet over a comparatively short time-frame have been recorded in documentaries such as Super Size Me (Spurlock). The after effects of what we widely call “junk food” are also evident in rat studies. Neuroscientist Paul Kenny, who like Ahmed was investigating possible similarities between food- and cocaine-addicted rats, allowed his animals unlimited access to both rat ‘junk food’ and healthy food for rats. He then changed their diets. “The rats with unlimited access to junk food essentially went on a hunger strike. ‘It was as if they had become averse to healthy food’, says Kenny. It took two weeks before the animals began eating as much [healthy food] as those in the control group” (quoted, Trivedi 40). Developing a taste for certain food is consequently about much more than how they taste in the mouth it constitutes an in idual’s response to a mixture of taste, hormonal reactions and physiological changes. Choosing Health Glanz et al. conclude their study by commenting that “c aigns attempting to change people’s perception of the importance of nutrition will be interpreted in terms of existing values and beliefs. A more promising strategy might be to stress the good taste of healthful foods” (1126). Interestingly, this is the strategy already adopted by some health-focused cookbooks. I have 66 cookery books in my kitchen. None of ten books s led from the five spaces in which these books are kept had ‘taste’ as an index entry, but three books had ‘taste’ in their titles: The Higher Taste, Taste of Life, and The Taste of Health. All three books seek to promote healthy eating, and they all date from the mid-1980s. It might be that taste is not mentioned in cookbook indexes because it is a sine qua non: a focus upon taste is so necessary and fundamental to a cookbook that it goes without saying. Yet, as the physiological evidence makes clear, what we find palatable is highly mutable, varying between people, and capable of changing significantly in comparatively short periods of time. The good news from the research studies is that the changes wrought by high salt, high sugar, high fat diets need not be permanent. Luciano Rossetti, one of the authors on Wang et al’s paper, told Martindale that the physiological changes are reversible, but added a note of caution: “the fatter a person becomes the more resistant they will be to the effects of leptin and the harder it is to reverse those effects” (27). Morgan Spurlock’s experience also indicates this. In his case it took the actor/director 14 months to lose the 11.1 kg (13 percent of his body mass) that he gained in the 30 days of his fast-food-only experiment. Trivedi was more fortunate, stating that, “After two weeks of going cold turkey, I can report I have successfully kicked my ice cream habit” (41). A reader’s letter in response to Trivedi’s article echoes this observation. She writes that “the best way to stop the craving was to switch to a diet of vegetables, seeds, nuts and fruits with a small amount of fish”, adding that “cravings stopped in just a week or two, and the diet was so effective that I no longer crave junk food even when it is in front of me” (Mackeown). Popular culture indicates a range of alternative ways to resist food manufacturers. In the West, there is a growing emphasis on organic farming methods and produce (Guthman), on sl called Urban Agriculture in the inner cities (Mason and Knowd), on farmers’ markets, where consumers can meet the producers of the food they eat (Guthrie et al.), and on the work of advocates of ‘real’ food, such as Jamie Oliver (Warrin). Food and wine festivals promote gourmet tourism along with an emphasis upon the quality of the food consumed, and consumption as a peak experience (Hall and Sharples), while environmental perspectives prompt awareness of ‘food miles’ (Weber and Matthews), fair trade (Getz and Shreck) and of land degradation, animal suffering, and the inequitable use of resources in the creation of the everyday Western diet (Dare, Costello and Green). The burgeoning of these different approaches has helped to stimulate a commensurate growth in relevant disciplinary fields such as Food Studies (Wessell and Brien). One thing that all these new ways of looking at food and taste have in common is that they are options for people who feel they have the right to choose what and when to eat and to consume the tastes they prefer. This is not true of all groups of people in all countries. Hiding behind the public health c aigns that encourage people to exercise and eat fresh fruit and vegetables are the hidden “social determinants of health: The conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, including the health system” (WHO 45). As the definitions explain, it