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 diverse 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 example. 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 an d 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 individual 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 individual, a person’s taste preferences are by no means fixed. There is ample 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 campaign 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 individuals. 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 individual’s response to a mixture of taste, hormonal reactions and physiological changes.     Choosing Health Glanz et al. conclude their study by commenting that “campaigns 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 sampled 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 campaigns 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 individual’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 individual, 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 ‹http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/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 ‹http://www.anzca.net/conferences/past-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. 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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 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/news/health/australia-worlds-fattest-nation/2008/06/19/1213770886872.html›. 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Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: World Conference on Social Determinants of Health, World Health Organisation, 19–21 October 2011.

Abstract: The theme of the 1990s -- for the English-speaking middle-classes in consumer societies -- has been the Internet. The decade started with only a handful of people sensing the potential of online communication, but the following years have been characterised by an exponential growth in awareness as the Internet has established itself as the fastest growing medium in history (Arens 513). Ten years on, and fifty million users later, it's hard to remember that things were ever any different. Nonetheless, some aspects of the initial hesitancy about online are retained in everyday speech. 'Virtual community' is an example of such an anachronism; it harks back to a time of uncertainty. By the time a movement reaches double digits in age -- and the population of a medium-sized country -- it deserves to be taken seriously. For the Internet, and especially for social uses of the Internet, that means it's time to put an end to the virtual community. For those of us interested to read it, there's a wealth of learned opinion about what constitutes 'community'. From the early days, when Baym discussed computer-mediated community in terms of Usenet groups, to her more current work, the theme has been one of comparison: how does online differ from 'real life' (RL)? RL has been established as the standard against which online is measured. When this happened in the 1970s (and for me the 1970s was the decade of second-wave feminism) these 'naming rights' were challenged early on. Who were these people who claimed to have the right to judge -- and how appropriate was the standard they were using? Whose interests are served by judging online against the real? It's clear that the aim is to 'otherise' online, to marginalise it as a site for genuine experience. Let's end the implied discrimination here and now -- from 01/01/2000 (assuming we all survive Y2K), let's work for Online Liberation! Completeness demands that I play the game of comparing online and RL once more, however. As the Internet became 'adopted' (welcomed into some households, smuggled into others), those with a disposable income came to worry about more than Telstra and ISP bills. They began to consider the nature and status of their social contact in the online environment and started to interrogate the quality of the community they found there. There tend to be two big stumbling blocks to recognising online as community. Online participants didn't share geographical space, and they didn't 'really' know each other. As Stone (in Benedickt 82-3) documents, some people on the Internet have been taken in by a middle-aged male psychiatrist who pretended to be a woman. This could be a dreadful problem in RL, but do RL notions of space and identity matter online? More positively, what does online have that RL doesn't? When we turn the focus, and judge RL according to the standards of online -- accepting online at its own value -- we find RL lacking in many desirable features. In RL, for example: Participants are constrained by their age, sex, appearance, class etc; There are geographical limitations; Night tends to be a time for sleep (indeed the concept of night, as such, only pertains to RL); People make negative judgements if you go off in private with someone as soon as they say something interesting. Let's face it, RL's got a lot of drawbacks. Especially for baby boomers who want an acceptable venue to act the age they feel (cusp of thirty). In tandem with RL's drawbacks online offers a number of positive benefits, including: Participants can act the age they feel without looking silly; Ease of access to other people (given access to the technology); The combination of intensity and variety through simultaneous intimate conversations over an extended period of time; and It's a publishing platform for personal opinion (useful if you aren't a Packer or Murdoch). Looking at features which online and RL have in common, we find that the more an individual invests in a community (or any relationship) the more they are likely to benefit from that community. Deposits of social capital work in both locations (but in RL it's harder to draw upon investments at 3.00 am). In both locations people are attracted to others of like mind and interests, and then find their exchanges centre on the exploration of differences. Both settings let us learn about ourselves, but online allows us far more freedom to explore the 'real' person behind the a/s/l (age, sex, location) bounded persona. Online, like RL, has developed its own slang (did that originally mean 'short language'?). On my computer, for example, it's hard to type :), it automatically becomes ;). For the past four months I have been working on a collaborative participant-research project with a group of students whose ages range from 18-43. We have been developing a theory of involvement in online community. The engagement patterns identified now require more investigation with a wider cross-section of Net users and neophytes. It is to be expected that online participation -- as with audience membership -- may reflect 'age and stage' in terms of the nature and intensity of online involvement (notwithstanding the fluidity of a/s/l in cyberspace). Initial impressions from this research with Net users indicates that we judge 'community' according to our level of emotional investment; that online can involve huge emotional investment; and that vulnerability is as relevant to social behaviour online as it is in RL. Keen Netizens also reckon that only academics and people who have never 'lived' online are worried about whether online community 'really exists'. They take it as self-evident that online communities are ... online communities. And as for the concern of many that online seduces teenagers and young adults away from family life (echoes of all those early 'displacement studies' of television viewing in the 1950s), the experience of these participants is that much of family life centres around online. There's full and frank discussion of time spent online -- versus time spent in study -- not to mention phone bills, calls not getting through etc. Nonetheless, it's a pretty tame way to make one's transitional-adult presence felt, compared with a hard drug addiction or a full-face tattoo. And what about the 'dark side' of online -- the porn, the (consensual but wacky) cybersex groups, the MA-rated games, hate sites, gambling and genocide showcases? What about the fifty-something men pretending to be pre-teen girls on the my.chickclick.com chat lines? I rest my case. These are all features of community -- the good, the bad, the ugly and the exploited. Like any self-respecting social system, both RL and online are never manifest in just 'one' community but have members who interact in a number of contexts across a range of interests. Perhaps the fear that RL feels about online (which makes RL keen to label 'online' as 'virtual') centres on the fact that the 'dark side' in online is an illumination of the hidden and the marginalised in RL. We all know what happens with the return of the repressed. (It's larger than life!) The history of media studies shows displacement research, followed by effects research, content and semiotic analysis, the uses and gratifications perspective, and audience and consumption studies ethnography. Episodes of moral panic liberally laced these approaches, driving the research programme and making some funding applications more attractive than others. Online has an open research agenda and huge potential to inform us about ourselves, as well as about the medium and its characteristics. It has already attracted displacement research, and triggered a number of moral panics. Interactivity makes online a far more exciting and challenging venue for research than straightforward consumption studies of mass media. Online communities offer sites of maximum interactivity and social creativeness. They are the natural starting point for the post-Y2K research era. Growing up is learning to judge yourself by your own standards -- and not having to conform to other people's. It tends to start in our second decade and, for the more interesting among us, it never ends. The phrase 'online community' accepts the community within the context of its environment and its communications ecology. Virtual is the name given by others; online is what the community members choose to call themselves. Let's mark the end of the Internet's first decade by paying it the respect it deserves. The virtual is dead! Long live online! The author acknowledges the particular contributions of Russell Carman, Marian Palandri and an anonymous reviewer to this paper. References Arens, W. Contemporary Advertising. 7th ed. US: Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 1999. Baym, N. "The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication." CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks, Cal.: Sage, 1995. 138-63. Benedickt, M. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Lelia Green. "The End of the Virtual Community." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/virtual.php 〉 . Chicago style: Lelia Green, "The End of the Virtual Community," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/virtual.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Lelia Green. (1999) The end of the virtual community. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/virtual.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: Over the past quarter-century 'the self' has been transformed from a relatively esoteric concept of principal interest to philosophers and psychologists to a mainstay of popular culture and critical reflection. This paper addresses some of the themes linking this transition and suggests that the driving impetus behind it is the commodification of ideas as a strategy of coping with change (as well as the packaging and consumption of goods and services which bridge the gap between the less-than-perfect present and the shining future just around the corner). I start with a vivid recollection of some weeks in my undergraduate years worrying about the issue 'Is self-deception possible?' The problem to be solved for a tutorial presentation was, 'If the self is deceived by the self, which part of the self is doing the deceiving?' This conundrum could be handily addressed by reference to the various models of the divided self: the mind/brain model; or the conscious/subconscious model; the id/ego/superego model; the Parent/Adult/Child model (for all those Transactional Analysis aficionados) and, had I been dealing with the same query today, the Adult/Inner Child model. In addition to these theoretical constructions, there was evidence from physiological psychology of the 'split brain' phenomenon, where some unfortunate patients had had the crossover pathways between the two hemispheres of the brain surgically cut, usually as a strategy for dealing with epilepsy. Here it seemed to be literally possible for the right hand to not know what the left hand was doing (but only under strict laboratory conditions where certain information was only available to one hand or the other, or one eye or the other). Essentially, psychological theory had gone to considerable trouble to identify the self as a potential battleground for warring elements: internal 'others' with which the self is composed; in addition to the external influences impacting upon the self. All of these approaches offered a metaphor for conflict, which tied in with the subjective impression of 'the self' wanting things a number of ways; in particular wanting to have the cake, wanting to have a different cake and also wanting to eat all possible varieties of cake. The trouble was, this approach didn't really answer the question 'Is self-deception possible?' because I knew when I felt conflicted, and thus was not deceived. To be truly deceived, I rationalised, I wouldn't ever be aware that self-deception had been in operation. In which case, had it ever really happened? Where internal warring was evident, the idea of 'deception' failed to convince me, and was replaced instead by one of opposing impulses. Thus I decided that self-deception is impossible, and that instead we use it as a more-or-less conscious excuse for behaviour that is out of character. (My tutor was concerned that I had elided the concepts of 'I' and 'myself', in this presentation, but that is another story.) Two decades later, in the mid-nineties, I suddenly woke up to the fact that popular psychology had spawned a library of self-help literature of Alexandrian proportions. In fact, the volume of books, articles, magazines and related TV/radio shows (such as Oprah) -- not to mention the mega-millionaire motivationalists such as Wayne Dyer and Tony Robbins, whose website promises 'resources for creating an extraordinary quality of life' and whose influence is now evident in other areas of popular culture (eg, Farrelly and Farrelly's embarrassingly awful Shallow Hal). Robbins' claim: 'Within you is a powerful driving force that, once unleashed, can make your boldest visions, dreams, and desires real. You are about to discover the finest resources and tools available for awakening that force within you -- and transforming your life, instantly and forever', somewhat overstates my own experience of trying to put his theories into practice, but I've only bought the books and thus may be deceiving myself that I've truly committed what it takes to achieve transformation... (For those of you lacking 'disposable time' -- too busy to read the books -- the principles are often available on easy-to-consume cassette-tapes, videos, CDs and interactive websites.) A visit to any popular bookshop (although these sections are generally lacking in the academic ones) indicates that self-help is right up there with business/motivational books, and with new age/spiritual guidance. The popular culture of business practice might arguablely have started with Blanchard and Johnson's The One Minute Manager, but it is increasingly evident in