Journal articles: 'Evangelism plays' – Grafiati (2024)

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the antecedents of e-banking loyalty and evangelism via threefold construct of WEQUAL (usability, information quality, and service interaction) of public sector banks operating in India. Moreover, it also investigates the mediating role of consumers' trust on the website quality of these banks and their impact on e-banking loyalty and evangelism. The data was collected from 243 respondents through online questionnaire. In order to develop the model and test the hypotheses, partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was done through Smart PLS version 3.2.9. Results assert that website quality of banks positively influences the trust of consumers via usability, information quality, and service interaction. Also, consumer trust plays a mediation role between WEBQUAL constructs and e-banking loyalty and evangelism.

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Purpose This study aims to build on the notion of brand evangelism developed by Becerra and Badrinarayanan (2013) by examining how brand relationship variables regarding one brand (i.e. brand loyalty, brand community identification and self-brand connection) influence oppositional referrals to a rival brand (i.e. desire to harm and trash-talking) in the high definition (HD) videogame console industry. Design/methodology/approach A survey of online communities devoted to video gaming was conducted using a sample of 809 respondents, all owners of either a PlayStation or an Xbox. Findings The results show that the desire to harm the rival brand is strongly and positively associated to participation in trash-talking. Brand loyalty is connected to both dimensions of oppositional brand referrals. Consumers’ connection with the brand affects trash-talking only indirectly through the desire to harm. No association is found between identification with the brand community and oppositional brand referrals. Originality/value This study is the first to demonstrate the mechanism linking brand relationship variables regarding a focal brand with consumers’ disparagement of a rival brand, showing that a desire to harm plays a central role. Just as the desire for retaliation drives negative word-of-mouth in the context of an unsatisfactory experience with a brand (Grégoire and Fisher, 2006), the desire to harm drives trash-talking against a rival brand by brand evangelists. This study improves our understanding of the relationships consumers build with their preferred brands and how this relationship may influence their rejection of competing brands with which they do not have direct experience.

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Conscience is God-given and functions as an internal witness which ratifies the biblical message that we are sinners in need of salvation. Conscience contributes to repentance and faith, and plays a pivotal role in the sanctification of the believer. But conscience is also culturally variable. As a result cross-cultural missionaries seldom understand native conscience and frequently work at cross-purposes to it. This article suggests principles for the missionary who wishes to understand native conscience and contends that missionaries who follow these principles will find conscience to be a God-given ally in the tasks of evangelism and discipleship.

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Although religion clearly plays an important role in framing the way people interpret and cope with disasters, religion is virtually absent in policy debates and disaster reconstruction planning. Researchers have also tended to neglect the role of religion as a source of emotional and social support, and a vehicle of community building and group and individual identity for affected populations. This paper examines the connection between post-disaster resettlement and reconstruction, and the changing religious beliefs and practices of the women and men of Morolica, a town in southern Honduras swept away by the floods caused by Hurricane Mitch in October 1998. In Morolica, rates of conversion to Evangelism increased after the disaster, as several Evangelical missions collaborated with the local population on the reconstruction of their community. My data indicate that women and men had different reasons for being attracted to Evangelism, and that conversion entailed a transformation of the social norms and proper behavior that was different for each gender. Furthermore, these conversions can be understood as gendered survival tactics in a context of dislocation and catastrophic loss. Given the multiple and complex processes taking place in Post-Mitch Honduras in general, and Morolica in particular, I suggest that survival strategies and religious conversions are gender-differentiated, and need to be explored within a framework of shifting political ecological conditions, religious pluralism, and displacement.

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The salvation received by believers as a gift from God, is sometimes only accepted selfishly without prioritizing other people who have not accepted and know the truth of this salvation. believers think that mission is the job of church leaders and ministers only so there is no motivation in preaching the gospel of salvation. The author describes the study of the certainty of salvation as an incentive for believers to continue to preach the news of salvation for all mankind. Using descriptive qualitative methods with a literature study approach, it can be concluded that the certainty of salvation in Acts 4:12 is the driving force for evangelism. It is part of the actualization of the Great Commission of the Lord Jesus which will continue to be carried out until His second coming. By doing and understanding, first, understand that in the theological study and exegesis of Acts 4:12 found the value of salvation which is only found in the Name of Jesus Christ. Second, it leads believers to believe that Salvation is exclusive in Jesus Christ as part of the believer's faith and spirituality. The three believers can understand the nature and essence of evangelism which plays a very important role in educating believers to keep the spirit of preaching the gospel. The four believers are required to actualize the Great Commission as an indicator of believers in the role of evangelism. This is done as part of God's plan to make believers God's co-workers who bring good news to those who do not know the truth in Acts 4:12. AbstrakKeselamatan yang diterima oleh orang percaya sebagai anugrah Tuhan, terkadang hanya diterima secara egois tanpa mementingkan orang lain yang belum menerima dan mengenal kebenaran keselamtan tersebut. orang percaya mengangap bahwa misi adalah tugas para pemimpin dan pelayan gereja saja sehingga tidak adanya motivasi dalam memberitakan injil keselamatan. Penulis mendeskripsikan kajian kepastian keselamatan sebagai pendorong orang percaya untuk terus memberitakan kabar keselamatan bagi seluruh manusia. Menggunakan metode kualitatif deskritif dengan pendekatan studi literature maka dapat disimpulkan bahwa kepastian keselamatan dalam Kisah Para Rasul 4:12 sebagai pendorong pekabaran Injil. Merupakan sebagai bagian dari aktualisasi Amanat Agung Tuhan Yesus yang terus dikerjakan sampai kedatanganNya kedua kali. Dengan mengerjakan dan memahami, yang pertama, menegerti bahwa dalam kajian teologis dan eksegese Kisah Para Rasul 4:12 ditemukan nilai keselamatan yang hanya ditemukan di dalam Nama Yesus Kristus. Kedua, Hal tersebut membawa orang percaya untuk mengimani bahwa Keselamatan eksklusif dalam Yesus Kristus sebagai bagian dari iman dan kerohanian orang percaya. Ketiga ornag percaya dapat memahami adanya hakikat dan esensi penginjilan yang sangat berperan mengedukasi orang percaya untuk tetap semangat memberitakan Injil. Keempat orang percaya diwajibkan mengaktualisasi Amanat Agung sebagai indikator orang percaya dalam peran penginjilan. Hal ini dilakukan sebagai bagian dari rencan Tuhan menjadikan orang percaya kawan sekerja Allah yang membawa kabar baik bagi mereka yang belum mengenal kebenaran dalam Kisah para Rasul 4: 12.

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The main focus of this research is to explain the role of philosophy in evangelism. This is done, there are findings of problems that view philosophy with suspicion and are advised to avoid it, besides that philosophy is considered as the work of the devil that can distort one's faith in Christ. To examine this, here uses an analytical method on the history of Christian philosophy with a qualitative method approach. The purpose of this research is to prove that philosophy does not deviate Christians from their faith, philosophy is also not the work of the devil and does not need to be viewed negatively or avoided, but philosophy can actually be used and plays a role in preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to people who find it difficult to believe and demand there is scientific evidence against his mind regarding the gospel of Jesus Christ. The conclusion of this research is that philosophy can play a role in bridging difficulties in preaching the gospel, philosophy can be used to play a role in expanding the preaching of the gospel and philosophy can also help in giving accountability for the gospel message that is conveyed.

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The problem of the Covid-19 pandemic is experienced by the church in carrying our religious activities, especially personal evangelism. Restrictions on religious activities hinder personal evangelism. The Covid-19 kills thousands of people around people in the church. The fear of death is part of the understanding of God’s wrath in the Old and the New Testaments. God's wrath is shadowed by God's love. God's work of salvation becomes God's work of love. The results of descriptive interpretive research on understanding God's wrath and love are a golden opportunity to overcome personal gospel preaching during the Covid-19 period. The church plans and develops the potential of the church congregation in multiplying the "golden" opportunities of evangelism. Church leaders can use data that is integrated with the service systematics to support evangelism. All elements of the church can reach more souls. Evangelists communicate the understanding of God's wrath and God's love is communicated through online media networks be ‘golden’ opportunity in personal evangelism. AbstrakMasalah pandemi Covid-19 dialami oleh gereja dalam menjalankan kegiatan keagamaan khususnya pengabaran Injil pribadi. Pembatasan kegiatan keagamaan menghambatkan pengabaran Injil pribadi. Virus covid-19 membunuh ribuan orang terjadi di sekitar gereja. Ketakutan kematian menjadi bagian dari pemahaman murka Allah dalam Perjanjian Lama dan Perjanjian Baru. Murka Allah dibayangi kasih Allah. Karya keselamatan Allah menjadi karya kasih Allah. Hasil penelitian deskriptif interpretatif tentang pemahaman murka dan kasih Allah menjadi peluang emas untuk mengatasi pengabaran Injil pribadi di masa covid-19. Gereja merencanakan dan mengembangkan potensi jemaat gereja dalam mengali peluang ‘emas’ pengabaran Injil. Pemimpin gereja dapat menggunakan data yang diintergrasi dengan sistematika pelayanan mendukung pengabaran Injil. Seluruh elemen gereja dapat menjangkau lebih banyak jiwa-jiwa. Pengabar Injil mengkomunikasikan pemahaman murka Allah dan kasih Allah dikomunikasikan melalui jejaring media online menjadi peluang ‘emas’ dalam pengabaran Injil pribadi.

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Interfaith relation is an important issue in the education field. Perhaps, it is because education plays a crucial role in the transfer of the science of religion and theology custody. Then religious education became a central issue in the arena of interreligious relations. Education will determine the style of interfaith relations in a plural society. Legislation on religious education thus should be criticized. The plurality of religion becomes a source of instability and disintegration seems to make the government tried to cope with any vulnerability harmony. Finally, the government issued regulations related to this issue. One of them is the Minister of Religious Affairs Decree Number 84 Year 1996 regarding Implementation Guidelines for Vulnerability Reduction Religious Harmony of Life. The operational guidelines vulnerability religious harmony is intended as a guide to the work of the officials and leaders of organizational units within the Ministry of Religious Affairs (now the Ministry of Religious Affairs) to take measures and coordinate in preventing insecurity in the field of religious harmony. Under these regulations, the causes of insecurity interreligious harmony, among others: the establishment of places of worship, evangelism, foreign aid, interfaith marriage, religious festivities, blasphemy, activity streams splinter and aspects of the non-religious influence, such as population density, the gap socioeconomic, implementation of education, ideological and regional political infiltration and international scale, which entered Indonesia through religious activities. This article examines these issues in the context of Indonesia.

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Interfaith relation is an important issue in the education field. Perhaps, it is because education plays a crucial role in the transfer of the science of religion and theology custody. Then religious education became a central issue in the arena of interreligious relations. Education will determine the style of interfaith relations in a plural society. Legislation on religious education thus should be criticized. The plurality of religion becomes a source of instability and disintegration seems to make the government tried to cope with any vulnerability harmony. Finally, the government issued regulations related to this issue. One of them is the Minister of Religious Affairs Decree Number 84 Year 1996 regarding Implementation Guidelines for Vulnerability Reduction Religious Harmony of Life. The operational guidelines vulnerability religious harmony is intended as a guide to the work of the officials and leaders of organizational units within the Ministry of Religious Affairs (now the Ministry of Religious Affairs) to take measures and coordinate in preventing insecurity in the field of religious harmony. Under these regulations, the causes of insecurity interreligious harmony, among others: the establishment of places of worship, evangelism, foreign aid, interfaith marriage, religious festivities, blasphemy, activity streams splinter and aspects of the non-religious influence, such as population density, the gap socio-economic, implementation of education, ideological and regional political infiltration and international scale, which entered Indonesia through religious activities. This article examines these issues in the context of Indonesia.

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Penulisan karya ilmiah ini dilatar belakangi dengan sebuah tujuan untuk melihat lagu hymn karya Charles Wesley memiliki relevansi di dalam sebuah penginjilan, yang dilakukan oleh Wesley bersaudara. Wesley bersaudara merupakan salah satu tokoh gerejawi yang mempunyai peran besar dalam berkembangnya pelayanan penginjilan di Inggris. Masing-masing diantara Wesley bersaudara mempunyai peran tersendiri ketika menjalankan pelayanan. John Wesley terkenal dengan khotbahnya yang membangun dan displin dalam iman kepada Yesus Kristus, sedangkan Charles Wesley terkenal dengan kemampuannya dalam menulis lirik lagu. Metode penelitian yang digunakan dalam penulisan karya ilmiah ini adalah dengan menggunakan metode kualitatif. Dan untuk melakukan metode penelitian tersebut hal yang akan dilakukan, yaitu: Pertama, pengambilan dan pengumpulan data melalui buku, jurnal, dan skripsi online yang berkaitan dengan judul yang dibahas dalam karya tulis ini. Kedua, observasi lagu-lagu ciptaan Charles Wesley. Dalam karya ilmiah ini, penulis mencoba untuk membuktikan bahwa lagu hymn karya Charles Wesley mempunyai relevansi di dalam penginjilan Wesley bersaudara berperan sejauh mana nyanyian yang diciptakan oleh Charles Wesley, mendukung khotbah dari John Wesley, dan pelayanan penginjilan yang dikerjakan menghasilkan makna baru. Setiap syair mengandung makna yang mendalam dalam menggugah hati jemaat, sehingga lewat nyanyian mampu membuat jemaat bertobat, dan mengalami peneguhan iman di dalam Yesus kristus.The writing of this scientific work was motivated to see the role of a song in evangelism, carried out by the Wesley brothers. The Wesley brothers were one of the ecclesiastical figures who had a large role in developing evangelistic services in England. Each of the Wesley brothers has its role when running services. John Wesley is famous for his constructive preaching and discipline in faith in Jesus Christ, while Charles Wesley is famous for writing song lyrics. The research method used in writing this thesis is to use qualitative methods. And to do the research method, the things that will be done are: First, data collection and collection through books, journals, and online thesis related to the title discussed in this paper. Second, observation of songs by Charles Wesley. In this scientific work, the author tries to prove that the role of singing in the Wesley evangelization of brothers plays the extent to which the song was created by Charles Wesley, supporting John Wesley’s sermon. Each poem contains a profound meaning in moving the congregation's hearts so that singing can make the church repent and experience the confirmation of faith in Jesus Christ.