is the “social determinants of health [that] are mostly responsible for health iniquities” with evidence from all countries around the world demonstrating that “in general, the lower an in idual’s socioeconomic position, the worse his or her health” (WHO 45). For the comparatively disadvantaged, it may not be the taste of fast food that attracts them but the combination of price and convenience. If there is no ready access to cooking facilities, or safe food storage, or if a caregiver is simply too time-poor to plan and prepare meals for a family, junk food becomes a sensible choice and its palatability an added bonus. For those with the education, desire, and opportunity to break free of the taste for salty and sugary fats, however, there are a range of strategies to achieve this. There is a persuasive array of evidence that embracing a plant-based diet confers a multitude of health benefits for the in idual, for the planet and for the animals whose lives and welfare would otherwise be sacrificed to feed us (Green, Costello and Dare). Such a choice does involve losing the taste for foods which make up the lion’s share of the Western diet, but any sense of deprivation only lasts for a short time. The fact is that our sense of taste responds to the stimuli offered. It may be that, notwithstanding the desires of Jamie Oliver and the like, a particular child never will never get to like broccoli, but it is also the case that broccoli tastes differently to me, seven years after becoming a vegan, than it ever did in the years in which I was omnivorous. When people tell me that they would love to adopt a plant-based diet but could not possibly give up cheese, it is difficult to reassure them that the pleasure they get now from that specific cocktail of salty fats will be more than compensated for by the sheer exhilaration of eating crisp, fresh fruits and vegetables in the future. Conclusion For decades, the mass market food industry has tweaked their products to make them hyper-palatable and difficult to resist. They do this through marketing experiments and consumer behaviour research, schooling taste buds and brains to anticipate and relish specific cocktails of sweet fats (cakes, biscuits, chocolate, ice cream) and salty fats (chips, hamburgers, cheese, salted nuts). They add ingredients to make these products stimulate taste buds more effectively, while also producing cheaper items with longer life on the shelves, reducing spoilage and the complexity of storage for retailers. Consumers are trained to like the tastes of these foods. Bitter, sour, and umami receptors are comparatively under-stimulated, with sweet, salty, and fat-based tastes favoured in their place. Western societies pay the price for this learned preference in high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and obesity. Public health advocate Bruce Neal and colleagues, working to reduce added salt in processed foods, note that the food and manufacturing industries can now provide most of the calories that the world needs to survive. “The challenge now”, they argue, “is to have these same industries provide foods that support long and healthy adult lives. And in this regard there remains a very considerable way to go”. If the public were to believe that their sense of taste is mutable and has been distorted for corporate and industrial gain, and if they were to demand greater access to natural foods in their unprocessed state, then that journey towards a healthier future might be far less protracted than these and many other researchers seem to believe. References Bernstein, Adam, and Walter Willett. “Trends in 24-Hr Sodium Excretion in the United States, 1957–2003: A Systematic Review.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 92 (2010): 1172–1180. Bhaktivedanta Book Trust. The Higher Taste: A Guide to Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking and a Karma-Free Diet, over 60 Famous Hare Krishna Recipes. Botany, NSW: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1987. Brinsden, Hannah C., Feng J. He, Katharine H. Jenner, & Graham A. MacGregor. “Surveys of the Salt Content in UK Bread: Progress Made and Further Reductions Possible.” British Medical Journal Open 3.6 (2013). 2 Feb. 2014 ‹ontent/3/6/e002936.full›. Coughlan, Andy. “In Good Taste.” New Scientist 2223 (2000): 11. Dare, Julie, Leesa Costello, and Lelia Green. “Nutritional Narratives: Examining Perspectives on Plant Based Diets in the Context of Dominant Western Discourse”. Proceedings of the 2013 Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Conference. Ed. In Terence Lee, Kathryn Trees, and Renae Desai. Fremantle, Western Australia, 3-5 Jul. 2013. 