such global best sellers as Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly EffectivePeople, Gardner and Gardner's The Motley Fool Investment Guide and Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad (and associated spin-offs). This interest in business, however, is more than an interest in practice and process: it's an interest in versions of the self. Thus the Motley Fool reader is advised to 'go against' their instincts, because that way they do something different from the average. Rich Dad, Poor Dad is a fable of different ways to view life, success and happiness (one of which is presented as more likely to result in a humungous bank balance). If it only takes a minute to be a manager -- why wouldn't you spend that minute? And all of us would like to be more effective in some area of our lives… The business books that make it into the best seller lists offer help to transform the self into someone … rather more suited to the times than we were before we started to read that particular guru's take on the future perfect. The impetus for the growth in the popular culture of the evolving self seems to me to be (at least partly) explained by our sense of accelerating change. The constant in both the business and the self-help literature is a valuing of the capacity of managing and adapting to change. It is no accident that there has been this burgeoning of self-development material at the same time that we are encouraged: to prepare ourselves for new careers every seven years; to reclassify ourselves as lifelong learners; to assess ourselves as a collection of 'skills', 'attributes' and 'competencies', able to apply to others for 'recognition of prior learning'; and, to accept a governmental diktat that we are all in the business of 'mutual obligation'. Under these circumstances, and in this environment, a willing engagement with the self-help literature indicates a positive desire to manage the transition of the self to some acceptance of a changed future. It implies the resolution of the five stages of grief (Kubler-Ross). Having worked through denial and isolation; anger; bargaining; and depression the active self-developer reaches 'acceptance' and manages the stress of change by helping the self adjust to an anticipated future. Even the sense of having a strategy to cope with new demands can be part of a solution to perceived powerlessness: helpless leads to hopeless (and depressed). Self-help is a strategy to cope with change and move on. The pressures may be new, and the books may be growing in number and in applicability, but the marketing principles fuelling this consumer demand are well established. For example, an Australianised Consumer Behaviour textbook identifies (Schiffman et al, 137) 'four specific kinds of self-image: Actual self-image (ie how consumers in fact see themselves) Ideal self-image (ie how consumers would like to see themselves) Social self-image (ie how consumers feel others see them) Ideal social self-image (ie how consumers would like others to see them) before going on to add, "a fifth type of self-image, expected self-image (ie how consumers expect to see themselves at some specified future time)" (137, bold in original). Marketers use the gap between the perceived self-image and the ideal self-image as an opportunity for product development, and for creating strategies to promote existing goods and services. In essence, consumer societies continuously package and represent images of our future selves as ways of selling us products that help us become more beautiful, clever and effective. They might also 'reverse the visible signs of aging'. (The realage.com website is a wonderful place where an older self becomes younger as the days pass and the life-extending strategies are adopted, minimising an individual's 'real' -- as opposed to chronological -- age.) Although Schiffman et al (137) argue that the expected self-image is somewhere between the actual self-image and the ideal self-image, most well-founded (credible) expectations of the future-self involve a planned programme of change -- such as enrolment in a course of study or diligent application to the contents and suggestions of an appropriate self-help book… Thus the expected self-image might differ qualitatively from the ideal self-image in that the former may have some basis in an achievable future while the latter might be impossibly unlikely. An individual's social identity and their consumption practices are already well linked. For example, Hearn, Mandeville and Anthony (104) estimate that 'consumption now accounts for about 60 per cent of GDP … mass communication, advertising and the consumer economy form a nexus that is centrally implicated in the operation of Western societies.' They go on to argue that the 'central assertion of postmodern views of consumption is that social identity can be interpreted as a function of consumption' (106). Green suggests that it is 'the voluntary nature of consumption -- together with the impossibility of not consuming -- [that] prevents [consumption] from being categorised unambiguously as work'. The implication is that the self-help literature represents a complex communication. Purchase of a self-help book identifies one version of an ideal self-image for that person, and also allies them with those aspects of popular culture including and touching upon that book and that self-help philosophy. (Even more is communicated if the book is purchased for someone else, or received as a gift from someone else!) The presence of the book on a person's shelves can also indicate a strategy to manipulate perceptions of the individual's social self-image and might express to others an element of the individual's ideal social self-image (moderated, perhaps, by throw-away statements such as: 'Of course, theory is one thing, practice another', or 'I think Carmen may have been dropping a heavy hint with this present'). At the same time, the individual may have a clear impression of the expected self-image likely to result from consumption of the book's contents, and thus the act of consumption is likely to represent the adoption of a particularly individual vision for the future self. The popularity of the self-help genre and its generalisation into lifestyle programmes and publications -- the Martha Stewart effect -- is an indication that the 'present self' is generally categorised as a work in progress. Paradoxically, the self may be most evident and fixed in the act of becoming, since the self in the present undergoes continual change (apart from its constant requirement for 'help'). References Blanchard, Kenneth and Spencer Johnson. The One Minute Manager. New York: Berkley Books, 1983. Covey, Stephen. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic. Melbourne: Business Library, 1989. Dyer, Wayne. http://www.drwaynedyer.com [accessed 25 Aug. 2002] Gardner, David and Tom Gardner. The Motley Fool Investment Guide: How the Fool Beats Wall Street's Wise Men and How You Can Too. New York: Fireside Books, 1997. Green, Lelia. 'The Work of Consumption -- Why Aren't We Paid?' M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture. 4.5 (2001) http://www.media-culture.org.au [accessed 25 Aug. 2002] Hearn, Greg, Tom Mandeville, and David Anthony. The Communication Superhighway: Social and Economic Change in the Digital Age. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. 104-31. Kiyosaki, Richard with Sharon Lechter. Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Thei rKids about Money that the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not! Paradise Valley, Arizona: TechPress Inc, 1997. Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying. London: Tavistock Publications, 1970. realage.com. http://www.realage.com [accessed 25 Aug. 2002] Robbins, Anthony. http://www.tonyrobbins.com [accessed 25 Aug. 2002] - - - . Unlimited Power: The New Science of Personal Achievement. London: Simon & Schuster, 1988. - - - . Awaken the Giant Within. New York: Summit Books, 1991. - - - . Giant Steps. New York: Fireside Books, 1994. - - - . Notes from a Friend. New York, Fireside Books, 1995. Schiffman, Leon, David Bednall, Elizabeth Cowley, Aaron O'Cass, Judith Watson and Leslie Kanuk. Consumer Behaviour. 2nd ed. French's Forest: Pearson Education Australia, 2001. Shallow Hal. Dir. Bobby and Peter Farrelly. 20th Century Fox, 2001. Links http://www.media-culture.org.au http://www.realage.com http://www.tonyrobbins.com http://www.drwaynedyer.com Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Green, Lelia. "Who is Being Helped When We Help Our Self?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] 〈  http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Green2.html  & gt. Chicago Style Green, Lelia, "Who is Being Helped When We Help Our Self?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), 〈  http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Green2.html  & gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Green, Lelia. (2002) Who is Being Helped When We Help Our Self?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). 〈  http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Green2.html  & gt ([your date of access] ).

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 camps.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 individual’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 individual 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 example, 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, Campays 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 divide 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 individuals 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 individuals 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 individual’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 ha d 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. 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Sydney: University of Western Sydney, 2012.Wilson, Michael John, and James Arvanitakis. “The Resilience Complex.” M/C Journal 16.5 (2013). 〈 http://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.

Abstract: Audiences are a contested domain with Ang and others desperate to analyse, anatomise, understand and describe them. They are particularly important for the commercialisation of any medium since advertisers like to know what they are getting for their money and, in the famous aphorism, 'the role of the commercial media is to deliver audiences to advertisers'. Marshall's concept of 'audience-commodity' continues this intellectual interrogation of the audience and its production by individual practices of media consumption. Mass media audiences have consumed much research attention over most of the past century with major consideration being paid to the displacement of other activities arising from the consumption of newly-introduced media, effects of the media and a succession of moral panics. It has only been in recent years that 'the audience' has been researched on (essentially) its own terms -- in the branch of media and culture studies enquiry called, conveniently, 'audience studies'. Well- known Australian examples of such studies often concern children and adolescents and include: Hodge & Tripp, Noble, and Palmer (now Gillard). Audience studies assumes that audience participants are sufficiently insightful and sufficiently cognisant of their various pleasures, desires and frustrations to be able to discuss their media consumption patterns with interested researchers. The paradigm takes as read that people have reasons for their behaviours, and sets out to uncover what these are through (often) a variety of interview and observation techniques. It accords audience membership an importance in people's lives. The nature of the 'general' audience is illuminated by specific comments and examples offered during the research process by specific audience members -- analysed and interpreted by the research team. What is clear from a cursory glance at the literature is that audiences do not talk about 'broadcasting' per se, they talk about specific programs and have a tendency to compare programs with others of the same type. Audiences perceive broadcasting as divided into genred broadcasting streams. Unless asked to do so, an audience member (and I've formally interviewed over two hundred such people) is unlikely to compare Home and Away with the ABC Evening News. Comparisons between Home and Away and Neighbours are commonplace, however. What genre is the Internet? A silly question, I know -- but one that is begged by the repeated discussions of Internet culture, Internet communications and information and Internet communities as 'the Internet'. It's a long time since media studies and popular culture academics have discussed 'broadcasting' generically because concern for the specifics of genred broadcasting (both in television and radio) have rendered generalised discussion ridiculously global and oversimplified. In broadcasting we talk about television and radio as if they were (since they are) significantly different. We recognise that the production values for soap opera, drama, sport, news and current affairs and light entertainment are dissimilar. It's only silly to ask 'what genre is the Internet' because, when we think about it, the Internet is multiply genred. Audiences that consume broadcast programmes can be differentiated from each other in terms of age, gender and socioeconomic status, and in terms of viewing place, viewing style, motivation and preferred programme genres. As Morley indicates in his 1986 treatise, Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, the domestic context is central to the everyday consumption of TV. He argues that "the social dimensions of 'watching television' -- the social relationships within which viewing is performed as an activity -- have to be brought more directly into focus if we are properly to understand television audiences' choices of, and responses to, their viewing" (15). That focus upon social relationships as the domestic context within which television is consumed is the substance of his book. Holmes suggests that much of the appeal of the Internet is a spurious one, viz. by selling "a new kind of community to those who have been disconnected from geographical communities" (35). He claims that society has been divided into a multitude of separate domestic spheres within which television is consumed, creating an isolation which the Internet is marketed as solving. "The Internet offers to the dispossessed the ability to remove some of the walls for brief periods of time in return for a time-charged fee" (35). A key to understanding the domestic consumption of television, however, is an understanding of the specifics of genre, and the pleasures associated with the consumption of the genre. Uses to which the broadcast material is put in daily life in interpersonal settings are essentially related to the broadcast material consumed. Discussion of soaps, and of finance reporting, may both be used to develop interpersonal networks and to display current knowledge, but these discussions are likely to occur in different domestic/work contexts. Have we had enough of generalised discussion of the global Internet? Can we move onto addressing whether it is genred; and if so, in which ways? Faced with the cacophony which is the Internet today -- let alone the projected manifestation of the Internet tomorrow -- we are forced to conclude that the Internet has the potential to mimic the features of all the media and genres that have preceded it, and more. It can operate as a mass medium, as a niche medium, and as one-to-one discrete communication -- Dayan's 'particularistic' media (103-13). Within all these categories it can (or has the potential to) work in audio, visual, audiovisual, text and data. On top of this complexity, it offers a variety of degrees of interactivity from simple access to full content creation as part of the communication exchange. You thought Media Studies was big? Watch out for the disciplinary field of Internet Studies! The concept of the active audience has been a staple of audience studies theory for a generation. Here the activity recognised in the 'active' audience is one of the audience actively engaging with programme content -- resisting, reformulating and recirculating the messages and meanings on offer. This is a different level of interactivity compared with that implicit in some aspects of the Internet (online community, for example). Internet interactivity recognises that the text is produced as part of the act of consumption. Have the audience activity characteristics of online community members been sufficiently differentiated from -- say -- the activity of accessing Encyclopaedia Britannica online? Are online community members more of a 'www.participants' than an 'audience'; should we see audiences as genred too? Television audiences (as my anonymous reviewer has helpfully remarked) are typically constituted via essentialising experiences' "generally domestic/familial setting, generally in the context of other activities, generally ritualised in terms of the serialisation of these experiences etc." We know that this is the case from detailed investigations into the consumption of television. Less is known about the experience of online participation, although Wilbur discusses "the strangely solitary work that many CMC [computer-mediated communications] researchers are engaged in, sitting alone at their computers, but surrounded by a global multitude" (6). He goes on to suggest seven definitions of 'virtual community' before concluding that the "multi-bladed, critical Swiss army knives" might offer an appropriate metaphor for the many uses of the Internet. 