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In recent years the importance of the title ‘Son of God’ for Matthew's Gospel has received well-deserved recognition. There need be no hesitation in acknowledging the programmatic role which it plays in the christological development of the First Gospel. Thus, in considering this appellation, we are not lightly extracting a vacuous designation appropriated by the Evangelist from his tradition, but are dealing rather with a confessional title of continuing vitality for the Matthean church. All the more surprising is it, then, that the actualcontentof this expression has of late received comparatively little attention from many of those concerned to establish its importance. Moreover, among those who have dealt in more detail with the meaning of the title in Matthew's Gospel, little by way of a satisfactory consensus has been achieved.

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Abstract "Kingdom of Heaven" figures prominently in one Judaic system, forms part of the background of another, and plays no role whatsoever in a third, which makes possible the comparison and contrast of Judaisms. What is at stake in this exercise is how and whether "Kingdomk of Heaven" functions as a category-formation in the Aggadic theology as it does in the Evangelists' account of Jesus' teaching adn the media framed to bear that message. In Aggadic and Halakic contexts, by contrast, the theme of God's rule pervades, but the particularization of that theme as "Kingdom of Heaven" forms no more than an inert category-formation, one that figures as part of the background of ideas that everywhere inhere but nowhere take an active, generative role.

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Abstract "Kingdom of Heaven" figures prominently in one Judaic system, forms part of the background of another, and plays no role whatsoever in a third, which makes possible the comparison and contrast of Judaisms. What is at stake in this exercise is how and whether "Kingdomk of Heaven" functions as a category-formation in the Aggadic theology as it does in the Evangelists' account of Jesus' teaching adn the media framed to bear that message. In Aggadic and Halakic contexts, by contrast, the theme of God's rule pervades, but the particularization of that theme as "Kingdom of Heaven" forms no more than an inert category-formation, one that figures as part of the background of ideas that everywhere inhere but nowhere take an active, generative role.

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Abstract It is clear that the Spirit of God plays a very important role in Matthew’s account. It is also important to note that Matthew refers to the Spirit in ways that are distinctive. For example, among the evangelists only Matthew speaks of the Spirit of God, and Matthew is unique in the NT in referring to the Spirit of the Father. This manner of nuancing the Spirit is analogous to the varied ways in which Matthew describes the kingdom, a concept qualified by such terms as “heaven,” “God,” “Father,” and “Son of Man.” This similarity is appropriate since a further unique feature of the Gospel is that Matthew alone decisively associates the Spirit of God with the presence of the kingdom of God. This discussion will focus first on Jesus’s experience of the Spirit and then on the work of the Spirit in the redemptive or kingdom activity of Jesus.

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This article intends to demonstrate that for Augustine, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit cannot be separated from a unification synonymous of consonance. Also, this is linked to the properties he attributes to the Holy Ghost. First of all, it can be seen from his exegetical theory of the reception of the Scriptures (the notion of plurality of meanings, developed in books XII and XIII of the Confessions. The idea of consonance also plays an important role in his demonstration of the agreement of the evangelists in the De consensu euangelistarum. Finally, the idea of concord and consonance of the Scriptures allows him to criticize not only the multiplicity of discordant pagan cults, but also the disagreement between philosophical schools, as he does in book I of the De consensu; and in book XVIII of the City of God, he uses the same arguments against the whole of the «earthly city». Hermeneutic, philosophic and political categories are joined together by these images of consonance.

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This script writing against the background of social conditions in South Kalimantan diverse in terms of ethnicity, or religion. We take the example of religious pluralism in South Kalimantan. This religious pluralism condition often we term Religious Pluralism. Religious Pluralism succession plays a very important to maintain the diversity and creating understanding of the harmony that lately in various areas, especially in Indonesia being tested. Religious pluralism is a perspective of religious harmony. This understanding of the role in order to be more effective is to educate every student either by teachers, lecturers and other teaching staff in order to achieve that purpose. Both from the Primary Education, Secondary, to university, both from High school and College of General. Results of field interviews showed that religious pluralism is understood by some of the Faculty of Islamic Theology and Humanities IAIN Antasari is a pluralism that if no further interpreted it leads to liberalism even to relativism and nihilism. However, if seen from what has been interpreted by some leaders of Religious Pluralism, then pluralism itself be accepted as a philosophy in building harmony. While others say that sociologically Religious Pluralism has to be accepted by Muslims without having interpreted the deeper, because Pluralism itself is not relativism, or even nihilism. Meanwhile, partially-Lecturer Lecturer STT Borneo Evangelical Church (GKE) views of Religious Pluralism in context pluralistic society will be criticized for some faiths who are intolerant of other religions. While others consider only limited Religious Pluralism understand the differences and cooperation in specific social issues, without any compromise in theology, leading to the elimination of the role of God in life.

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Liberation is a psychological attribute that primarily aims towards peace of mind followed by emancipation from fetters. Every individual covets liberation through their actions and expects a conducive milieu to experience the same. However, for oppressed people, the journey to liberation is convoluted as it involves escape from many elements. In a hierarchical society like India, liberation means liberation from the whole structure in which religious affiliation plays an important role. The marginalized section of the population seldom has the liberty to choose for their lives and they continue to remain subordinated under age-old power relations, which are garbed in the names of destiny and ordinance. For them, liberation is a quest to make an identity and reinstate the value of self-worth. Christianity, with the Church as its mission partner, seeks to liberate these caged souls from their precarious standings. This study will try to show how the Canadian Baptist Mission, with a primary objective to evangelize, left a trail of aspiration among the tribal Savaras of Ganjam to undertake the pursuit of liberation and fight oppression on their own.

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A Igreja desempenha sua missão de evangelizar através da acolhida da vocação ministerial suscitada pelo Espírito Santo. Esta acolhida se expressa em inúmeros serviços voltados para o atendimento de aspectos concretos da vida das comunidades eclesiais. Neste artigo, o Autor tendo presente o Documento Final das Conferências Gerais do Episcopado Latino-americano e Caribenho pretende entender como cada uma delas tratou o tema dos ministérios eclesiais, indicando o percurso feito e assinalando o que considera como conquistas, diferenças e avanços sobre um dos temas mais fundamentais e urgentes para a Igreja. Abstract: The church plays its role to evangelize through the welcome of the ministerial vocation raised by the Holy Spirit. This welcome is expressed in several activities for the care of specific aspects of life of the ecclesial communities. In this article, the author, referring to the Final Document of the General Conference of the Latin American and Caribbean Bishops, intends to understand how each one treated the theme of ecclesial ministries, indicating the way and showing what he considers as achievements, differences and advances on one of the most fundamental and urgent role for the ChurchKeywords: Latin American Episcopate; General Conferences; Latin American Church; Ordained ministries; Non-ordained ministries.

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In 1988, Tomino Yoshiyuki released Char’s Counterattack, the filmic conclusion to the nine year saga he had begun with the original anime series, Mobile Suit Gundam (1979). Set in a distant and alternate future where war is fought in giant humanoid robots known as “mobile suits,” Char’s Counterattack centers on the final battle between the Democratic Earth Federation and the fascist Neo Zeon Empire. This essay examines Char’s Counterattack as its own watershed moment for the Gundam franchise wherein Gundam would begin to spin-off into multiple media and other franchises, including more anime and films, but also manga, toys, novels, and later video games, all of which would be exported throughout the world, giving rise to Gundam’s global popularity. In reading the explosion of the Gundam franchise alongside its roots in the genre of “real robot” anime, this essay postulates that the destruction of real robots in Char’s Counterattack allegorizes the concept of C ool Japan. In doing so, this essay traces the production and exportation of Gundam’s media to both East Asia in the 1980s and North America in the early aughts, thereby repositioning the pivotal role Char’s Counterattack plays in the growth of otaku culture alongside other works in the anime canon, such as Akira (1988) and Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995).

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Church Accompaniment Music is an instrument that produces a beautiful and melodious tone and plays one of the important roles in Church Worship. However, it is not yet known the congregation's response to the accompaniment music. This research was conducted to find out and describe the congregation's satisfaction with the music of worship accompaniment. The method used is descriptive quantitative. The sample of this study was the congregation of GKE Sinta Asi Muara Teweh with a sampling quota technique. Data collection techniques using questionnaires and documentation. Data analysis techniques by using data frequency distribution tables and guideline tables to describe data. Of the 31 respondents to the congregation of the Kalimantan Evangelical Church Sinta Asi Muara Teweh stated that they were satisfied with the accompaniment music and it was functioning properly and in accordance with the needs of the congregation to worship. It was shown that 20 respondents (54.50%) stated good, 9 respondents (29.10%) stated quite good. Of the different types of accompaniment used: 71% of respondents stated that worship was more satisfied accompanied by a piano (without a rhythm keyboard). There were 22.60% of respondents who stated that worship could be accompanied by other musical instruments. Based on the aspect of the congregation living or not: there are 61.35% of respondents living and 32.35% of respondents feeling less passionate. Musik Iringan Gereja merupakan suatu suatu instrumen yang menghasilkan suatu nada yang indah dan merdu serta memainkan salah satu peranan penting dalam Ibadah Gereja. Namun belum diketahui tanggapan jemaat terhadap musik iringan. Penelitian ini di lakukan untuk mengetahui dan mendeskripsikan kepuasan jemaat terhadap musik iringan ibadah. Metode yang digunakan adalah deskriptif kuantitatif. Sampel penelitian ini adalah jemaat GKE Sinta Asi Muara Teweh dengan teknik kuota sampling. Teknik pengumpulan data menggunakan kuesioner dan dokumentasi. Teknik analisis data dengan menggunakan tabel distribusi frekuensi data dan tabel pedoman untuk mendeskripsikan data. Dari 31 orang responden jemaat Gereja Kalimantan Evangelis Sinta Asi Muara Teweh menyatakan sudah merasa puas terhadap musik iringan dan sudah berfungsi dengan baik dan sesuai dengan kebutuhan jemaat untuk beribadah. Hal ini ditunjukan bahwa 20 responden (54,50%) menyatakan baik, 9 responden (29,10%) menyatakan cukup baik. Dari perbedaan jenis iringan yang digunakan: 71% responden menyatakan ibadah lebih puas diiringi dengan piano (tanpa rhythm keyboard). Terdapat 22,60% responden menyatakan ibadah dapat diiringi alat musik lain. Berdasarkan aspek jemaat menghayati atau tidak: terdapat 61,35% responden menghayati dan 32,35% responden merasa kurang menghayati.

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Holy Spirit plays an important role in the theology of the fourth Evangelist. During the Last Super, and therefore right before his death, Jesus from Nazareth not only foretold the coming of the Holy Spirit, but also designated the nature of his mission. The Paraclete, as Jesus calls him, will “testify about” Jesus (John 15:26) and “will demonstrate to the world what sin, righteousness and judgment are about” (John 16:8). Many scholars, while interpreting these words, point to the juridical function of the Paraclete. Accordingly, the Paraclete would pass right judgment on the world in view of the sin of unbelief. However, a detailed exegetical analysis, taking into account the various narrative techniques employed by the author of the fourth Gospel, among them the technique of misunderstanding, allows for a different interpretation of Jesus’ words. Accusations against Jesus are very frequent in the fourth Gospel. The “world” calls him a “sinner” (8:46) and “one who blasphemes” (10:36). In the context of such charges, the passing of judgment on Jesus, as well as his crucifixion and death, were understood as a revelation of God’s justice in regard to Jesus. The Paraclete’s mission will consist in revealing to the “world” and to the disciples the meaning of these events in a reversed perspective. John describes his task by the use of the technique of irony. The Paraclete will reveal as true that Jesus indeed accepted death as a “sinner”, but in the sense of expiatory sacrifice antitype. For that reason, the justice of God has been realized not “in regard” to Jesus, but “in Jesus.” As a result, the “world’s” judgment on Jesus has, in fact, initiated God’s judgment on the “world” and its ruler. The Paraclete is to give a testimony about the victory of life over death in Jesus Christ, and thus to lead the “world” to faith, and the disciples to the fullness of faith.

