Journal articles: 'Baby Boomer(s)' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

A measurement invariance study was performed on the Life Satisfaction Survey for Apostolic Women Religious (LSSAWR) across age cohorts to support its continued use to assess satisfaction with religious life across an individual sister’s life span, and to conduct intergenerational comparisons within and across congregations worldwide. Unfortunately, measurement invariance (MI) is often assumed rather than tested but is important to determine when comparisons are conducted across groups. Establishing MI produces confidence that the differences observed are a result of real differences between groups rather than a result of group membership. In general, the current study provides evidence that the LSSAWR is MI for life satisfaction across the Silent, Baby Boomer, and Generation X cohorts and should be robust to many types of analyses. Therefore, the continued use of the LSSAWR to provide feedback to individual Sisters and congregations of women religious regarding commitment to religious life and overall life satisfaction is supported. The most notable result was two of the five dimensions of the scale were statistically indistinguishable for the Silent generation, but not for the Baby Boomer or Generation X cohorts. This article discusses the importance of measurement invariance studies and implications for instruments used across the life span with items that could be age sensitive.   

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AbstractStatus epilepticus is one of the most common neurological emergencies and is likely to have increasing prevalence in coming years given an aging “baby boomer” population in the United States. Because status epilepticus is associated with significant morbidity and mortality, identification and treatment are paramount. Care should be taken to exclude nonorganic mimics and infectious and metabolic causes. Status epilepticus can be classified into stages with associated recommendations for escalation in therapy, increasing from push-dose benzodiazepines to continuous anesthetic infusions and other nontraditional therapies. Concurrent electroencephalogram monitoring helps to identify, localize, and assess resolution of ictal patterns alongside antiseizure drug administration. A protocol is proposed for the management of status epilepticus in a step-wise fashion.

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“I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling - but surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh1 Millenials or Generation Y physicians (born 1977/1980-1995) today form the majority of medical personnel, from medical students and residents in their early twenties and thirties to young attending physicians hitting forty; practicing side-by-side with Generation X (1965-1976/1980) in their late thirties to early fifties; Baby Boomers (1946-1964) in their mid-fifties, sixties and early seventies; and the last of the Silent Generation or Traditionalists (1925-1945) in their mid-seventies, eighties and nineties.2,3 Among 734 Fellows of the Philippine Society of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery alone, there are currently 18 Traditionalists, 192 Boomers, 360 Generation X, and 164 Millenials. Assuming the 862 board-certified Diplomates waiting to become full-fledged Fellows and 182 Residents-in-Training are also Millenials, there are a total of 1,208 Millenials in the field of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery in the Philippines. With four distinct generations simultaneously in the workforce, it is not unusual to hear older physicians gripe about “these Millenials,” and how different they are from previous generations. The so-called generation gap has been used to characterize inter-generational relations, wherein the preceding generation historically puts down the younger, and the succeeding generation usually complains about the older one. I posit that central to this conflict is a clash between tradition -- the way things should be done (as perceived by the older generation) -- and disruption, the way things can be done differently (from the perspective of the younger generation). In particular (meaning no offense to the “in-between” Generation X, and at risk of being overly simplistic), this is highlighted by the supposed looming showdown between Baby Boomers who are not yet ready to leave and Millenials who can hardly wait to take over.4 Tradition, a “statement, belief or practice handed down from generation to generation” comes from the Old French tradicion “transmission, presentation, handing over” and directly from the Latin traditionem “delivery, surrender, a handing down, a giving up,” from tradere “deliver, hand over,” derived from trans – “over” + dare “to give.”5 Although older generations may like to think they uphold tradition (giving them the right and duty to pass it on to succeeding ones), a large part of what defines each generation in the first place is their departure from the statements, beliefs or practices of their predecessors. Such a transition may have been gradual or sudden, and more pronounced in some generations than in others. Our post-war Boomer generation grew up in a world where face-to-face communication was supplemented by the written (handwritten, typewritten, typeset or telegraphed) and spoken (rotary-dial telephone) word. In medicine and medical education, history and physical examination were taught through lectures (with overhead and opaque projectors, slides on carousels and filmstrips) and live demonstrations on patients and on one another. The advent of word processing and advances in telecommunications and technology that became available to Generation X (who in the Philippines include “martial law babies” oblivious to our “wonder years” of the sixties) gradually changed the landscape of medical education and practice, but it would take the digital and internet revolution to finally, drastically change the world-- and Millenials were the primary beneficiaries of this change. Disruption, from the Latin disruptionem “a breaking asunder,” which comes from disrumpere “break apart, split, shatter, break to pieces,” from dis- “apart” + rumpere “to break”6 perhaps best describes the Baby Boomer generation’s experience of the technological revolution that Millenials grew up with. Suddenly, everything could be had in a split-second and the world was connected in real time. No longer did one have to master penmanship, typing and speed-reading, and homes no longer displayed dictionaries and encyclopedias. Even the library card catalogue and periodicals index became obsolete, as most anything became instantly available and accessible – including information, fast food and relationships. Millenials grew up with this transition, and readily mastered the rapidly changing technology. The locus of socialization was no longer face-to-face interaction within the family, but the worldwide web and social media. In medical education, lectures gave way to podcasts and webinars; heavy textbooks gave way to electronic references; and even dissection gave way to 3D virtual human anatomy. The Millenials’ expertise in, and dependence on, technology can both be their boon and bane – as I often note when residents and students automatically search their peripheral brains (a.k.a. mobile devices) to answer a ward round question. But they are also as quick to intuitively master the diagnostic and therapeutic tools that did not exist when their older colleagues were in residency.7 The early access that Millenials and Generation X had to computer resources in childhood certainly laid “a critical foundation for use of these systems later in life,” compared to Baby Boomers and Traditionalists whose “lack of early experience may limit their enthusiasm” for such tools.3 As Cole puts it, “Baby Boomers don't react well to a 20-something coming in and disrupting the way things have ‘always been’ while Millennials don't react well when they're told to shoot for the moon and ‘do big things,’ and then when they walk in the door with new ideas ready to disrupt age-old models, get told to know their place.”8 Thus, older generations of physicians may question how the stock knowledge and clinical eye of Millenials can compare to theirs, who learned medicine without these tools, and wonder how Millenials would fare in conflict and catastrophic situations when technology fails, or in low- and middle-income rural settings where technology is scarce. Conversely, Millenials wonder why Boomers insist on their old ways and just don’t get it! Perhaps we can learn from Mohr et al.3 about bridging generational issues in medical and surgical education—for instance, between the Socratic Method whereby Boomers may appear to intimidate learners9 versus the Millenial expectation that presentation of information be tailored to their needs, individually or via available technology.10 It could be helpful for Millenials who are “outcomes-oriented and value doing more than knowing”11 “to realize that Traditionalists and Boomers ‘know how to do’ and are ready and able to teach.”3 On the other hand, “when instructing Boomers in new technology or information,” the Millenial teacher “should recognize that this role reversal is uncomfortable to older generations” and “mitigate discomfort … by focus(ing) on the relevance of the information and creat(ing) an environment in which it is ‘safe’ to ask questions and challenge the teacher.”3 Indeed, if inter-generational differences could be surmounted, there is much that Boomers can learn from Millenials, and vice versa. If as Cole observes, “this great debate is hauntingly similar to a parent/child argument,”8 it is because Boomers and Millennials are “also each other’s children and parents, bound together in an intricate web of love, support, anxiety, resentment, and interdependence.”4 Perhaps by involving Generation X in bridging the great divide, and fostering an environment that allows for inter-generational differences in teaching and learning styles, non-disruptive disruption of tradition can take place. Each generation must have the humility (as opposed to intellectual arrogance) to accept that they can learn from other generations – younger or older—for truly meaningful medical progress to take place. We cannot do otherwise, for Generation Z (born after 1995, and about to enter Medical School) is already poised to join the fray. References Butler S. The Way of All Flesh. New York: Dover Publications, 2004. 315 pages. The Center for Generational Kinetics. How to determine generational birth years. November 28, 2016 ©2016 [cited 2017 Nov 2.] Available from: http://genhq.com/generational_birth_years/ Mohr NM, Moreno-Walton L, Mills AM, Brunett PH, Promes SB. Generational Influences in Academic Emergency Medicine: Teaching and Learning, Mentoring, and Technology (Part I). Acad Emerg Med. 2011 Feb;18(2):190-199. DOI: 10.1111/j.1553-2712.2010.00985.x PMID: 21314779 PMCID: PMC3076332 Taylor P, Pew Research Center. The Next America: Boomers, Millenials, and the Looming Generational Showdown. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016. 384 pages. Harper D. Online Etymology Dictionary © 2001-2017 [Cited 2017 November 2.] Available from: https://www.etymonline.com/word/tradition Harper D. Online Etymology Dictionary © 2001-2017 [Cited 2017 November 2.] Available from: https://www.etymonline.com/word/disruption Sopher M. How Millenial Doctors Will Shape the Future of Health Care. Blog on the Internet, Baltimore: Rendia, 2016 October 26. [Cited 2017 November 2.] Available from: https://blog.rendia.com/millennials/ Cole N. The Real Reason Baby Boomers and Millenials Don’t See Eye to Eye (Written by a Millenial). Southeast Asia. 2017 Jan 20 [Cited 2017 November 2] Available from: https://www.inc.com/nicolas-cole/the-real-reason-baby-boomers-and-millennials-dont-see-eye-to-eye-written-by-a-mi.html Seabrook M. Intimidation in medical education: students' and teachers' perspectives. Studies Higher Educ. 2004;29(1):59–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1234567032000164877 Feiertag J, Berge ZL. Training generation N: How educators should approach the Net Generation. Education and Training. 2008 September;50(6):457–64. DOI: 10.1108/00400910810901782 Mangold K. Educating a new generation: teaching baby boomer faculty about millennial students. Nurse Educ. 2007 Jan-Feb;32(1):21-23. PMID: 17220763

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Background. Efficient strategies are needed in order to achieve the objective of the WHO of eradicating Hepatitis C virus (HCV). Hepatitis C infection can be eliminated by a combination of direct acting antiviral (DAA). The problem is that many individuals remain undiagnosed. The objective is to conduct a systematic review of the evidence on economic evaluations that analyze the screening of HCV followed by treatment with DAAs. Methods. Eleven databases were performed in a 2015-2018-systematic review. Inclusion criteria were economic evaluations that included incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) in terms of cost per life year gained or quality-adjusted life year. Results. A total of 843 references were screened. Sixteen papers/posters meet the inclusion criteria. Ten of them included a general population screening. Other populations included were baby-boomer, people who inject drugs, prisoners or immigrants. Comparator was “standard of care”, other high-risk populations or no-screening. Most of the studies are based on Markov model simulations and they mostly adopted a healthcare payer´s perspective. ICER for general population screening plus treatment versus high-risk populations or versus routinely performed screening showed to be below the accepted willingness to pay thresholds in most studies and therefore screening plus DAAs strategy is highly cost-effective. Conclusion. This systematic review shows that screening programmes followed by DAAs treatment is cost-effective not only for high risk population but for general population too. Because today HCV can be easily cured and its long-term consequences avoided, a universal HCV screening plus DAAs therapies should be the recommended strategy to achieve the WHO objectives for HCV eradication by 2030.

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The current generation of baby boomers is aging differently than previous generations. The activism of the 60's generation is morphing into an experience of active retirement. This article suggests that as Christian educators consider characteristics of the baby boomers, the lenses of calling/vocation and wisdom be used to guide our thinking about spiritual formation for this generation.

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Marketing strategy in E-Commerce companies is very important thing because along with the globalization, marketing also changed the way marketing used to be. E-Commerce can reach their consumers widely, so they need to approach their customer more with their strength and benefit especially in privacy concern (Bruseke, 2016). E-Commerce in Indonesia is growing up so fast because Indonesian people have a tendency to find cheaper prices and ease of shopping. E-Commerce business with a good marketing strategy focused on this demography should result in stable returns over the next few decade. Millennials are more dependent on their gadget. So it’s very easy for millennial to access application to buy something from the internet. It’s also obvious that millennials have a different approach to shopping with the baby boomers. Millennials prefer more affordable price tag and fast shipping. Along with that baby boomers don’t really mind about the price.

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Abstract This paper aims to measure the Romanian Millennials’ ethnocentrism tendency, together with their attitude of consumption towards Romanian-made products. Millennials, known as the Generation Y, are the demographic cohort, following the Baby Boomers and the Generation X. There is no specific date in time when this cohort begins and ends, but researchers put the early 1980’s as starting birth and, the mid-1990’s to early 2000’s as the ending birth year. Representing the youth and the young adult population, they are the principal source of worldwide influence in the world. Given the fast and massive changes of the society, in which the Generation Y developed, there are numerous socio-psychological characteristics promoted by researchers, all of these being essential for buying and consumer status of Millennials. The data were gathered using a structured online questionnaire, filled in by 518 Romanian youngsters, representative for the Generation Y, aged between 15 to 34 years old. Ethnocentrism was measured using the consumer ethnocentric tendencies scale (CETSCALE) developed by Shrimp and Sharma (1987). The attitudinal statements were used to measure the consumption behavior towards locally made products. The data was analyzed with the SPSS 20.0 statistics software for Windows, using descriptive statistics, factor analysis and correlation. The research results underline the role of the government and industry in encouraging Romanians to buy local products.

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Koristeći se podatcima za 29 zemalja iz devete runde Europskoga društvenog istraživanja, ovaj rad istražuje međugeneracijske promjene u tranziciji u odraslu dob u Europi. Fokus je na ključnim životnim događajima koji obilježavaju tranziciju u odraslu dob; u radu se odvojeno prema spolu analiziraju međugeneracijske promjene i razlike među europskim regijama u ulasku na tržište rada, napuštanju roditeljskog doma, prvom suživotu s partner(ic)om, sklapanju prvog braka i prvom roditeljstvu. Rezultati pokazuju da se tranzicija u odraslu dob različito odvijala za tihu generaciju (rođene između 1928. i 1945.), baby boomere (rođene između 1946. i 1964.), generaciju X (rođene između 1965. i 1980.) i milenijalce (rođene između 1981. i 1996.), a međugeneracijske promjene u tranziciji u odraslu dob odvijale su se drukčijim intenzitetom u sedam analiziranih europskih regija. Prvo roditeljstvo povezano je s drugim životnim događajima koji obilježavaju tranziciju u odraslu dob, a suživot s partner(ic)om i ulazak u brak pritom se ističu kao najjači prediktori za prvo roditeljstvo. Povezanost drugih životnih događaja u sklopu tranzicije u odraslu dob s prvim roditeljstvom varira među generacijama i među europskim regijama. Nalazi upućuju na važnost socioekonomskih, institucionalnih i normativnih čimbenika u objašnjavanju drukčijih putanja u sklopu tranzicije u odraslu dob. K tome, uključivši u analizu i bivše socijalističke zemlje koje su rijetko bile dio sličnih prijašnjih istraživanja, ovaj rad pridonosi spoznajama o validnosti primijenjenih teorijskih paradigmi o tranziciji mladih u odraslu dob u širem europskom makrokontekstu, a da istodobno ukazuje i na kompleksnost istih u svjetlu njihovih razlika među različitim europskim regijama.