'Participation' in this culture is similarly hard to define, and (given that it is so individual and spatially private) expressive of individual difference. "For those who doubt the possibility of online intimacy, I can only speak of ... hours sitting at my keyboard with tears streaming down my face, or convulsed with laughter" (Wilbur 18). I wait for the ethnographic research before I venture further into definitions of 'www.participants'. Online community, I would argue, is a specifically genred stream of Internet activity. Further, it is particularly interesting to audience researchers because it has no clear precursor in the audiences and readerships of the traditional mass media. Holmes (32) has usefully differentiated between 'Communities of broadcast' (using the generic term, to offer an exception to the rule!) and 'Communities of interactivity', but he does so to highlight difference -- not to argue great similarity. The community of interest brought into being by the shared consumption and social circulation of elements of broadcast programming differs from the community of interactivity made visible through online community membership -- and both differ from Anderson's notion of the imagined community. Online communit ies are particularly problematic for audience studies theorists because the audience is the content producer. There is no content apart from the interactions and creativity of community members, and the contributions of new/casual online participants. For sites where 'hits' are enumerated, the simple act of access is also content production, and creates value and interest for others. Clearly the research is yet to be done in these areas. If we are to theorise cogently and in depth about people's activities and production/consumption patterns on the Internet, we need to identify genres and investigate specific audience/community members. Interactions with online community members suggest that age may offer a critical nexus of audience/participant distinction (Palandri & Green). Community members of 35+ have had to deliberately choose to learn the conventions of Internet interaction. They have experienced specific motivations. In affluent societies such as ours, on the other hand, for many people under 20, the required Internet skills and competencies have been normalised as part of an everyday social repertoire, in the same way that almost all of us have learned the conventions of television viewing. An understanding of the specifics of difference, and of congruence, will make discussions of Internet audiences/participants/content providers/community members that much more useful. Such research has an added frisson. I started this article with an acknowledgement of Ang's book Desperately Seeking the Audience. The research to be undertaken in the Internet genre of online community includes the need to seek desperately for the audience; the individual audience member; and (in many cases) the individual audience member's multiple identities -- each of which offers specific and different value to the researched community member. Identity is a key issue for Internet researchers, and a signal difference between communities of broadcast and communities of interactivity. As Holmes has usefully pointed out: "broadcast facilitates mass recognition ... with little reciprocity while the Internet facilitates reciprocity with little or no recognition" (31). We need to acknowledge, recognise and explore these differences in the next generation of audience studies research. References Anderson, B. Imagined Communities. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991. Ang, I. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge, 1991. Dayan, D. "Particularistic Media and Diasporic Communications." Media, Ritual and Identity. Eds T. Liebes and J. Curran. London: Routledge, 1998. 103-13. Hodge, B., and D. Tripp. Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986. Holmes, D. "Virtual Identity: Communities of Broadcast, Communities of Interactivity." Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace. Ed. D. Holmes. London: Sage, 1997. 26-45. Morley, D. Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure. London: Routledge, 1986. Noble, G. Children in Front of the Small Screen. London: Constable, 1975. Palandri, M., and L. Green. "Image Management in a Bondage, Discipline, Sadomasochist Subculture: A Cyber-Ethnographic Study." CyberPsychology and Behavior. USA: Mary Ann Liebert, forthcoming. 〈 http://www.liebertpub.com/cpb/default.htm 〉 . Palmer, P. Girls and Television. Sydney: NSW Ministry of Education, 1986. ---. The Lively Audience: A Study of Children around the TV Set. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986. Wilbur, S.P. "An Archaeology of Cyberspaces: Virtuality, Community, Identity." Internet Culture. Ed. D. Porter. New York: Routledge, 1997. 5- 22. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Lelia Green. "Relating to Internet 'Audiences'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/internet.php 〉 . Chicago style: Lelia Green, "Relating to Internet 'Audiences'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/internet.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Lelia Green. (2000) Relating to Internet 'Audiences'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/internet.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: Russell Belk,in an amazing 1995 essay on consumption (where 22 of the 38 pages are references, demonstrating hyper-consumption in action), argues that the 1990s heralded a new understanding of consumer behaviour. In the shifting paradigm identified by Belk, the analytical focus of consumer behaviour research became translated from 'Economic/Psychological' to 'Sociological/Anthropological', and from a 'Focus on buying' to a 'Focus on consuming' (61). This made intuitive sense in a world of postmodern marketing (Brown), and it re-enforced an idea that had been put forward by Dallas Smythe that audiences are sold to advertisers . The value of an audience lies in its potential to consume, and Virginia Nightingale subsequently explored this dynamic in her argument that consumption is work: "It is because of the relationship between advertising and television that watching television is work. Watching television is a leisure activity in the pursuit of which viewers are asked to lose themselves, to blur the distinctions between reality and fantasy. They are asked to forget that watching television is also work, to see television advertisements not as a continual reminder of the work of purchasing, but as entertainment. They are asked to believe that what they see on television is what they want to see, specially selected to please them." (33-4) Nightingale had previously argued that consumption in the domestic context was not only work, but quintessentially women'swork: Commercial television is an integral part of the modern shopping world. In this age of image advertising, it is from television that the meanings of brands are learned. If women learned to shop in the nineteenth century, they had to be taught to shop for others in the twentieth. The unpredictable woman of the nineteenth century had to be transformed into predictable, programmable 'Mum' one hundred years later. The branding of food commodities and the establishment of television as an efficient system of brand information assisted a change in the mode of address of the shopping world to women purchasers. In the cut-price world of the 50s and 60s seduction was out and value was in. In a shopping world of comparable brands, Mum has to learn not only the meaning, the lifestyle connotations of branded products from television advertising, but their meanings for the members of the family destined to consume her purchases (33). This way of looking at the world although illuminating begged the question as to an appropriate definition of work. Why did watching television seem so much less like work than, say, typing an article, or working as a waiter? Staying alive breathing, metabolising requires work at some level; what differentiates the 'going to work' side of working: and how does this relate to a consumer society which (as Belk identifies) increasingly involves an emphasis upon consumption rather than production? Greg Hearn, Tom Mandeville and David Anthony estimate that "consumption now accounts for about 60 per cent of GDP ... mass communication, advertising and the consumer economy form a nexus that is centrally implicated in the operation of Western societies" (104). They go on to argue that the "central assertion of postmodern views of consumption is that social identity can be interpreted as a function of consumption" (106). Citing Lunt and Livingstone, Hearn et al. suggest that "fuelled by their ability to modify and process the building blocks of identity (images, visual codes, phrases and ideas), our current mass media, via identity construction, have expanded consumption in advanced industrial societies" (107). Identity construction, however, is a given of existence it is impossible to live without some kind of identity, and impossible to adopt an identity in a vacuum, with no relationship to the social world in which the individual lives. Given that identity-construction is a necessity of existence, and will also necessarily reflect an individual's social practices and their consumption characteristics, can it be seen as 'work'? (And, if not, why not?) One way this problem can be investigated is through changes in work patterns in contemporary societies. Among the most dramatic socio-economic developments of the past two generations has been the changing role of women in the workforce. Some women still in employment are members of the generation which, as recently as the 1960s, were obliged to surrender their jobs upon marriage. Many were subsequently re-employed on a casual basis, but others were unable to resume a career of any sort given that they now had 'family responsibilities' (even if that 'family responsibility' was their spouse alone). The reason behind the compulsory female resignations was the patriarchal view that it was the husband's role to provide financially for his wife. For a married woman to hold a job was akin to double dipping the job was there to support a woman who had no husband to support her; or for a man with a wife (and sometimes other family) to provide for. When women successfully campaigned against this discriminatory practice, and later in favour of equal pay for equal work, the ultimate result was that the real wages of men fell. Two-income families do not earn twice a 'living' wage; they earn a living wage between them. The advent of equal pay for women means that only a small proportion of women (or men) have the choice of making domestic and community-based unwaged labour the focus of their daily life, without the effect of this choice being a much smaller financial engagement in consumer society. The gender dimension to money-earning remains considerable, even in this age of equal opportunity legislation. In particular, the 'wages for housework' campaign has been all but lost over the past thirty years. Further, although it is now unlawful for women to receive less money than their male counterparts for equal work, women's average pay continues to lag significantly behind that of men (WEL). This is one way of demonstrating that traditional women's work tends to be less well paid than men's work. Nursing, teaching and office work all remain low-paid compared with executive occupations, although compulsory post-schooling study requirements might be higher in the female areas. And it is commonplace to note that in traditionally female occupations (like primary school teaching) although males might be out-numbered 5:1 it tends to be a man who gets promoted. (Less a case of the glass ceiling: more a case of the invisible escalator.) In capitalist societies, the original source of monetary wealth lies in power the power to control labour/work for the profit of an individual other than the labourer. This is a hangover from feudal agrarianism, and a precursor to the information age (Bell). In all human society, power confers advantage, including the capacity to direct the work of others. While this was true of the feudal lord, the merchant prince and the early industrialist, it achieved its purest form with the introduction of monetary rewards for labour. Frederic Jameson (77) comments that: "technology may well serve as adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labour stored up in our machinery, an alienated power, what Sartre calls the counterfinality of the practico-inert, which turns back on and against us in unrecognizable forms and seems to constitute the massive dystopian horizon of our collective as well as our individual praxis." What Jameson says of technology in general would be equally true of the particular technology of money. Accumulated capital, and its constituent parts of coins, notes, currencies and data sets represents 'dead human labour', in the sense of work expended in the past in the production of goods and services. It is this stored human labour which buys the carrots, or the magazine subscription, and which represents an exchange for the time and energy that would have been required to grow the carrots, or produce the magazine. Similarly, the income paid to the carrot-grower, the journalist, the designer and the advertiser represents to them a distilled recompense for their work. Arguably, the energy that produced the labour for which one is paid is 'dead' energy controlled by another and exchanged for money. At an individual level, the roles played in the