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ZusammenfassungDieser Artikel stellt einen praktisch-theologischen Diskurs über die Präsenz und Bedeutung von Kirche und Gemeinde dar. Für viele, die am Christentum interessiert sind, gibt es unterschiedliche Hürden zu überwinden in Form einer institutionalisierten Kirche und organisierten Religion. Wir können nicht die Tatsache ausblenden, dass die Kirche keinen schmeichelhaften Ruf in unserer Gesellschaft genießt. Und das gilt nicht nur für Menschen, die sie von außen beobachten, sondern zuweilen erzeugt die bloße Existenz von Kirche und Gemeinde ein Problem für unsere individualistische Gesellschaft. Dieser Trend wurde in den 1960er und 70er Jahren gefördert, als Kirche und Gemeinde von Theologen unterschiedlicher christlicher Traditionen übersehen und abgelehnt wurden, einschließlich beispielsweise von Anhängern der Befreiungstheologie. Mitunter wurde die Gemeinde als deformierter Ausdruck einer gewissen Wesenseinheit verstanden, die eigentlich das Reich Gottes sein sollte.Jedoch misst die Lehre von Jesus in den Evangelien der Gemeinde eine durchaus bedeutende Rolle bei, und der Fokus der neutestamentlichen Briefe liegt auf Gemeindegründung und ‐bau. Trotz aller kritischen Kommentare und aller Entstellungen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart argumentiert der Autor dass das Christentum nicht ohne Kirche und Gemeinde existieren kann. Die Gemeinde ist kein Relikt aus der Vergangenheit, sondern ein wesentlicher Bestandteil des Evangeliums. Wir dürfen kontextuelle Prägungen für die Gemeinde suchen, sie aber nicht insgesamt zu vermeiden suchen. Sie ist keine Erfindung von Christen, sondern sie ist die geliebte Braut von Christus, die eine wichtige Rolle im Erlösungsplan und einen entscheidenden Part bei der Auslegung der Heiligen Schrift spielt.SummaryThis article is a practical-theological discourse about the appearance and the importance of the Church. For many who are interested in Christianity, there are different obstacles in the form of the institutional Church and organised religion. We cannot avoid the fact that the Church does not have a favourable reputation in our society. Not just for people watching her from the outside, but even the mere existence of the Church sometimes creates a problem for our individualistic society. This trend was fostered in the 1960s and ‘70s when the Church was overlooked and rejected by theologians of various Christian traditions, including for example adherents of Liberation Theology. The Church was sometimes understood as a deformed expression of a certain entity that should in reality be the Kingdom of God.However, the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels gives the Church quite an important role, and the focus of the New Testament Epistles is church planting and building. In spite of all critical comments and distortions of the past and the present, I will argue that Christianity cannot exist without the Church. The Church is not a relic of the past but a substantial part of the gospel. We are allowed to seek a contextualised expression of the Church, but not to avoid her altogether. She is not an invention of Christians; she is the beloved bride of Christ that plays an important role in the plan of salvation and a crucial role in interpreting the Scriptures.RésuméCet article est un discours de théologie pratique sur la naissance et l’importance de l’Église. Bien des gens intéressés par le christianisme butent contre divers obstacles lorsqu’ils considèrent la forme de l’Église institutionnelle et de la religion organisée. On ne peut éviter le fait que l’Église n’a pas une réputation très favorable dans notre société. Non seulement c’est le cas d’observateurs extérieurs, mais la simple existence même de l’Église constitue parfois un problème dans notre société individualiste. Cette tendance est apparue dans les années soixante et soixante-dix du fait que l’Église était négligée et rejetée par des théologiens appartenant à diverses traditions, comme par exemple les tenants de la théologie de la libération. L’Église a parfois été considérée comme une expression déformée d’une certaine entité qui devrait en réalité être le Royaume de Dieu.Cependant, l’enseignement de Jésus dans les évangiles attribue à l’Église un rôle important et les épîtres du Nouveau Testament se concentrent sur l’implantation et l’édification d’Églises. Malgré toutes les critiques négatives et les distorsions du passé et du présent, je soutiens que le christianisme n’existe pas sans l’Église. L’Église n’est pas une relique du passé mais elle fait partie intégrante de l’Évangile. Il est permis de rechercher une expression contextualisée de l’Église, mais pas de renoncer à l’Église. Elle n’est pas une invention des chrétiens ; elle est l’épouse bien-aimée de Christ, elle joue un rôle important dans le plan du salut et a une fonction cruciale d’interprétation de l’Écriture.

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From Obama's success to the Arab spring, from Kolaveri Di in India to Gangnam style, social media is omnipresent. We no longer go to the news, news finds us; we no longer visit merchandise, merchandise find us; social media has shrunk the globe beyond imagination. Social media is based on the combined notion of influence and participation -.tools that synchronize their voice with the company's voice and that combined voice affects the next customer. The development of social media networks have made it feasible for the customers to speak to thousands of other customers concerning a particular brand or a company. This communication between one to several additionally referred to as word-of-mouth marketing, isn't new to marketing, but the distinction is that currently these communications are on the far side boundaries. With the growing effect of social media on consumer buying behavior, it becomes imperative for a business to understand the competitive advantages of assorted social media avenues across diverse markets. As the world of online marketing is continuously progressing, the marketers must understand how these changes may influence buyer practices, and consequently promotional programs and strategies. Choices on how and when to successfully use the traditional as well as the social media alternatives require careful thought and consideration. This paper aims to throw light on the recent social media marketing strategies and demonstrates how this platform of online networking helps organizations to captivate their clients in a finer manner, thus building a stronger relationship with them. Also the present paper offers significant understanding to the marketers in knowing the vital role social media marketing plays in the formation of a strong brand. The present paper is conceptual in nature, and through the intensive literature review identifies the latest social media practices being adopted by the 21st century marketers. The study is an endeavor to see how advertisers are utilizing social networking as a strategic tool for advancement. The study finds that enhanced presence and communication on various social media channels help the firms in creating a better brand image while reducing promotional budgets. The paper additionally indicates how the exceptional attributes of correspondence by means of online networking help organizations not only in building a superior connection with their customers but also in converting them into their brand advocates. Thus, these network platforms are helping the businesses to engage with the purchasers, influencing them, connecting with them and finally changing them into their evangelists.

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Abstract The non-receptor protein tyrosine phosphatase SHP2 (PTPN11) plays an important role in the regulation of RAS/MAPK signal transduction downstream of growth factor receptor activation. Loss of SHP2 activity suppresses tumor cell growth, making SHP2 a potential target for cancer therapy. Here we report the discovery of GDC-1971 (formerly RLY-1971), a highly potent, selective, and orally bioavailable small-molecule SHP2 inhibitor that stabilizes SHP2 in a closed, auto-inhibited conformation. GDC-1971 potently inhibits both wild-type SHP2 (IC50 <1nM) and the E76K activating mutant (IC50 <250nM) in biochemical assays. In standard 2-dimensional and anchorage-independent growth conditions, GDC-1971 inhibits cellular proliferation in models harboring receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs), SHP2, NF1, KRAS, or BRAF mutations in a dose-dependent manner. GDC-1971 potently inhibits the proliferation of cellular models harboring KRAS G12C or G12A mutations (median IC50 <80 nM) compared to models harboring other KRAS G12, G13 or Q61 mutations (median IC50 >1 uM), indicating a link between KRAS GTP hydrolysis and SHP2 dependency. Despite this trend, some non-KRAS G12C or G12A cell lines harboring other KRAS mutations responded to GDC-1971 in vitro, suggesting some heterogeneity in RTK/SHP2 signaling dependence in subsets of other KRAS mutants. In vivo, GDC-1971 demonstrates dose-dependent RAS/MAPK pathway inhibition and induces significant tumor-growth inhibition in human xenograft models harboring EGFR and KRAS alterations at continuous daily doses that are well tolerated. Given the reported role of SHP2 as a critical mediator of resistance to targeted therapies, we assessed the activity of GDC-1971 combinations in multiple contexts. We observed increased suppression of the MAPK signaling cascade and anti-proliferation synergy when combining GDC-1971 with EGFR, ALK, and KRAS G12C inhibitors in vitro. The observed in vitro synergy translated to dramatic anti-tumor growth effects in vivo. GDC-1971 in combination with the KRAS G12C covalent inhibitor GDC-6036 resulted in significant regressions at doses well below those required for single agent activity in a KRAS G12C-mutant NSCLC xenograft model. In rodent and dog toxicology studies, GDC-1971 is well tolerated at exposures above those required to induce regression in xenograft models. The biochemical and cellular potency and favorable pharmaceutical properties of GDC-1971 support the further clinical development in RTK/MAPK pathway altered tumors using continuous daily dosing alone and in combination with other targeted agents, including the KRAS-G12C inhibitor GDC-6036 (clinical trial NCT04449874). Citation Format: Bret Williams, Alexander Taylor, Olivia Orozco, Christopher Owen, Elizabeth Kelley, Andre Lescarbeau, Kelley Shortsleeves, Randy Kipp, Vy Nguyen, Erin Brophy, Jeremy Wilbur, Yong Tang, David Lanzetta, Nigel Waters, Sherri Smith, Fabrizio Giordanetto, Paul Maragakis, Jack Greismann, Lindsay Willmore, Eric Therrien, Yang Xiao, Marie Evangelista, Luca Gerosa, Eva Lin, Mark Merchant, Alfonso Arrazate, Emily Chan, Pablo Sáenz-López Larrocha, Stefan Chun, Thomas Hunsaker, Gauri Deshmukh, Christine M. Bowman, David E. Shaw, Mark Murcko, Mahesh Padval, W Patrick Walters, James Watters, Donald A. Bergstrom. Discovery and characterization of the potent, allosteric SHP2 inhibitor GDC-1971 for the treatment of RTK/RAS driven tumors [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 3327.

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Brand evangelism is essential to the profitability of e-shops, but the effects of failure attribution and recovery justice in encouraging brand evangelism in the online service recovery context are not straightforward. Grounded on a framework integrating Attribution theory, Justice theory, and Attachment theory, this study explores whether failure attribution and recovery justice affect brand evangelism through recovery satisfaction with emotional attachment as a moderator. We gathered 400 samples from e-shoppers who encountered a service failure and recovery in the past year to verify the hypotheses using structural equation modeling and multiple-group analysis. Results declare that failure attribution (locus, stability, and controllability) and recovery justice (distributive, procedural, and interactional justice) are significantly related to recovery satisfaction and subsequent brand evangelism. Moreover, failure attribution (locus, stability, and controllability) correlates significantly with recovery justice (distributive, procedural, and interactional justice). In addition, emotional attachment plays a moderating role on the relationships between distributive and procedural justice on recovery satisfaction. This work contributes to brand evangelism research by giving a different perspective (i.e., service recovery) to comprehend what stimulate or deter brand evangelism. In addition, this work develops service recovery research through the combination of the third dimension of attribution (locus) and fourth dimension of justice (informational justice) into a framework, investigating the effect of failure attribution on recovery justice, and revealing the moderating effect of emotional attachment in the recovery process.

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Church leadership plays an important and irreplaceable role in the planting and the configuration of the missional congregation. The key to the formation of missional communities is their leadership. In that regard, this article explores Classical Ghanaian Pentecostal Churches’ leadership and leadership formation from a missiological perspective. This was done through an exposition on their leadership system (structure). It was argued that Classical Ghanaian Pentecostal Churches’ leadership is based on the Fivefold Ministry (Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor and Teacher). These leadership functions were therefore discussed in the light of their missiological implication. The conclusion arrived at is that it is not enough to discover one’s spiritual gift or calling; these gifts should be developed and nurtured through mentoring and proper theological education, with the ultimate purpose being to participate in the Missio Dei.

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Since 2015, there has been a rapid increase in academic libraries focusing their services on artificial intelligence (AI), immersive technologies (XR), big data, and other technologies that align their interests with corporations in the tech industry. However, there are broad ethical failures within this industry that libraries are not equipped to manage and instead risk importing those failures and discriminatory thinking into library services and technologies. This paper draws on the authors’ research on XR accessibility in academic libraries to illustrate how broader trends in technocratic thinking in academia are producing socio-technical configurations that often exclude disabled library users. It argues that critical failures in designing and implementing accessibility programs for emerging technologies in academic libraries point to the broader technocratic imperatives of contemporary universities operating under the logics of neoliberalism. Accessibility is an afterthought in this context, forcing users to adjust their bodies and senses to conform to the master plans of technology designers and evangelists.

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L’articolo intende offrire un quadro sistematico dell’insegnamento di Giovanni Paolo II sulla donna, prendendo in esame numerosi scritti (Lettere, Messaggi, Udienze), primo fra tutti la Lettera Apostolica “Mulieris Dignitatem”. L’autrice, ripercorrendo il pensiero del Pontefice, affronta il tema della dignità della donna secondo diversi piani o livelli: teologico, filosofico, sociale e culturale. La lettura teologica mette in luce la verità sulla donna, così come scaturisce dalla Sapienza Creatrice di Dio e così come perfettamente si rivela nella Storia della Salvezza con Maria, Sposa e Madre di Dio. La lettura filosofica sottolinea la specificità ontologica della donna: “femminilità e mascolinità sono tra loro complementari non solo dal punto di vista fisico e psichico, ma ontologico” (Lettera alle donne, 7). Il genio della donna, così frequentemente chiamato in causa da Giovanni Paolo II, rivela questa specificità e si esprime nella capacità di leggere gli eventi e guardare l’essere umano con gli occhi del cuore. Le letture teologica e filosofica dell’antropologia femminile sostanziano una specifica missione sociale e culturale della donna, che è la promozione di un’autentica civiltà, basata sulla radicale affermazione del valore della vita e del valore dell’amore. L’articolo si conclude con l’appello di Giovanni Paolo II rivolto alla responsabilità delle stesse donne: “tocca a loro di farsi promotrici di un nuovo femminismo che, senza cadere nella tentazione di rincorrere modelli maschilisti, sappia riconoscere ed esprimere il vero genio femminile in tutte le manifestazioni della convivenza civile, operando per il superamento di ogni forma di discriminazione, di violenza e di sfruttamento” (Evangelium vitae, n. 99). ---------- This artiche intends to offer a systematic outline of John Paul II’s teaching about women, taking into accont several writings (Letters, Messages, Audiences), first of all the Apostolic Letter “Mulieris Dignitatem”. The author reconsiders the Pope’s thought and analyses the subject of women’s dignity according different plans or levels: theological, philosophical, social and cultural. The theological approach enlightens the truth about women as it originates from God’s creative Wisdom and is perfectly revealed in the History of Salvation with Mary, Bride and Mother of God. The philosophical approach underlines women’s ontological specificity: “Womanhood and manhood are complementary not only from the physical and psychological points of view, but also from the ontological (Letters to Women, 7). The genius of women, so frequently recalled by John Paul II, reveals this specificity and is expressed in the capacity to interprete events and look at human being with the eyes of the heart. The theological and anthropological approaches of feminine anthropology substantiate women’s specific social and cultural mission, that is the promotion of an authentic civilization, based on the the radical assertion of the value of life and love. The article ends with John Paul II’s calling addressed to the responsibility of women themselves: “It depends on them to promote a “new feminism” which rejects the temptation of imitating models of ‘male domination’, in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society, and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation” (Evangelium vitae, n. 99).