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The current study aims to sociologically categorize the generations of the Pakistani workforce. For this purpose, similar to Schuman and Scott (1989)’s research methodology of identifying generations on the basis of their collective memories of formative events, the current study deploys a quantitative research design. Particularly, this is done by incorporating the socio-economic, political, and technologically significant events (SPTSE) into a questionnaire survey. These events have already been identified as generational pointers of the three Pakistani generations by Shaikh, Jamal, and Iqbal (2021). The Chi-Square results of the current research verify that the Pakistani Baby Boomers (Born during 1942-1961), Pakistani Generation X (Born during 1962-1981), and Pakistani Millennials / Generation Y (Born during 1982-2001) differ in recollecting certain SPTSE which they encountered during their coming-of-age years. Hence, having lived a particular set of formative eras, their generational characteristics, particularly with regard to their attitudes, values, and behaviors, are influenced, which are different and unique from that of the Western generations. This way, the generational pointers serve as a basis for the classification of the three Pakistani generations, and so prove the Asian context-specific application of the theory of generations.

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Population ageing has become an increasing challenge of our time. The process of demographic ageing is more intense in the Balkan countries, some of which have already held the world?s top positions. This paper examines the trends of population ageing in the Balkans and the South East Europe (SEE) countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, FYR of Macedonia, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Croatia) at the beginning of the 21st century and the cross-country differences in the timing of the ageing process. In addition to the analysis of an overall effect of the main factors, this paper examines the influence of population ageing on labour force in the Balkan countries. There are three factors behind the increases in the share of the population aged 65 and over: declining fertility rates in recent decades which have reduced the relative number of young people, the rise in life expectancy and the cohort of baby boomers over the age of 60. The ageing of the Balkan countries population introduces several major policy challenges. Paper highlights the impact of population ageing on human resources and labor supply.

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Background: Gynaetresia is the narrowing or complete occlusion of the vagin* which may be congenital or acquired. Acquired gynaetresia is commoner in Nigeria due to female genital mutilation and vagin*l insertion of herbs. Gynaetresia is a public health issue that requires a great attention to prevent all its associated morbidities. Objective: To report a case of nullipara with acquired gynaetresia that presented in labour. Methods: The case note of the patient and how she was managed were reviewed. Relevant review of the literature on the subject was also done. Results: She was a 24 year old Primary Health Care (PHC) booked Gravida 3 Para 0+2, a trader with secondary level of education who presented in labour ward of Rivers State University Teaching Hospital (RSUTH) at an unknown gestation. She was referred from the PHC on account of labour pains of 6 hours duration and a dense fibrotic tissue sealing off most of the vagin*l wall. There was a history of passage of herbal concoction in her vagin* 14 months prior to presentation to induce abortion. She had emergency lower segment Caesarean Section (C/S) and outcome was a live male baby who weighed 3kg with a good APGAR score. She did well post operatively, was counseled for vaginoplasty and discharged home with her baby on the 5thpost-operative day in good clinical state. Conclusion: Acquired gynaetresia due to vagin*l insertion of herbal pessaries is a preventable condition if only our women in this part of the world are made to understand the significance and implications of this act. This is by educating the public on the morbidities associated with this condition.

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Recent research has investigated the determinant factors of customers’ adoption of digital banking. But, after the spread of Corona 19 virus and world-wide pandemic, the customer behavior, traditional and digital market dynamics have changed. This study focuses on understanding the attitude and intention of customers to use mobile banking applications, digital banking marketing strategies and consumer behavior, especially during Covid-19 lock-down, in a developing country, Turkey. It is argued that service-wise attributes (e.g. usability) of mobile banking applications and personal traits (e.g. innovativeness) of bank customers have a positive impact on attitude towards and intention to use mobile banking applications. Besides, it is claimed that Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated customers’ intention to use mobile technologies including mobile banking apps. The study aims to put forward the generational differences in terms of mobile banking usage, as well. The comprehensive model derived from Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) [18] with some extensions from Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model [76], were tested using IBM SPSS and AMOS, through the survey delivered to 702 customers, which were chosen through convenience sampling. An e-mail survey has been shared with Turkish customers, after the first wave of Covid-19 pandemic, in June 2020. The results revealed that, usability, security, enjoyment and performance of mobile banking applications have positive and financial risk has a negative impact on attitude towards mobile banking and attitude has a positive impact on intention to use mobile banking applications (Five of hypothesis of the model are found to be highly significant (0,001). The CFI of the model is 0,898, where R2 is 0.490). Generation Y customers have a more positive attitude and intention to use mobile banking, compared to Generation X, as well as Baby Boomers. Besides, despite the economic recession and shrink in usage of traditional banking channels, Covid-19 pandemic has improved digital customers’ intention to use mobile banking applications. The research contributed to establish an enriched TAM, covering both functional, social and risk aspects of mobile banking. For the practitioners, the research has created value-added findings and recommendations for digital marketing strategies of organizations including investment proposals on functionality and security of their mobile banking services, as well as further penetration in Generation Y customers, during the pandemic.

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AbstractCooperative Learning’s (CL) implementation has received an incredible amount of research attention from academics held in high esteem. However, the researcher claims that it is up to every new generation of educators to formulate their conclusions regarding CL’s effectiveness in a contemporary classroom. Although the author begins by situating CL as a pedagogical tool that goes back nearly fifty years and insinuates a progression in use, he also claims CL should not only be compared to itself for scrutiny but it should be compared with the current generation’s academic needs. Later Baby Boomers that graduated high school in the 1980’s experienced a radically different academia than Generation X, Y, or Gen Z’ers, consequently a valid comparative analysis must see CL through present day lens. The author further claims, with the exception of references to CL’s beginnings, the date parameter for findings are limited to the last fifteen months which includes all of 2017 and half of 2016. The document continues by contextualizing CL’s precursors along with its distinctive historical genesis. Furthermore, the objective of this paper is not only to take a snapshot of the current CL literature based on the iconic five elements of CL formulated by David W. Johnson, Roger T. Johnson, and Edythe Johnson Holubec (1989), but to also provide a litmus test on the current relevancy of CL in thepost-millennial age.The author claims his theoretical framework centers on several factors composed of cognitive, behavioral, and social interdependence. The conclusions are based on three tendencies or categories in the literature that point to a) pre-implementation, b) implementation and c) post-implementation. These three tendencies are also described as the rationalization for implementation, context of the implementation, and the effects of CL’s outcomes. Furthermore, the results chronical the importance of CL in maintaining a student’s social presence in light of current social or anti-social trends.

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Advertising can be defined as an openly sponsored offering of goods, services, or ideas through any medium of public communication. Advertising, in the past decade has undergone significant development and it now comprises television, radio and internet besides the traditional print media. Levens (2012) defines advertising as the paid, non -personal communication of a marketing message by an identified sponsor through mass media which acts as a tool for a company to massively introduce a product or service to the consumers using the available media that are endless starting from billboards, posters, wall paintings to the most explicit places like the back of event tickets or even the public transport t hat roams all over the city. Government sponsored advertisem*nts (GSA ) or public service advertisem*nt (PSA) on the other hand can be defined as messages in the public interest disseminated by the media without charge. Today, public serviceadvertising has been increasingly used in a non-commercial fashion in several countries across the world in order to promote various social causes (Devadas and Manohar, 2011). The objective is to raise awareness, change public attitudes and behavior towards social issues. The purpose of this paper is to explore as to whether advertisem*nt s sponsored by the Malaysian government merely disclose social responsibility information or do they go beyond this to inculcate Higher Order Thinking Skills among the audience from the three generations; Baby boomers, Generation X and Generation Y. As such, a purposive sampling was used in the selection of the advertisem*nts for the study based on thecontent that catered for the three generations. To identify whether the advertisem*nts inculcate Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) according to Blooms Taxanomy (1990), the contents of the advertisem*nts were analysed using a framework based on an integrated approach combining content and semiotic analysis. To further support the findings, a survey was carried out among 100 samples to identify their perception on government sponsored advertisem*nts. The samples for the survey were also selected using a purposive sampling. This was to ensure that there were representatives from the three generations. It is hoped that this study will contribute to the scarce l iterature on the effectiveness of advertisem*nts in cultivating Higher Order Thinking Skills.

Abstract:

Magyarországon jelenleg hat generáció éli életét. A fiatalabb korcsoporthoz tartoznak az Alfák és a Z generáció tagjai, a középnemzedék tagjai a X és Y generációsok, a legidősebbek a Baby Boomerek és a Veteránok. A turisztikai piac a generációk szegmentációja szerint az életkor alapján a következő szakaszokra bontható: ifjúsági turizmus, középkorosztály turizmusa és az idősek turizmusa.Magyarország népessége 2020. január 1-jén 9 769 526 fő volt, ami 1981 óta a születések alacsony, és a halálozások magas száma miatt csökkenő tendenciát mutat. Öregedő korszerkezetű társadalomban élünk, melynek eredményeként az idősebb generációk egyre jelentősebb tényezővé válnak a piacon növekvő vásárlóerejük, az egyének emelkedő várható élettartama, és az egészségben, aktívan eltöltött évek számának növekedése miatt. Mindez a szabadidő eltöltésére és az utazási szokásokra, vagyis a turisztikai piacra is kihatással van.Kutatások igazolják, az idősebbeket több tényező motiválja az utazásra. Motiváló tényező lehet az egyéni fejlődés, szocializáció, szabadidő kihasználása, relaxáció, valamint egészségügyi okok. Például Kolos Krisztina és Kövesdi Júlia (2020) kutatása bizonyítja, hogy az idős korosztályt az egészségi állapot megőrzése és javítása ösztönzi az utazásra, szolgáltatások igénybevételére. A gyógyturizmus alapfogalmából adódik, hogy ebben az esetben nem csak turistákról, hanem gyógyulni vágyókról, azaz gyógyturistákról beszélhetünk.A gyógyturizmus piacának legnagyobb csoportját a 60 év feletti idősek alkotják, akik leggyakrabban mozgásszervi bántalmakkal keresik fel a gyógyfürdőket. A mozgásszervi panaszok jelentős részét képezik az ízületi megbetegedések, melyen belül megkülönböztetjük a gyulladásos ízületi megbetegedéseket, illetve a kopásos ízületi megbetegedéseket. A mozgásszervi betegségek világszerte a legelterjedtebb betegségek közé tartoznak. Felmérések alapján előfordulási gyakoriságuk lényegesen magasabb, mint bármely egyéb betegségcsoportba sorolt betegség gyakorisága. A panaszok változó lokalizációban és változó súlyossággal megjelenve rontják a beteg életminőségét.A gyógyturizmus gyógyüdülőhelyekre koncentrálódik. Jellemzően nem szezonális, hanem a turisták egész évben folyamatosan igénybe veszik szolgáltatásait. A magyarországi gyógyhelyek legnagyobb része termálvízre, néhány jelentős fürdőnk viszont langyos vízre alapozott, illetve vannak hideg vizű gyógyfürdőink is.Az Észak-Alföldi régió különösen gazdag gyógyfürdőkben, közülük is kiemelkedik a Sóstó-Gyógyfürdő, mely a Régió kiemelt fejlesztésű gyógyhelye lett, a külföldi vendégek számát figyelembe véve nemzetközi jelentőségűnek is mondható. Komplex ellátás vehető igénybe a mozgásszervi problémákkal küzdő betegek számára. A gyógyítás alapja a gyógyvíz (nátrium-kloridos, jódos, brómos, hidrogén-karbonátos gyógyvíz). A fürdő Magyarországon vezető az orvosi céllal történő gyógyvíz felhasználásban.A mozgásszervi betegségek kezelésére segítséget nyújt a fürdőben működő gyógyászat és a komplex fürdőgyógyászati kezelés, mely gyógyvizes és ehhez társuló természetes gyógytényezők és a szárazföldi kezelések kombinálása. A kezeléseket a már kivizsgált betegek vehetik igénybe, ha már készült valamilyen képalkotó diagnosztikai eljárás az illetőről és szakrendelőben átesett egy részletes mozgásszervi betegvizsgálaton. Az aktuális panaszokhoz igazodva a szakorvos gyógykúrát állít össze.Kutatásom eredményei bizonyítják, hogy az idős generációs születtek a gyógyturizmus jelentősebb részét képezik. Az idősebb gyógyturisták a kialakult mozgásszervi problémák miatt keresik fel leginkább a gyógyfürdőt, s ott olyan fürdőgyógyászati kezeléseket vesznek igénybe, melyeket a szakorvos az aktuális problémáiktól függően személyre szabottan állított össze. IrodalomjegyzékKOLOS K., KÖVESDI J. (2020): Az idősek turizmusban való részvétele Magyarországon: motivációk és turisztikai élmények vizsgálata

Abstract:

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Abstract:

An elderly man of my acquaintance once told me that there was nothing much to recommend living beyond 90. Things have changed over the past two decades, however. These days all he'd need is a touch of Viagra, an attitude reorientation, a little bit of manifesting and he'd be feeling as fit as, as, well … as a man in his 60s. Had he been around now, as a knowledgeable nonagenarian, he need not have mourned the passing of the years. Instead, he could have concentrated on becoming daily younger. As Second Youth so blithely trumpets: "In your youth, your mind, body and spirit are capable of great recuperative powers but, as you get older, you believe that those powers diminish. Not true! As long as you have a will -- and a method -- to improve your life, you will find the power to make it happen." Lacking the method? Look no longer… Books entitled RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be? (Roizen 1999) appear at the top of the New York Times best seller list, arguing that some 70-year olds can have the health profile of average 44-year olds within three years of making the right choices. (www.RealAge.com) This is the book's manifesto: The whole point of RealAge is to promote old age. Healthy, vibrant and young old age. RealAge shows you how you can live at eighty with all the energy and vigor of a fifty-five year old, how you can be the ninety year old who still lives on your own, travels and forcefully expresses feisty opinions -- the person who leaves the 'kids' marveling, 'How does she do it?' Having respect for old age means wanting to end the suffering that so often goes along with it. No one wants to be bedridden, afflicted with heart disease, or undergoing cancer treatment. Everyone wants to be able to do all the things he or she has always done and more. [Italics, gendered language, original] (Roizen 1999, p. 10) This website-supported best seller is part of a burgeoning industry which includes Cassel and Vallasi (1999) The Practical Guide to Aging: What Everyone Needs to Know, and Perls and Silver (1999) Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential at Any Age. "‘People have gotten old before, but never this many people and never this many people with such a high level of education … [boomers] will become obsessed with health and prevention of all the infirmities that accompany aging’ predicts Russell." (Wetzstein 1999, citing Russell.) The hypothesis put forward by Russell, by Wetzstein (1999) and by others, is that this is an 'age and stage' issue. It represents a new generational perspective reflective of the mindset and the life experience of the post mid-1940s 'baby boomer'. This website-supported best seller is part of a burgeoning industry which includes Cassel and Vallasi (1999) The Practical Guide to Aging: What Everyone Needs to Know, and Perls and Silver (1999) Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential at Any Age. "‘People have gotten old before, but never this many people and never this many people with such a high level of education … [boomers] will become obsessed with health and prevention of all the infirmities that accompany aging’ predicts Russell." (Wetzstein 1999, citing Russell.) The hypothesis put forward by Russell, by Wetzstein (1999) and by others, is that this is an 'age and stage' issue. It represents a new generational perspective reflective of the mindset and the life experience of the post mid-1940s 'baby boomer'. Boomers refuse to see 40 as middle aged (Wetzstein 1999), and would perish the thought that the Rolling Stones would ever retire. They define 50s as ‘Second youth’. (Gabriel & Molli 1995) They continue to participate in adventure and encounter holidays and subscribe to complementary health care regimes and new age approaches to daily life. They sign up for www.lovinguniversity.net and marvel at how much younger 43-yr old founder Susan Bradley looks on her website than in a recent Who Weekly (2001, p. 71). This baby boomer refusal to age has manifested itself widely in general and specialist consumer magazines, in broadcast TV and radio shows concentrating on good health and super-fitness, and in other elements of popular culture. Even given the hype, however, this new perspective might have long-term beneficial health/medical effects. The aging of the boomer generation may not be accurately predictable from the data collected from other generations with other mindsets. The back cover of Second Youth proclaims: "Desperate and aging far too fast she staked everything on discovering a natural source of Young Women's Hormones. Now, her triumph gives you thirty extra years of Second Youth. Age moved backwards for this woman. Just as it can -- this very month -- for you". (Gabriel & Molli 1995, back cover) Did someone mention snake oil? Or Bluebeard? Coupled with an optimism that allows them to forecast health and happiness into double-digit decades, however, boomers have a demonstrable suspicion of conventional medical ‘authority’ and a willingness to do their own research on health topics of interest. According to Mycek (1999) "In 1998, the [US] bill for homeopathic remedies (chiropractic and massage therapy, vitamins, yoga, herbal remedies, hypnosis, acupuncture) exceeded the total gross domestic product of all [US] hospitals put together." For boomers, a greater emphasis on health is not going to mean more of the same health care products, delivered in the same way. It is going to mean doing things differently. But is this a healthy way for us to look at aging and (shall we mention the word) death? Is our desire/burning commitment to remain indefinitely young and healthy in some way 'sick'? It is eminently reasonable to hypothesise -- as many people approaching their 'middle years' do -- that baby boomers are aiming to reinvent the aging process. (Dychtwald, 1999) The past quarter century has seen the burgeoning growth of preventative/health promotion and complementary health promoting services including nutritionists, naturopaths, chiropractors, rebalancers, meditation teachers, physiotherapists, counsellors and life coaches. The oldest members of the richest, best informed, most numerous generation in history are turning 55. The boomers (born from 1946--1960) can't put off for any longer the fact that -- chronologically -- they are approaching middle age. But what does this mean to a generation with many members who would rather be dead than old? Does the denial of chronological age, and the espousal of 'physiological age' (the premise upon which the RealAge philosophy and empire is built) represent a sick fantasy to avoid accepting our mortality? Baby boomers are a specific, much researched, sociocultural phenomenon. Their aim is to move beyond actuarial projections to re-write expectations of aging. From the self-help movement to the success of the potency drug Viagra, there is ample evidence that boomers have plans and expectations for their own aging processes that differ radically from those adopted by their parents. People born into the prosperity and plenty of the early post-WWII years often police their health attitudes and behaviours in proactive ways. These patterns are likely to impact upon their health profiles in the future and to influence the creation of services tailored to meet different hopes, fears and expectations. Who says Cher can't look young forever? Most health care planning is based on actuarial data that examines past events and extrapolates from these events into the future. However, this is not likely to result in a valid prediction of the health and aging patterns of the boomer generation. Graham May is a futurologist. He suggests that (May 2000), in anticipating the future, we are attempting either to foresee it, to manage it, or to create it. The philosophical distinctions between these perspectives provide different rationales for those who wish to influence the future. Attempts to foresee, or predict, the future – for example by extrapolating trends – presuppose that in some very particular ways the future already exists and/or is closely related to the forces evident in the present and the past. Managing the present with the future in mind accepts that present actions and decisions influence the future, and suggests that the future does not exist and is capable of being influenced by our current choices. The creation of the future – through techniques such as ‘creative visioning’ – works on the basis that once situations that do not exist have been imagined they can be brought into existence. These three approaches, separately and in parallel, offer ways of negotiating the uncertainty and essential unpredictability of the future, and of longevity and fitness. The longevity and second youth approach combines the idea of managing the future and envisioning it: 'the manifestation' approach. Baby boomers have already created a different future for our society. They are credited with re-writing the institutions of marriage (via de factos, divorce, blended families, single parents, older pregnancies); marketing (psychodemographics rather than age, sex, socioeconomic status); religion (the decline of the Church and the rise of new age philosophies, faith healing, angels on demand); education (just-in-time learning, lifelong learning); work practices -- and health. The boomers are also rewriting what aging means for them, and to them. Using popular culture starting points, such as Second Youth and RealAge, it seems that a major boomer project of the next twenty years is working to defy/turn back the aging clock. This project is invested with the hopes, fears, dreams and expectations of millions of citizens in western societies. Boomers are practical, however, as well as ‘just in time’ and they know that a belief that they can do it is half the battle. Let's assume that although many boomers are already fitter and healthier than any generation before them at their age, others may be intending to ‘make a break’ for fitness as an early priority of their retirement. Boomers may also expect their retirement years to be years of health and plenty, and they seem to indicate that they're prepared actively to work with these goals in mind. However, not all will be successful in beating their biology. How do boomers expect to manage their own chronic ailments in the future: arthritis, failing hearing and sight, late onset diabetes, heart disease, incontinence, dementia etc? Will the stem cell implants solve all foreseeable problems? Excluding alternative and complementary medical strategies, the health care industry is one of the biggest sectors of the economy representing 8% GDP (and rising). As indicated by its growing place in popular culture, health is also a hobby, pastime and pleasure – and the contemporary obsession with health is … sick. Although the social advantage to be conferred by living as healthily as possible, and as well as possible, is self-evident, it may require a level of selfishness and self-absorption unparalleled in human history. More to the point, however, this approach to getting older brings problems of its own. Firstly, it is built on a fear of aging, and a wish to deny the aging process which may become more desperate as the years (and they will) take their toll. Far from increasing the pleasure and satisfaction of 'a good age' this dynamic, operating over the decades, is as likely to build frustration, depression and a sense of powerlessness. As a (breast) cancer patient once told me: 'It's bad enough having cancer without everyone else thinking it's my fault for not having a positive enough attitude!' Aging is going to happen -- will we go with the flow - or end up like King Canute, with wet feet, trying to turn back the tide? Secondly, this perspective is counter-productive in fetishising a numerical age. When we're so focused on chronological age, biological age and the celebrating of our first, second and third 'year younger' parties (with fruit and water, please) we're not coming to terms with what's real for us in our ecological niche. Humanity is comprised of sentient, vertebrate, mammals. Far better to know our life cycle, and plan our lives to fit within it, than to pretend it can be revered. Much better to accept that we can be a very fit seventy year old (or a very unfit seventy year old) than to persuade ourselves that 'That's just my chronology, my real age is 44.' I'm sure we'll all be able to tell the difference… If anyone seriously believed the hype of living 26 years younger, you'd have to feel more than sorry for them. You'd have to suspect that maybe, even if they were blissfully unaware of it, they're a little bit sick. I gather that there's a Centre for Positive Aging recently started up in Perth: that's something altogether healthier References Cassel, C. and Vallasi, G. The Practical Guide to Aging: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Dychtwald, K. 'Age power': how the new-old will transform medicine in the 21st century, Geriatrics, vol. 54, no. 12, 1999, 22—7. Gabriel, V. and Molli, J. Second Youth, Melbourne: Bookman Press, 1995. May, G. Worldviews, assumptions and typologies of the future, Journal of Future Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, November, 2000, 37—51 Mycek, S. We’re not in Kansas anymore, Trustee, vol. 52, no. 8, 1999, 20—4 Perls, T. and Silver, M. Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential at Any Age, New York: Basic Books, 1999. Roizen, M. RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be? London: Thorsons, 1999 Wetzstein, C. Boomers’ new quest: to be forever young, Insight on the News, vol. 15, no. 24, 28th June, 1999, 40 Who Weekly Love is in the air, no. 474, 2 April, 2001, 71

Abstract:

ObjectiveUsing administrative claims for privately insured and Medicare Advantage enrollees from a large, private, U.S. health plan, we estimated the prevalence of hepatitis C testing among individuals who were recommended to be tested (i.e., baby boomer cohort born between 1945 and 1965) by the CDC and United States Preventive Services Task Force. This panel will discuss strengths and weaknesses for monitoring hepatitis C testing using alternative data sources including self-reported data, insurance claims data, and laboratory testing data.IntroductionHepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is the most common blood-borne disease in the US and the leading cause of liver-related morbidity and mortality. Approximately 3.5 million individuals in the US were estimated to be living with HCV in 2010 and approximately half of them were unaware that they were currently infected. Among HCV infected individuals, those born between 1945 and 1965 (usually referred to as the baby boomer cohort) represents approximately 75% of current cases. Because of the substantial burden of disease among this age group, CDC expanded its existing HCV risk-based testing recommendations to include a one-time HCV antibody test for all persons born between 1945-1965. The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) subsequently made the same recommendation in June 2013.MethodsWe obtained health plan enrollment information and claims data from the 2011 - 2017 OptumLabs® Data Warehouse, and utilized data from patients enrolled in either commercially insured programs or Medicare Advantage. We examined trends in HCV testing for the birth cohort born between 1945 and 1965 and compared their trend in testing to individuals who were not in the birth cohort. We developed two different estimates for HCV testing incidence in order to make comparisons to other commercial claims datasets. The denominator for both estimates was the number of adults continuously enrolled in one or more health plan(s) in a given calendar year (allowing up to a 45-day gap in coverage). The numerator for the first estimate was the number of people receiving any HCV related test in the current calendar year who had not received any HCV related test including HCV antibody test, HCV RNA test or HCV genotype test in the previous calendar years. The numerator for the second estimate was the number of people who were given an HCV antibody test (CPT: 86803 and 80074) in a given calendar year, irrespective of previous testing history.ResultsDuring the study period 2011 - 2017, there were 20,332,848 unique adults who met the inclusion criteria in the OptumLabs® data. Approximately 7.1 million (35.0%) of these individuals were born between 1945 and 1965. On average, there were approximately 2.8 million birth cohort enrollees for any given calendar year. For the birth cohort, the annual incidence of HCV testing was about 2% per year during the time period between 2008 and 2011 (data not shown). In general, between 2011 and 2017, the trends in testing rates were consistent across both estimation methods. Specifically for the birth cohort, the HCV testing rate increased substantially between 2012 and 2017, peaking in 2017 at 8.56% [95% CI: 8.53-8.59%] and 10.24% [95% CI: 10.21-10.27%]. The greatest increase occurred between 2016 and 2017 when the testing rate almost doubled. In contrast, for the non-birth cohort, the HCV testing rate started in 2012 at a rate similar to the birth cohort but did not increase in a similar fashion and did not see a substantial increase in HCV testing in 2016 or 2017.ConclusionsSince CDC and USPSTF recommended universal testing for the birth cohort in 2012 and 2013, respectively, hepatitis C testing rates have been increasing across all age groups. The rate of increase for the birth cohort was substantially greater than that for the non-birth cohort. CDC and USPSTF recommendations are likely a strong contributing factor impacting hepatitis C testing rates in the US. Efforts to promote hepatitis C testing should continue.

Abstract:

This paper is a study on a trans-parochial community (TCC) in order to obtain an accurate and holistic picture of itspractices and beliefs. It attempts to answer one main question: What is it doing and why? In light of the absence of scholarlyresearch on the trans-parochial dimension of charismatic communities, it provides an insider’s perspective of how theinner domains of parish life are experienced and understood by the members of one highly popular local TCC. These domainsare 1) community, 2) worship, 3) leadership, 4) formation, and 5) stewardship. Using ethnographically informed sources andmethods to gather data, it is found that the TCC in this study embodies an alternative style of worship and programming:contextualized, experiential, multi-sensory, and participative. Inside an unconventional space, it allows members to experiencethe spiritual and psychosocial goods that they seek and desire. The parishes may hold this TCC as a mirror of what they want toachieve and what it can and must do to reinforce the quality of pastoral attention that their parishioners receive. References Aldridge, A. Religion in the Contemporary World. 3rd Edition. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Angier, P. Changing Youth Worship. 2 National Society/Church House Publishing, 1997. Arbuckle, G. Refounding the Church: Dissent for Leadership. Quezon City: Claretian Publications, 1996. Atkinson, R. “Alternative Worship: Post- Modern or Post-Mission Church.” ANVIL,Vol. 23 (4), 2006:259-264. Bryman, A. Social Research Method. 4th Edition. Oxford University Press, 2012. Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. National Pastoral Consultationon Church Renewal: The Challenge to Catholicism in the New Millennium.Manila: St. Paul’s Press, 2001. Collins-Mayo, S. & Beaudoin, T. Religion, Pop Culture and “Virtual Faith”. FromReligion and Youth (Collins-Mayo, S. & Dandelion, P., Eds). England: Ashgate, 2003. Collins, S. Steve Collins 2012 A Definition of Alternative Worshiphttps://www.alternativeworship.org/definitions_definition.html), 2012. Fetterman, D. Ethnography: Step by Step. 3rd Edition. Los Angeles: Sage, 2010. Flory, R. & Miller, D.E. The Expressive Communalism of Post-Boomer Religion inthe USA. From Religion and Youth (Collins-Mayo, S. & Dandelion, P., Eds).England: Ashgate, 2008. Fowler, J. The Stages of Faith. London: Harper & Row, 1981. Glock, C & Stark, R. Religion and Society in tension. Chicago; Rand McNally, 1965. Gomes, J.E.A Gilles, S.N. Worship and Urban Structure in unconventional locations:the spatial features of religious groups’ diversity in Metro Manila.Philippine Sociological Review 62 (Special issue on the sociology of Religion):83-113. Likn:https:/www.dropbox.com/s/a34lvrsyo0kp04g/Gomez%26GillesWOrshipUrbanstr, 2014. Greely, A. After Secularity: The Neo-Gemeinschaft Society: A Post-ChristianPostscript. Sociology of Religion (3), 1966: 119-127DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3710385. Haynes, J. Religion in third world politics. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publisher,1994. Huang, D.P., S.J. “Emerging Global Post-modern culture in the Philippines.”Landas,13, 1, 1999: 48-58. Jones, I. & Webster, P. Expressions of Authenticity: Music for Worship in RedefiningChristian Britain: Post 1945 perspectives. Garnet, Grimley, Harris, Whyte& Williams (Eds), London: SCM, 2007: 50-62. Lanuza, G.M. Christian Fundamentalism, Postmodernism, Globalization and theThird World. An Attempt at Sociological Explication. Philippiniana Sacra,Vol. XXXVIII, 114 (Sept-December 2003): 415-460, 2003. Lyon, D. Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times. Cambridge: PolityPress, 2000. Luckman, T. The Invisible Religion: the problem of religion in modern society. London:Collier-MacMillan, 1989. Mangahas, M. Social Weather Station Survey on Religion. https://www.sws.org.ph/swsmain/artcldisppage/?artcsyscode=ART-2017041310552, 2017. Mangahas, M. Social Weather Station Survey on Religion. https://www.sws.org.ph/swsmain/artcldisppage/?artcsyscode=ART-2017041310552, 2013. Miller, D.E. Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Myers, D. Introducing Social Psychology. London: Mc-Graw Hill, 2003. Putnam, R. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Journal of Democracy,6, 1951: 65-68. Roof, W.C. Spiritual Marketplace: baby boomers and the remaking of AmericanReligion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Salazar, C. “Understanding Belief: Some Qualitative Evidence.” Journal of EmpiricalTheology. 27, 2014:199-213. Spears, L. Character and Servant Leadership: Ten Characteristics of Effective,Caring Leaders, 2013. Spinks, B. The Worship Mall: Contemporary Responses to Contemporary Culture.Church Publishing Inc, 2010. Taylor, C. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Villote, R. From There to Here: A Pastoral Journal 1970-1988. Rizal: SynerAideConsultancies, 1988. Wilson, B. Religion in a Secular Society: a sociological comment. London: Watts, 1976. Wuthnow, R. After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. Princeton: University,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Abstract:

Metaverse teknolojisi, birçok uluslararası şirketin ilgisini çeken, bir sonraki internet devrimi olacağı öngörülen bir teknoloji olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Bloomberg Intelligence raporuna göre; metaverse pazarının 2024 yılına kadar 800 milyon dolara ulaşmasının beklendiği belirtilmektedir. ‘Meta’ ve ‘Universe’ kelimelerinin birleşiminden oluşan metaverse kavramı ‘sanal evren’olarak tanımlanmaktadır. Kavram otel sektöründe ise karşımıza ‘Metahotels’ olarak çıkmaktadır. Metahotels, insanların oluşturdukları avatarları ile evlerinden sanal bir ortam içerisinde kişiselleştirilmiş deneyimler hissedebilecekleri dijital oteller olarak ifade edilmektedir. Yapılan literatür taraması doğrultusunda, uluslararası otellerin bazılarının bu yeni teknolojiye adapte olmak için adım attıkları bilinmektedir. Otel sektörü açısından, gelir artışı, marka sadakati ve kişiselleştirilmiş misafir deneyimine önemli etki göstereceği beklenmektedir. Metaverse evrenine dahil olan ve kripto para birimini kabul eden otellerin lüks otel segmentinde yer aldıkları görülmektedir. Araştırmalar, metaverse teknolojisinin Baby Boomers ve X kuşağı’ndan ziyade, Y ve Z kuşağı kişilere daha çok hitap edeceğini ortaya koymaktadır. Bu çalışmada, otel sektörüne bu yeni teknolojinin sağlayabileceği olası etkilerden bahsederek bir öngörü sunulması hedeflenmektedir. Değişen misafir beklentilerini karşılayabilen ve onlara hizmet alternatifleri sunabilen otel işletmelerinin daha tercih edilebilir olacağı ve bu durumunda ancak teknolojiye uyumla gerçekleşebileceği öngörülmektedir.

Abstract:

E- Retailing is a commercial transaction wherein exchange of goods and services are taking place through the internet with the assistance of electronic gadgets such as Mobile phones, Tablets, Laptops, Desk top Computers, Automated vending machines, Kiosk Machines, etc. The advancement of digital technology has transformed the „Baby Boomers” to “Digital Natives” who are well acquainted with the electronic widgets/doodads to get ready themselves for e-Retailing transactions. E- retailing is a modern commercial platform that provides enormous variety of commodities with varied offers, discounts and features blended with flexible payment modes. A Customer is said to be well contented when they realize their expectations are almost fulfilled right from ordering the products till they ultimately consumed leading to Customer Satisfaction. This research paper makes an attempt to understand the behavioral pattern of the millennia‟s and the challenges it creates for Online retail organizations. A principal data is generated by serving a structured questionnaire to a random sample of 100 online buyers in Chennai City to identify their buying behaviour for describing the level of satisfaction of E- retailing business. With the help of Statistical analysis using the tools such as ANOVA, Chi-Square and Factor study it has been revealed that millennials are tapping the recent technological improvements in e-retailing business to augment their fulfilment and well influenced by the Socio-Economic variables for maximizing the Overall Satisfaction.

Abstract:

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: +mn-ea;">Today&rsquo;s workers and consumers </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">consist of four generations of individuals raised with very different technologies and lifestyles. How does this affect attracting and retaining individuals as workers or consumers? Generational differences of Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y may </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: +mn-ea;">influence their values and preferences. </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Why will understanding these dissimilar perceptions be important? According to Murphy (2007), &ldquo;different perspectives on issues like work ethic, leadership, and authority can cause conflict, frustration, and misunderstanding if not managed well&rdquo; (p.18).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In a recent </span>&ldquo;World of Work Survey&rdquo; (2008), the older and younger generations noted l<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">ittle or no interaction with the other. This is not conducive to a cooperative environment where working with and learning from one another can be vital. Understanding what appeals to the generations as consumers is also critical for organizations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>T</span>argeting specific generations for their preferences and reaching them through media that is suitable to their style is an important marketing trend (Marconi, 2001).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Customizing for these dissimilar cohorts will require knowledge of their particular attitudes and inclinations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Understanding these different perceptions will enable improved communications for the workforce and the consumer. This paper seeks to clarify some of these differences. </span></span></p>

Abstract:

JURNAL MANAJEMEN BISNISDAN KEWIRAUSAHAAN Volume 02/No.6/November/2018 e-ISSN 2598-0289 Terbit enam kali dalam setahun. Berisi tulisan yang diangkat dari hasil penelitian di bidang Ilmu Manajemen dan Kewirausahaan. Ketua Dewan PenyuntingProf. Ir. Carunia Mulya Firdausy, MA, Ph.D – Universitas Tarumanagara Wakil Ketua Dewan PenyuntingDr. Eko Harry Susanto – Universitas Tarumanagara Anggota Dewan Penyunting Dr. Ir. Agus Zainul Arifin, MM – Universitas TarumanagaraDr. Eddy Supriyatna MZ, M.HUM – Universitas TarumanagaraDr. Anas Lutfi, MM, MKN – Universitas IndonesiaDr. Hardius Usman, M.Si – Universitas IndonesiaDr. Indra Widjaja, SE, MM – Universitas TarumanagaraDr. Hetty Karunia Tunjung Sari – Universitas Tarumanagara SekretariatMaria Benedicta, SEStephanie Pane, SE, MM Alamat Penyunting dan Tata Usaha: Program Studi MM Untar, Kampus 1, Gedung Utama, Lantai 14, Jl. Let. Jen. S. Parman No. 1 Grogol, Jakarta 11440. Telp. (62-21) 5655806 dan Fax. (62-21) 5655808. Email: mmuntar@tarumanagara.ac.id JURNAL MANAJEMEN BISNIS & KEWIRAUSAHAAN November 2018, Volume 02, No 6 e-ISSN 2598-0289Halaman 1-114 ANALISA KINERJA KEUANGAN PADA PT. ASTRA INTERNATIONAL TBK PERIODE 2012-2017DARI SUDUT PANDANG ANALISIS RASIO KEUANGAN DAN METODE DU PONTRoben Wijaya 01-11 PENGARUH CITRA NEGARA, CITRA MEREK, DAN NEGARA ASAL TERHADAP MINAT BELIPADA SMARTPHONE DI INDONESIAMuhammad Imam Al Gibran dan Chairy 12-17 ANALISIS PENGARUH FLEXIBLE HRM TERHADAP FIRM INNOVATIVENESS YANG DIMEDIASIINNOVATIVE WORK BEHAVIOR(STUDI KASUS PADA PT XYZ)Kevin Matthew Aditya 18-24 STRATEGI PEMASARAN DALAM RANGKA MENINGKATKAN PENJUALAN KERAMIK PRIVATE LABELDAN MEMENANGKAN KOMPETISI PADA PT.CATUR MITRA SEJATI SENTOSA,Tbk (Mitra10)Henry dan Chairy 25-31 ANALISIS STRATEGI PERUSAHAAN MULTINASIONAL PT. SHINHAN INDO FINANCE DALAMMENGEMBANGKAN BISNIS DI INDONESIADito Kurniawan 32-38 PENGARUH GREEN PERCEVIED VALUE, GREEN PRODUCT INNOVATION, GREEN SELF IDENTITIY,BRAND CREDIBILITY TERHADAP GREEN PURCHASE INTENTION MELALUI GREEN BRAND EQUITYPADA PRODUK SKIN-CARE KOREA DI INDONESIAAlvin 39-45 PENGARUH BRAND AUTHENTICITY TERHADAP BRAND ATTACHMENT(STUDI KASUS PADA SEPATU OLAHRAGA ADIDAS)Erwin Saputra 46-52 PENGARUH KEMASAN TERHADAP MINAT BELI MASYARAKAT DENGAN KUALITASSEBAGAI VARIABEL MEDIASI PADA PRODUK “LEGIT”Billy Ivanko dan Hetty Karunia Tunjungsari 53-59 PENGARUH KESADARAN KESEHATAN DAN PRODUK MAKANAN TERHADAPMINAT BELI RESTORAN VEGETARIAN DENGAN VARIABEL MODERASI RELIGIUSITAS DI INDONESIAHimawan dan Hetty Karunia Tunjungsari 60-67 PENGARUH SOCIAL NETWORK MARKETING (SNM) DAN ELECTRONIC WORD OF MOUTH (EWOM)TERHADAP MINAT BELI PELANGGANWenny Kartika Susanto dan Keni 68-73 PERENCANAAN BISNIS PENUKARAN MATA UANG ASING “FORRENCY”Denis Wijaya 74-80 PENGARUH KUALITAS JASA, KEMUDAHAN TRANSAKSI, DAN PROMOSI TERHADAP LOYALITASKONSUMEN PT XYZ: KEPUASAN KONSUMEN SEBAGAI VARIABEL MEDIASILaura Debora 81-88 KINERJA KEUANGAN DAN POTENSI KEBANGKRUTAN DARI PERUSAHAAN TRANSPORTASI JURNAL MANAJEMEN BISNIS & KEWIRAUSAHAAN November 2018, Volume 08, No 6 e-ISSN 2598-0289Halaman 1-114 PELAYARAN PADA TAHUN 2013-2017 Aditya Budi Kurniawan dan Carunia M. Firdausy 89-95 PENGARUH KETERLIBATAN SUPLIER DAN KONSUMEN SERTA INOVASI PRODUK TERHADAPPERFORMA PRODUK BARU DI PT. PUSPA PHARMARey Hagai Yheri dan Yanuar 96-103 PENDAPAT PEMILIK USAHA-USAHA KULINER DI JAKARTA TERHADAP PERAN GO-FOODDALAM PENGEMBANGAN USAHANYAOctarini dan Eko Harry Susanto 104-108 PENGARUH BUDAYA ORGANISASI DAN KOMPENSASI TERHADAP KEPUASAN KERJA DALAMMENINGKATKAN KINERJA KARYAWAN (STUDI KASUS PADA GENERASI BABY BOOMERS, X, Y DAN Z)Stevanny Novianti Saliman 109-114

Abstract:

This article is a comparison of two remarkably different takes on a single subject, namely the shifting meaning of the word ‘publishing’ brought about by the changes in literacy habits related to Web 2.0. One the one hand, we have Andrew Keen’s much lambasted 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur, which is essentially an attempt to defend traditional gatekeeper models of cultural production by denigrating online, user-generated content. The second is Spin journalist Andy Greenwald’s Nothing Feels Good, focusing on the Emo subculture of the early 2000s and its reliance on Web 2.0 as an integral medium for communication and the accumulation of subcultural capital. What I want to suggest in this article is that these two books, with their contrasting readings of Web 2.0, both tell us something specific about what the word “publishing” means and how it is currently undergoing a significant change brought about by a radical adaptation of literacy practices. What I think both books also do is give us an insight into how those changes are being interpreted, to be rejected on the one hand and applauded on the other. Both books have their faults. Keen’s work can fairly easily be passed off as a sort of cantankerous reminiscence for the legitimacy of an earlier era of publishing, and Greenwald’s Emos have, like all teen subcultures, changed somewhat. Yet what both books portray is an attempt to digest how Web 2.0 has altered perceptions of what constitutes legitimate speaking positions and how that is reflected in the literacy practices that shape the relationships among authors, readers, and the channels through which they interact. Their primary difference is a disparity in the value they place on Web 2.0’s amplification of the Internet’s use as a social and communicative medium. Greenwald embraces it as the facilitator of an open-access dialogue, whereas Keen sees it as a direct threat to other, more traditional, gatekeeper genres. Accordingly, Keen begins his book with a lament that Web 2.0’s “democratization” of media is “undermining truth, souring civic discourse and belittling expertise, experience, and talent … it is threatening the very future of our cultural institutions” (15). He continues, Today’s editors, technicians, and cultural gatekeepers—the experts across an array of fields—are necessary to help us to sift through what’s important and what’s not, what is credible from what is unreliable, what is worth spending our time on as opposed to the white noise that can be safely ignored. (45) As examples of the “white noise,” he lists some of the core features of Web 2.0—blogs, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. The notable similarity between all of these is that their content is user generated and, accordingly, comes from the position of the personal, rather than from a gatekeeper. In terms of their readership, this presents a fundamental shift in an understanding of authenticated speaking positions, one which Keen suggests underwrites reliability by removing the presence of certifiable expertise. He looks at Web 2.0 and sees a mass of low grade, personal content overwhelming traditional benchmarks of quality and accountability. His definition of “publishing” is essentially one in which a few, carefully groomed producers express work seen as relevant to the wider community. The relationship between reader and writer is primarily one sided, mediated by a gatekeeper and rests on the assumption by all involved that the producer has the legitimacy to speak to a large, and largely silent, readership. Greenwald, by contrast, looks at the same genres and comes to a remarkably different and far more positive conclusion. He focuses heavily on the lively message boards of the social networking site Makeoutclub, the shift to a long tail marketing style by key Emo record labels such as Vagrant and Drive-Thru Records and, in particular, the widespread use of LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) by suburban, Emo fixated teenagers. Of this he writes: The language is inflated, coded as ‘adult’ and ‘poetic’, which often translates into affected, stilted and forced. But if one can accept that, there’s a sweet vulnerability to it. The world of LiveJournal is an enclosed circuit where everyone has agreed to check their cynicism at the sign on screen; it’s a pulsing, swoony realm of inflated emotions, expectations and dialogue. (287) He specifically notes that one cannot read mediums like LiveJournal in the same style as their more traditional counterparts. There is a necessity to adopt a reading style conducive to a dialogue devoid of conventional quality controls. It is also, he notes, a heavily interconnected, inherently social medium: LiveJournals represent the truest and easiest realization of the essential teenage (and artistic) tenet of the importance of a ‘room of one’s own’, and yet the framework of the website is enough to make each individual room interconnected into a mosaic of richly felt lives. (288) Where Keen sees Web 2.0 as a shift way from established cultural forums, Greenwald sees it as an interconnected conversation. His definition of publishing is more fluid, founded on a belief not in the authenticity of a single, validated voice but on the legitimacy of interaction and communication entirely devoid of any gatekeepers. Central to understanding the difference between Greenwald and Keen is the issue or whether or not we accept the legitimacy of personal voices and how we evaluate the kind of reading practices involved in interpreting them. In this respect, Greenwald’s reference to “a room of one’s own” is telling. When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own in 1929, Web 2.0 wasn’t even a consideration, but her work dealt with a similar subject matter, detailing the key role the novel genre played in legitimising women’s voices precisely because it was “young enough to be soft in [their] hands” (74). What would eventually emerge from Woolf’s work was the field of feminist literary criticism, which hit its stride in the mid-eighties. In terms of its understanding of the power relations inherent to cultural production, particularly as they relate to gatekeeping, it’s a rich academic tradition notably lacking in the writing on Web 2.0. For example, Celia Lury’s essay “Reading the Self,” written more than ten years before the popularisation of the internet, looks specifically at the way in which authoritative speaking positions gain their legitimacy not just through the words on the page but through the entire relationships among author, genre, channels of distribution, and readership. She argues that, “to write is to enter into a relationship with a community of readers, and various forms of writing are seen to involve and imply, at any particular time, various forms of relationship” (102). She continues, so far as text is clearly written/read within a particular genre, it can be seen to rest upon a more or less specific set of social relations. It also means that ‘textual relations’—that is, formal techniques, reading strategies and so on—are not held separate from ‘non-textual relations’—such as methods of cultural production and modes of distribution—and that the latter can be seen to help construct ‘literary value.’ (102) The implication is that an appropriation of legitimised speaking positions isn’t done purely by overthrowing or contesting an established system of ‘quality’ but by developing a unique relationship between author, genre, and readership. Textual and non-textual practices blur together to create literary environments and cultural space. The term “publishing” is at the heart of these relationships, describing the literacies required to interpret particular voices and forms of communication. Yet, as Lury writes, literacy habits can vary. Participation in dialogue-driven, user-generated mediums is utterly different from conventional, gatekeeper-driven ones, yet the two can easily co-exist. For instance, reading last year’s Man Booker prize-winner doesn’t stop one from reading, or even writing, blogs. One can enact numerous literacy practices, move between discourses and inhabit varied relationships between genre, reader, and writer. However, with the rise of Web 2.0 a whole range of literacies that used to be defined as “private sphere” or “everyday literacies,” everything from personal conversations and correspondence to book clubs and fanzines, have become far, far more public. In the past these dialogue-based channels of communication have never been in a position where they could be defined as “publishing.” Web 2.0 changes that, moving previously private sphere communication into online public space in a very obvious way. Keen dismisses this shift as a wall of white noise, but Greenwald does something equally interesting. To a large extent, his positive treatment of Web 2.0’s “affected, stilted and forced” user-generated content is validated by his focus on a “Youth” subculture, namely Emo. Indeed, he heavily links the impact of youthful subcultural practices with the internet, writing that Teenage life has always been about self-creation, and its inflated emotions and high stakes have always existed in a grossly accelerated bubble of hypertime. The internet is the most teenage of media because it too exists in this hypertime of limitless limited moments and constant reinvention. If emo is the soundtrack to hypertime, then the web is its greatest vehicle, the secret tunnel out of the locked bedroom and dead-eyed judgmental scenes of youth. (277) In this light, we accept the voices of his Emo subjects because, underneath their low-quality writing, they produce a “sweet vulnerability” and a “dialogue,” which provides them with a “secret tunnel” out of the loneliness of their bedrooms or unsupportive geographical communities. It’s a theme that hints at the degree to which discussions of Web 2.0 are often heavily connected to arguments about generationalism, framed by the field of youth studies and accordingly end up being mined for what Tara Brabazon calls “spectacular youth subcultures” (23). We see some core examples of this in some of the quasi-academic writing on the subject of “Youth.” For example, in his 2005 book XYZ: The New Rules of Generational Warfare, Michael Grose declares Generation Y as “post-literate”: Like their baby boomer parents and generation X before them, generation Ys get their information from a range of sources that include the written and spoken word. Magazines and books are in, but visual communication is more important for this cohort than their parents. They live in a globalised, visual world where images rather than words are universal communication media. The Internet has heightened the use of symbols as a direct communicator. (95) Given the Internet is overwhelmingly a textual medium, it’s hard to tell exactly what Grose’s point is other than to express his confusion over new literacy practices. In a similar vein and in a similar style, Rebecca Huntley writes in her book The World According to Y, In the Y world, a mobile phone is not merely a phone. It is, as described by demographer Bernard Salt, “a personal accessory, a personal communications device and a personal entertainment centre.” It’s a device for work and play, flirtation and sex, friendship and family. For Yers, their phone symbolizes freedom and flexibility. More than that, your mobile phone symbolizes you. (16) Like Keen, Grose and Huntley are trying to understand a shift in publishing and media that has produced new literacy practices. Unlike Keen, Grose and Huntley pin the change on young people and, like Greenwald, they turn a series of new literacy practices into something akin to what Dick Hebdige called “conspicuous consumption” (103). It’s a term he linked to his definition of bricolage as the production of “implicitly coherent, though explicitly bewildering, systems of connection between things which perfectly equip their users to ‘think’ their own world” (103). Thus, young people are differentiated from the rest of the population by their supposedly unique consumption of “symbols” and mobile phones, into which they read their own cryptic meanings and develop their own generational language. Greenwald shows this methodology in action, with the Emo use of things like LiveJournal, Makeoutclub and other bastions of Web 2.0 joining their record collections, ubiquitous sweeping fringes and penchant for accessorised outfits as part of the conspicuous consumption inherent to understandings of youth subculture. The same theme is reflected in Michel de Certeau’s term “tactics” or, more common amongst those studying Web 2.0, Henry Jenkins’s notion of “poaching”. The idea is that people, specifically young people, appropriate particular forms of cultural literacy to redefine themselves and add a sense of value to their voices. De Certeau’s definition of tactics, as a method of resistance “which cannot count on a ‘proper’ (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality” (489), is a prime example of how Web 2.0 is being understood. Young people, Emo or not, engage in a consumption of the Internet, poaching the tools of production to redefine the value of their voices in a style completely acceptable to the neo-Marxist, Birmingham school understanding of youth and subculture as a combination producing a sense of resistance. It’s a narrative highly compatible within the fields of cultural and media studies, which, despite major shifts brought about by people like Ken Gelder, Sarah Thornton, Keith Kahn-Harris and the aforementioned Tara Brabazon, still look heavily for patterns of politicised consumption. The problem, as I think Keen inadvertently suggests, is that the Internet isn’t just about young people and their habits as consumers. It’s about what the word “publishing” actually means and how we think about the interaction among writers, readers, and the avenues through which they interact. The idea that we can pass off the redefinition of literacy practices brought about by Web 2.0 as a subcultural youth phenomena is an easy way of bypassing wider cultural shifts onto a token demographic. It presents Web 2.0 as an issue of “Youth” resisting the hegemony of traditional gatekeepers, which is effectively what Greenwald does. Yet such an approach has a very short shelf life. It’s a little like claiming the telephone or the television set were “youth genres.” The uptake of new technologies will inadvertently impact differently on those who grew up with them as compared to those who grew up without them. Yet ultimately changes in literacy habits are much larger than a generationalist framework can really express, particularly given the first generation of “digital natives” are now in their thirties. There’s a lot of things wrong with Andrew Keen’s book but one thing he does do well is ground the debate about Web 2.0 back to issues of legitimate speaking positions and publishing. That said, he also significantly simplifies those issues when he claims the problem is purely about the decline of traditional gatekeeper models. Responding to Keen’s criticism of him, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig writes, I think it is a great thing when amateurs create, even if the thing they create is not as great as what the professional creates. I want my kids to write. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop reading Hemingway and read only what they write. What Keen misses is the value to a culture that comes from developing the capacity to create—independent of the quality created. That doesn’t mean we should not criticize works created badly (such as, for example, Keen’s book…). But it does mean you’re missing the point if you simply compare the average blog to the NY times (Lessig). What Lessig expresses here is the different, but not mutually exclusive, literacy practices involved in the word “publishing.” Publishing a blog is very different to publishing a newspaper and the way readers react to both will change as they move in and out the differing discursive spaces each occupies. In a recent collaborative paper by Sue Thomas, Chris Joseph, Jess Laccetti, Bruce Mason, Simon Mills, Simon Perril, and Kate Pullinger, they describe this capacity to move across different reading and writing styles as “transliteracy.” They define the term as “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks” (Thomas et al.). It’s a term that perfectly describes the capacity to move fluidly across discursive environments. Here we return to Greenwald’s use of a framework of youth and subculture. While I have criticised the Birminghamesque fixation on a hom*ogeneous “Youth” demographic enacting resistance through conspicuous consumption, there is good reason to use existing subculture studies methodology as a means of understanding how transliteracies play out in everyday life. David Chaney remarks, the idea of subculture is redundant because the type of investment that the notion of subculture labelled is becoming more general, and therefore the varieties of modes of symbolization and involvement are more common in everyday life. (37) I think the increasing commonality of subcultural practices in everyday life actually makes the idea more relevant, not less. It does, however, make it much harder to pin things on “spectacular youth subcultures.” Yet the focus on “everyday life” is important here, shifting our understanding of “subculture” to the types of literacies played out within localised, personal networks and experiences. As de Certeau has argued, the practice of everyday life is an issue of “a way of thinking invested in a way of acting, an art of combination which cannot be dissociated from an art of using” (Certeau 486). This is as true for our literacy practices as anything else. Whether we choose to label those practices subcultural or not, our ability to interpret, take part in and react to different communicative forums is clearly fundamental to our understanding of the world around us, regardless of our age. Sarah Thornton suggests a useful alternate definition of subculture when she talks about subcultural capital: Subcultural capital is the linchpin of an alternative hierarchy in which the aces of age, gender, sexuality and race are all employed in order to keep the determinations of class, income and occupation at bay (105). This is an understanding that avoids easy narratives of young people and their consumption of Web 2.0 by recognising the complexity with which people’s literacy habits, in the cultural sense, connect to their active participation in the production of meaning. Subcultural capital implies that the framework through which individuals read, interpret, and shift between discursive environments, personalising and building links across the strata of cultural production, is acted out at the local and personal level, rather than purely through the relationship between a producing gatekeeper and a passive, consuming readership. If we recognise the ability for readers to connect multiple mediums, to shift between reading and writing practices, and to seamlessly interpret and digest markedly different assumptions about legitimate speaking voices across genres, our understanding of what it means to “publish” ceases to be an issue of generationalism or conventional mediums being washed away by the digital era. The issue we see in both Keen and Greenwald is an attempt to digest the way Web 2.0 has forced the concept of “publishing” to take on a multiplicity of meanings, played out by individual readers, and imbued with their own unique and interwoven textual and cultural literacy habits. It’s not only Emos who publish livejournals, and it’s incredibly naive to assume gatekeepers have ever really held a monopoly on all aspects of cultural production. What the rise of Web 2.0 has done is simply to bring everyday, private sphere dialogue driven literacies into the public sphere in a very obvious way. The kind of discourses once passed off as resistant youth subcultures are now being shown as common place. Keen is right to suggest that this will continue to impact, sometimes negatively, on traditional gatekeepers. Yet the change is inevitable. As our reading and writing practices alter around new genres, our understandings of what constitutes legitimate fields of publishing will also change. References Brabazon, Tara. From Revolution to Revelation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. de Certeau, Michel. “Practice of Every Day Life.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Ed. John Story. London: Prentice Hall, 1998. 483–94. Chaney, David. “Fragmented Culture and Subcultures.” After Subculture. Ed. Andy Bennett and Keith Kahn-Harris. Houndsmill: Palgrave McMillian, 2004. 36–48. Greenwald, Andy. Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2003. Grose, Michael. XYZ: The New Rules of Generational Warfare. Sydney: Random House, 2005. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen and Co Ltd, 1979. Huntley, Rebecca. The World According to Y. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2006. Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2007. Lessig, Lawrence. “Keen’s ‘The Cult of the Amateur’: BRILLIANT!” Lessig May 31, 2007. Aug. 19 2008 ‹http://www.lessig.org/blog/2007/05/keens_the_cult_of_the_amateur.html>. Lury, Celia. “Reading the Self: Autobiography, Gender and the Institution of the Literary.” Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies. Ed. Sarah. Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey. Hammersmith: HarperCollinsAcademic, 1991. 97–108. Thomas, Sue, Chris Joseph, Jess Laccetti, Bruce Mason, Simon Mills, Simon Perril, and Kate Pullinger. “Transliteracy: Crossing Divides.” First Monday 12.12. (2007). Apr. 1 2008 ‹http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2060/1908>. Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Oxford: Polity Press, 1995. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Frogmore: Triad/Panther Press, 1977.

Abstract:

If you live through this with me, I swear that I would die for you— Hole, “Asking for It” (1994)The 1990s was a curious decade – post-1980s excess and the Black Monday correction, we limped into the last decade of the 20th century with a whimper, not a bang. The baby boomers were in ascendency, shaking off the detritus of a century of extremes behind closed doors.It’s easy now to think that the disaffection manifesting in Generation X and in particular in the grunge music scene was a put on, an act. But in most big game cultures the emerging generation was caught between old school regimes that refused to recognise very obvious failures and what appeared to be distant, no access futures. This point has been compellingly made by Mark Davis, the author of one of the essays in this 'nineties' issue of M/C Journal.The editors of this issue came of age in 1990s Australia. Or, to paraphrase grunge act Hole, we lived through this. And what a time to be alive! How appropriate to revisit the twentieth century’s swansong as the second decade of the twenty-first century nears its own denouement.When we sat down to work on this issue, one clear question arose: How to explain this 1990s nostalgia? Commentators have proffered a slew of explanations. These have ranged from the “20 year cycles” for nostalgia in popular culture (Tucker) to a desire for an apparently simpler, more trouble-free and, well, less connected time. As Atkinson wryly observes: “While we had the internet in the grunge era, it didn't necessarily dominate your life at that point. Your existence was probably a bunch more focused on IRL than URLs.”Some contributors invoke 1990s nostalgia. Paul Stafford provides a reverential and autoethnographic account of his experiences as a fan of grunge music during that genre’s early 1990s heyday. Renee Middlemost describes the excoriating response from fans to The Simpsons’ episode “That 90s Show”. Middlemost’s essay reminds us of the program’s brilliance prior to “jumping the shark” in the 2000s.Yes, the 1990s hosted transgressive, test of time-standing examples of popular culture. This includes the ‘grunge’ music genre that arose in the US circa the early 1990s, in the work of bands such as Hole, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden (see Stafford’s essay). Grunge music and its associated sub-cultural markers went on to flourish globally in countries such as Poland, as Marek Jezinski and Lukasz Wojtkowski describe in their contribution.The 1990s also saw lesser known, but no less significant, pop cultural phenomena. Julian Novitz revisits the Doctor Who novels published between 1991 and 1997. These novels are particularly significant given that the 1990s have commonly been regarded as the “wilderness years” for that franchise.The 1990s saw an increased feminist visibility in popular culture. This visibility is suggested in Jessica Ford’s essay on Roseanne/Roseanne Barr’s feminism, Claire Knowles’s reading of Agent Scully (of X Files fame) as feminist icon, and Justine Ettler’s reflection on her meeting with US “post-punk-feminist” Kathy Acker. Ettler is the author of the breakout Australian novel The River Ophelia (1995), which was influenced by Acker’s oeuvre, and of which Acker was evidently a fan.Yet, 1990s feminisms had their limitations. They lacked, for example, the focus of intersectionality that was conceptualised by African-American legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw during the late 1980s, and that is only now (in the 21st century) really starting to take shape, albeit not without a struggle. Ford makes this point when analysing the “whiteness” of Roseanne/Roseanne’s gender politics in the 90s and 2018.In other areas, too, the 90s were not “all good”. There was no such thing as regional arts development funds. There was no reconciliation or Beyond Blue. No #MeToo or #TimesUp. No kombucha or viral campaigns or shops open after five. No royal commissions into child abuse. Australia was yet to have a female prime minister or governor general. Mentioning global warming meant you were a crackpot. Gender reassignment was something your nanna and your neighbour had never heard about.Put simply, then, the 1990s cannot be described in entirely affirmative or negative terms. The 1990s (as with any decade, really) is too complex for such summations.In some ways the 1990s was about what was started (internet insurgence), what was set on fire (Die Yuppy Die), and what came after the ashes drifted. Many of our writers have taken this comparative view, exploring the then(s) and now(s) and the enormous gaps between that don’t just register in years. Mark Davis, for example, argues the Alt Right is far more nightmarish in the new millennium than even he could have imagined.Some contributors have explored the merger of old and new, past and future in creative and idiosyncratic ways. Chris Campanioni theorises “the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine.” Campanioni’s exploration focuses, in particular, on the Y2K bug and David Lynch’s cult series Twin Peaks (1990-91), and the much hyped reboot in 2017.In his feature essay contribution, Mitch Goodwin reminds us that 1999 — and its anticipation of technological dystopia (Y2K anxieties ahoy!) — “could not have happened” without 1995. Goodwin teases out this point via readings of two futuristic thrillers Johnny Mnemonic and Strange Days.As Goodwin puts it:It might seem strange now but tapping into the contents of Keanu Reeve’s brain was a utopian data moment in 1995. This was still the digital frontier when the network was as yet not fully colonised by corporate America. The Lo-Teks effectively delivering a global moment of healing via satellite. These were the dreams we had in the nineties.While no single collection could hope to encapsulate the complexity of the period spanning 1990 to 1999. The contributors to the ‘Nineties’ issue of M/C Journal have given this one helluva go.References Bernstein, Sara. “Why Gen X Isn’t Psyched for the ‘90s Revival.” Vox. 13 Mar. 2018. <https://www.vox.com/2018/3/13/17064842/gen-x-90s-revival>.Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989): 139-167.Davis, Mark. Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Hole. “Asking for It.” Live through This. Georgia, US: City Slang, 1994.