personaeof a person earning money, or a person spending money (a common indication of consumption) are very different: with the role of the person earning money much more circumscribed. Joshua Meyrowitz (29-31) spends some time in explaining Goffman's analysis of the roles of the waiter, using metaphors from drama of front/back region/stage: Waiters for example are in a front region when they serve people in a restaurant dining room. In the front region waiters are usually polite and respectful. Their appearance and manner is one of cleanliness and efficiency. They do not enter into the dinner conversations of restaurant patrons. They do not comment on their customers' eating habits or table manners. They rarely, if ever, eat while in the sight of patrons. When waiters step from the dining room into the kitchen, however, they suddenly cross a line between the onstage and backstage areas. In the kitchen waiters are in an area which is hidden from the audience and they share this area with others who perform the same or similar roles vis-a-vis the audience. Here, then, waiters may make remarks to each other about the 'strange behaviour of the people at table seven', they may imitate a customer, or give advice to a 'rookie' on methods of getting big tips. In the kitchen food may be handled and discussed with somewhat less respect than in the dining room, and waiters may 'get out of costume' or sit in a sloppy position with their feet up on a counter... We expect to be treated differently in a restaurant than in a doctor's office. We expect the doctor to appear confident, concerned, patient and professional and slightly superior. We expect a waitress to be efficient, respectful and nonintrusive. And we demand these differences in 'character' even if the waitress is a student earning her way through medical school. This analysis indicates that where behaviour is related to money where a person is paid to fulfil a role; the production of the goods or services the behaviour is more constrained and circumscribed by the expectations of the employer/consumer. The behaviour of people who are paying for a service, whose intention is to consume, is the least constrained. It may be that Kerry Packer has awful table manners, but few restauranteurs would fail to be pleased to see him walking through their door. At the level of the individual producer/consumer in consumer societies, money is seen to exert decisive control in the lives of workers. Is it possible to think of a better, less obviously coercive way to get people into cars, and onto freeways and clocking into the office on such a regular, reliable basis: other than their being paid to do so? American academic Camille Paglia does not think so: "Capitalism, whatever its problems, remains the most efficient economic mechanism yet devised to bring the highest quality of life to the greatest number... Because I have studied the past, I know that, in America and under capitalism, I am the freest woman in history" (Menand 27). Paglia obviously considers herself sufficiently well paid. Since access to money limits access to goods, to some experiences and to travel, money is a potent incentive to behave in a way that is rewarded by society. Even so, not everyone is able to exhibit the work behaviour that social systems are most inclined to reward. The stresses of unemployment lie in its curtailing of options; in its implications for health, housing, leisure, and educational opportunities; and in the fact that the need to get more money monopolises the time of the unemployed. The old adage 'time is money' is only partly true. In some respects the two share an inverse relationship: 'free' time is inversely related to money. For the vast majority of the population, the opportunity to convert work/labour into money significantly limits the time available in which to enjoy consuming the rewards for their labours. When people have 'free' time, it is frequently because the opportunity to earn money by the production of goods and services is absent. Consequently possible consumption activities are also severely limited. There are no hard and fast rules in Jameson's late capitalist society, but the general case might be that we are paid to produce goods, services and information through our controlled work, while consumption is generally constructed as a voluntary activity. It is partly that voluntariness which implicates consumption in identity construction, makes it an expression of individual difference, and renders it potentially pleasurable. Arguably, however, the voluntary nature of consumption together with the impossibility of notconsuming prevents it from being categorised unambiguously as 'work'. The relationship of work to money helps explain why it may be work to watch television, but it's a different kind of work from that performed at the Coles check-out. Identity-construction may be a major consumer project using raw materials provided by the mass media, but it is not work we're paid to do. No-one else is prepared to use their stored labour to recompense us for our everyday work as non-professional television viewers, or for our project of self-individuation as expressed through the production of our personal identity. References Belk, Russell. "Studies in the New Consumer Behaviour." Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies. Ed. D. Miller. London: Routledge, 1995. 58-95. Bell, Daniel. The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society. Rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Brown, Stephen. Postmodern Marketing. London: Routledge, 1995. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Hearn, Greg, Tom Mandeville and David Anthony. The Communication Superhighway: Social and Economic Change in the Digital Age. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left Review146 (1984): 53-92. Lunt, Peter, and Sonia Livingstone. Mass Consumption and Personal Identity: Everyday Economic Experience. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1992. Menand, Louis. "Sexual Politics with Snap, Crackle and Pure Paglian Pop." The Australian3 Feb. 1993: 27. Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Nightingale, Virginia. "Women as Audiences." Television and Women's Culture: The Politics of the Popular. Ed. M.-E. Brown. Sydney: Currency Press, 1990. 25-36. Smythe, Dallas. Dependency Road. New Jersey: Ablex, 1981. WEL. 12 Nov. 2001 〈 http://www.wel.org.au/policy/00pol1.htm 〉 . Links http://www.wlu.ca/~wwwpress/jrls/cjc/BackIssues/17.4/melody.html http://www.onemoreweb.com/soapbox/paglia.html http://www.wel.org.au/policy/00pol1.htm http://www.business.utah.edu/~mktrwb/ http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/jameson/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia. "The Work of Consumption: Why Aren't We Paid?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Green.xml 〉 . Chicago Style Green, Lelia, "The Work of Consumption: Why Aren't We Paid?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), 〈 http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Green.xml 〉 ([your date of access]). APA Style Green, Lelia. (2001) The Work of Consumption: Why Aren't We Paid?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). 〈 http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Green.xml 〉 ([your date of access]).

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 examples 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 diverse 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 diverse 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 example, 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 example 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 individual 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) example 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 t heir 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 individually 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 examples 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. 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Abstract: This paper addresses that natural consort of love: sex. It particularly considers the absence of actual sex from mainstream popular culture and the marginalisation of 'fun' sex as porn, requiring its illicit circulation as ‘illegitimate’ videos. The absence of sex from films classified and screened in public venues (even to over-18s) prevents a discourse about actual sex informing the discourse of love and romance perpetuated through Hollywood movies. The value of a variety of representations of sexual practice in the context of a discussion of love, sex and romance in Western cinema was briefly illuminated for the few days that Baise-moi was legitimately screened in Australia. For all that love is one of the great universal themes, Western cinema tends to communicate this ‘finer feeling’ through recourse to romance narratives. Which is not to say that romantic representations of love are devoid of sex, just that that the cinematic convention is to indicate sex, without showing it. Indeed, without the actors 'doing it'. The peculiarity of this situation is not usually clear, however, because there is so little mainstream sex-cinema with which to compare the anodyne gyrations of romantic Hollywood. Which was where Baise-moi came in, briefly. Baise-moi is variously translated for English-speaking cinema audiences as 'Fuck me' (in Australia) and 'Rape me' (in the US, where, astonishingly, Rape me is seen as a less objectionable title than Fuck me.) Of the two titles, Fuck me is by far the cleverer and more authentically related to the meaning and content, whereas Rape me is a travesty, particularly given the shocking power of an extremely graphic and violent rape scene which initiates much of the succeeding violence. An early appeal by the Australian Attorney-General (to the Review Board) against the Office of Film and Literature Classification’s granting of an R rating meant that Baise-moi was hastily removed from Australian cinemas. The movie is, however, heavily reviewed on the web and readers are referred to commentaries such as those by Gary Morris and Frank Vigorito. The grounds on which Classification was refused were given as ‘strong depictions of violence’, ‘sexual violence’, ‘frequent, actual detailed sex scenes’ and ‘scenes which demean both women and men’. Violence, sexual violence and ‘scenes which demean’ are hardly uncommon in films (although it may be unusual that these demean even-handedly). If the amount of violence is nothing new, the sex was certainly different from the usual cinematic fare. Although this was not the first time that ‘unsimulated’ sex had been shown on the art-house big screen, the other major examples were not entirely similar. Romance was wordy, arguably feminist, and a long way from mindless sex-because-they-like-it. Intimacy 's ‘sex scenes are explicit but totally non pornographic, they’re painful, needy, unsatisfying except on an orgasmic level’, according to Margaret Pomeranz, who reviewed the film for SBS. Baise-moi is different because, as Vigorito says, ‘please make no mistake that the two main characters in this film, the so-called French Thelma and Louise, certainly do want to fuck’. (They also like to kill.) Baise-moi is often characterised as a quasi-feminist revenge movie where the two protagonists Manu (a porn star) and Nadine (a sex worker) seek revenge with (according to Morris) ‘ultimately more nihilism than party-hearty here, with the non-stop killings laid squarely at the doorstep of a society that’s dehumanized its citizens’. While the brutality depicted is mind-blowing (sometimes literally/visually) it is the sex that got the film banned, but not until after some 50,000 Australians had seen it. The elements that separate Baise-moi from Intimacy and Romance (apart from the extreme violence) is that the characters have (heterosexual) sex with a variety of partners, and sometimes do so just for fun. Further, although the Office of Film and Literature Classification ‘considers that the film has significant artistic and cultural merit’ (OFLC), one of the directors wrote the novel on which the film is based while the other director and the two stars are former porn industry workers. If Baise-moi had been accepted as cinema-worthy, where would the sex-on-the-screen factor have stopped for future classification of films? The popular culture approach to romance, love and sex moves comparatively smoothly from the first kiss to the rumpled sheets. Although the plot of a romantic film may consist in keeping the love and sex activities apart, the love is (almost invariably) requited. And, as films such as Notting Hill demonstrate, true love these days is communicated less frequently through the willingness of a couple to have sex (which generally goes without saying), and more often through commitment to the having and rearing of a shared child (whereas off-screen this may more usually be the commitment of a shared mortgage). Sex, in short, is popularly positioned as a precursor to love; as not entirely necessary (and certainly not sufficient) but very usually associated with the state of 'being in love'. It is comparatively rare to see any hesitation to engage in sex on the part of a film-portrayed loving couple, other than hurdles introduced through the intervention of outside forces. A rare example of thinking and talking before fucking is The Other Sister , but this means it rates as an R in the States because of ‘thematic elements involving sex-related material’. In contrast, the film Notting Hill, where the characters played by Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant hardly pause for breath once attraction is established, rates a PG-13 (‘for sexual content and brief strong language’). Thus it is all right for producers to have sex in a storyline, but any hesitation, or discussion, makes the film unsuited to younger audiences. Given that characters’ thinking about sex, and talking about sex, as part of (or preliminary to) having sex apparently increases the age at which the audience is allowed to see the film, perhaps it should not be surprising that actually showing sex about which the audience can then think and talk is almost entirely banned. Yet for a culture that associates sex so strongly with love, and celebrates love so thoroughly in film, television and literature (not to mention popular magazines such as Woman's Day, New Idea, New Weekly and Who), to be occasionally challenged by a film that includes actual sex acts seems not unreasonable, particularly when restricted to audiences of consenting adults. Ian McEwan's debut collection of short stories, First love, last rites explores this conundrum of 'the sex that shall only be acted, never performed' in a short story, 'Cocker at the theatre' (McEwan 57). The tale is about a theatrical production where the actors are new, and nude, and the theme of the play is copulation. It is a story of its time, mid-seventies, the resonating-hippie Age of Aquarius, when Hair still rocked. McEwan's naked couples are assembled by the play's director and then pressed together to begin the rhythmic moves required to complement the thumping musical score of GTC: ‘Grand Time Copulation’. The male and female actors are not near enough to each other, so they are spliced closer together: ‘When they began to move again their pubic hair rasped’ (57-8). The director is unimpressed by the result: ‘I know it's hard, but you have to look as if you're enjoying this thing.' (His voice rose.) 'Some people do, you know. It's a fuck, you understand, not a funeral.' (His voice sank.) 