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Preeclampsia (PE) is a multisystem disorder characterized by new onset hypertension associated with placental ischemia (PI), mitochondrial (mt) dysfunction, and an imbalance in T helper (TH) and Natural Killer (NK) cells during pregnancy. The reduced uterine perfusion pressure (RUPP) model is an established model for PE. We have previously shown an important role for IL-17 in hypertension and activation of NK cells in the RUPP rat. We don’t know the role for IL-17 or TH17 cells in contributing to NK cell mediated mt dysfunction and ROS associated with PI. Therefore, we hypothesize that hypertension in response to PI stimulated TH17 cells causes mt ROS mediated through IL-17 signaling to NK cells. On gestation day 12 (GD12) RUPP-induced TH17s (splenic CD4+/CD25- cells) were adoptively transferred (Ad-T) into normal pregnant (NP) rats. Recombinant mouse IL-17 receptor C (IL-17RC) (100 pg/day) was administered from GD14-19 via osmotic mini-pump. On GD19, samples were collected and mean arterial pressure (MAP) was measured. Mt respiration and mt ROS data was measured in isolated mt from renal and placental tissues using the Oxygraph 2K and fluorescent microplate reader, respectively. A one-way ANOVA with Bonferroni post hoc test was used for statistical analysis. MAP was increased in Ad-T rats (112 ± 0.72mmHg, n=14) compared to NP (92 ± 3.03mmHg, n=14) (p<0.05), and was lowered with IL-17RC (97.2± 2.14 mmHg, n=13). Circulating activated NK cells were significantly increased with Ad-T (3.326± 0.76 %gated, n=9) (p<0.0001) compared to NP (0.05± 0.05 %, n=11), and were attenuated with IL-17RC (0.42± 0.4 %, n=5) (p<0.01). Placental activated NK cells were significantly increased with Ad-T (2.5± 1.01 %, n=4) (p<0.05) compared to NP (0.03± 0.03 %, n=8) and were attenuated with IL-17RC (0.21± 0.12 %, n=4) (p<0.05). Renal mtROS increased in Ad-T (312.4 ± 44.7%, n=9) compared to NP (191.9 ± 20.5%, n=5). Placental mtROS significantly increased in Ad-T (312.5 ± 23.6%, n=9) (P<0.0005) compared to NP controls (134 ± 9.6%, n=5) (p<0.0001), and was decreased by administration of IL-17RC (174.5± 42.5 %, n=5) (p<0.0001). These data demonstrate that IL-17 signaling plays an important role in NK cell activation and tissue mt function in response to TH17 cells stimulated during PE.

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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

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Unlike some current discourse on automediality, this essay eschews most of the analysis concerning the adoption or modification of avatars to deliberately enhance, extend or distort the self. Rather than the automedial enabling of alternative, virtual selves modified by playful, confronting or disarming avatars we concentrate instead on emerging efforts to present the self in hyper-realist, interactive modes. In doing so we ask, what is the relationship between traumatic forms of automediation and the affective impact on and response of the audience? We argue that, while on the one hand there are promising avenues for valuable individual and social engagements with traumatic forms of automediation, there is an overwhelming predominance of suffering as a theme in such virtual depictions, comingled with uncritically asserted promises of empathy, which are problematic as the technology assumes greater mainstream uptake.As Smith and Watson note, embodiment is always a “translation” where the body is “dematerialized” in virtual representation (“Virtually” 78). Past scholarship has analysed the capacity of immersive realms, such as Second Life or online games, to highlight how users can modify their avatars in often spectacular, non-human forms. Critics of this mode of automediality note that users can adopt virtually any persona they like (racial, religious, gendered and sexual, human, animal or hybrid, and of any age), behaving as “identity tourists” while occupying virtual space or inhabiting online communities (Nakamura). Furthermore, recent work by Jaron Lanier, a key figure from the 1980s period of early Virtual Reality (VR) technology, has also explored so-called “homuncular flexibility” which describes the capacity for humans to seemingly adapt automatically to the control mechanisms of an avatar with multiple legs, other non-human appendages, or for two users to work in tandem to control a single avatar (Won et. al.). But this article is concerned less with these single or multi-player online environments and the associated concerns over modifying interactive identities. We are principally interested in other automedial modes where the “auto” of autobiography is automated via Artificial Intelligences (AIs) to convincingly mimic human discourse as narrated life-histories.We draw from case studies promoted by the 2017 season of ABC television’s flagship science program, Catalyst, which opened with semi-regular host and biological engineer Dr Jordan Nguyen, proclaiming in earnest, almost religious fervour: “I want to do something that has long been a dream. I want to create a copy of a human. An avatar. And it will have a life of its own in virtual reality.” As the camera followed Nguyen’s rapid pacing across real space he extolled: “Virtual reality, virtual human, they push the limits of the imagination and help us explore the impossible […] I want to create a virtual copy of a person. A digital addition to the family, using technology we have now.”The troubling implications of such rhetoric were stark and the next third of the program did little to allay such techno-scientific misgivings. Directed and produced by David Symonds, with Nguyen credited as co-developer and presenter, the episode “Meet the Avatars” immediately introduced scenarios where “volunteers” entered a pop-up inner city virtual lab, to experience VR for the first time. The volunteers were shown on screen subjected to a range of experimental VR environments designed to elicit fear and/or adverse and disorienting responses such as vertigo, while the presenter and researchers from Sydney University constantly smirked and laughed at their participants’ discomfort. We can only wonder what the ethics process was for both the ABC and university researchers involved in these broadcast experiments. There is little doubt that the participant/s experienced discomfort, if not distress, and that was televised to a national audience. Presenter Nguyen was also shown misleading volunteers on their way to the VR lab, when one asked “You’re not going to chuck us out of a virtual plane are you?” to which Nguyen replied “I don't know what we’re going to do yet,” when it was next shown that they immediately underwent pre-programmed VR exposure scenarios, including a fear of falling exercise from atop a city skyscraper.The sweat-inducing and heart rate-racing exposures to virtual plank walks high above a cityscape, or seeing subjects haptically viewing spiders crawl across their outstretched virtual hands, all elicited predictable responses, showcased as carnivalesque entertainment for the viewing audience. As we will see, this kind of trivialising of a virtual environment’s capacity for immersion belies the serious use of the technology in a range of treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (see Rizzo and Koenig; Rothbaum, Rizzo and Difede).Figure 1: Nguyen and researchers enjoying themselves as their volunteers undergo VR exposure Defining AutomedialityIn their pioneering 2008 work, Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien, Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser coined the term “automediality” to problematise the production, application and distribution of autobiographic modes across various media and genres—from literary texts to audiovisual media and from traditional expression to inter/transmedia and remediated formats. The concept of automediality was deployed to counter the conventional critical exclusion of analysis of the materiality/technology used for an autobiographical purpose (Gernalzick). Dünne and Moser proffered a concept of automediality that rejects the binary division of (a) self-expression determining the mediated form or (b) (self)subjectivity being solely produced through the mediating technology. Hence, automediality has been traditionally applied to literary constructs such as autobiography and life-writing, but is now expanding into the digital domain and other “paratextual sites” (Maguire).As Nadja Gernalzick suggests, automediality should “encourage and demand not only a systematics and taxonomy of the constitution of the self in respectively genre-specific ways, but particularly also in medium-specific ways” (227). Emma Maguire has offered a succinct working definition that builds on this requirement to signal the automedial universally, noting it operates asa way of studying auto/biographical texts (of a variety of forms) that take into account how the effects of media shape the kinds of selves that can be represented, and which understands the self not as a preexisting subject that might be distilled into story form but as an entity that is brought into being through the processes of mediation.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point to automediality as a methodology, and in doing so emphasize how the telling or mediation of a life actually shapes the kind of story that can be told autobiographically. They state “media cannot simply be conceptualized as ‘tools’ for presenting a preexisting, essential self […] Media technologies do not just transparently present the self. They constitute and expand it” (Smith and Watson “Virtually Me” 77).This distinction is vital for understanding how automediality might be applied to self-expression in virtual domains, including the holographic avatar dreams of Nguyen throughout Catalyst. Although addressing this distinction in relation to online websites, following P. David Marshall’s description of “the proliferation of the public self”, Maguire notes:The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies […] has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities.For Maguire, these automedial works operate textually “to construct the authorial self or persona”.An extension to this digital, authorial construction is apparent in the exponential uptake of screen mediated prosumer generated content, whether online or theatrical (Miller). According to Gernalzick, unlike fictional drama films, screen autobiographies more directly enable “experiential temporalities”. Based on Mary Anne Doane’s promotion of the “indexicality” of film/screen representations to connote the real, Gernalzick suggests that despite semiotic theories of the index problematising realism as an index as representation, the film medium is still commonly comprehended as the “imprint of time itself”:Film and the spectator of film are said to be in a continuous present. Because the viewer is aware, however, that the images experienced in or even as presence have been made in the past, the temporality of the so-called filmic present is always ambiguous” (230).When expressed as indexical, automedial works, the intrinsic audio-visual capacities of film and video (as media) far surpass the temporal limitations of print and writing (Gernalzick, 228). One extreme example can be found in an emergent trend of “performance crime” murder and torture videos live-streamed or broadcast after the fact using mobile phone cameras and FaceBook (Bender). In essence, the political economy of the automedial ecology is important to understand in the overall context of self expression and the governance of content exhibition, access, distribution and—where relevant—interaction.So what are the implications for automedial works that employ virtual interfaces and how does this evolving medium inform both the expressive autobiographical mode and audiences subjectivities?Case StudyThe Catalyst program described above strove to shed new light on the potential for emerging technology to capture and create virtual avatars from living participants who (self-)generate autobiographical narratives interactively. Once past the initial gee-wiz journalistic evangelism of VR, the episode turned towards host Nguyen’s stated goal—using contemporary technology to create an autonomous virtual human clone. Nguyen laments that if he could create only one such avatar, his primary choice would be that of his grandfather who died when Nguyen was two years old—a desire rendered impossible. The awkward humour of the plank walk scenario sequence soon gives way as the enthusiastic Nguyen is surprised by his family’s discomfort with the idea of digitally recreating his grandfather.Nguyen next visits a Southern California digital media lab to experience the process by which 3D virtual human avatars are created. Inside a domed array of lights and cameras, in less than one second a life-size 3D avatar is recorded via 6,000 LEDs illuminating his face in 20 different combinations, with eight cameras capturing the exposures from multiple angles, all in ultra high definition. Called the Light Stage (Debevec), it is the same technology used to create a life size, virtual holocaust survivor, Pinchas Gutter (Ziv).We see Nguyen encountering a life-size, high-resolution 2D screen version of Gutter’s avatar. Standing before a microphone, Nguyen asks a series of questions about Gutter’s wartime experiences and life in the concentration camps. The responses are naturalistic and authentic, as are the pauses between questions. The high definition 4K screen is photo-realist but much more convincing in-situ (as an artifact of the Catalyst video camera recording, in some close-ups horizontal lines of transmission appear). According to the project’s curator, David Traum, the real Pinchas Gutter was recorded in 3D as a virtual holograph. He spent 25 hours providing 1,600 responses to a broad range of questions that the curator maintained covered “a lot of what people want to say” (Catalyst).Figure 2: The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan presented an installation of New Dimensions in Testimony, featuring Pinchas Gutter and Eva SchlossIt is here that the intersection between VR and auto/biography hybridise in complex and potentially difficult ways. It is where the concept of automediality may offer insight into this rapidly emerging phenomenon of creating interactive, hyperreal versions of our selves using VR. These hyperreal VR personae can be questioned and respond in real-time, where interrogators interact either as casual conversers or determined interrogators.The impact on visitors is sobering and palpable. As Nguyen relates at the end of his session, “I just want to give him a hug”. The demonstrable capacity for this avatar to engender a high degree of empathy from its automedial testimony is clear, although as we indicate below, it could simply indicate increased levels of emotion.Regardless, an ongoing concern amongst witnesses, scholars and cultural curators of memorials and museums dedicated to preserving the history of mass violence, and its associated trauma, is that once the lived experience and testimony of survivors passes with that generation the impact of the testimony diminishes (Broderick). New media modes of preserving and promulgating such knowledge in perpetuity are certainly worthy of embracing. As Stephen Smith, the executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation suggests, the technology could extendto people who have survived cancer or catastrophic hurricanes […] from the experiences of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder or survivors of sexual abuse, to those of presidents or great teachers. Imagine if a slave could have told her story to her grandchildren? (Ziv)Yet questions remain as to the veracity of these recorded personae. The avatars are created according to a specific agenda and the autobiographical content controlled for explicit editorial purposes. It is unclear what and why material has been excluded. If, for example, during the recorded questioning, the virtual holocaust survivor became mute at recollecting a traumatic memory, cried or sobbed uncontrollably—all natural, understandable and authentic responses given the nature of the testimony—should these genuine and spontaneous emotions be included along with various behavioural ticks such as scratching, shifting about in the seat and other naturalistic movements, to engender a more profound realism?The generation of the photorealist, mimetic avatar—remaining as an interactive persona long after the corporeal, authorial being is gone—reinforces Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, where a clone exists devoid of its original entity and unable to challenge its automedial discourse. And what if some unscrupulous hacker managed to corrupt and subvert Gutter’s AI so that it responded antithetically to its purpose, by denying the holocaust ever happened? The ethical dilemmas of such a paradigm were explored in the dystopian 2013 film, The Congress, where Robyn Wright plays herself (and her avatar), as an out of work actor who sells off the rights to her digital self. A movie studio exploits her screen persona in perpetuity, enabling audiences to “become” and inhabit her avatar in virtual space while she is limited in the real world from undertaking certain actions due to copyright infringement. The inability of Wright to control her mimetic avatar’s discourse or action means the assumed automedial agency of her virtual self as an immortal, interactive being remains ontologically perplexing.Figure 3: Robyn Wright undergoing a full body photogrammetry to create her VR avatar in The Congress (2013)The various virtual exposures/experiences paraded throughout Catalyst’s “Meet the Avatars” paradoxically recorded and broadcast a range of troubling emotional responses to such immersion. Many participant responses suggest great caution and sensitivity be undertaken before plunging headlong into the new gold rush mentality of virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI affordances. Catalyst depicted their program subjects often responding in discomfort and distress, with some visibly overwhelmed by their encounters and left crying. There is some irony that presenter Ngyuen was himself relying on the conventions of 2D linear television journalism throughout, adopting face-to-camera address in (unconscious) automedial style to excitedly promote the assumed socio-cultural boon such automedial VR avatars will generate.Challenging AuthenticityThere are numerous ethical considerations surrounding the potential for AIs to expand beyond automedial (self-)expression towards photorealist avatars interacting outside of their pre-recorded content. When such systems evolve it may be neigh impossible to discern on screen whether the person you are conversing with is authentic or an indistinguishable, virtual doppelganger. In the future, a variant on the Turning Test may be needed to challenge and identify such hyperreal simulacra. We may be witnessing the precursor to such a dilemma playing out in the arena of audio-only podcasts, with some public intellectuals such as Sam Harris already discussing the legal and ethical problems from technology that can create audio from typed text that convincingly replicate the actual voice of a person by sampling approximately 30 minutes of their original speech (Harris). Such audio manipulation technology will soon be available to anybody with the motivation and relatively minor level of technological ability in order to assume an identity and masquerade as automediated dialogue. However, for the moment, the ability to convincingly alter a real-time computer generated video image of a person remains at the level of scientific innovation.Also of significance is the extent to which the audience reactions to such automediated expressions are indeed empathetic or simply part of the broader range of affective responses that also include direct sympathy as well as emotions such as admiration, surprise, pity, disgust and contempt (see Plantinga). There remains much rhetorical hype surrounding VR as the “ultimate empathy machine” (Milk). Yet the current use of the term “empathy” in VR, AI and automedial forms of communication seems to be principally focused on the capacity for the user-viewer to ameliorate negatively perceived emotions and experiences, whether traumatic or phobic.When considering comments about authenticity here, it is important to be aware of the occasional slippage of technological terminology into the mainstream. For example, the psychological literature does emphasise that patients respond strongly to virtual scenarios, events, and details that appear to be “authentic” (Pertaub, Slater, and Barker). Authentic in this instance implies a resemblance to a corresponding scenario/activity in the real world. This is not simply another word for photorealism, but rather it describes for instance the experimental design of one study in which virtual (AI) audience members in a virtual seminar room designed to treat public speaking anxiety were designed to exhibit “random autonomous behaviours in real-time, such as twitches, blinks, and nods, designed to encourage the illusion of life” (Kwon, Powell and Chalmers 980). The virtual humans in this study are regarded as having greater authenticity than an earlier project on social anxiety (North, North, and Coble) which did not have much visual complexity but did incorporate researcher-triggered audio clips of audience members “laughing, making comments, encouraging the speaker to speak louder or more clearly” (Kwon, Powell, and Chalmers 980). The small movements, randomly cued rather than according to a recognisable pattern, are described by the researchers as creating a sense of authenticity in the VR environment as they seem to correspond to the sorts of random minor movements that actual human audiences in a seminar can be expected to make.Nonetheless, nobody should regard an interaction with these AIs, or the avatar of Gutter, as in any way an encounter with a real person. Rather, the characteristics above function to create a disarming effect and enable the real person-viewer to willingly suspend their disbelief and enter into a pseudo-relationship with the AI; not as if it is an actual relationship, but as if it is a simulation of an actual relationship (USC). Lucy Suchman and colleagues invoke these ideas in an analysis of a YouTube video of some apparently humiliating human interactions with the MIT created AI-robot Mertz. Their analysis contends that, while it may appear on first glance that the humans’ mocking exchange with Mertz are mean-spirited, there is clearly a playfulness and willingness to engage with a form of AI that is essentially continuous with “long-standing assumptions about communication as information processing, and in the robot’s performance evidence for the limits to the mechanical reproduction of interaction as we know it through computational processes” (Suchman, Roberts, and Hird).Thus, it will be important for future work in the area of automediated testimony to consider the extent to which audiences are willing to suspend disbelief and treat the recounted traumatic experience with appropriate gravitas. These questions deserve attention, and not the kind of hype displayed by the current iteration of techno-evangelism. Indeed, some of this resurgent hype has come under scrutiny. From the perspective of VR-based tourism, Janna Thompson has recently argued that “it will never be a substitute for encounters with the real thing” (Thompson). Alyssa K. Loh, for instance, also argues that many of the negatively themed virtual experiences—such as those that drop the viewer into a scene of domestic violence or the location of a terrorist bomb attack—function not to put you in the position of the actual victim but in the position of the general category of domestic violence victim, or bomb attack victim, thus “deindividuating trauma” (Loh).Future work in this area should consider actual audience responses and rely upon mixed-methods research approaches to audience analysis. In an era of alt.truth and Cambridge Analytics personality profiling from social media interaction, automediated communication in the virtual guise of AIs demands further study.ReferencesAnon. “New Dimensions in Testimony.” Museum of Jewish Heritage. 15 Dec. 2017. 19 Apr. 2018 <http://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/new-dimensions-in-testimony/>.Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Meet The Avatars.” Catalyst, 15 Aug. 2017.Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 166-184.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Legacies of the Degraded Image in Violent Digital Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.Broderick, Mick. “Topographies of Trauma, Dark Tourism and World Heritage: Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific. 24 Apr. 2010. 14 Apr. 2018 <http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue24/broderick.htm>.Debevec, Paul. “The Light Stages and Their Applications to Photoreal Digital Actors.” SIGGRAPH Asia. 2012.Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. “Allgemeine Einleitung: Automedialität”. Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. Eds. Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2008. 7-16.Harris, Sam. “Waking Up with Sam Harris #64 – Ask Me Anything.” YouTube, 16 Feb. 2017. 16 Mar. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMTuquaAC4w>.Kwon, Joung Huem, John Powell, and Alan Chalmers. “How Level of Realism Influences Anxiety in Virtual Reality Environments for a Job Interview.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 71.10 (2013): 978-87.Loh, Alyssa K. "I Feel You." Artforum, Nov. 2017. 10 Apr. 2018 <https://www.artforum.com/print/201709/alyssa-k-loh-on-virtual-reality-and-empathy-71781>.Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170.Mathews, Karen. “Exhibit Allows Virtual ‘Interviews’ with Holocaust Survivors.” Phys.org Science X Network, 15 Dec. 2017. 18 Apr. 2018 <https://phys.org/news/2017-09-virtual-holocaust-survivors.html>.Maguire, Emma. “Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website” M/C Journal 17.9 (2014).Miller, Ken. More than Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Evolution of Screen Performance. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Murdoch University. 2009.Milk, Chris. “Ted: How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine.” TED Conferences, LLC. 16 Mar. 2015. <https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine>.Nakamura, Lisa. “Cyberrace.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 42-54.North, Max M., Sarah M. North, and Joseph R Coble. "Effectiveness of Virtual Environment Desensitization in the Treatment of Agoraphobia." International Journal of Virtual Reality 1.2 (1995): 25-34.Pertaub, David-Paul, Mel Slater, and Chris Barker. “An Experiment on Public Speaking Anxiety in Response to Three Different Types of Virtual Audience.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 11.1 (2002): 68-78.Plantinga, Carl. "Emotion and Affect." The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingstone and Carl Plantinga. New York: Routledge, 2009. 86-96.Rizzo, A.A., and Sebastian Koenig. “Is Clinical Virtual Reality Ready for Primetime?” Neuropsychology 31.8 (2017): 877-99.Rothbaum, Barbara O., Albert “Skip” Rizzo, and JoAnne Difede. "Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1208.1 (2010): 126-32.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.———. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.Suchman, Lucy, Celia Roberts, and Myra J. Hird. "Subject Objects." Feminist Theory 12.2 (2011): 119-45.Thompson, Janna. "Why Virtual Reality Cannot Match the Real Thing." The Conversation, 14 Mar. 2018. 10 Apr. 2018 <http://theconversation.com/why-virtual-reality-cannot-match-the-real-thing-92035>.USC. "Skip Rizzo on Medical Virtual Reality: USC Global Conference 2014." YouTube, 28 Oct. 2014. 2 Apr. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFge2XgDa8>.Won, Andrea Stevenson, Jeremy Bailenson, Jimmy Lee, and Jaron Lanier. "Homuncular Flexibility in Virtual Reality." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20.3 (2015): 241-59.Ziv, Stan. “How Technology Is Keeping Holocaust Survivor Stories Alive Forever”. 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Abstract:

Cyborgs already walk among us. (“Cures to Come” 76) This essay was begun as a reaction to a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie called Sweet Nothing in My Ear (2008), which follows the lives of two parents, Dan, who is hearing (played by Jeff Daniels), and Laura, who is deaf (Marlee Matlin), as they struggle to make a decision about whether or not to give their 11-year-old son, Adam (late-deafened), a cochlear implant. Dan and Laura represent different perspectives, hearing and deaf perspectives. The film dramatizes the parents’ conflict and negotiation, exposing audiences to both sides of the cochlear implant debate, albeit in a fairly simplistic way. Nevertheless, it represents the lives of deaf people and gives voice to debates about cochlear implants with more accuracy and detail than most film and television dramas. One of the central scenes in the film is what I call the “activation scene”, quite common to cochlear implant narratives. In the scene, the protagonists witness a child having his implant activated or turned on. The depiction is reminiscent of the WATER scene in the film about Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker, employing a sentimental visual rhetoric. First, the two parents are shown seated near the child, clasping their hands as if in prayer. The audiologist, wielder of technology and therefore clearly the authority figure in the scene, types away furiously on her laptop. At the moment of being “turned on,” the child suddenly “hears” his father calling “David! David!” He gazes angelically toward heaven as piano music plays plaintively in the background. The parents all but fall to their knees and the protagonist of the film, Dan, watching through a window, weeps. It is a scene of cure, of healing, of “miracle,” a hyper-sentimentalised portrait of what is in reality often a rather anti-climactic event. It was certainly anti-climactic in my son, Michael’s case. I was taken aback by how this scene was presented and dismayed overall at some of the inaccuracies, small though they were, in the portrayal of cochlear implants in this film. It was, after all, according to the Nielsen ratings, seen by 8 million people. I began to wonder what kinds of misconceptions my son was going to face when he met people whose only exposure to implants was through media representations. Spurred by this question, I started to research other recent portrayals of people with implants on U.S. television in the past ten years, to see how cochlear implant (hereafter referred to as CI) identity has been portrayed by American media. For most of American history, deaf people have been portrayed in print and visual media as exotic “others,” and have long been the subject of an almost morbid cultural fascination. Christopher Krentz suggests that, particularly in the nineteenth century, scenes pairing sentimentality and deafness repressed an innate, Kristevan “abject” revulsion towards deaf people. Those who are deaf highlight and define, through their ‘lack’, the “unmarked” body. The fact of their deafness, understood as lack, conjures up an ideal that it does not attain, the ideal of the so-called “normal” or “whole” body. In recent years, however, the figure of the “deaf as Other” in the media, has shifted from what might be termed the “traditionally” deaf character, to what Brenda Jo Brueggeman (in her recent book Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places), calls “the new deaf cyborg” or the deaf person with a cochlear implant (4). N. Katharine Hailes states that cyborgs are now “the stage on which are performed contestations about the body boundaries that have often marked class, ethnic, and cultural differences” (85). In this essay, I claim that the character with a CI, as portrayed in the media, is now not only a strange, “marked” “Other,” but is also a screen upon which viewers project anxieties about technology, demonstrating both fascination fear. In her book, Brueggeman issues a call to action, saying that Deaf Studies must now begin to examine what she calls “implanting rhetorics,” or “the rhetorical relationships between our technologies and our identity” and therefore needs to attend to the construction of “the new deaf cyborg” (18). This short study will serve, I hope, as both a response to that injunction and as a jumping-off point for more in-depth studies of the construction of the CI identity and the implications of these constructions. First, we should consider what a cochlear implant is and how it functions. The National Association of the Deaf in the United States defines the cochlear implant as a device used to help the user perceive sound, i.e., the sensation of sound that is transmitted past the damaged cochlea to the brain. In this strictly sensorineural manner, the implant works: the sensation of sound is delivered to the brain. The stated goal of the implant is for it to function as a tool to enable deaf children to develop language based on spoken communication. (“NAD Position”) The external portion of the implant consists of the following parts: a microphone, which picks up sound from the environment, which is contained in the behind-the-ear device that resembles the standard BTE hearing aid; in this “hearing aid” there is also a speech processor, which selects and arranges sounds picked up by the microphone. The processor transmits signals to the transmitter/receiver, which then converts them into electric impulses. Part of the transmitter sits on the skin and attaches to the inner portion of the transmitter by means of a magnet. The inner portion of the receiver/stimulator sends the impulses down into the electrode array that lies inside the cochlea, which in turn stimulates the auditory nerve, giving the brain the impression of sound (“Cochlear Implants”). According to manufacturer’s statistics, there are now approximately 188,000 people worldwide who have obtained cochlear implants, though the number of these that are in use is not known (Nussbaum). That is what a cochlear implant is. Before we can look at how people with implants are portrayed in the media, before we examine constructions of identity, perhaps we should first ask what constitutes a “real” CI identity? This is, of course, laughable; pinning down a hom*ogeneous CI identity is no more likely than finding a blanket definition of “deaf identity.” For example, at this point in time, there isn’t even a word or term in American culture for someone with an implant. I struggle with how to phrase it in this essay - “implantee?” “recipient?” - there are no neat labels. In the USA you can call a person deaf, Deaf (the “D” representing a specific cultural and political identity), hearing impaired, hard of hearing, and each gradation implies, for better or worse, some kind of subject position. There are no such terms for a person who gets an implant. Are people with implants, as suggested above, just deaf? Deaf? Are they hard of hearing? There is even debate in the ASL community as to what sign should be used to indicate “someone who has a cochlear implant.” If a “CI identity” cannot be located, then perhaps the rhetoric that is used to describe it may be. Paddy Ladd, in Understanding Deaf Culture, does a brilliant job of exploring the various discourses that have surrounded deaf culture throughout history. Stuart Blume borrows heavily from Ladd in his “The Rhetoric and Counter-Rhetoric of a 'Bionic' Technology”, where he points out that an “essential and deliberate feature” of the history of the CI from the 60s onward, was that it was constructed in an overwhelmingly positive light by the mass media, using what Ladd calls the “medical” rhetorical model. That is, that the CI is a kind of medical miracle that promised to cure deafness. Within this model one may find also the sentimental, “missionary” rhetoric that Krentz discusses, what Ladd claims is a revival of the evangelism of the nineteenth-century Oralist movement in America. Indeed, newspaper articles in the 1980s and 90s hailed the implant as a “breakthrough”, a “miracle”; even a quick survey of headlines shows evidence of this: “Upton Boy Can Hear at Last!”, “Girl with a New Song in Her Heart”, “Children Head Queue for Bionic Ears” (Lane). As recently as January 2010, an issue of National Geographic featured on its cover the headline Merging Man and Machine: The Bionic Age. Sure enough, the second photograph in the story is of a child’s bilateral cochlear implant, with the caption “within months of the surgery (the child) spoke the words his hearing parents longed for: Mama and Dada.” “You’re looking at a real bionic kid,” says Johns Hopkins University surgeon John Niparko, proudly (37). To counter this medical/corporate rhetoric of cure, Ladd and Blume claim, the deaf community devised a counter-rhetoric, a discourse in which the CI is not cast in the language of miracle and life, but instead in terms of death, mutilation, and cultural oppression. Here, the implant is depicted as the last in a long line of sad*stic experiments using the deaf as guinea pigs. Often the CI is framed in the language of Nazism and genocide as seen in the title of an article in the British Deaf News: “Cochlear Implants: Oralism’s Final Solution.” So, which of these two “implanting rhetorics” is most visible in the current construction of the CI in American television? Is the CI identity presented by rendering people with CIs impossibly positive, happy characters? Is it delineated using the metaphors of the sentimental, of cure, of miracle? Or is the CI identity constructed using the counter-rhetorical references to death, oppression and cultural genocide? One might hypothesize that television, like other media, cultivating as it does the values of the hearing hegemony, would err on the side of promulgating the medicalised, positivist rhetoric of the “cure” for deafness. In an effort to find out, I conducted a general survey of American television shows from 2000 to now that featured characters with CIs. I did not include news shows or documentaries in my survey. Interestingly, some of the earliest television portrayals of CIs appeared in that bastion of American sentimentality, the daytime soap opera. In 2006, on the show “The Young and the Restless”, a “troubled college student who contracted meningitis” received an implant, and in 2007 “All My Children” aired a story arc about a “toddler who becomes deaf after a car crash.” It is interesting to note that both characters were portrayed as “late-deafened”, or suddenly inflicted with the loss of a sense they previously possessed, thus avoiding any whiff of controversy about early implantation. But one expects a hyper-sentimentalised portrayal of just about everything in daytime dramas like this. What is interesting is that when people with CIs have appeared on several “reality” programs, which purport to offer “real,” unadulterated glimpses into people’s lives, the rhetoric is no less sentimentalized than the soaps (perhaps because these shows are no less fabricated). A good example of this is the widely watched and, I think, ironically named show “True Life” which appears on MTV. This is a series that claims to tell the “remarkable real-life stories of young people and the unusual subcultures they inhabit.” In episode 42, “ True Life: I’m Deaf”, part of the show follows a young man, Chris, born deaf and proud of it (his words), who decides to get a cochlear implant because he wants to be involved in the hearing world. Through an interpreter Chris explains that he wants an implant so he can communicate with his friends, talk with girls, and ultimately fulfill his dreams of having a job and getting married (one has to ask: are these things he can’t do without an implant?). The show’s promo asks “how do you go from living a life in total silence to fully understanding the spoken language?” This statement alone contains two elements common to the “miracle” rhetoric, first that the “tragic” deaf victim will emerge from a completely lonely, silent place (not true; most deaf people have some residual hearing, and if you watch the show you see Chris signing, “speaking” voluminously) to seamlessly, miraculously, “fully” joining and understanding the hearing world. Chris, it seems, will only come into full being when he is able to join the hearing world. In this case, the CI will cure what ails him. According to “True Life.” Aside from “soap opera” drama and so-called reality programming, by far the largest dissemination of media constructions of the CI in the past ten years occurred on top-slot prime-time television shows, which consist primarily of the immensely popular genre of the medical and police procedural drama. Most of these shows have at one time or another had a “deaf” episode, in which there is a deaf character or characters involved, but between 2005 and 2008, it is interesting to note that most, if not all of the most popular of these have aired episodes devoted to the CI controversy, or have featured deaf characters with CIs. The shows include: CSI (both Miami and New York), Cold Case, Law and Order (both SVU and Criminal Intent), Scrubs, Gideon’s Crossing, and Bones. Below is a snippet of dialogue from Bones: Zach: {Holding a necklace} He was wearing this.Angela: Catholic boy.Brennan: One by two forceps.Angela {as Brennan pulls a small disc out from behind the victim’s ear} What is that?Brennan: Cochlear implant. Looks like the birds were trying to get it.Angela: That would set a boy apart from the others, being deaf.