2 Feb. 2014 ‹onferences ast-conferences/159.html›. Getz, Christy, and Aimee Shreck. “What Organic and Fair Trade Labels Do Not Tell Us: Towards a Place‐Based Understanding of Certification.” International Journal of Consumer Studies 30.5 (2006): 490–501. Glanz, Karen, Michael Basil, Edward Maibach, Jeanne Goldberg, & Dan Snyder. “Why Americans Eat What They Do: Taste, Nutrition, Cost, Convenience, and Weight Control Concerns as Influences on Food Consumption.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 98.10 (1988): 1118–1126. Green, Lelia, Leesa Costello, and Julie Dare. “Veganism, Health Expectancy, and the Communication of Sustainability.” Australian Journal of Communication 37.3 (2010): 87–102 Guthman, Julie. Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California P, 2004 Guthrie, John, Anna Guthrie, Rob Lawson, & Alan Cameron. “Farmers’ Markets: The Small Business Counter-Revolution in Food Production and Retailing.” British Food Journal 108.7 (2006): 560–573. Hall, Colin Michael, and Liz Sharples. Eds. Food and Wine Festivals and Events Around the World: Development, Management and Markets. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2008. Hamzelou, Jessica. “Taste Bud Trickery Needed to Cut Salt Intake.” New Scientist 2799 (2011): 11. Japan Patent Office. History of Industrial Property Rights, Ten Japanese Great Inventors: Kikunae Ikeda: Sodium Glutamate. Tokyo: Japan Patent Office, 2002. L’Abbé, Mary R., S. Stender, C. M. Skeaff, Ghafoorunissa, & M. Tavella. “Approaches to Removing Trans Fats from the Food Supply in Industrialized and Developing Countries.” European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 63 (2009): S50–S67. Lenoir, Magalie, Fuschia Serre, Lauriane Cantin, & Serge H. Ahmed. “Intense Sweetness Surpasses Cocaine Reward.” PLOS One (2007). 2 Feb. 2014 ‹rticle/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000698›. Lupton, Deborah. Fat. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2013. MacGregor, Graham, and Sonia Pombo. “The Amount of Hidden Sugar in Your Diet Might Shock You.” The Conversation 9 January (2014). 2 Feb. 2014 ‹he-amount-of-hidden-sugar-in-your-diet-might-shock-you-21867›. Mackeown, Elizabeth. “Cold Turkey?” [Letter]. New Scientist 2787 (2010): 31. Martindale, Diane. “Burgers on the Brain.” New Scientist 2380 (2003): 26–29. Mason, David, and Ian Knowd. “The Emergence of Urban Agriculture: Sydney, Australia.” The International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 8.1–2 (2010): 62–71. Neal, Bruce, Jacqui Webster, and Sebastien Czernichow. “Sanguine About Salt Reduction.” European Journal of Preventative Cardiology 19.6 (2011): 1324–1325. Nelson, Greg, Jayaram Chandrashekar, Mark A. Hoon, Luxin Feng, Grace Zhao, Nicholas J. P. Ryba, & Charles S. Zuker. “An Amino-Acid Taste Receptor.” Nature 416 (2002): 199–202. O’Callaghan, Tiffany. “Sugar on Trial: What You Really Need to Know.” New Scientist 2954 (2011): 34–39. Rogers, Jenny. Ed. The Taste of Health: The BBC Guide to Healthy Cooking. London, UK: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985. Rogers, Michael A. “Novel Structuring Strategies for Unsaturated Fats—Meeting the Zero-Trans, Zero-Saturated Fat Challenge: A Review.” Food Research International 42.7 August (2009): 747–753. Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. London, UK: Penguin, 2002. Super Size Me. Dir. Morgan Spurlock. Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2004. Stafford, Julie. Taste of Life. Richmond, Vic: Greenhouse Publications Ltd, 1983. Stark, Jill. “Australia Now World’s Fattest Nation.” The Age 20 June (2008). 2 Feb. 2014 ‹www.theage.com.au/news/health/australia-worlds-fattest-nation/2008/06/19/1213770886872.html›. Trivedi, Bijal. “Junkie Food: Tastes That Your Brain Cannot Resist.” New Scientist 2776 (2010): 38–41. Wang, Jiali, Silvana Obici, Kimyata Morgan, Nir Barzilai, Zhaohui Feng, & Luciano Rossetti. “Overfeeding Rapidly Increases Leptin and Insulin Resistance.” Diabetes 50.12 (2001): 2786–2791. Warin, Megan. “Foucault’s Progeny: Jamie Oliver and the Art of Governing Obesity.” Social Theory & Health 9.1 (2011): 24–40. Weber, Christopher L., and H. Scott Matthews. “Food-miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States.” Environmental Science & Technology 42.10 (2008): 3508–3513. Wessell, Adele, and Donna Lee Brien. Eds. Rewriting the Menu: the Cultural Dynamics of Contemporary Food Choices. Special Issue 9, TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Programs October 2010. World Health Organisation. Closing the Gap: Policy into Practice on Social Determinants of Health [Discussion Paper]. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: World Conference on Social Determinants of Health, World Health Organisation, 19–21 October 2011.