'Let's have it again, with some enthusiasm this time.' However, all is not entirely well, after a good second beginning. ‘Them on the end, they're going too fast, what do you think?' [says the director to the stage manager] They watched together. It was true, the two who had been moving well, they were a little out of time ... 'My God,' said [the director] 'They're fucking … It's disgusting and obscene … pull them apart.' (58-9). The issue raised here, as in the case of the removal of any classification from Baise-moi that effectively prevented further public screenings, is the double standard of a society that expends so much of its critical and cultural energies in exploring the nature of love, romance and sexual attraction but balks (horrified) at the representation of actual sex. Yet one of the values of a cinematic replay of 'unsimulated sex' is that it acts as a ‘reality check’ for all the mushy renditions of romance that form the mainstream representation of 'love' on-screen. So, if we want to see sex, should we not simply consume pornography? In modern-day Australia it is impossible to discuss depictions of live sex without conjuring up connotations of ‘porn’. Porn, however, is not usually consumed in a manner or place that allows it to interrogate media messages from mainstream production houses and distributors. Watching porn, for example at home on video, removes it from a context in which it could realistically prompt a re-evaluation of the visual diet of love and sex Hollywood-style, an opportunity that was provided by Baise-moi during its temporary season. The comparative absence of on-screen sexual activity means that there is an absence of texts through which we can interrogate mainstream representations of lovemaking. Whereas the Eros Foundation aims to promote debate leading to ‘logical perspectives on sex and rational law reform of the sex industry’, and avoids using the term 'pornography' on its home page, it is hard to find any representations of unsimulated sex that are not classified as porn and consequently easily pigeon-holed as 'not relevant' to cultural debate except in general terms regarding (say) 'censorship' or 'the portrayal of women'. It is hard to know what Baise-moi might have said to Australian audiences about the relationship between sex, authenticity (Morris uses the term ‘trashy integrity’) and popular culture since the film was screened for only the briefest of intervals, and throughout that time the ‘hype’ surrounding it distracted audiences from any discussion other than would it/wouldn't it, and should it/shouldn't it, be banned. Hopefully, a future Attorney-General will allow the adults in this country to enjoy the same range of popular cultural inputs available to citizens in more liberal nations, and back the initial (liberal) decision of the OFLC. And what has love got to do with all this? Not much it seems, although doesn't popular culture ‘teach’ that one of the main uses for a love theme is to provide an excuse for some gratuitous sex? Perhaps, after all, it is time to cut to the chase and allow sex to be screened as a popular culture genre in its own right, without needing the excuse of a gratuitous love story. Works Cited McEwan, Ian. First love, last rites. London: Picador, 1975. 56-60. Morris, Gary. “Baise-moi. Feminist screed or fetish-fuckathon? Best to flip a coin.” Lip Magazine 2001. http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/revi... OFLC. Classification Review Board News release, 10 May 2002. http://www.oflc.gov.au/PDFs/RBBaiseMoi.pdf Pomeranz, Margaret. “Intimacy.” The Movie Show: Reviews. http://www.sbs.com.au/movieshow/reviews.... Vigorito, Frank. “Natural porn killers.” Offoffofffilm 2001. http://www.offoffoff.com/film/2001/baise... Filmography Baise-moi. Dirs. Virginie Despentes and CoRalie Trinh Thi. Dist. Film Fixx, 2000. Intimacy. Dir. Patrice Chereau. Dist. Palace Films, 2001. Notting Hill. Dir. Roger Michell. Dist. Universal Pictures, 1999. Romance. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Dist. Potential Films, 1999. The other sister. Dir. Gary Marshall. Dist. Touchstone Pictures, 1999. Links http://www.offoffoff.com/film/2001/baisemoi.php3 http://www.eros.com.au http://film.guardian.co.uk/censorship/news/0,11729,713540,00.html http://www.sbs.com.au/movieshow/reviews.php3?id=838 http://www.michaelbutler.com/hair http://www.oflc.gov.au/PDFs/RBBaiseMoi.pdf http://www.movie-source.com/no/othersister.shtml http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/revimorris_128.shtml Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Green, Lelia. "Sex" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year 〈 http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/sex.php 〉 . APA Style Green, L., (2002, Nov 20). Sex. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/sex.html

Abstract: In its preamble, The Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism (WA) commits the state to becoming: “A society in which respect for mutual difference is accompanied by equality of opportunity within a framework of democratic citizenship”. One of the principles of multiculturalism, as enunciated in the Charter, is “equality of opportunity for all members of society to achieve their full potential in a free and democratic society where every individual is equal before and under the law”. An important element of this principle is the “equality of opportunity … to achieve … full potential”. The implication here is that those who start from a position of disadvantage when it comes to achieving that potential deserve more than ‘equal’ treatment. Implicitly, equality can be achieved only through the recognition of and response to differential needs and according to the likelihood of achieving full potential. This is encapsulated in Kymlicka’s argument that neutrality is “hopelessly inadequate once we look at the diversity of cultural membership which exists in contemporary liberal democracies” (903). Yet such a potential commitment to differential support might seem unequal to some, where equality is constructed as the same or equal treatment regardless of differing circumstances. Until the past half-century or more, this problematic has been a hotly-contested element of the struggle for Civil Rights for African-Americans in the United States, especially as these rights related to educational opportunity during the years of racial segregation. For some, providing resources to achieve equal outcomes (rather than be committed to equal inputs) may appear to undermine the very ethos of liberal democracy. In Australia, this perspective has been the central argument of Pauline Hanson and her supporters who denounce programs designed as measures to achieve equality for specific disadvantaged groups; including Indigenous Australians and humanitarian refugees. Nevertheless, equality for all on all grounds of legally-accepted difference: gender, race, age, family status, sexual orientation, political conviction, to name a few; is often held as the hallmark of progressive liberal societies such as Australia. In the matter of religious freedoms the situation seems much less complex. All that is required for religious equality, it seems, is to define religion as a private matter – carried out, as it were, between consenting parties away from the public sphere. This necessitates, effectively, the separation of state and religion. This separation of religious belief from the apparatus of the state is referred to as ‘secularism’ and it tends to be regarded as a cornerstone of a liberal democracy, given the general assumption that secularism is a necessary precursor to equal treatment of and respect for different religious beliefs, and the association of secularism with the Western project of the Enlightenment when liberty, equality and science replaced religion and superstition. By this token, western nations committed to equality are also committed to being liberal, democratic and secular in nature; and it is a matter of state indifference as to which religious faith a citizen embraces – Wiccan, Christian, Judaism, etc – if any. Historically, and arguably more so in the past decade, the terms ‘democratic’, ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘equal’ have all been used to inscribe characteristics of the collective ‘West’. Individuals and states whom the West ascribe as ‘other’ are therefore either or all of: not democratic; not liberal; or not secular – and failing any one of these characteristics (for any country other than Britain, with its parliamentary-established Church of England, headed by the Queen as Supreme Governor) means that that country certainly does not espouse equality. The West and the ‘Other’ in Popular Discourse The constructed polarisation between the free, secular and democratic West that values equality; and the oppressive ‘other’ that perpetuates theocracies, religious discrimination and – at the ultimate – human rights abuses, is a common theme in much of the West’s media and popular discourse on Islam. The same themes are also applied in some measure to Muslims in Australia, in particular to constructions of the rights of Muslim women in Australia. Typically, Muslim women’s dress is deemed by some secular Australians to be a symbol of religious subjugation, rather than of free choice. Arguably, this polemic has come to the fore since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. However, as Aly and Walker note, the comparisons between the West and the ‘other’ are historically constructed and inherited (Said) and have tended latterly to focus western attention on the role and status of Muslim women as evidence of the West’s progression comparative to its antithesis, Eastern oppression. An examination of studies of the United States media coverage of the September 11 attacks, and the ensuing ‘war on terror’, reveals some common media constructions around good versus evil. There is no equal status between these. Good must necessarily triumph. In the media coverage, the evil ‘other’ is Islamic terrorism, personified by Osama bin Laden. Part of the justification for the war on terror is a perception that the West, as a force for good in this world, must battle evil and protect freedom and democracy (Erjavec and Volcic): to do otherwise is to allow the terror of the ‘other’ to seep into western lives. The war on terror becomes the defence of the west, and hence the defence of equality and freedom. A commitment to equality entails a defeat of all things constructed as denying the rights of people to be equal. Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux and Garland analysed the range of discourses evident in Time and Newsweek magazines in the five weeks following September 11 and found that journalists replicated themes of national identity present in the communication strategies of US leaders and elites. The political and media response to the threat of the evil ‘other’ is to create a monolithic appeal to liberal values which are constructed as being a monopoly of the ‘free’ West. A brief look at just a few instances of public communication by US political leaders confirms Hutcheson et al.’s contention that the official construction of the 2001 attacks invoked discourses of good and evil reminiscent of the Cold War. In reference to the actions of the four teams of plane hijackers, US president George W Bush opened his Address to the Nation on the evening of September 11: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). After enjoining Americans to recite Psalm 23 in prayer for the victims and their families, President Bush ended his address with a clear message of national unity and a further reference to the battle between good and evil: “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). In his address to the joint houses of Congress shortly after September 11, President Bush implicated not just the United States in this fight against evil, but the entire international community stating: “This is the world’s fight. This is civilisation’s fight” (cited by Brown 295). Addressing the California Business Association a month later, in October 2001, Bush reiterated the notion of the United States as the leading nation in the moral fight against evil, and identified this as a possible reason for the attack: “This great state is known for its diversity – people of all races, all religions, and all nationalities. They’ve come here to live a better life, to find freedom, to live in peace and security, with tolerance and with justice. When the terrorists attacked America, this is what they attacked”. While the US media framed the events of September 11 as an attack on the values of democracy and liberalism as these are embodied in US democratic traditions, work by scholars analysing the Australian media’s representation of the attacks suggested that this perspective was echoed and internationalised for an Australian audience. Green asserts that global media coverage of the attacks positioned the global audience, including Australians, as ‘American’. The localisation of the discourses of patriotism and national identity for Australian audiences has mainly been attributed to the media’s use of the good versus evil frame that constructed the West as good, virtuous and moral and invited Australian audiences to subscribe to this argument as members of a shared Western democratic identity (Osuri and Banerjee). Further, where the ‘we’ are defenders of justice, equality and the rule of law; the opposing ‘others’ are necessarily barbaric. Secularism and the Muslim Diaspora Secularism is a historically laden term that has been harnessed to symbolise the emancipation of social life from the forced imposition of religious doctrine. The struggle between the essentially voluntary and private demands of religion, and the enjoyment of a public social life distinct from religious obligations, is historically entrenched in the cultural identities of many modern Western societies (Dallmayr). The concept of religious freedom in the West has evolved into a principle based on the bifurcation of life into the objective public sphere and the subjective private sphere within which individuals are free to practice their religion of choice (Yousif), or no religion at all. Secularism, then, is contingent on the maintenance of a separation between the public (religion-free) and the private or non- public (which may include religion). The debate regarding the feasibility or lack thereof of maintaining this separation has been a matter of concern for democratic theorists for some time, and has been made somewhat more complicated with the growing presence of religious diasporas in liberal democratic states (Charney). In fact, secularism is often cited as a precondition for the existence of religious pluralism. By removing religion from the public domain of the state, religious freedom, in so far as it constitutes the ability of an individual to freely choose which religion, if any, to practice, is deemed to be ensured. However, as Yousif notes, the Western conception of religious freedom is based on a narrow notion of religion as a personal matter, possibly a private emotional response to the idea of God, separate from the rational aspects of life which reside in the public domain. Arguably, religion is conceived of as recognising (or creating) a supernatural dimension to life that involves faith and belief, and the suspension of rational thought. This Western notion of religion as separate from the state, dividing the private from the public sphere, is constructed as a necessary basis for the liberal democratic commitment to secularism, and the notional equality of all religions, or none. Rawls questioned how people with conflicting political views and ideologies can freely endorse a common political regime in secular nations. The answer, he