(Bones, “A Boy in the Tree”, 1.3, 2005) In this scene, the forensics experts are able to describe significant points of this victim’s identity using the only two solid artifacts left in the remains, a crucifix and a cochlear implant. I cite this scene because it serves, I believe, as a neat metaphor for how these shows, and indeed television media in general, are, like the investigators, constantly engaged in the business of cobbling together identity: in this particular case, a cochlear implant identity. It also shows how an audience can cultivate or interpret these kinds of identity constructions, here, the implant as an object serves as a tangible sign of deafness, and from this sign, or clue, the “audience” (represented by the spectator, Angela) immediately infers that the victim was lonely and isolated, “set apart from the others.” Such wrongheaded inferences, frivolous as they may seem coming from the realm of popular culture, have, I believe, a profound influence on the perceptions of larger society. The use of the CI in Bones is quite interesting, because although at the beginning of the show the implant is a key piece of evidence, that which marks and identifies the dead/deaf body, the character’s CI identity proves almost completely irrelevant to the unfolding of the murder-mystery. The only times the CI character’s deafness is emphasized are when an effort is made to prove that the he committed suicide (i.e., if you’re deaf you are therefore “isolated,” and therefore you must be miserable enough to kill yourself). Zak, one of the forensics officers says, “I didn’t talk to anyone in high school and I didn’t kill myself” and another officer comments that the boy was “alienated by culture, by language, and by his handicap” (odd statements, since most deaf children with or without implants have remarkably good language ability). Also, in another strange moment, the victim’s ambassador/mother shows a video clip of the child’s CI activation and says “a person who lived through this miracle would never take his own life” (emphasis mine). A girlfriend, implicated in the murder (the boy is killed because he threatened to “talk”, revealing a blackmail scheme), says “people didn’t notice him because of the way he talked but I liked him…” So at least in this show, both types of “implanting rhetoric” are employed; a person with a CI, though the recipient of a “miracle,” is also perceived as “isolated” and “alienated” and unfortunately, ends up dead. This kind of rather negative portrayal of a person with a CI also appears in the CSI: New York episode ”Silent Night” which aired in 2006. One of two plot lines features Marlee Matlin as the mother of a deaf family. At the beginning of the episode, after feeling some strange vibrations, Matlin’s character, Gina, checks on her little granddaughter, Elizabeth, who is crying hysterically in her crib. She finds her daughter, Alison, dead on the floor. In the course of the show, it is found that a former boyfriend, Cole, who may have been the father of the infant, struggled with and shot Alison as he was trying to kidnap the baby. Apparently Cole “got his hearing back” with a cochlear implant, no longer considered himself Deaf, and wanted the child so that she wouldn’t be raised “Deaf.” At the end of the show, Cole tries to abduct both grandmother and baby at gunpoint. As he has lost his external transmitter, he is unable to understand what the police are trying to tell him and threatens to kill his hostages. He is arrested in the end. In this case, the CI recipient is depicted as a violent, out of control figure, calmed (in this case) only by Matlin’s presence and her ability to communicate with him in ASL. The implication is that in getting the CI, Cole is “killing off” his Deaf identity, and as a result, is mentally unstable. Talking to Matlin, whose character is a stand-in for Deaf culture, is the only way to bring him back to his senses. The October 2007 episode of CSI: Miami entitled “Inside-Out” is another example of the counter-rhetoric at work in the form of another implant corpse. A police officer, trying to prevent the escape of a criminal en route to prison, thinks he has accidentally shot an innocent bystander, a deaf woman. An exchange between the coroner and a CSI goes as follows: (Alexx Woods): “This is as innocent as a victim gets.”(Calleigh Duquesne): “How so?”AW: Check this out.”CD: “I don’t understand. Her head is magnetized? Steel plate?”AW: “It’s a cochlear implant. Helps deaf people to receive and process speech and sounds.”(CSI dramatization) AW VO: “It’s surgically implanted into the inner ear. Consists of a receiver that decodes and transmits to an electrode array sending a signal to the brain.”CD: “Wouldn’t there be an external component?”AW: “Oh, she must have lost it before she was shot.”CD: “Well, that explains why she didn’t get out of there. She had no idea what was going on.” (TWIZ) Based on the evidence, the “sign” of the implant, the investigators are able to identify the victim as deaf, and they infer therefore that she is innocent. It is only at the end of the program that we learn that the deaf “innocent” was really the girlfriend of the criminal, and was on the scene aiding in his escape. So she is at first “as innocent” as they come, and then at the end, she is the most insidious of the criminals in the episode. The writers at least provide a nice twist on the more common deaf-innocent stereotype. Cold Case showcased a CI in the 2008 episode “Andy in C Minor,” in which the case of a 17-year-old deaf boy is reopened. The boy, Andy, had disappeared from his high school. In the investigation it is revealed that his hearing girlfriend, Emma, convinced him to get an implant, because it would help him play the piano, which he wanted to do in order to bond with her. His parents, deaf, were against the idea, and had him promise to break up with Emma and never bring up the CI again. His body is found on the campus, with a cochlear device next to his remains. Apparently Emma had convinced him to get the implant and, in the end, Andy’s father had reluctantly consented to the surgery. It is finally revealed that his Deaf best friend, Carlos, killed him with a blow to the back of the head while he was playing the piano, because he was “afraid to be alone.” This show uses the counter-rhetoric of Deaf genocide in an interesting way. In this case it is not just the CI device alone that renders the CI character symbolically “dead” to his Deaf identity, but it leads directly to his being literally executed by, or in a sense, excommunicated from, Deaf Culture, as it is represented by the character of Carlos. The “House Divided” episode of House (2009) provides the most problematic (or I should say absurd) representation of the CI process and of a CI identity. In the show, a fourteen-year-old deaf wrestler comes into the hospital after experiencing terrible head pain and hearing “imaginary explosions.” Doctors Foreman and Thirteen dutifully serve as representatives of both sides of the “implant debate”: when discussing why House hasn’t mocked the patient for not having a CI, Thirteen says “The patient doesn’t have a CI because he’s comfortable with who he is. That’s admirable.” Foreman says, “He’s deaf. It’s not an identity, it’s a disability.” 13: “It’s also a culture.” F: “Anything I can simulate with $3 earplugs isn’t a culture.” Later, House, talking to himself, thinks “he’s going to go through life deaf. He has no idea what he’s missing.” So, as usual, without permission, he orders Chase to implant a CI in the patient while he is under anesthesia for another procedure (a brain biopsy). After the surgery the team asks House why he did it and he responds, “Why would I give someone their hearing? Ask God the same question you’d get the same answer.” The shows writers endow House’s character, as they usually do, with the stereotypical “God complex” of the medical establishment, but in doing also they play beautifully into the Ladd and Blume’s rhetoric of medical miracle and cure. Immediately after the implant (which the hospital just happened to have on hand) the incision has, miraculously, healed overnight. Chase (who just happens to be a skilled CI surgeon and audiologist) activates the external processor (normally a months-long process). The sound is overwhelming, the boy hears everything. The mother is upset. “Once my son is stable,” the mom says, “I want that THING out of his head.” The patient also demands that the “thing” be removed. Right after this scene, House puts a Bluetooth in his ear so he can talk to himself without people thinking he’s crazy (an interesting reference to how we all are becoming cyborgs, more and more “implanted” with technology). Later, mother and son have the usual touching sentimental scene, where she speaks his name, he hears her voice for the first time and says, “Is that my name? S-E-T-H?” Mom cries. Seth’s deaf girlfriend later tells him she wishes she could get a CI, “It’s a great thing. It will open up a whole new world for you,” an idea he rejects. He hears his girlfriend vocalize, and asks Thirteen if he “sounds like that.” This for some reason clinches his decision about not wanting his CI and, rather than simply take off the external magnet, he rips the entire device right out of his head, which sends him into shock and system failure. Ultimately the team solves the mystery of the boy’s initial ailment and diagnoses him with sarcoidosis. In a final scene, the mother tells her son that she is having them replace the implant. She says it’s “my call.” This show, with its confusing use of both the sentimental and the counter-rhetoric, as well as its outrageous inaccuracies, is the most egregious example of how the CI is currently being constructed on television, but it, along with my other examples, clearly shows the Ladd/Blume rhetoric and counter rhetoric at work. The CI character is on one hand portrayed as an innocent, infantilized, tragic, or passive figure that is the recipient of a medical miracle kindly urged upon them (or forced upon them, as in the case of House). On the other hand, the CI character is depicted in the language of the counter-rhetoric: as deeply flawed, crazed, disturbed or damaged somehow by the incursions onto their Deaf identity, or, in the worst case scenario, they are dead, exterminated. Granted, it is the very premise of the forensic/crime drama to have a victim, and a dead victim, and it is the nature of the police drama to have a “bad,” criminal character; there is nothing wrong with having both good and bad CI characters, but my question is, in the end, why is it an either-or proposition? Why is CI identity only being portrayed in essentialist terms on these types of shows? Why are there no realistic portrayals of people with CIs (and for that matter, deaf people) as the richly varied individuals that they are? These questions aside, if these two types of “implanting rhetoric”, the sentimentalised and the terminated, are all we have at the moment, what does it mean? As I mentioned early in this essay, deaf people, along with many “others,” have long helped to highlight and define the hegemonic “norm.” The apparent cultural need for a Foucauldian “marked body” explains not only the popularity of crime dramas, but it also could explain the oddly proliferant use of characters with cochlear implants in these particular shows. A person with an implant on the side of their head is definitely a more “marked” body than the deaf person with no hearing aid. The CI character is more controversial, more shocking; it’s trendier, “sexier”, and this boosts ratings. But CI characters are, unlike their deaf predecessors, now serving an additional cultural function. I believe they are, as I claim in the beginning of this essay, screens upon which our culture is now projecting repressed anxieties about emergent technology. The two essentialist rhetorics of the cochlear implant, the rhetoric of the sentimental, medical model, and the rhetoric of genocide, ultimately represent our technophilia and our technophobia. The CI character embodies what Debra Shaw terms a current, “ontological insecurity that attends the interface between the human body and the datasphere” (85). We are growing more nervous “as new technologies shape our experiences, they blur the lines between the corporeal and incorporeal, between physical space and virtual space” (Selfe). Technology either threatens the integrity of the self, “the coherence of the body” (we are either dead or damaged) or technology allows us to transcend the limitations of the body: we are converted, “transformed”, the recipient of a happy modern miracle. In the end, I found that representations of CI on television (in the United States) are overwhelmingly sentimental and therefore essentialist. It seems that the conflicting nineteenth century tendency of attraction and revulsion toward the deaf is still, in the twenty-first century, evident. We are still mired in the rhetoric of “cure” and “control,” despite an active Deaf counter discourse that employs the language of the holocaust, warning of the extermination of yet another cultural minority. We are also daily becoming daily more “embedded in cybernetic systems,” with our laptops, emails, GPSs, PDAs, cell phones, Bluetooths, and the likes. We are becoming increasingly engaged in a “necessary relationship with machines” (Shaw 91). We are gradually becoming no longer “other” to the machine, and so our culturally constructed perceptions of ourselves are being threatened. In the nineteenth century, divisions and hierarchies between a white male majority and the “other” (women, African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans) began to blur. Now, the divisions between human and machine, as represented by a person with a CI, are starting to blur, creating anxiety. Perhaps this anxiety is why we are trying, at least in the media, symbolically to ‘cure’ the marked body or kill off the cyborg. Future examinations of the discourse should, I believe, use these media constructions as a lens through which to continue to examine and illuminate the complex subject position of the CI identity, and therefore, perhaps, also explore what the subject position of the post/human identity will be. References "A Boy in a Tree." Patrick Norris (dir.), Hart Hanson (by), Emily Deschanel (perf.). Bones, Fox Network, 7 Sep. 2005. “Andy in C Minor.” Jeannete Szwarc (dir.), Gavin Harris (by), Kathryn Morris (perf.). Cold Case, CBS Network, 30 March 2008. Blume, Stuart. “The Rhetoric and Counter Rhetoric of a “Bionic” Technology.” Science, Technology and Human Values 22.1 (1997): 31-56. Brueggemann, Brenda Jo. Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places. New York: New York UP, 2009. “Cochlear Implant Statistics.” ASL-Cochlear Implant Community. Blog. Citing Laurent Le Clerc National Deaf Education Center. Gallaudet University, 18 Mar. 2008. 29 Apr. 2010 ‹http:/ /aslci.blogspot.com/2008/03/cochlear-implant-statistics.html›. “Cures to Come.” Discover Presents the Brain (Spring 2010): 76. Fischman, Josh. “Bionics.” National Geographic Magazine 217 (2010). “House Divided.” Greg Yaitanes (dir.), Matthew V. Lewis (by), Hugh Laurie (perf.). House, Fox Network, 22 Apr. 2009. “Inside-Out.” Gina Lamar (dir.), Anthony Zuiker (by), David Caruso (perf.). CSI: Miami, CBS Network, 8 Oct. 2007. Krentz, Christopher. Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Chapel Hill: UNC P, 2007. Ladd, Paddy. Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters Limited, 2002. Lane, Harlan. A Journey Into the Deaf-World. San Diego: DawnSignPress, 1996. “NAD Position Statement on the Cochlear Implant.” National Association of the Deaf. 6 Oct. 2000. 29 April 2010 ‹http://www.nad.org/issues/technology/assistive-listening/cochlear-implants›. Nussbaum, Debra. “Manufacturer Information.” Cochlear Implant Information Center. National Deaf Education Center. Gallaudet University. 29 Apr. 2010 < http://clerccenter.gallaudet.edu >. Shaw, Debra. Technoculture: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg, 2008. “Silent Night.” Rob Bailey (dir.), Anthony Zuiker (by), Gary Sinise (perf.). CSI: New York, CBS Network, 13 Dec. 2006. “Sweet Nothing in My Ear.” Joseph Sargent (dir.), Stephen Sachs (by), Jeff Daniels (perf.). Hallmark Hall of Fame Production, 20 Apr. 2008. TWIZ TV scripts. CSI: Miami, “Inside-Out.” “What Is the Surgery Like?” FAQ, University of Miami Cochlear Implant Center. 29 Apr. 2010 ‹http://cochlearimplants.med.miami.edu/faq/index.asp›.