Abstract:

The brand began, quite literally, as a method for ranchers to identify their cattle. By burning a distinct symbol into the hide of a baby calf, the owner could insure that if it one day wandered off his property or was stolen by a competitor, he’d be able to point to that logo and claim the animal as his rightful property. When the manufacturers of products adopted the brand as a way of guaranteeing the quality of their goods, its function remained pretty much the same. Buying a package of oats with the Quaker label meant the customer could trace back these otherwise generic oats to their source. If there was a problem, he knew where he could turn. More important, if the oats were of satisfactory or superior quality, he knew where he could get them again. Trademarking a brand meant that no one else could call his oats Quaker. Advertising in this innocent age simply meant publicizing the existence of one’s brand. The sole objective was to increase consumers awareness of the product or company that made it. Those who even thought to employ specialists for the exclusive purpose of writing ad copy hired newspaper reporters and travelling salesmen, who knew how to explain the attributes of an item in words that people tended to remember. It wasn’t until 1922 that a preacher and travelling “medicine show” salesman-turned-copywriter named Claude Hopkins decided that advertising should be systematized into a science. His short but groundbreaking book Scientific Advertising proposed that the advertisem*nt is merely a printed extension of the salesman¹s pitch and should follow the same rules. Hopkins believed in using hard descriptions over hype, and text over image: “The more you tell, the more you sell” and “White space is wasted space” were his mantras. Hopkins believed that any illustrations used in an ad should be directly relevant to the product itself, not just a loose or emotional association. He insisted on avoiding “frivolity” at all costs, arguing that “no one ever bought from a clown.” Although some images did appear in advertisem*nts and on packaging as early as the 1800s - the Quaker Oats man showed up in 1877 - these weren¹t consciously crafted to induce psychological states in customers. They were meant just to help people remember one brand over another. How better to recall the brand Quaker than to see a picture of one? It wasn’t until the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as Americans turned toward movies and television and away from newspapers and radio, that advertisers’ focus shifted away from describing their brands and to creating images for them. During these decades, Midwestern adman Leo Burnett concocted what is often called the Chicago school of advertising, in which lovable characters are used to represent products. Green Giant, which was originally just the Minnesota Valley Canning Company’s code name for an experimental pea, became the Jolly Green Giant in young Burnett’s world of animated characters. He understood that the figure would make a perfect and enticing brand image for an otherwise boring product and could also serve as a mnemonic device for consumers. As he watched his character grow in popularity, Burnett discovered that the mythical figure of a green giant had resonance in many different cultures around the world. It became a kind of archetype and managed to penetrate the psyche in more ways than one. Burnett was responsible for dozens of character-based brand images, including Tony the Tiger, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, and the Marlboro Man. In each case, the character creates a sense of drama, which engages the audience in the pitch. This was Burnett’s great insight. He still wanted to sell a product based on its attributes, but he knew he had to draw in his audience using characters. Brand images were also based on places, like Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing, or on recognizable situations, such as the significant childhood memories labelled “Kodak moments” or a mother nurturing her son on a cold day, a defining image for Campbell’s soup. In all these cases, however, the moment, location, or character went only so far as to draw the audience into the ad, after which they would be subjected to a standard pitch: ‘Soup is good food’, or ‘Sorry, Charlie, only the best tuna get to be Starkist’. Burnett saw himself as a homespun Midwesterner who was contributing to American folklore while speaking in the plain language of the people. He took pride in the fact that his ads used words like “ain’t”; not because they had some calculated psychological effect on the audience, but because they communicated in a natural, plainspoken style. As these methods found their way to Madison Avenue and came to be practiced much more self-consciously, Burnett¹s love for American values and his focus on brand attributes were left behind. Branding became much more ethereal and image-based, and ads only occasionally nodded to a product’s attributes. In the 1960s, advertising gurus like David Ogilvy came up with rules about television advertising that would have made Claude Hopkins shudder. “Food in motion” dictated that food should always be shot by a moving camera. “Open with fire” meant that ads should start in a very exciting and captivating way. Ogilvy told his creatives to use supers - text superimposed on the screen to emphasize important phrases and taglines. All these techniques were devised to promote brand image, not the product. Ogilvy didn’t believe consumers could distinguish between products were it not for their images. In Ogilvy on Advertising, he explains that most people cannot tell the difference between their own “favourite” whiskey and the closest two competitors’: ‘Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don¹t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn¹t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image. The brand image is ninety percent of what the distiller has to sell.’ (Ogilvy, 1993). Thus, we learned to “trust our car to the man who wears the star” not because Texaco had better gasoline than Shell, but because the company’s advertisers had created a better brand image. While Burnett and his disciples were building brand myths, another school of advertisers was busy learning about its audience. Back in the 1920s, Raymond Rubicam, who eventually founded the agency Young and Rubicam, thought it might be interesting to hire a pollster named Dr. Gallup from Northwestern University to see what could be gleaned about consumers from a little market research. The advertising industry’s version of cultural anthropology, or demographics, was born. Like the public-relations experts who study their target populations in order to manipulate them later, marketers began conducting polls, market surveys, and focus groups on the segments of the population they hoped to influence. And to draw clear, clean lines between demographic groups, researchers must almost always base distinctions on four factors: race, age, sex, and wages. Demographic research is reductionist by design. I once consulted to an FM radio station whose station manager wanted to know, “Who is our listener?” Asking such a question reduces an entire listenership down to one fictional person. It’s possible that no single individual will ever match the “customer profile” meant to apply to all customers, which is why so much targeted marketing often borders on classist, racist, and sexist pandering. Billboards for most menthol cigarettes, for example, picture African-Americans because, according to demographic research, black people prefer them to regular cigarettes. Microsoft chose Rolling Stones songs to launch Windows 95, a product targeted at wealthy baby boomers. “The Women’s Global Challenge” was an advertising-industry-created Olympics for women, with no purpose other than to market to active females. By the 1970s, the two strands of advertising theory - demographic research and brand image - were combined to develop campaigns that work on both levels. To this day, we know to associate Volvos with safety, Dr. Pepper with individuality, and Harley-Davidson with American heritage. Each of these brand images is crafted to appeal to the target consumer’s underlying psychological needs: Volvo ads are aimed at upper-middle-class white parents who fear for their children’s health and security, Dr. Pepper is directed to young nonconformists, and the Harley-Davidson image supports its riders’ self-perception as renegades. Today’s modern (or perhaps postmodern) brands don’t invent a corporate image on their own; they appropriate one from the media itself, such as MetLife did with Snoopy, Butterfinger did with Bart Simpson, or Kmart did by hiring Penny Marshall and Rosie O’Donnell. These mascots were selected because their perceived characteristics match the values of their target consumers - not the products themselves. In the language of today’s marketers, brand images do not reflect on products but on advertisers’ perceptions of their audiences’ psychology. This focus on audience composition and values has become the standard operating procedure in all of broadcasting. When Fox TV executives learned that their animated series “King of the Hill”, about a Texan propane distributor, was not faring well with certain demographics, for example, they took a targeted approach to their character’s rehabilitation. The Brandweek piece on Fox’s ethnic campaign uncomfortably dances around the issue. Hank Hill is the proverbial everyman, and Fox wants viewers to get comfortable with him; especially viewers in New York, where “King of the Hill”’s homespun humor hasn’t quite caught on with the young urbanites. So far this season, the show has pulled in a 10.1 rating/15 share in households nationally, while garnering a 7.9 rating/12 share in New York (Brandweek, 1997) As far as Fox was concerned, while regular people could identify with the network’s new “everyman” character, New Yorkers weren’t buying his middle-American patter. The television show’s ratings proved what TV executives had known all along: that New York City’s Jewish demographic doesn’t see itself as part of the rest of America. Fox’s strategy for “humanizing” the character to those irascible urbanites was to target the group’s ethnographic self-image. Fox put ads for the show on the panels of sidewalk coffee wagons throughout Manhattan, with the tagline “Have a bagel with Hank”. In an appeal to the target market’s well-developed (and well-researched) cynicism, Hank himself is shown saying, “May I suggest you have that with a schmear”. The disarmingly ethnic humor here is meant to underscore the absurdity of a Texas propane salesman using a Jewish insider’s word like “schmear.” In another Upper West Side billboard, Hank’s son appeals to the passing traffic: “Hey yo! Somebody toss me up a knish!” As far as the New York demographic is concerned, these jokes transform the characters from potentially threatening Southern rednecks into loveable hicks bending over backward to appeal to Jewish sensibilities, and doing so with a comic and, most important, nonthreatening inadequacy. Today, the most intensely targeted demographic is the baby - the future consumer. Before an average American child is twenty months old, he can recognize the McDonald’s logo and many other branded icons. Nearly everything a toddler encounters - from Band-Aids to underpants - features the trademarked characters of Disney or other marketing empires. Although this target market may not be in a position to exercise its preferences for many years, it pays for marketers to imprint their brands early. General Motors bought a two-page ad in Sports Illustrated for Kids for its Chevy Venture minivan. Their brand manager rationalized that the eight-to-fourteen-year-old demographic consists of “back-seat consumers” (Leonhardt, 1997). The real intention of target marketing to children and babies, however, goes deeper. The fresh neurons of young brains are valuable mental real estate to admen. By seeding their products and images early, the marketers can do more than just develop brand recognition; they can literally cultivate a demographic’s sensibilities as they are formed. A nine-year-old child who can recognize the Budweiser frogs and recite their slogan (Bud-weis-er) is more likely to start drinking beer than one who can remember only Tony the Tiger yelling, “They¹re great!” (Currently, more children recognize the frogs than Tony.) This indicates a long-term coercive strategy. The abstraction of brand images from the products they represent, combined with an increasing assault on our demographically targeted psychological profiles, led to some justifiable consumer paranoia by the 1970s. Advertising was working on us in ways we couldn’t fully understand, and people began to look for an explanation. In 1973, Wilson Bryan Key, a communications researcher, wrote the first of four books about “subliminal advertising,” in which he accused advertisers of hiding sexual imagery in ice cubes, and psychoactive words like “sex” onto the airbrushed surfaces of fashion photographs. Having worked on many advertising campaigns from start to finish, in close proximity to everyone from copywriters and art directors to printers, I can comfortably put to rest any rumours that major advertising agencies are engaging in subliminal campaigns. How do images that could be interpreted as “sexual” show up in ice cubes or elbows? The final photographs chosen for ads are selected by committee out of hundreds that are actually shot. After hours or days of consideration, the group eventually feels drawn to one or two photos out of the batch. Not surprising, these photos tend to have more evocative compositions and details, but no penises, breasts, or skulls are ever superimposed onto the images. In fact, the man who claims to have developed subliminal persuasion, James Vicary, admitted to Advertising Age in 1984 that he had fabricated his evidence that the technique worked in order to drum up business for his failing research company. But this confession has not assuaged Key and others who relentlessly, perhaps obsessively, continue to pursue those they feel are planting secret visual messages in advertisem*nts. To be fair to Key, advertisers have left themselves open to suspicion by relegating their work to the abstract world of the image and then targeting consumer psychology so deliberately. According to research by the Roper Organization in 1992, fifty-seven percent of American consumers still believe that subliminal advertising is practiced on a regular basis, and only one in twelve think it “almost never” happens. To protect themselves from the techniques they believe are being used against them, the advertising audience has adopted a stance of cynical suspicion. To combat our increasing awareness and suspicion of demographic targeting, marketers have developed a more camouflaged form of categorization based on psychological profiles instead of race and age. Jim Schroer, the executive director of new marketing strategy at Ford explains his abandonment of broad-demographic targeting: ‘It’s smarter to think about emotions and attitudes, which all go under the term: psychographics - those things that can transcend demographic groups.’ (Schroer, 1997) Instead, he now appeals to what he calls “consumers’ images of themselves.” Unlike broad demographics, the psychographic is developed using more narrowly structured qualitative-analysis techniques, like focus groups, in-depth interviews, and even home surveillance. Marketing analysts observe the behaviors of volunteer subjects, ask questions, and try to draw causal links between feelings, self-image, and purchases. A company called Strategic Directions Group provides just such analysis of the human psyche. In their study of the car-buying habits of the forty-plus baby boomers and their elders, they sought to define the main psychological predilections that human beings in this age group have regarding car purchases. Although they began with a demographic subset of the overall population, their analysis led them to segment the group into psychographic types. For example, members of one psychographic segment, called the ³Reliables,² think of driving as a way to get from point A to point B. The “Everyday People” campaign for Toyota is aimed at this group and features people depending on their reliable and efficient little Toyotas. A convertible Saab, on the other hand, appeals to the ³Stylish Fun² category, who like trendy and fun-to-drive imports. One of the company’s commercials shows a woman at a boring party fantasizing herself into an oil painting, where she drives along the canvas in a sporty yellow Saab. Psychographic targeting is more effective than demographic targeting because it reaches for an individual customer more directly - like a fly fisherman who sets bait and jiggles his rod in a prescribed pattern for a particular kind of fish. It’s as if a marketing campaign has singled you out and recognizes your core values and aspirations, without having lumped you into a racial or economic stereotype. It amounts to a game of cat-and-mouse between advertisers and their target psychographic groups. The more effort we expend to escape categorization, the more ruthlessly the marketers pursue us. In some cases, in fact, our psychographic profiles are based more on the extent to which we try to avoid marketers than on our fundamental goals or values. The so-called “Generation X” adopted the anti-chic aesthetic of thrift-store grunge in an effort to find a style that could not be so easily identified and exploited. Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying “Whatever.” The members of Generation X are putting up a good fight. Having already developed an awareness of how marketers attempt to target their hearts and wallets, they use their insight into programming to resist these attacks. Unlike the adult marketers pursuing them, young people have grown up immersed in the language of advertising and public relations. They speak it like natives. As a result, they are more than aware when a commercial or billboard is targeting them. In conscious defiance of demographic-based pandering, they adopt a stance of self-protective irony‹distancing themselves from the emotional ploys of the advertisers. Lorraine Ketch, the director of planning in charge of Levi¹s trendy Silvertab line, explained, “This audience hates marketing that’s in your face. It eyeballs it a mile away, chews it up and spits it out” (On Advertising, 1998). Chiat/Day, one of the world’s best-known and experimental advertising agencies, found the answer to the crisis was simply to break up the Gen-X demographic into separate “tribes” or subdemographics - and include subtle visual references to each one of them in the ads they produce for the brand. According to Levi’s director of consumer marketing, the campaign meant to communicate, “We really understand them, but we are not trying too hard” (On Advertising, 1998). Probably unintentionally, Ms. Ketch has revealed the new, even more highly abstract plane on which advertising is now being communicated. Instead of creating and marketing a brand image, advertisers are creating marketing campaigns about the advertising itself. Silvertab’s target market is supposed to feel good about being understood, but even better about understanding the way they are being marketed to. The “drama” invented by Leo Burnett and refined by David Ogilvy and others has become a play within a play. The scene itself has shifted. The dramatic action no longer occurs between the audience and the product, the brand, or the brand image, but between the audience and the brand marketers. As audiences gain even more control over the media in which these interactive stories unfold, advertising evolves ever closer to a theatre of the absurd. excerpted from Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say)? Works Cited Ogilvy, David. Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Vintage, 1983. Brandweek Staff, "Number Crunching, Hollywood Style," Brandweek. October 6, 1997. Leonhardt, David, and Kathleen Kerwin, "Hey Kid, Buy This!" Business Week. June 30, 1997 Schroer, Jim. Quoted in "Why We Kick Tires," by Carol Morgan and Doron Levy. Brandweek. Sept 29, 1997. "On Advertising," The New York Times. August 14, 1998 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Rushkoff, Douglas. "Coercion " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>. APA Style Rushkoff, D. (2003, Jun 19). Coercion . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>