posits, lies in the conception of justice as a mechanism to regulate society independently of plural (and often opposing) religious or political conceptions. Thus, secularism can be constructed as an indicator of pluralism and justice; and political reason becomes the “common currency of debate in a pluralist society” (Charney 7). A corollary of this is that religious minorities must learn to use the language of political reason to represent and articulate their views and opinions in the public context, especially when talking with non-religious others. This imposes a need for religious minorities to support their views and opinions with political reason that appeals to the community at large as citizens, and not just to members of the minority religion concerned. The common ground becomes one of secularism, in which all speakers are deemed to be indifferent as to the (private) claims of religion upon believers. Minority religious groups, such as fundamentalist Mormons, invoke secular language of moral tolerance and civil rights to be acknowledged by the state, and to carry out their door-to-door ‘information’ evangelisation/campaigns. Right wing fundamentalist Christian groups and Catholics opposed to abortion couch their views in terms of an extension of the secular right to life, and in terms of the human rights and civil liberties of the yet-to-be-born. In doing this, these religious groups express an acceptance of the plurality of the liberal state and engage in debates in the public sphere through the language of political values and political principles of the liberal democratic state. The same principles do not apply within their own associations and communities where the language of the private religious realm prevails, and indeed is expected. This embracing of a political rhetoric for discussions of religion in the public sphere presents a dilemma for the Muslim diaspora in liberal democratic states. For many Muslims, religion is a complete way of life, incapable of compartmentalisation. The narrow Western concept of religious expression as a private matter is somewhat alien to Muslims who are either unable or unwilling to separate their religious needs from their needs as citizens of the nation state. Problems become apparent when religious needs challenge what seems to be publicly acceptable, and conflicts occur between what the state perceives to be matters of rational state interest and what Muslims perceive to be matters of religious identity. Muslim women’s groups in Western Australia for example have for some years discussed the desirability of a Sharia divorce court which would enable Muslims to obtain divorces according to Islamic law. It should be noted here that not all Muslims agree with the need for such a court and many – probably a majority – are satisfied with the existing processes that allow Muslim men and women to obtain a divorce through the Australian family court. For some Muslims however, this secular process does not satisfy their religious needs and it is perceived as having an adverse impact on their ability to adhere to their faith. A similar situation pertains to divorced Catholics who, according to a strict interpretation of their doctrine, are unable to take the Eucharist if they form a subsequent relationship (even if married according to the state), unless their prior marriage has been annulled by the Catholic Church or their previous partner has died. Whereas divorce is considered by the state as a public and legal concern, for some Muslims and others it is undeniably a religious matter. The suggestion by the Anglican Communion’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law regarding marital disputes or financial matters is ultimately unavoidable, sparked controversy in Britain and in Australia. Attempts by some Australian Muslim scholars to elaborate on Dr Williams’s suggestions, such as an article by Anisa Buckley in The Herald Sun (Buckley), drew responses that, typically, called for Muslims to ‘go home’. A common theme in these responses is that proponents of Sharia law (and Islam in general) do not share a commitment to the Australian values of freedom and equality. The following excerpts from the online pages of Herald Sun Readers’ Comments (Herald Sun) demonstrate this perception: “These people come to Australia for freedoms they have never experienced before and to escape repression which is generally brought about by such ‘laws’ as Sharia! How very dare they even think that this would be an option. Go home if you want such a regime. Such an insult to want to come over to this country on our very goodwill and our humanity and want to change our systems and ways. Simply, No!” Posted 1:58am February 12, 2008 “Under our English derived common law statutes, the law is supposed to protect an individual’s rights to life, liberty and property. That is the basis of democracy in Australia and most other western nations. Sharia law does not adequately share these philosophies and principles, thus it is incompatible with our system of law.” Posted 12:55am February 11, 2008 “Incorporating religious laws in the secular legal system is just plain wrong. No fundamentalist religion (Islam in particular) is compatible with a liberal-democracy.” Posted 2:23pm February 10, 2008 “It should not be allowed in Australia the Muslims come her for a better life and we give them that opportunity but they still believe in covering them selfs why do they even come to Australia for when they don’t follow owe [our] rules but if we went to there [their] country we have to cover owe selfs [sic]” Posted 11:28am February 10, 2008 Conflicts similar to this one – over any overt or non-private religious practice in Australia – may also be observed in public debates concerning the wearing of traditional Islamic dress; the slaughter of animals for consumption; Islamic burial rites, and other religious practices which cannot be confined to the private realm. Such conflicts highlight the inability of the rational liberal approach to solve all controversies arising from religious traditions that enjoin a broader world view than merely private spirituality. In order to adhere to the liberal reduction of religion to the private sphere, Muslims in the West must negotiate some religious practices that are constructed as being at odds with the rational state and practice a form of Islam that is consistent with secularism. At the extreme, this Western-acceptable form is what the Australian government has termed ‘moderate Islam’. The implication here is that, for the state, ‘non-moderate I slam’ – Islam that pervades the public realm – is just a descriptor away from ‘extreme’. The divide between Christianity and Islam has been historically played out in European Christendom as a refusal to recognise Islam as a world religion, preferring instead to classify it according to race or ethnicity: a Moorish tendency, perhaps. The secular state prefers to engage with Muslims as an ethnic, linguistic or cultural group or groups (Yousif). Thus, in order to engage with the state as political citizens, Muslims must find ways to present their needs that meet the expectations of the state – ways that do not use their religious identity as a frame of reference. They can do this by utilizing the language of political reason in the public domain or by framing their needs, views and opinions exclusively in terms of their ethnic or cultural identity with no reference to their shared faith. Neither option is ideal, or indeed even viable. This is partly because many Muslims find it difficult if not impossible to separate their religious needs from their needs as political citizens; and also because the prevailing perception of Muslims in the media and public arena is constructed on the basis of an understanding of Islam as a religion that conflicts with the values of liberal democracy. In the media and public arena, little consideration is given to the vast differences that exist among Muslims in Australia, not only in terms of ethnicity and culture, but also in terms of practice and doctrine (Shia or Sunni). The dominant construction of Muslims in the Australian popular media is of religious purists committed to annihilating liberal, secular governments and replacing them with anti-modernist theocratic regimes (Brasted). It becomes a talking point for some, for example, to realise that there are international campaigns to recognise Gay Muslims’ rights within their faith (ABC) (in the same way that there are campaigns to recognise Gay Christians as full members of their churches and denominations and equally able to hold high office, as followers of the Anglican Communion will appreciate). Secularism, Preference and Equality Modood asserts that the extent to which a minority religious community can fully participate in the public and political life of the secular nation state is contingent on the extent to which religion is the primary marker of identity. “It may well be the case therefore that if a faith is the primary identity of any community then that community cannot fully identify with and participate in a polity to the extent that it privileges a rival faith. Or privileges secularism” (60). Modood is not saying here that Islam has to be privileged in order for Muslims to participate fully in the polity; but that no other religion, nor secularism, should be so privileged. None should be first, or last, among equals. For such a situation to occur, Islam would have to be equally acceptable both with other religions and with secularism. Following a 2006 address by the former treasurer (and self-avowed Christian) Peter Costello to the Sydney Institute, in which Costello suggested that people who feel a dual claim from both Islamic law and Australian law should be stripped of their citizenship (Costello), the former Prime Minister, John Howard, affirmed what he considers to be Australia’s primary identity when he stated that ‘Australia’s core set of values flowed from its Anglo Saxon identity’ and that any one who did not embrace those values should not be allowed into the country (Humphries). The (then) Prime Minister’s statement is an unequivocal assertion of the privileged position of the Anglo Saxon tradition in Australia, a tradition with which many Muslims and others in Australia find it difficult to identify. Conclusion Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia, partly because it is perceived that their faith is under attack and that it needs defending (Aly). They construct the defence of their faith as a choice and an obligation; but also as a right that they have under Australian law as equal citizens in a secular state (Aly and Green). Australian Muslims who have no difficulty in reconciling their core Australianness with their deep faith take it as a responsibility to live their lives in ways that model the reconciliation of each identity – civil and religious – with the other. In this respect, the political call to Australian Muslims to embrace a ‘moderate Islam’, where this is seen as an Islam without a public or political dimension, is constructed as treating their faith as less than equal. Religious identity is generally deemed to have no place in the liberal democratic model, particularly where that religion is constructed to be at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy, namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. Indeed, it is as if the national commitment to secularism rules as out-of-bounds any identity that is grounded in religion, giving precedence instead to accepting and negotiating cultural and ethnic differences. Religion becomes a taboo topic in these terms, an affront against secularism and the values of the Enlightenment that include liberty and equality. In these circumstances, it is not the case that all religions are equally ignored in a secular framework. What is the case is that the secular framework has been constructed as a way of ‘privatising’ one religion, Christianity; leaving others – including Islam – as having nowhere to go. Islam thus becomes constructed as less than equal since it appears that, unlike Christians, Muslims are not willing to play the secular game. In fact, Muslims are puzzling over how they can play the secular game, and why they should play the secular game, given that – as is the case with Christians – they see no contradiction in performing ‘good Muslim’ and ‘good Australian’, if given an equal chance to embrace both. Acknowledgements This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. 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Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001. 206-28.Brown, Chris. “Narratives of Religion, Civilization and Modernity.” Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order. Eds. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 293-324. Buckley, Anisa. “Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Sunday Herald Sun 10 Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008 〈 http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,231869735000117,00.html 〉 .Bush, George. W. “President Outlines War Effort: Remarks by the President at the California Business Association Breakfast.” California Business Association 2001. 17 April 2007 〈 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011017-15.html 〉 .———. “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”. Washington, 2001. 17 April 2007 〈 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html 〉 .Charney, Evan. “Political Liberalism, Deliberative Democracy, and the Public Sphere.” The American Political Science Review 92.1 (1998): 97- 111.Costello, Peter. “Worth Promoting, Worth Defending: Australian Citizenship, What It Means and How to Nurture It.” Address to the Sydney Institute, 23 February 2006. 24 Apr. 2008 〈 http://www.treasurer.gov.au/DisplayDocs.aspx?doc=speeches/2006/004.htm & pageID=05 & min=phc & Year=2006 & DocType=1 〉 .Dallmayr, Fred. “Rethinking Secularism.” The Review of Politics 61.4 (1999): 715-36.Erjavec, Karmen, and Zala Volcic. “‘War on Terrorism’ as Discursive Battleground: Serbian Recontextualisation of G. W. Bush’s Discourse.” Discourse and Society 18 (2007): 123- 37.Green, Lelia. “Did the World Really Change on 9/11?” Australian Journal of Communication 29.2 (2002): 1-14.Herald Sun. “Readers’ Comments: Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Herald Sun Online Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008. 〈 http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/comments/0,22023,23186973-5000117,00.html 〉 .Humphries, David. “Live Here, Be Australian.” The Sydney Morning Herald 25 Feb. 2006, 1 ed.Hutcheson, John S., David Domke, Andre Billeaudeaux, and Philip Garland. “U.S. National Identity, Political Elites, and Patriotic Press Following September 11.” Political Communication 21.1 (2004): 27-50.Kymlicka, Will. “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality.” Ethics 99.4 (1989): 883-905.Modood, Tariq. “Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship.” The Political Quarterly (1994): 53-74.Osuri, Goldie, and Subhabrata B. Banerjee. “White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being in Australia.” Social Semiotics 14.2 (2004): 151- 71.Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971.Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books 1978.Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism. WA: Government of Western Australia, Nov. 2004. 11 March 2008 〈 http://www.equalopportunity.wa.gov.au/pdf/wa_charter_multiculturalism.pdf 〉 .Yousif, Ahmad. “Islam, Minorities and Religious Freedom: A Challenge to Modern Theory of Pluralism.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 20.1 (2000): 30-43.