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Abstract:

“The cop in our head represses us better than any police force. Through generations of conditioning, the system has created people who have a very hard time coming together to create resistance.” – Seth Tobocman, War in the Neighborhood (1999) Even when creators of autobiographically-based comics claim to depict real events, their works nonetheless inspire confrontations as a result of ideological contestations which position them, on the one hand, as popular culture, and, on the other hand, as potentially subversive material for adults. In Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood (1999), the street politics in which Tobocman took part extends the graphic novel narrative to address personal experiences as seen through a social lens both political and fragmented by the politics of relationships. Unlike Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991), War in the Neighborhood is situated locally and with broader frames of reference, but, like Maus, resonates globally across cultures. Because Tobocman figures the street as the primary site of struggle, John Street’s historiographically-oriented paper, “Political Culture – From Civic Culture to Mass Culture”, presents a framework for understanding not that symbols determine action, any more than material or other objective conditions do, but rather that there is a constant process of interpretation and reinterpretation which is important to the way actors view their predicament and formulate their intentions. (107-108) Though Street’s main focus is on the politicization of choices involving institutional structures, his observation offers a useful context to examining Tobocman’s memoir of protest in New York City. Tobocman’s identity as an artist, however, leads him to caution his readers: Yes, it [War in the Neighborhood] is based on real situations and events, just as a landscape by Van Gogh may be based on a real landscape. But we would not hire Van Gogh as a surveyor on the basis of those paintings. (From the “Disclaimer” on the copyright page.) This speaks to the reality that all art, no matter how innocuously expressed, reflect interpretations refracted from the artists’ angles. It also calls attention to the individual artist’s intent. For Tobocman, “I ask that these stories be judged not on how accurately they depict particular events, but on what they contain of the human spirit” (from the “Disclaimer” on the copyright page). War in the Neighborhood, drawn in what appears to be pencil and marker, alternates primarily between solidly-inked black generic shapes placed against predominantly white backgrounds (chapters 1-3, 5, 7-9, and 11) and depth-focused drawing-quality images framed against mostly black backgrounds (chapters 4 and 6); chapter 10 represents an anomaly because it features typewritten text and photographs that reify the legitimacy of the events portrayed even when “intended to be a work of art” (from the “Disclaimer” on the copyright page). According to Luc Sante’s “Introduction”, “the high-contrast images here are descended from the graphic vocabulary of Masereel and Lynn Ward, an efficient and effective means of representing the war of body and soul” (n.p.). This is especially evident in the last page of War in the Neighborhood, where Tobocman bleeds himself through four panels, the left side of his body dressed in skin with black spaces for bone and the right side of his body skeletonized against his black frame (panels 5-6: 328). For Tobocman, “the war of body and soul” reifies the struggle against the state, through which its representatives define people as capital rather than as members of a social contract. Before the second chapter, however, Tobocman introduces New York squatter, philosopher and teacher Raphael Bueno’s tepee-embedded white-texted poem, “‘Nine-Tenths of the Law’” (29). Bueno’s words eloquently express the heart behind War in the Neighborhood, but could easily be dismissed because they take up only one page. The poem’s position is significant, however. It reflects the struggles between agency and class, between power and oppression, and between capitalism and egalitarianism. Tobocman includes a similar white-texted tepee in Chapter 4, though the words are not justified and the spacing between the words and the edges of the tepee are larger. In this chapter, Tobocman focuses on the increasing media attention given to the Thompson Square Park homeless, who first organize as “the Homeless Clients Advisory Board” (panel 7: 86). The white-texted tepee reads: They [Tent City members] got along well with the Chinese students, participated in free China rallys, learned to say ‘Down with Deng Xiao ping’ in Chinese. It was becoming clear to Tent City that their homelessness meant some thing on a world stage. (panel 6: 103) The OED Online cites 1973 as the first use of gentrification, which appeared in “Times 26 Sept. 19/3.” It also lists uses in 1977, 1982 and 1985. While the examples provided point to business-specific interests associated with gentrification, it is now defined as “the process by which an (urban) area is rendered middle-class.” While gentrification, thus, infers the displacement of minority members for the benefits of white privilege, it is also complicated by issues of eminent domain. For the disenfranchised who lack access to TV, radio and other venues of public expression (i.e., billboards), “taking it to the streets” means trafficking ideas, grievances and/or evangelisms. In places like NYC, the nexus for civic engagement is the street. The main thrust of Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood, however, centers on the relationships between (1) the squatters, against whom Reagan-era economics destabilized, (2) the police, whose roles changed as local policies shifted to accommodate urban planning, (3) the politicians, who “began to campaign to destroy innercity neighborhoods” (20), and (4) the media, which served elitist interests. By chapter 3, Tobocman intrudes himself into the narrative to personalize the story of squatters and their resistance of an agenda that worked to exclude them. In chapter 4, he intersects the interests of squatters with the homeless. With chapter 5, Tobocman, already involved, becomes a squatter, too; however, he also maintains his apartment, making him both an insider and an outsider. The meta-discourses include feminism, sexism and racism, entwined concepts usually expressed in opposition. Fran is a feminist who demands not only equality for women, but also respect. Most of the men share traditional values of manhood. Racism, while recognized at a societal level, creeps into the choices concerning the dismissal or acceptance of blacks and whites at ABC House on 13th Street, where Tobocman resided. As if speaking to an interviewer, a black woman explains, as a white male, his humanity had a full range of expression. But to be a black person and still having that full range of expression, you were punished for it. ... It was very clear that there were two ways of handling people who were brought to the building. (full-page panel: 259) Above the right side of her head is a yin yang symbol, whose pattern contrasts with the woman’s face, which also shows shading on the right side. The yin yang represents equanimity between two seemingly opposing forces, yet they cannot exist without the other; it means harmony, but also relation. This suggests balance, as well as a shared resistance for which both sides of the yin yang maintain their identities while assuming community within the other. However, as Luc Sante explains in his “Introduction” to War in the Neighborhood, the word “community” gets thrown around with such abandon these days it’s difficult to remember that it has ever meant anything other than a cluster of lobbyists. ... A community is in actuality a bunch of people whose intimate lives rub against one another’s on a daily basis, who possess a common purpose not unmarred by conflict of all sizes, who are thus forced to negotiate their way across every substantial decision. (n.p., italics added) The homeless organized among themselves to secure spaces like Tent House. The anarchists lobbied the law to protect their squats. The residents of ABC House created rules to govern their behaviors toward each other. In all these cases, they eventually found dissent among themselves. Turning to a sequence on the mayoral transition from Koch to Dinkins, Tobocman likens “this inauguration day” as a wedding “to join this man: David Dinkins…”, “with the governmental, business and real estate interests of New York City” (panel 1: 215). Similarly, ABC House, borrowing from the previous, tried to join with the homeless, squatters and activist organizations, but, as many lobbyists vying for the same privilege, contestations within and outside ABC splintered the goal of unification. Yet the street remains the focal point of War in the Neighborhood. Here, protests and confrontations with the police, who acted as intermediary agents for the politicians, make the L.E.S. (Lower East Side) a site of struggle where ordinary activities lead to war. Though the word war might otherwise seem like an exaggeration, Tobocman’s inclusion of a rarely seen masked figure says otherwise. This “t-shirt”-hooded (panel 1: 132) wo/man, one of “the gargoyles, the defenders of the buildings” (panel 3: 132), first appears in panel 3 on page 81 as part of this sequence: 319 E. 8th Street is now a vacant lot. (panel 12: 80) 319 taught the squatters to lock their doors, (panel 1: 81) always keep a fire extinguisher handy, (panel 2: 81) to stay up nights watching for the arsonist. (panel 3: 81) Never to trust courts cops, politicians (panel 4: 81) Recognize a state of war! (panel 5: 81) He or she reappears again on pages 132 and 325. In Fernando Calzadilla’s “Performing the Political: Encapuchados in Venezuela”, the same masked figures can be seen in the photographs included with his article. “Encapuchados,” translates Calzadilla, “means ‘hooded ones,’ so named because of the way the demonstrators wrap their T-shirts around their faces so only their eyes show, making it impossible for authorities to identify them” (105). While the Encapuchados are not the only group to dress as such, Tobocman’s reference to that style of dress in War in the Neighborhood points to the dynamics of transculturation and the influence of student movements on the local scene. Student movements, too, have traditionally used the street to challenge authority and to disrupt its market economy. More important, as Di Wang argues in his book Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870-1930, in the process of social transformation, street culture was not only the basis for commoners’ shared identity but also a weapon through which they simultaneously resisted the invasion of elite culture and adapted to its new social, economic, and political structures. (247) While focusing on the “transformation that resulted in the reconstruction of urban public space, re-creation of people’s public roles, and re-definition of the relationship among ordinary people, local elites and the state” (2), Wang looks at street culture much more broadly than Tobocman. Though Wang also connects the 1911 Revolution as a response to ethnic divisions, he examines in greater detail the everyday conflicts concerning local identities, prostitutes in a period marked by increasing feminisms, beggars who organized for services and food, and the role of tea houses as loci of contested meanings. Political organization, too, assumes a key role in his text. Similarly to Wang, what Tobocman addresses in War in the Neighborhood is the voice of the subaltern, whose street culture is marked by both social and economic dimensions. Like the poor in New York City, the squatters in Iran, according to Asef Bayat in his article “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the ‘Informal People’”, “between 1976 and the early 1990s” (53) “got together and demanded electricity and running water: when they were refused or encountered delays, they resorted to do-it-yourself mechanisms of acquiring them illegally” (54). The men and women in Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood, in contrast, faced barricaded lines of policemen on the streets, who struggled to keep them from getting into their squats, and also resorted to drastic measures to keep their buildings from being destroyed after the court system failed them. Should one question the events in Tobocman’s comics, however, he or she would need to go no further than Hans Pruijt’s article, “Is the Institutionalization of Urban Movements Inevitable? A Comparison of the Opportunities for Sustained Squatting in New York City and Amsterdam”: In the history of organized squatting on the Lower East Side, squatters of nine buildings or clusters of buildings took action to avert threat of eviction. Some of the tactics in the repertoire were: Legal action; Street protest or lock-down action targeting a (non-profit) property developer; Disruption of meetings; Non-violent resistance (e.g. placing oneself in the way of a demolition ball, lining up in front of the building); Fortification of the building(s); Building barricades in the street; Throwing substances at policemen approaching the building; Re-squatting the building after eviction. (149) The last chapter in Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood, chapter 11: “Conclusion,” not only plays on the yin and yang concept with “War in the Neighborhood” in large print spanning two panels, with “War in the” in white text against a black background and “Neighborhood” in black text against a white background (panels 3-4: 322), but it also shows concretely how our wars against each other break us apart rather than allow us to move forward to share in the social contract. The street, thus, assumes a meta-narrative of its own: as a symbol of the pathways that can lead us in many directions, but through which we as “the people united” (full-page panel: 28) can forge a common path so that all of us benefit, not just the elites. Beyond that, Tobocman’s graphic novel travels through a world of activism and around the encounters of dramas between people with different goals and relationships to themselves. Part autobiography, part documentary and part commentary, his graphic novel collection of his comics takes the streets and turns them into a site for struggle and dislocation to ask at the end, “How else could we come to know each other?” (panel 6: 328). Tobocman also shapes responses to the text that mirror the travesty of protest, which brings discord to a world that still privileges order over chaos. Through this reconceptualization of a past that still lingers in the present, War in the Neighborhood demands a response from those who would choose “to take up the struggle against oppression” (panel 3: 328). In our turn, we need to recognize that the divisions between us are shards of the same glass. References Bayat, Asef. “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the “Informal People.’” Third World Quarterly 18.1 (1997): 53-72. Calzadilla, Fernando. “Performing the Political: Encapuchados in Venezuela.” The Drama Review 46.4 (Winter 2002): 104-125. “Gentrification.” OED Online. 2nd Ed. (1989). http://0-dictionary.oed.com.csulib.ctstateu.edu/ cgi/entry/50093797?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=gentrification &first=1&max_to_show=10>. 25 Apr. 2006. Pruijt, Hans. “Is the Institutionalization of Urban Movements Inevitable? A Comparison of the Opportunities for Sustained Squatting in New York and Amsterdam.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27.1 (Mar. 2003): 133-157. Street, John. “Political Culture – From Civic to Mass Culture.” British Journal of Political Science 24.1 (Jan. 1994): 95-113. Toboman, Seth. War in the Neighborhood (chapter 1 originally published in Squatter Comics, no. 2 (Photo Reference provided by City Limits, Lower East Side Anti-displacement Center, Alan Kronstadt, and Lori Rizzo; Book References: Low Life, by Luc Sante, Palante (the story of the Young Lords Party), Squatters Handbook, Squatting: The Real Story, and Sweat Equity Urban Homesteading; Poem, “‘Nine-Tenths of the Law,’” by Raphael Bueno); chapter 2 (Inkers: Samantha Berger, Lasante Holland, Becky Minnich, Ursula Ostien, Barbara Lee, and Seth Tobocman; Photo Reference: the daily papers, John Penley, Barbara Lee, Paul Kniesel, Andrew Grossman, Peter LeVasseur, Betsy Herzog, William Comfort, and Johannes Kroemer; Page 81: Assistant Inker: Peter Kuper, Assistant Letterer: Sabrina Jones and Lisa Barnstone, Photo Reference: Paul Garin, John Penley, and Myron of E.13th St); chapter 3 originally published in Heavy Metal 15, no. 11 (Inkers: Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman; Letterers: Sabrina Jones, Lisa Barnstone, and Seth Tobocman; Photo Reference: Paul Garin, John Penley, Myron of 13th Street, and Mitch Corber); chapter 4 originally published in World War 3 Illustrated, no. 21 (Photo Reference: John Penley, Andrew Lichtenstein, The Shadow, Impact Visuals, Paper Tiger TV, and Takeover; Journalistic Reference: Sarah Ferguson); chapter 5 originally published in World War 3 Illustrated, no. 13, and reprinted in World War 3 Illustrated Confrontational Comics, published by Four Walls Eight Windows (Photo Reference: John Penley and Chris Flash (The Shadow); chapter 6 (Photo reference: Clayton Patterson (primary), John Penley, Paul Garin, Andrew Lichtenstein, David Sorcher, Shadow Press, Impact Visuals, Marianne Goldschneider, Mike Scott, Mitch Corber, Anton Vandalen, Paul Kniesel, Chris Flash (Shadow Press), and Fran Luck); chapter 7 (Photo Reference: Sarah Teitler, Marianne Goldschneider, Clayton Patterson, Andrew Lichtenstein, David Sorcher, John Penley, Paul Kniesel, Barbara Lee, Susan Goodrich, Sarah Hogarth, Steve Ashmore, Survival Without Rent, and Bjorg; Inkers: Ursula Ostien, Barbara Lee, Samantha Berger, Becky Minnich, and Seth Tobocman); chapter 8 originally published in World War 3 Illustrated, no. 15 (Inkers: Laird Ogden and Seth Tobocman; Photo Reference: Paul Garin, Clayton Patterson, Paper Tiger TV, Shadow Press, Barbara Lee, John Penley, and Jack Dawkins; Collaboration on Last Page: Seth Tobocman, Zenzele Browne, and Barbara Lee); chapter 9 originally published in Real Girl (Photo Reference: Sarah Teitler and Barbara Lee); chapter 10 (Photos: John Penley, Chris Egan, and Scott Seabolt); chapter 11: “Conclusion” (Inkers: Barbara Lee, Laird Ogden, Samantha Berger, and Seth Tobocman; Photo Reference: Anton Vandalen). Intro. by Luc Sante. Computer Work: Eric Goldhagen and Ben Meyers. Text Page Design: Jim Fleming. Continuous Tone Prints and Stats Shot at Kenfield Studio: Richard Darling. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1999. Wang, Di. Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870-1930. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Raney, Vanessa. "Where Ordinary Activities Lead to War: Street Politics in Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/01-raney.php>. APA Style Raney, V. (Jul. 2006) "Where Ordinary Activities Lead to War: Street Politics in Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/01-raney.php>.