Screening Language Acquisition Skills in a Mediated Childhood

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Date: 2021

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-65916-5_8

Narrative Research Methods, Particularly Focused upon Digital Technology Use in Everyday Life

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Date: 2019

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04960-7_4

The Intratourist Gaze: Grey Nomads and ‘Other Tourists’

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 12-2011

DOI: 10.1177/1468797611432043

Abstract: The presence of other tourists is an integral part of the tourist experience. Hence, gazing upon other tourists is an inevitable part of being a tourist. This paper introduces the concept of the intratourist gaze, a tourist gaze where tourists are both the subjects and objects of the gaze. An analysis from ethnographic fieldwork carried out with senior tourists in rural and remote Australia indicates that the intratourist gaze has the potential to be a disciplinary gaze which, in this case, privileges and safeguards the natural environment. This paper explores the important influence other tourists have on tourists’ behaviours and sense of identity. It also contributes to discussion regarding tourist/tourist interactions in the under-explored area of qualitative research into senior tourism.

The parent-child-app learning assemblage: Scaffolding early childhood learning through app use in the family home

Publisher: Unpublished

Date: 2018

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.14973.87520

The creative industries: culture and policy

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Date: 24-10-2013

DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2013.843643

Using Digital Interventions to Engage in the Everyday

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 11-2014

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X1415300109

Abstract: This themed issue of MIA advances our understanding of how digital media are implicated in processes of change. It interrogates how people engage digital media in creative practices that lead to interventions in their own or others' lives, and explores the intentionalities through which they do this, and the processes and experiences such activities involve. The intention is to bring to the fore the idea of intervening as a way of being active in the world – as a scholar, creative practitioner, activist or simply someone living their everyday life in ways that seek to generate forms of change. The articles in this issue address the use of creative interventions for affective and community-constructing ends, examining and highlighting the conscious use of the digital to disrupt and subvert existing patterns in communication and culture, heralding new possibilities while promoting inclusivity and social innovation.

Holding the Line: Responsibility, Digital Citizenship and the Platforms

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Date: 2022

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-95220-4_5

Abstract: This chapter analyses ex les of conflicts in standards that may illustrate the need for digital platforms to adopt a more proactive approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR). It asks what changes platform media would need to make to ‘take responsibility’ in the digital landscape., and undertaken an exploration of existing regulatory approaches and analyses of practice, to propose an enhanced vision of digital corporations’ application of CSR to benefit in iduals and societies. The suggestion is that digital platforms be constructed as publishers of information, requiring them to be accountable for material carried on their sites.

BBC London

Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Edith Cowan University - Mount Lawley Campus

Location: Australia

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Murdoch University

Location: Australia

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University Of Cambridge

Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Perth Institute Of Business And Technology / Cambridge University

Location: Australia

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Charles Sturt University

Location: Australia

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Monash University

Location: Australia

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Edith Cowan University

Location: Australia

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University Of Western Australia

Location: Australia

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MESH: Amalgamating Innovative Teams Of Cross-disciplinary Collaborators For Creativity In Media-arts, E-culture, Science And Humanities

Start Date: 2003

End Date: 2003

Funder: Australian Research Council

European Commission’s Safer Internet Programme, EU Kids Online I, II, III, IV

Start Date: 2006

End Date: 2019

Funder: European Commission

The Internet Of Toys: Benefits And Risks Of Connected Toys For Children

Start Date: Start date not available

End Date: End date not available

Funder: Australian Research Council

AU Kids Online

Start Date: 2009

End Date: 2010

Funder: Australian Research Council - Cetre for Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation

Narratives In Health Communication – A Multi-disciplinary Approach To Strengthen Understanding Of The Roles And Uses Of Narratives In Conveying Health Information And Changing Health Behaviors

Start Date: 2014

End Date: 2017

Funder: European Commission

The Digital Literacy And Multimodal Practice Of Young Children

Start Date: 2015

End Date: 2019

Funder: European Commission - COST - European Cooperation in Science and Technology

Discovery Projects - Grant ID: DP0211751

Start Date: 03-2002

End Date: 03-2005

Amount: $186,189.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP120100685

Start Date: 11-2012

End Date: 12-2016

Amount: $220,000.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Discovery Projects - Grant ID: DP180103922

Start Date: 07-2018

End Date: 12-2022

Amount: $349,700.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP110200020

Start Date: 01-2012

End Date: 12-2015

Amount: $179,982.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP0668220

Start Date: 06-2006

End Date: 06-2012

Amount: $93,950.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Discovery Projects - Grant ID: DP190102435

Start Date: 09-2019

End Date: 12-2023

Amount: $375,000.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Discovery Projects - Grant ID: DP0559707

Start Date: 2005

End Date: 08-2010

Amount: $146,000.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP0990807

Start Date: 07-2010

End Date: 12-2013

Amount: $221,000.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP0775520

Start Date: 05-2007

End Date: 05-2010

Amount: $75,354.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Discovery Projects - Grant ID: DP110100864

Start Date: 07-2011

End Date: 12-2015

Amount: $145,000.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP0453946

Start Date: 02-2004

End Date: 02-2007

Amount: $70,668.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Discovery Projects - Grant ID: DP150104734

Start Date: 06-2015

End Date: 12-2018

Amount: $365,211.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP140100935

Start Date: 12-2014

End Date: 12-2018

Amount: $150,000.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

ARC Centres Of Excellence - Grant ID: CE200100022

Start Date: 02-2021

End Date: 02-2028

Amount: $34,934,592.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Special Research Initiatives - Grant ID: SR0590002

Start Date: 12-2005

End Date: 06-2014

Amount: $12,495,538.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Special Research Initiatives - Grant ID: SR0354753

Start Date: 2004

End Date: 12-2004

Amount: $10,000.00

Funder: Australian Research Council