Abstract: “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they are not out to get you.” (unattributed, multiply-claimed)“What does it matter what the crackpots believe? It matters to the extent that others come to believe them.” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan)If the notion of being at home in one’s country is safe and reassuring, the homeland and the heartland of what we judge important, then the thought that a country needs its own homeland security is destined to create a sense of unease. Australia’s homeland security unit was set up in May 2003 (Riley), just weeks after the allies’ Coalition of the Willing had celebrated George W Bush’s declaration aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, of ‘Victory in Iraq’ (BBC). It might have been expected, in this victorious glow, that the country would feel confidently able to return to a state of security. Apparently however – if paradoxically – it is only necessary to set up a department of Homeland Security when a country feels insecure. In a country of insecurity – and the dimensions of that insecurity were to be researched and teased out over the months and years to come – there are likely to be some people who feel more or less secure. What might the reasons be for people to feel fearful in their own country?The discourse of terrorism has created and revealed significant divisions in Australian society, apparently unequalled since the Vietnam draft (if the size of the public protests before the 2003 Iraq War, and the polarisation of opinion since, is a gauge). At a time when the ‘imagined nation’ (Anderson) becomes more conflicted and less accessible as a result of such division and fear, a number of publications have concentrated upon the impacts of this changed national environment on Australia’s Muslim communities. Some commentators have identified threats to the conception of Australia as a welcoming country which embraces a multi-cultural vision of itself (Poynting and Noble; Manning ‘Arabic and Muslim people in Sydney’s daily newspapers’). Clearly, in all this insecurity, the discourse of terrorism has directly impacted upon Australian perceptions of Australian others – and Australian constructions of Australian others – as well as upon perceptions of those others beyond the country’s borders.While attention has been paid elsewhere (Aly and Green ‘Moderate Islam’) to the binary perspectives of audience members who fear Bush’s global policies, and audience members who fear the actions and motives of the non-Western other (typically the ‘Islamic fundamentalist’); further narratives of country, belonging and security are also circulating. These stories may have less purchase in popular discourse simply because there is no ‘news hook’ upon which to hang them – or paradoxically as we discuss below, the news is ‘old news’ and is thus not considered newsworthy or dramatic enough. However, when researchers become aware of such discourses it becomes important to ask why some stories are hidden from view. Specifically, this paper pays attention to the fact that a national survey of levels of fear, comparing broader community Australians with Australian Muslims, found unexpectedly that the group which recorded the highest fear levels of all was the small number of people identifying themselves as Australian Jews. While the finding was from a sample of only 7 respondents, and while a cell size such as this is in line with acceptable statistical expectations for a sample of 573 (see below), another 63 people identifying as Jewish voluntarily contacted the research team when they heard about the survey, with the aim of expressing their views. A further eighteen people, expressing extreme anti-Semitic sentiments, also voluntarily contacted the team. Thus of the 92 public callers to Mark Balnaves, the Chief Investigator who was the contact point for responses to the survey, 81 constructed Jewishness and Jewish identity as a relevant prompt for their comment.    In terms of the original project, 750 people were interviewed over the telephone and agreed to complete a survey assessing their levels of fear. The survey is reported elsewhere (Aly and Balnaves ‘They want us to be afraid’; Aly, Balnaves and Chalon). Of these 750 respondents, Australian Muslims were disproportionately sampled with 177 respondents identifying themselves in this way (although only 105 interviewees actually gave their faith as Islamic indicating that a significant proportion might have been secular, or non-practicing, Australian Muslims). This community was over-represented in order to obtain a statistically robust sample for analysing discourses of terrorism and the other. Thus the respondents who did not identify as Islamic represented 573 interviewees, and the 7 Jewish respondents constituted over 1% of these, which – given a proportion of secular and non-religious Jews – may tie in with the 0.4% of 2006 Census respondents giving their religion as Jewish (ABS). These small Jewish Census numbers have to be read with caution. It is not unusual for respondents to censuses who are fearful of possibly unpredictable futures to not disclose their religious or cultural affiliation.  Nonetheless, this is clearly not a statistically-significant sample. It was to avoid such small numbers that the survey had been set up to over-sample Muslim respondents in terms of their proportional representation in the Australian population.The proportion of respondents to the fear survey identifying with major religious groupings was:Religion (Question 5) FrequencyPercentValid PercentCumulative PercentChristian46662.162.162.1Buddhist131.71.763.9Islamic10514.014.077.9Jewish7.9.978.8Other - specify374.94.983.7None11815.715.799.5Refused4.5.5100.0Total750100.0100.0 While it was not self-evident prior to undertaking this research that Australian Muslims would necessarily present as more fearful than broader community Australians, this is in fact what happened. The results from Australian Jews and the overwhelmingly Jewish-focussed public responses to the survey, however, were totally unexpected by the researchers – none of whom is Jewish. Green and Balnaves invited Bloustien, a cultural anthropologist, to join them in interrogating these issues around Jewish-ness in Australia. The authors started by exploring several related questions in this preliminary paper: firstly, whether these findings might be representative of a generalisable outcome and, if so, the factors which might explain it. Secondly, why these findings had been so unexpected to the researchers in a study of Australian community perceptions of fear: what clues might have been overlooked and why? Thirdly, how could we start to unravel the complex emotion of fear and understand what it means for different citizens and communities in contemporary Australia?  As indicated above, the majority of the 92 calls from Perth and interstate, enquiring about the survey while it was being conducted and when it had a high news profile, were from Jewish (63) and overtly anti-Semitic (18) members of the community.  The latter were from those who insisted that it was the Jewish population that was responsible for the terror started on 9/11, thus tapping into one of the many conspiracy theories that circulate in the electronic and digital media:In addition to causing massive loss of life, the attacks spawned a host of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that implicated the Jews and Israel in the bloodshed. As it turns out, those canards were not fleeting expressions of paranoid fantasy that dissipated once they were debunked. On the contrary, nearly five years later, the various ‘Jews-did-it’ scenarios emanating from the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have proven stubbornly resilient. ‘If anything, they’re flourishing,’ says Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a liberal think tank based in Somerville, Mass. (Greenberg) The callers to the University would not have had to look very far to find what they took to be ‘documentary proof’ offered for Jewish perfidy. Anti-Semitic websites offer ‘evidence’ for a range of theories, including that there was an international Jewish conspiracy, with identified United States Senators as part of the conspiracy. Barkun argues that these anti-Semitic explanations represent a “closed system of ideas that is structured so that it is impossible to disprove” (Barkun; Pipes ‘Conspiracy’, ‘Hidden hand’). The 81 Jewish-related calls from the community noted above do not count as a statistically representative probability sample of any defined sampling frame.  However, they highlight the fact that Jewish communities are a section of the Australian population who, historically, have an interest in shifts in public opinion that lead to social isolation. The first enquiry to Mark Balnaves following national publicity about the survey was from an elderly Australian Jewish Perth resident. He had heard about the survey from friends and was concerned that public opinion in Australia was turning against those who were perceived as different. His comment was “We are next!”Although the kinds of fears expressed by members of Australia’s Muslim communities have been discussed elsewhere (Exploding media myths), part of the genesis of that fear is located in the inability of some communities to see their experiences and perceptions reflected in mainstream media coverage. According to Noelle-Neumann (‘Spiral of silence’, ‘Turbulences’), people who think they represent a minority view tend to keep quiet in public debates, whereas those who think they represent a majority point of view tend to make their views known. As most public debates are mass mediated (and are rarely conducted in solely interpersonal contexts in modern societies), most people have no way of finding out what the majority’s thoughts are other than relying on news coverage and public opinion polls. People make judgements about whether they are in the majority or a minority concerning a specific issue and if they think they are in the minority, and the issue is important to them, they will often keep silent for fear of social isolation. Public opinion polls, interestingly, cannot for the most part pick up the spiral of silence because people are responding to their perceptions of what the majority think, or against the questions the pollster has put (Altheide; Fletcher; Foyle).With the departure of the Howard Government ‘fear’ is not simply ‘old news’. The elderly Jewish caller, afraid that his community was in trouble, may not be part of a ‘representative statistical sample’ but he certainly represents himself, as the other callers represented themselves. The fear survey was designed to elicit a fairly quick overview against a summative scale of people’s sense of fearfulness within the community. In truth, the results should – in a country like Australia – show almost no-one perceiving themselves as fearful of living in our society.Why might Jewish people particularly feel so fearful in their own country? In a rush to respond to changing perceptions of Australian Muslims in the aftermath of the Tampa incident (August 2001) and the 9/11 attacks on the US, studies such as Dunn and Mahtani’s (‘Media representations of ethnic minorities’) indicated that more than two-thirds of those surveyed believed that humanity could be sorted into natural categories of race, with the majority feeling that Australia was “weakened” by people of different ethnic origins. While race, ethnicity and religion are all highly significant in terms of being different dimensions of an individual’s identity, the indication from responses of those with particular religious affiliations, such as Jewish and Muslim Australians, is that when levels of fear increase, levels of security decrease. People who feel a ‘sense of otherness’ in these processes unite behind the identity which feels to them in most need of protecting (Aly and Green, ‘Less than equal’). The impact is that the highly diverse ethnicities which might otherwise characterise Australian Muslims (with some 64 ethnicities and language groups [Lewis and Hassan] ) are seen as less relevant in terms of an individual’s identity than their over-arching cultural identification as Muslim. So while studies of Australian fearfulness have understandably raised concerns over an ‘Atmosfear of Terror’ (Aly and Balnaves) among Australian Muslims, little attention has been paid to the effects of polarisation of the sense of home and country upon minority Australian communities not identifying with Islam. This finding that (a very small sample of) Australian Jewish respondents registered highly on the fear scale ties in with the discomforts indicated by Dunn and Mahtani’s study, and a possibly generalised concern with the sense of a nation polarising around factors of ethnicity, culture and religion (rather than taking these for granted as everyday differences). In this respect it might be said that Australian Jews were equally concerned, along with Australian Muslims, but this is not necessarily so, and was certainly not what was indicated in the public responses to Mark Balnaves. The disproportionate response to the survey findings indicated that Australian Jews were highly concerned: possibly because the discussions were only in terms of Australian Muslims. Even though the media and commentary predominantly focused on Muslim identities, it seemed to be the case that people identifying with Judaism felt equally – or, possibly, even more – isolated than Muslims did.Accounting for the High Level of Fear Amongst Jewish AustraliansQuestions raised by the unexpected results and reactions to the survey are only surprising if one considers that the majority of people in Australian should feel safe, and that there is no reason for them to feel otherwise. That is, it is making an assumption that once people come to Australia they (can) leave behind their cultural backgrounds and align their fears and perceptions with those held by the majority.  