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 p*rn, 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:

Introduction "Doesn't that wreck your records?" This is one of the first things I generally get asked when someone watches me at work in my home or while spinning at a party. It reminds me of a different but related question I once asked someone who worked at Rotate This!, a particularly popular Toronto DJ refuge, a few days after I had bought my first turntable: DJO: "How do you stop that popping and crackling sound your record gets when you scratch back and forth on the same spot for a while?" CLERK: "You buy two copies of everything, one you keep at home all wrapped-up nice and never use, and the other you mess with." My last $150 had just managed to pay for an old Dual direct drive record player. The precious few recently-released records I had were gifts. I nodded my head and made my way over to the rows of disks which I flipped through to make it look like I was maybe going to buy something. Lp cover after lp cover stared back at me all with names I had absolutely never heard of before, organised according to a hyper- hybridised classification scheme that completely escaped my dictionary-honed alphabetic expectations. Worst of all, there seemed to be only single copies of everything left! A sort of outsider's vertigo washed over me, and 3 minutes after walking into unfamiliar territory, I zipped back out onto the street. Thus was to begin my love/hate relationship with the source of all DJ sounds, surliness and misinformation--the independent record shop. My query had (without my planning) boldly pronounced my neophyte status. The response it solicited challenged my seriousness. How much was I willing to invest in order to ride "the wheels of steel"? Sequence 1 Will Straw describes the meteoric rise to prominence of the CD format, If the compact disk has emerged as one of the most dazzlingly effective of commodity forms, this has little to do with its technical superiority to the vinyl record (which we no longer remember to notice). Rather, the effectiveness has to do with its status as the perfect crossover consumer object. As a cutting-edge audiophile invention, it seduced the technophilic, connoisseurist males who typically buy new sound equipment and quickly build collections of recordings. At the same time, its visual refinement and high price rapidly rendered it legitimate as a gift. In this, the CD has found a wide audience among the population of casual record buyers.(61) Straw's point has to do with the fate of musical recordings within contemporary commodity culture. In the wake of a late 70's record industry slump, music labels turned their attention toward the recapturing of casual record sales (read: aging baby boomers). The general shape of this attempt revolved around a re-configuring of the record- shopping experience dedicated towards reducing "the intimidation seen as endemic to the environment of the record store."(59) The CD format, along with the development of super-sized, general interest (all-genre) record outlets has worked (according to Straw) to streamline record sales towards more-predictable patterns, all the while causing less "selection stress."(59) Re-issues and compilations, special-series trademarks, push-button listening stations, and maze-like display layouts, combined with department store-style service ("Can I help you find anything?") all work towards eliminating the need for familiarity with particular music "scenes" in order to make personally gratifying (and profit engendering) musical choices. Straw's analysis is exemplary in its dissatisfaction with treating the arena of personal musical choice as unaffected by any constraints apart from subjective matters of taste. Straw's evaluation also isolates the vinyl record as an object eminently ready (post-digital revolution) for subcultural appropriation. Its displacement by the CD as the dominant medium for collecting recorded music involved the recasting of the turntable as outdated and inferior, thereby relegating it to the dusty attic, basem*nt or pawn shop (along with crates upon crates upon crates of records). These events set the stage for vinyl's spectacular rise from the ashes. The most prominent feature of this re-emergence has to do not simply with possession of the right kind of stuff (the cachet of having a music collection difficult for others to borrow aside), but with what vinyl and turntable technology can do. Bridge In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige claims that subcultures are, cultures of conspicuous consumption...and it is through the distinctive rituals of consumption, through style, that the subculture at once reveals its "secret identity" and communicates its forbidden meanings. It is basically the way in which commodities are used in subculture which mark the subculture off from more orthodox cultural formations.(103 Hebdige borrows the notion of bricolage from Levi Strauss in order to describe the particular kind of use subcultures make of the commodities they appropriate. Relationships of identity, difference and order are developed from out of the minds of those who make use of the objects in question and are not necessarily determined by particular qualities inherent to the objects themselves. Henceforth a safety pin more often used for purposes like replacing missing buttons or temporarily joining pieces of fabric can become a punk fashion statement once placed through the nose, ear or torn Sex Pistols tee-shirt. In the case of DJ culture, it is the practice of mixing which most obviously presents itself as definitive of subcultural participation. The objects of conspicuous consumption in this case--record tracks. If mixing can be understood as bricolage, then attempts "to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code"(18) by such a practice are not in vain. Granting mixing the power of meaning sets a formidable (semiotic) framework in place for investigating the practice's outwardly visible (spectacular) form and structure. Hebdige's description of bricolage as a particularly conspicuous and codified type of using, however, runs the risk of privileging an account of record collecting and mixing which interprets it entirely on the model of subjective expression.(1.) What is necessary is a means of access to the dialogue which takes place between a DJ and her records as such. The contents of a DJ's record bag (like Straw's CD shopping bag) are influenced by more that just her imagination, pocket book and exposure to different kinds of music. They are also determined in an important way by each other. Audio mixing is not one practice, it is many, and the choice to develop or use one sort of skill over another is intimately tied up with the type and nature of track one is working with. Sequence 2 The raw practice of DJing relies heavily on a slider integral to DJ mixers known as the _cross-fader_(ital). With the standard DJ set up, when the cross-fader is all the way to the left, the left turntable track plays through the system; vice versa when the fader is all the way to the right. In between is the "open" position which allows both inputs to be heard simultaneously. The most straightforward mixing technique, "cutting," involves using this toggle to quickly switch from one source to another--resulting in the abrupt end of one sound- flow followed by its instantaneous replacement. This technique can be used to achieve a variety of different effects--from the rather straightforward stringing together of the final beat of a four bar sequence from one track with a strong downbeat from something new in order to provide continuous, but sequential musical output, to the thoroughly difficult practice of "beat juggling," where short excerpts of otherwise self-contained tracks ("breaks") are isolated and then extended indefinitely through the use of two copies of the same record (while one record plays, the DJ spins the other back to the downbeat of the break in question, which is then released in rhythm). In both cases timing and rhythm are key. These features of the practice help to explain DJ predilections for tracks which make heavy, predictable use of their rhythm sections. "Blending" is a second technique which uses the open position on the cross-fader to mix two inputs into a live sonic collage. Tempo, rhythm and "density" of source material have an enormous impact on the end result. While any two tracks can be layered in this way, beats that are not synchronized are quick to create cacophony, and vocals also tend to clash dramatically. Melodic lines in general pose certain challenges here since these are in particular keys and have obvious starts and finishes. This is one reason why tracks produced specifically for DJing often have such long, minimal intros and exits. This makes it much easier to create "natural" sounding blends. Atmospheric sounds, low-frequency hums, speech samples and repetitive loops with indeterminate rhythm structures are often used for these segments in order to allow drawn-out, subtle transitions when moving between tracks. If an intro contains a fixed beat (as is the case often with genres constructed specifically for non-stop dancing like house, techno and to some extent drum and bass), then those who want seamless blends need to "beat match" if they want to maintain a dancer's groove. The roots of this technique go back to disco and demand fairly strict genre loyalty in order to insure that a set's worth of tracks all hover around the same tempo, defined in beats-per- minute, or BPMs. The basic procedure involves finding the downbeat of the track one wishes to mix through a set of headphones, releasing that beat in time with the other record while making fine tempo- adjustments via the turntable's pitch control to the point where the track coming through the earphones and the track being played over the system are in synch. The next step is "back-spinning" or "needle dropping" to the start of the track to be mixed, then releasing it again, this time with the cross-fader open. Volume levels can then be adjusted in order to allow the new track to slowly take prominence (the initial track being close to its end at this point) before the cross-fader is closed into the new position and the entire procedure is repeated. Scratching is perhaps the most notorious mixing technique and involves the most different types of manipulations. The practice is most highly developed in hip hop (and related genres like drum and bass) and is used both as an advanced cutting technique for moving between tracks as well as a sonic end-in-itself. It's genesis is attributed to a South Bronx DJ known as Grand Wizard Theodore who was the first (1977) to try to make creative use of the sound associated with moving a record needle back and forth over the same drumbeat, a phenomena familiar to DJs used to cueing-up downbeats through headphones. This trick is now referred to as the "baby scratch," and it along with an ever-increasing host of mutations and hybrids make- up the skills that pay the bills for hip hop DJs. In the case of many of these techniques, the cross-fader is once again used heavily in order to remove unwanted elements of particular scratches from the mix, as well as adding certain staccato and volume-fading effects. Isolated, "pure" sounds are easiest to scratch with and are therefore highly sought after by this sort of DJ--a pastime affectionately referred to as "digging in the crates." Sources of such sounds are extremely diverse, but inevitably revolve around genre's which use minimal orchestration (like movie-soundtracks), accentuated rhythms with frequent breakdowns (like funk or jazz), or which eschew musical form all together (like sound-effects, comedy and children's records). Exit To answer the question which started this investigation, in the end, how wrecked my records get depends a lot on what I'm using them for. To be sure, super-fast scratching patterns and tricks that use lots of back-spinning like beat-juggling will eventually "burn" static into spots on one's records. But with used records costing as little as $1 for three, and battle records (2.) widely available, the effect of this feature of the technology on the actual pursuit of the practice is negligible. And most techniques don't noticeably burn records at all, especially if a DJ's touch is light enough to allow for minimal tone-arm weight (a parameter which controls a turntable's groove-tracking ability). This is the kind of knowledge which comes from interaction with objects. It is also the source of a great part of the subcultural bricoleur's stylistic savvy. Herein lies the essence of the intimidating power of the indie record shop--its display of intimate, physical familiarity with the hidden particularities of the new vinyl experience. Investigators confronted with such familiarity need to find ways to go beyond analyses which stop at the level of acknowledgment of the visible logic displayed by spectacular subcultural practices if they wish to develop nuanced accounts of subcultural life. Such plumbing of the depths often requires listening in the place of observing--whether to first-hand accounts collected through ethnography or to the subtle voice of the objects themselves. (1.) An example of such an account: "DJ-ing is evangelism; a desire to share songs. A key skill is obviously not just to drop the popular, well-known songs at the right part of the night, but to pick the right new releases, track down the obscurer tunes and newest imports, get hold of next month's big tune this month; you gather this pile, this tinder, together, then you work the records, mix them, drop them, cut them, scratch them, melt them, beat them all together until they unite. Voilà; disco inferno." Dave Haslam, "DJ Culture," p. 169. (2.) Records specifically designed by and for scratch DJs and which consist of long strings of scratchable sounds. References Haslam, David. "DJ Culture." The Clubcultures Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 1997 Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Melvin and Co. Ltd.. 1979 Straw, Will. "Organized Disorder: The Changing Space of the Record Shop." The Clubcultures Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 1997

Abstract:

When historian Graeme Davison famously declared that “Australia was born urban and quickly grew suburban” (98), he was clearly referring to Melbourne or Sydney, but certainly not Brisbane. Although the Brisbane of 2011 might resemble a contemporary, thriving metropolis, its genealogy is not an urban one. For most of its history, as Gillian Whitlock has noted, Brisbane was “a place where urban industrial society is kept at bay” (80). What distinguishes Brisbane from Australia’s larger southern capital cities is its rapid morphology into a city from a provincial, suburban, town. Indeed it is Brisbane’s distinctive regionalism, with its sub-tropical climate, offering a steamy, fecund backdrop to narratives of the city that has produced a plethora of writing in literary accounts of the city, from author David Malouf through to contemporary writers such as Andrew McGahan, John Birmingham, Venero Armanno, Susan Johnson, and Nick Earls. Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition makes its transformation unique among Australian cities. Its rapid population growth and urban development have changed the way that many people now live in the city. Unlike the larger cities of Sydney or Melbourne, whose inner cities were established on the Victorian model of terrace-row housing on small lots, Brisbane’s early planners eschewed this approach. So, one of the features that gives the city its distinction is the languorous suburban quality of its inner-city areas, where many house blocks are the size of the suburban quarter-acre block, all within coo-ee of the city centre. Other allotments are medium to small in size, and, until recently, housed single dwellings of varying sizes and grandeur. Add to this a sub-tropical climate in which ‘green and growth’ is abundant and the pretty but flimsy timber vernacular housing, and it’s easy to imagine that you might be many kilometres from a major metropolitan centre as you walk around Brisbane’s inner city areas. It is partly this feature that prompted demographer Bernard Salt to declare Brisbane “Australia’s most suburban city” (Salt 5). Prior to urban renewal in the early 1990s, Brisbane was a low-density town with very few apartment blocks; most people lived in standalone houses.From the inception of the first Urban Renewal program in 1992, a joint initiative of the Federal government’s Building Better Cities Program and managed by the Brisbane City Council (BCC), Brisbane’s urban development has undergone significant change. In particular, the city’s Central Business District (CBD) and inner city have experienced intense development and densification with a sharp rise in medium- to high-density apartment dwellings to accommodate the city’s swelling population. Population growth has added to the demand for increased density, and from the period 1995–2006 Brisbane was Australia’s fastest growing city (ABS).Today, parts of Brisbane’s inner city resembles the density of the larger cities of Melbourne and Sydney. Apartment blocks have mushroomed along the riverfront and throughout inner and middle ring suburbs. Brisbane’s population has enthusiastically embraced apartment living, with “empty nesters” leaving their suburban family homes for the city, and apartments have become the affordable option for renters and first home purchasers. A significant increase in urban amenities such as large-scale parklands and river side boardwalks, and a growth in service industries such as cafes, restaurants and bars—a feature of cities the world over—have contributed to the appeal of the city and the changing way that people live in Brisbane.Urbanism demands specific techniques of living—life is different in medium- to high-density dwellings, in populous places, where people live in close proximity to one another. In many ways it’s the antithesis to suburban life, a way of living that, as Davison notes, was established around an ethos of privacy, health, and seclusion and is exemplified in the gated communities seen in the suburbs today. The suburbs are characterised by generosity of space and land, and developed as a refuge and escape from the city, a legacy of the nineteenth-century industrial city’s connection with overcrowding, disease, and disorder. Suburban living flourished in Australia from the eighteenth century and Davison notes how, when Governor Phillip drew up the first town plan for Sydney in 1789, it embodied the aspirations of “decency, good order, health and domestic privacy,” which lie at the heart of suburban ideals (100).The health and moral impetus underpinning the establishment of suburban life—that is, to remove people from overcrowding and the unhygienic conditions of slums—for Davison meant that the suburban ethos was based on a “logic of avoidance” (110). Attempting to banish anything deemed dangerous and offensive, the suburbs were seen to offer a more natural, orderly, and healthy environment. A virtuous and happy life required plenty of room—thus, a garden and the expectation of privacy was paramount.The suburbs as a site of lived experience and cultural meaning is significant for understanding the shift from suburban living to the adoption of medium- to high-density inner-city living in Brisbane. I suggest that the ways in which this shift is captured discursively, particularly in promotional material, are indicative of the suburbs' stronghold on the collective imagination. Reinforcing this perception of Brisbane as a suburban city is a history of literary narratives that have cast Brisbane in ways that set it apart from other Australian cities, and that are to do with its non-urban characteristics. Imaginative and symbolic discourses of place have real and material consequences (Lefebvre), as advertisers are only too well aware. Discursively, city life has been imagined oppositionally from life in the suburbs: the two sites embody different cultural meanings and values. In Australia, the suburbs are frequently a site of derision and satire, characterized as bastions of conformity and materialism (Horne), offering little of value in contrast to the city’s many enchantments and diverse pleasures. In the well-established tradition of satire, “suburban bashing is replete in literature, film and popular culture” (Felton et al xx). From Barry Humphries’s characterisation of Dame Edna Everage, housewife superstar, who first appeared in the 1960s, to the recent television comedy series Kath and Kim, suburbia and its inhabitants are represented as dull-witted, obsessed with trivia, and unworldly. This article does not intend to rehearse the tradition of suburban lampooning; rather, it seeks to illustrate how ideas about suburban living are hard held and how the suburban ethos maintains its grip, particularly in relation to notions of privacy and peace, despite the celebratory discourse around the emerging forms of urbanism in Brisbane.As Brisbane morphed rapidly from a provincial, suburban town to a metropolis throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a set of metropolitan discourses developed in the local media that presented new ways of inhabiting and imagining the city and offered new affiliations and identifications with the city. In establishing Brisbane’s distinction as a city, marketing material relied heavily on the opposition between the city and the suburbs, implying that urban vitality and diversity rules triumphant over the suburbs’ apparent dullness and hom*ogeneity. In a billboard advertisem*nt for apartments in the urban renewal area of Newstead (2004), images of architectural renderings of the apartments were anchored by the words—“Urban living NOT suburban”—leaving little room for doubt. It is not the design qualities of the apartments or the building itself being promoted here, but a way of life that alludes to utopian ideas of urban life, of enchantment with the city, and implies, with the heavy emphasis of “NOT suburban,” the inferiority of suburban living.The cultural commodification of the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century city has been well documented (Evans; Dear; Zukin; Harvey) and its symbolic value as a commodity is expressed in marketing literature via familiar metropolitan tropes that are frequently amorphous and international. The malleability of such images makes them easily transportable and transposable, and they provided a useful stockpile for promoting a city such as Brisbane that lacked its own urban resources with which to construct a new identity. In the early days of urban renewal, the iconic images and references to powerhouse cities such as New York, London, and even Venice were heavily relied upon. In the latter example, an advertisem*nt promoting Brisbane appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald colour magazine (May 2005). This advertisem*nt represented Brisbane as an antipodean Venice, showing a large reach of the Brisbane river replete with gondolas flanked by the city’s only nineteenth-century riverside building, the Custom’s House. The allusion to traditional European culture is a departure from the usual tropes of “fun and sun” associated with promotions of Queensland, including Brisbane, while the new approach to promoting Brisbane is cognizant of the value of culture in the symbolic and economic hierarchy of the contemporary city. Perhaps equally, the advertisem*nt could be read as ironic, a postmodern self-parodying statement about the city in general. In a nod to the centrality of the spectacle, the advertisem*nt might be a salute to idea of the city as theme park, a pleasure playground and a collective fantasy of escape. Nonetheless, either interpretation presents Brisbane as somewhere else.In other promotional literature for apartment dwellings, suburban living maintains its imaginative grip, evident in a brochure advertising Petrie Point apartments in Brisbane’s urban renewal area of inner-city New Farm (2000). In the brochure, the promise of peace and calm—ideals that have their basis in suburban living—are imposed and promoted as a feature of inner-city living. Paradoxically, while suggesting that a wholesale evacuation and rejection of suburban life is occurring presumably because it is dull, the brochure simultaneously upholds the values of suburbia:Discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers who prefer lounging over latte rather than mowing the quarter acre block, are abandoning suburban living in droves. Instead, hankering after a more cosmopolitan lifestyle without the mind numbing drive to work, they are retreating to the residential mecca, the inner city, for chic shops and a lively dining, arts and theatre culture. (my italics)In the above extract, the rhetoric used to promote and uphold the virtues of a cosmopolitan inner-city life is sabotaged by a language that in many respects capitulates to the ideals of suburban living, and evokes the health and retreat ethos of suburbia. “Lounging” over lattes and “retreating to a residential mecca”[i] allude to precisely the type of suburban living the brochure purports to eschew. Privacy, relaxation, and health is a discourse and, more importantly, a way of living that is in many ways anathema to life in the city. It is a dream-wish that those features most valued about suburban life, can and should somehow be transplanted to the city. In its promotion of urban amenity, the brochure draws upon a somewhat bourgeois collection of cultural amenities and activities such as a (presumably traditional) arts and theatre culture, “lively dining,” and “chic” shops. The appeal to “discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers” has more than a whiff of status and class, an appeal that disavows the contemporary city’s attention to diversity and inclusivity, and frequently the source of promotion of many international cities. In contrast to the suburban sub-text of exclusivity and seclusion in the Petrie Point Apartment’s brochure, is a promotion of Sydney’s inner-city Newtown as a tourist site and spectacle, which makes an appeal to suburban antipathy clear from the outset. The brochure, distributed by NSW Tourism (2000) displays a strong emphasis on Newtown’s cultural and ethnic diversity, and the various forms of cultural consumption on offer. The inner-city suburb’s appeal is based on its re-framing as a site of tourist consumption of diversity and difference in which diversity is central to its performance as a tourist site. It relies on the distinction between “ordinary” suburbs and “cosmopolitan” places:Some cities are cursed with suburbs, but Sydney’s blessed with Newtown — a cosmopolitan neighbourhood of more than 600 stores, 70 restaurants, 42 cafes, theatres, pubs, and entertainment venues, all trading in two streets whose origins lie in the nineteenth century … Newtown is the Catwalk for those with more style than money … a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul, where Milano meets post-punk bohemia, where Max Mara meets Doc Marten, a stage where a petticoat is more likely to be your grandma’s than a Colette Dinnigan designer original (From Sydney Marketing brochure)Its opening oppositional gambit—“some cities are cursed with suburbs”—conveniently elides the fact that like all Australian cities, Sydney is largely suburban and many of Sydney’s suburbs are more ethnically diverse than its inner-city areas. Cabramatta, Fairfield, and most other suburbs have characteristically high numbers of ethnic groups such as Vietnamese, Korean, Lebanese, and so forth. Recent events, however, have helped to reframe these places as problem areas, rather than epicentres of diversity.The mingling of social groups invites the tourist-flâneur to a performance of difference, “a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul (my italics), where Milano meets post-punk bohemia,” and where “the upwardly mobile and down at heel” appear in what is presented as something of a theatrical extravaganza. Newtown is a product, its diversity a commodity. Consumed visually and corporeally via its divergent sights, sounds, smells and tastes (the brochure goes on to state that 70 restaurants offer cuisine from all over the globe), Newtown is a “successful neighbourhood experiment in the new globalism.” The area’s social inequities—which are implicit in the text, referred to as the “down at heel”—are vanquished and celebrated, incorporated into the rhetoric of difference.Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition and culture, as well as its lack of diversity in comparison to Sydney, reveals itself in the first brochure while the Newtown brochure appeals to the idea of a consumer-based cosmopolitanism. As a sociological concept, cosmopolitanism refers to a set of "subjective attitudes, outlooks and practices" broadly characterized as “disposition of openness towards others, people, things and experiences whose origin is non local” (Skrbis and Woodward 1). Clearly cosmopolitan attitudes do not have to be geographically located, but frequently the city is promoted as the site of these values, with the suburbs, apparently, forever looking inward.In the realm of marketing, appeals to the imagination are ubiquitous, but discursive practices can become embedded in everyday life. Despite the growth of urbanism, the increasing take up of metropolitan life and the enduring disdain among some for the suburbs, the hard-held suburban values of peace and privacy have pragmatic implications for the ways in which those values are embedded in people’s expectations of life in the inner city.The exponential growth in apartment living in Brisbane offers different ways of living to the suburban house. For a sub-tropical city where "life on the verandah" is a significant feature of the Queenslander house with its front and exterior verandahs, in the suburbs, a reasonable degree of privacy is assured. Much of Brisbane’s vernacular and contemporary housing is sensitive to this indoor-outdoor style of living, a distinct feature and appeal of everyday life in many suburbs. When "life on the verandah" is adapted to inner-city apartment buildings, expectations that indoor-outdoor living can be maintained in the same way can be problematic. In the inner city, life on the verandah may challenge expectations about privacy, noise and visual elements. While the Brisbane City Plan 2000 attempts to deal with privacy issues by mandating privacy screenings on verandahs, and the side screening of windows to prevent overlooking neighbours, there is ample evidence that attitudinal change is difficult. The exchange of a suburban lifestyle for an urban one, with the exposure to urbanity’s complexity, potential chaos and noise, can be confronting. In the Urban Renewal area and entertainment precinct of Fortitude Valley, during the late 1990s, several newly arrived residents mounted a vigorous campaign to the Brisbane City Council (BCC) and State government to have noise levels reduced from local nightclubs and bars. Fortitude Valley—the Valley, as it is known locally—had long been Brisbane’s main area for nightclubs, bars and brothels. A small precinct bounded by two major one-way roads, it was the locus of the infamous ABC 4 Corners “Moonlight State” report, which exposed the lines of corruption between politicians, police, and the judiciary of the former Bjelke-Petersen government (1974–1987) and who met in the Valley’s bars and brothels. The Valley was notorious for Brisbanites as the only place in a provincial, suburban town that resembled the seedy side of life associated with big cities. The BCC’s Urban Renewal Task Force and associated developers initially had a tough task convincing people that the area had been transformed. But as more amenity was established, and old buildings were converted to warehouse-style living in the pattern of gentrification the world over, people started moving in to the area from the suburbs and interstate (Felton). One of the resident campaigners against noise had purchased an apartment in the Sun Building, a former newspaper house and in which one of the apartment walls directly abutted the adjoining and popular nightclub, The Press Club. The Valley’s location as a music venue was supported by the BCC, who initially responded to residents’ noise complaints with its “loud and proud” campaign (Valley Metro). The focus of the campaign was to alert people moving into the newly converted apartments in the Valley to the existing use of the neighbourhood by musicians and music clubs. In another iteration of this campaign, the BCC worked with owners of music venues to ensure the area remains a viable music precinct while implementing restrictions on noise levels. Residents who objected to nightclub noise clearly failed to consider the impact of moving into an area that was already well known, even a decade ago, as the city’s premier precinct for music and entertainment venues. Since that time, the Valley has become Australia’s only regulated and promoted music precinct.The shift from suburban to urban living requires people to live in very different ways. Thrust into close proximity with strangers amongst a diverse population, residents can be confronted with a myriad of sensory inputs—to a cacophony of noise, sights, smells (Allon and Anderson). Expectations of order, retreat, and privacy inevitably come into conflict with urbanism’s inherent messiness. The contested nature of urban space is expressed in neighbour disputes, complaints about noise and visual amenity, and sometimes in eruptions of street violence. There is no shortage of examples in the Brisbane’s Urban Renewal areas such as Fortitude Valley, where acts of hom*ophobia, racism, and other less destructive conflicts continue to be a frequent occurrence. While the refashioned discursive Brisbane is re-presented as cool, cultured, and creative, the tensions of urbanism and tests to civility remain in a process of constant negotiation. This is the way the city’s past disrupts and resists its cool new surface.[i] The use of the word mecca in the brochure occurred prior to 11 September 2001.ReferencesAllon, Fiona, and Kay Anderson. "Sentient Sydney." In Passionate City: An International Symposium. Melbourne: RMIT, School of Media Communication, 2004. 89–97.Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Regional Population Growth, Australia, 1996-2006.Birmingham, John. "The Lost City of Vegas: David Malouf’s Old Brisbane." Hot Iron Corrugated Sky. Ed. R. Sheahan-Bright and S. Glover. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. xx–xx.Davison, Graeme. "The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb." Suburban Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Australian Cities. Ed. L. Johnson. Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1994. xx–xx.Dear, Michael. The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.Evans, Graeme. “Hard-Branding the Cultural City—From Prado to Prada.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27.2 (2003): 417–40.Evans, Raymond, and Carole Ferrier, eds. Radical Brisbane. Melbourne: The Vulgar Press, 2004.Felton, Emma, Christy Collis, and Phil Graham. “Making Connections: Creative Industries Networks in Outer Urban Locations.” Australian Geographer 14.1 (Mar. 2010): 57–70.Felton, Emma. Emerging Urbanism: A Social and Cultural Study of Urban Change in Brisbane. PhD thesis. Brisbane: Griffith University, 2007.Glover, Stuart, and Stuart Cunningham. "The New Brisbane." Artlink 23.2 (2003): 16–23. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Horne, Donald. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties. Ringwood: Penguin, 1964.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.Malouf, David. Johnno. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975. ---. 12 Edmondstone Street. London: Penguin, 1986.NSW Tourism. Sydney City 2000. Sydney, 2000.Salt, Bernard. Cinderella City: A Vision of Brisbane’s Rise to Prominence. Sydney: Austcorp, 2005.Skrbis, Zlatko, and Ian Woodward. “The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitanism Openness.” Sociological Review (2007): 1-14.Valley Metro. 1 May 2011 < http://www.valleymetro.com.au/the_valley.aspx >.Whitlock, Gillian. “Queensland: The State of the Art on the 'Last Frontier.’" Westerly 29.2 (1984): 85–90.Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1995.

Abstract:

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

Abstract:

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

Abstract:

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circ*mstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. 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Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. 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