While many Jewish Australians are involved, very active, well-established and indeed celebrated members of their communities and professions, history has taught Jewish communities, possibly more than any other, that circumstances can alter rapidly. However well Jewish people considered they were assimilated, the past has shown that political climates can change – and in doing so can change that sense of security and sense of belonging over night. Even in democracies, public opinion can become suddenly negative and translate itself into legislation and repressive laws. Already in Australia the government lists Muslims it likes as ‘moderate Muslims’, with pointers as to how this should be identified (Aly and Green, ‘Moderate Islam’). In Nazi Germany the legislation defined what constituted ‘Aryan’, while what was considered ‘Jewish’ was first defined then persecuted through harassment, torture and death (Friedlander 158). When particular communities experience such labelling inter-generationally and first hand, and suffer its outcomes, it is not surprising that many do not readily experience or express a secure sense of belonging, in old or new countries. When considering the reasons for the high levels of fear expressed by the Jewish respondents and the later voluntary callers who identified as Jewish, it is relevant to acknowledge the ongoing existence and impact of anti-Semitism. Indeed, clear evidence of such anti-Semitism was also offered in the form of the 18 anti-Semitic calls made to Mark Balnaves by people who saw Jews and Jewish influences as being behind the 9/11 atrocities. We can address the impacts of anti-Semitism under two main headings: a) Self-perception: historical experience and contemporary experience;b) Framing as outsiders and labelling by others: discourses of difference. Self-Perception: Historical ExperienceMany if not most of the Jewish population in Australia – perhaps including the elderly caller whose comment is contained in the title of this paper – would be living survivors of (or descendents of) the Holocaust; or refugees from pogroms in other countries post Second World War. Persecution of Jewish populations did not start with Nazi Germany, nor did it stop at the end of the Second World War. In fact, some of the worst state-sanctioned examples of Jewish persecution occurred in Europe after 1945 (Geller; Stephen Roth Institute). UN Watch, a non-governmental organization based in Geneva and partly funded by US Jewish organisations, whose mandate is to monitor the performance of the United Nations, published a November 2007 report on the overall inaction (and indeed sometimes the complicity) of the UN on issues of anti-Semitism (UN Watch report). With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the wane of Communism’s influence more generally, anti-Semitism in Europe has increased. This is partly because authoritarian Communist regimes tended to keep expressions of extreme nationalism and religious fervour in check (Urban).While Jewish individuals and communities come to Australia believing that they have the opportunity for religious and cultural freedom in a welcoming and democratic country, previous experience has taught many to be wary. For some, anxiety is never far away, and is re-confirmed even in Australian daily life. For example, in the Stephen Roth Institute report on Australia, 765 reports of anti-Jewish violence, vandalism, harassment and intimidation were logged in 2007, represented the highest total since national record-keeping began in 1989. Such anti-Semitism does not seem to be restricted to right-wing groups as the report indicates: Although the many small groups that comprise the Australian far left often make declarations critical of racism in all its forms, demonization of Israel is a common thread and the extremes of language used to condemn Zionism and Israel promote a mythology of a powerful, evil Jewish ‘internationalism’, almost indistinguishable from that depicted by the far right.Whether such ‘demonization’ is straight-forwardly anti-Semitism – or whether it constitutes a more nuanced contribution to a wider anti-Imperialism (and sometimes anti-US) discourse which tends to oppose Israeli and Zionist policies with regards to Palestine – is not the issue here. It raises anxiety among Australian Jewish communities that becomes particularly acute when public discourses reiterating old stereotypes and exclusionary ideologies circulate through the media and the public sphere. Recent calls by the Anti-Defamation Commission for the Victorian police to tackle more robustly verbal and physical anti-Semitic attacks, were rejected on the grounds that the police believed the accounts of anti-Semitic attacks were exaggerated “to justify greater taxpayer-funded security measures,” the implication being that if the Jewish community wanted greater security they should pay for it themselves (Kerbaj).  Self-Perception: Contemporary Experience The notion of Jewish communities being under threat is not solely a perception, but the result of repeated direct experiences. These direct experiences are in the form of documented physical attacks on individuals and organisations (as recorded by The Stephen Roth Institute, for example). Individual high profile members of Jewish communities receive death threats; grave sites are vandalised, and buildings such as schools and synagogues are fire-bombed. Following the failure of the Oslo Accords (signed in 1993), the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada (2000) and then the attacks on the US on September 11 2001, violence aimed at Jewish people and property increased – in Australia and around the world:In September 2000, the synagogue in Rosco Street in Bondi was attacked by arson while anti-Israel graffiti was daubed on the Illawarra Synagogue in Sydney’s South. The Canberra Jewish centre was fire-bombed four times between September 2001 and September 2002. Individual Jews, particularly men wearing skullcaps, were physically attacked, while community leaders received death threats. Violence and Jew-hatred manifested themselves in the pro-Palestinian rallies of 2000 and 2001, with the burning of Israeli and US flags. Such outbursts created fear and anxiety amongst Australian Jewry and the wider community. (Rutland) Attacks do not have to be physical to have the effect of raising anxiety in a smaller community and creating a sense of exclusion from the broader community. On 6 April 2002, an open letter was published in the The Guardian (Guardian, ‘More pressure for Mid-East peace’). It called for a international boycott of all cultural and research links with Israel until the Israeli government was prepared to open “serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians, along the lines proposed in many peace plans including most recently that sponsored by the Saudis and the Arab League.” That call was echoed in Australia, with a number of high profile Australian academics also calling for boycotts. These resolutions are part of an ongoing series which Julius and Dershowitz describe as “an act of violence, thoug h of a paradoxical kind – one of recoil and expulsion rather than assault.” Jewish Diasporic IdentitiesAs with almost every cultural group apart from those living in their traditional lands, communities which identify as Jewish regard themselves as belonging to a (global) diaspora. That is, Australian (local) members of the Jewish diaspora consider they are “living away from the geographical region identified as the heartland of [their] cultural tradition” (Green 130). While Australia’s Jewish community may feel themselves to be more or less well integrated within their host nation, the notion of diaspora functions as a discourse to construct the diasporic nation in ways analogous to Anderson’s imagined community. Given (as we have suggested earlier) that people who perceive themselves as being ‘othered’ may band together to protect the identity which feels most threatened, it may not be surprising that some Australian Jews indicate an attenuated sense of security.   Friedman argues that “the processes that create the context in which identity is practiced constitute a global arena of potential identity formation” (117). Here he foregrounds the work of the individual subject in drawing upon a range of influences to construct personal histories which inform the practices of the self. Processes involved in identity formation include such socially-constructed parameters as age, gender, class, ethnicity, cultural context, sexual orientation and religious affiliation. Dayan argues that the construction of a diasporic identity balances discourses generated within the global diasporic community with those produced elsewhere – including discourses emanating from the local (‘host’) country which may be more or less positive. Identity creation is an ongoing individual activity which produces the individual subject through the negotiation of the range of alternative discourses. Some aspects of available discursive identities will be appropriated while others will be confronted or rejected. Within these contexts, people can be seen to practice a range of identities. Dayan highlights the work of what he terms “particularistic media” in constituting a “micro public sphere” (103) which include physical and symbolic elements and understandings circulating among participants. These constructed understandings integrate the global identity in the context of a shared past. To such media can be added everyday practices – such as those of cooking and eating – and rite of passage rituals marking birth, coming of age, marriage and death. Relevant elements of material and social culture include newsletters, icons, photographs, travel, worship, meetings and greetings and web-based interactions – often consumed in a local context. The aim of particularistic media in a diasporic community, argues Dayan, “is not to create new identities but to prevent the death of existing ones” (110). In an environment where difference has been made problematic, engagement with such media and participation in such practices may increase the tension between the global and the local; and between the diaspora and the host nation of which they are a part and in which they live. This is not to presume the homogeneity of the Australian population, nor the uniformity of Australian Jews (who also form part of the culturally diverse wider Australia) – but it does indicate that both host and diaspora construct those who are ‘othered’ as engaging in specific practices through which the community may be identified. These practices include what Dayan refers to as the ‘rediscovery’ or ‘reinvention’ of tradition. They integrate the historic and global Jewish community over time and across space – differentiating that community from some dominant traditions of the local, Australian nation.   Framing as Outsiders and Labelling by Others: Discourses of Difference Possibly one of the greatest reasons for Australian Jewish communities’ sense of unease and sense of being outsiders is the framing and labelling that occurs in popular discourses circulated in the media. Regular accounts of assumed Jewish political  ‘influence’ and wealth have the effect of creating a fictionalised homogenised (caricaturised) Jewish identity at the expense of the real Australian citizen who also happens to be Jewish. While the possession of influence and wealth is undoubtedly true for many Australians from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds, the kind of libels to which Jewish Australians are subjected include the circulation of published virulent anti-Semitic literature (for example ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a forgery that claims to describe a secret Jewish conspiracy for world domination which is still promoted  and offered as evidence supporting anti-Semitism in many countries today: Jacobs and Weitzman). The lack of knowledge by the wider Australian community about the diversity and nature of Jewish culture, and perceived misunderstandings about Israeli society, impact on how Jewish Australian citizens can feel ‘othered’ in their everyday social encounters. Most non-Jewish Australians do not realise the breadth of ethnic backgrounds that are incorporated under the umbrella of Jewish culture. Across Australia, while Jewish communities frequently self-identify as coming from Ashkenazi (originally German speaking) or Sephardic (originally Spanish speaking) backgrounds, these definitions themselves fail to record the diversity of communities from Hungary, Poland, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, Italy, North Africa, Turkey, Asia Minor, the Netherlands, England, North and South America, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, India, the US, Israel and more recently arrived Ethiopian Jewry, as well as those people who through intermarriage and conversion originate from far East Asia. Within these mixed populations are communities which identify with particular religious traditions such as Hassidic, Orthodox, Progressive, Reform, Re-constructionist and also those who consider themselves secular but who still identify with Jewish culture and tradition. As demonstrated in the research with Australian Muslims (Aly and Green, ‘Less than equal’), the complexity of what lies behind the simplicity of labels is important as we consider why some groups are far more fearful than others in Australia. The Role of the Media in Framing the ‘Other’In their report of the classic Project Revere study, DeFleur and Larsen (‘The flow of information’) show that as stimulus intensity – the repetition of a message – increases, the proportion of people who get the information will also increase but not in direct proportion to the increasing number of repetitions.  Doubling the number of repetitions does not translate to doubling the number of people in the know. Arguably, stimulus intensity also affects the half-life of information and knowledge – lessons learned painfully, and often, become deeply ingrained and it may be hard to move on from these; even given a change of country, a new start, or even a new generation.  We are aware that perceptions of risk are firmly linked to bio-social markers. Lupton and Tulloch (‘Risk is part of your life’) point to the growing body of sociological research that investigates ways in which people respond to risk and identified that factors such as “gender, age and sexual identity [were implicated] in structuring risk perceptions”. The notion that historical experiences can heighten a sense of risk for an Australian community in the present, in the absence of specific drivers for this, is significant since many cultural studies approaches to dealing with contemporary political issues may not fully acknowledge the creation of new understandings through the integration of news and information with existing historical and cultural knowledges shared within the diasporic community.Cultivation theory (Shanahan and Morgan) can explain some aspects of the phenomenon of pervasive fear, as do Cohen’s theories about moral panics. What we tell ourselves about the causes, consequences and cures of fear constitutes a significant proportion of the media product currently consumed by Australian audiences. Popular culture examples of this discourse of fear include Channel 7’s ratings leader Border Security, “Australia’s frontline” in the quest for a secure homeland. To a diasporic community which constructs itself as having a particular experience of isolation and exclusion – whether in Australia or abroad – continual media repetition of the fear motif would be an invitation to a spiral of concern. In Western democracies like Australia the mass media have considerable freedom accorded to them in the expectation that they will both diffuse political information and act as watchdogs on the custodians of the body politic – governments, departments, institutions and the like. At the same time, formal attempts to build reassurance (‘Alert but not alarmed’) may backfire. Aldoory, for example, found that government messages of reassurance have often failed because the context in which those messages are to be received is poorly understood at a sub-cultural level. While most of the work on diffusion of information focuses either on ‘mass media’ environments or on ‘interpersonal’ contexts, few studies have explored the intersection of both and how adoption and diffusion relate to democratic processes (Balnaves et al; Goot; Manning, ‘Voting behaviour’). Clearly, however, the processes by which information is adopted and diffused have an important effect on how public opinion is formed within communities. In the Australian context, an understandable recent research focus on Australian Muslims should not obscure the relevance of pervasive fears which deeply concern Australian Jews. 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