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It is the same spectacle all over the Western world: whenever delegates gather to discuss the development and consequences of new media technologies, a handful of people among them will stand out from the crowd, and somehow seem not quite to fit in with the remaining assortment of techno-evangelists, Internet ethnographers, multimedia project leaders, and online culture critics. At some point in the proceedings, they'll get to the podium and hold a talk on their ideas for the future of copyright protection and intellectual property (IP) rights in the information age; when they are finished, the reactions of the audience typically range from mild "what was that all about?" amusem*nt to sheer "they haven't got a clue" disbelief. Spare a thought for copyright lawyers; they're valiantly fighting a losing battle. Ever since the digitalisation and networking of our interpersonal and mass media made information transmission and duplication effortless and instantaneous, they've been trying to come up with ways to uphold and enforce concepts of copyright which are fundamentally linked to information as bound to physical objects (artifacts, books, CDs, etc.), as Barlow has demonstrated so clearly in "Selling Wine without Bottles". He writes that "copyright worked well because, Gutenberg notwithstanding, it was hard to make a book. ... Books had material surfaces to which one could attach copyright notices, publisher's marques, and price tags". If you could control the physical media which were used to transmit information (paper, books, audio and video tapes, as well as radio and TV sets, or access to cable systems), you could control who made copies when and where, and at what price. This only worked as long as the technology to make copies was similarly scarce, though: as soon as most people learnt to write, or as faxes and photocopiers became cheaper, the only real copyright protection books had was the effort that would have to be spent to copy them. With technology continuously advancing (perhaps even at accellerating pace), copyright is soon becoming a legal fiction that is losing its link to reality. Indeed, we are now at a point where we have the opportunity -- the necessity, even -- to shift the fictional paradigm, to replace the industrial-age fiction of protective individual copyright with an information-age fiction of widespread intellectual cooperation. As it becomes ever easier to bypass and ignore copyright rules, and as copyright thus becomes ever more illusionary, this new fiction will correspondingly come ever closer to being realised. To Protect and to ... Lose Today, the lawyers' (and their corporate employers') favourite weapon in their fight against electronic copyright piracy are increasingly elaborate protection mechanisms -- hidden electronic signatures to mark intellectual property, electronic keys to unlock copyrighted products only for legitimate users (and sometimes only for a fixed amount of time or after certain licence payments), encryption of sensitive information, or of entire products to prevent electronic duplication. While the encryption of information exchanges between individuals has been proven to be a useful deterrent against all but the most determined of hackers, it's interesting to note that practically no electronic copyright protection mechanism of mass market products has ever been seen to work. However good and elaborate the protection efforts, it seems that as long as there is a sufficient number of interested consumers unwilling to pay for legitimate access, copy protections will be cracked eventually: the rampant software piracy is the best example. On the other hand, where copy protections become too elaborate and cumbersome, they end up killing the product they are meant to protect: this is currently happening in the case of some of the pay-per-view or limited-plays protection schemes forced upon the U.S. market for Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs). The eventual failure of such mechanisms isn't a particularly recent observation, even. When broadcast radio was first introduced in Australia in 1923, it was proposed that programme content should be protected (and stations financed) by fixing radio receivers to a particular station's frequency -- by buying such a 'sealed set' receiver you would in effect subscribe to a station and acquire the right to receive the content it provided. Never known as uninventive, those Australians who this overprotectiveness didn't completely put off buying a receiver (radio was far from being a proven mass medium at the time, after all) did of course soon break the seal, and learnt to adjust the frequency to try out different stations -- or they built their own radios from scratch. The 'sealed set' scheme was abandoned after only nine months. Even with the development of copy protection schemes since the 1920s, a full (or at least sufficiently comprehensive) protection of intellectual property seems as unattainable a fiction as it was then. Protection and copying technology are never far apart in development anyway, but even more fundamentally, the protected products are eventually meant to be used, after all. No matter how elaborately protected a CD, a video, or a computer programme is, it will still have to be converted into sound waves, image information, or executable code, and at that level copying will still remain possible. In the absence of workable copy protection, however, copies will be made in large amounts -- even more so since information is now being spread and multiplied around the globe virtually at the speed of light. Against this tide of copies, any attempts to use legislation to at least force the payment of royalties from illegitimate users are also becoming increasingly futile. While there may be a few highly publicised court cases, the multitude of small transgressions will remain unanswered. This in turn undermines the equality before the law that is a basic human right: increasingly, the few that are punished will be able to argue that, if "everybody does it", to single them out is highly unfair. At the same time, corporate efforts to uphold the law may be counterproductive: as Barlow writes, "against the swift tide of custom, the Software Publishers' current practice of hanging a few visible scapegoats is so obviously capricious as to only further diminish respect for the law". Quite simply, their legal costs may not be justified by the results anymore. Abandoning Copyright Law If copyright has become a fiction, however -- one that is still, despite all evidence, posited as reality by the legal system --, and if the makeup of today's electronic media, particularly the Internet, allow that fiction to be widely ignored and circumvented in daily practice -- despite all corporate legal efforts --, how is this disparity between law and reality to be solved? Barlow offers a clear answer: "whenever there is such profound divergence between the law and social practice, it is not society that adapts". He goes on to state that it may well be that when the current system of intellectual property law has collapsed, as seems inevitable, that no new legal structure will arise in its place. But something will happen. After all, people do business. When a currency becomes meaningless, business is done in barter. When societies develop outside the law, they develop their own unwritten codes, practices, and ethical systems. While technology may undo law, technology offers methods for restoring creative rights. When William Gibson invented the term 'cyberspace', he described it as a "consensual hallucination" (67). As the removal of copyright to the realm of the fictional has been driven largely by the Internet and its 'freedom of information' ethics, perhaps it is apt to speak of a new approach to intellectual property (or, with Barlow, to 'creative rights') as one of consensual, collaborative use of such property. This approach is far from being fully realised yet, and must so for now remain fiction, too, but it is no mere utopian vision -- in various places, attempts are made to put into place consensual schemes of dealing with intellectual property. They also represent a move from IP hoarding to IP use. Raymond speaks of the schemes competing here as the 'cathedral' and the 'bazaar' system. In the cathedral system, knowledge is tightly controlled, and only the finished product, "carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation" (1), is ever released. This corresponds to traditional copyright approaches, where company secrets are hoarded and locked away (sometimes only in order to keep competitors from using them), and breaches punished severely. The bazaar system, on the other hand, includes the entire community of producers and users early on in the creative process, up to the point of removing the producer/user dichotomy altogether: "no quiet, reverent cathedral-building here -- rather, ... a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches ... out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles", as Raymond admits (1). The Linux 'Miracle' Raymond writes about one such bazaar-system project which provides impressive proof that the approach can work, however: the highly acclaimed Unix-based operating system Linux. Instigated and organised by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds, this enthusiast-driven, Internet-based development project has achieved more in less than a decade than what many corporate developers (Microsoft being the obvious example) can do in thrice that time, and with little financial incentive or institutional support at that. As Raymond describes, "the Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximise utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could achieve" (10). Thus, while there is no doubt that individual participants will eventually always also be driven by selfish reasons, there is collaboration towards the achievement of communal goals, and a consensus about what those goals are: "while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which bug-spotting and improvements get done by hundreds of people" (Raymond 10). It is obvious that such collaborative projects need a structure that allows for the immediate participation of a large community, and so in the same way that the Internet has been instrumental in dismantling traditional copyright systems, it is also a driving factor in making these new approaches possible: "Linux was the first project to make a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool. I don't think it's a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993-1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet made possible" (Raymond 10). While some previous collaborative efforts exist (such as shareware schemes, which have existed ever since the advent of programmable home computers), their comparatively limited successes underline the importance of a suitable communication medium. The success of Linux has now begun to affect corporate structures, too: informational material for the Mozilla project, in fact, makes direct reference to the Linux experience. On the Net, Mozilla is as big as it gets -- instituted to continue development of Netscape Communicator-based Web browsers following Netscape's publication of the Communicator source code, it poses a serious threat to Microsoft's push (the legality of which is currently under investigation in the U.S.) to increase marketshare for its Internet Explorer browser. Much like Linux, Mozilla will be a collaborative effort: "we intend to delegate authority over the various modules to the people most qualified to make decisions about them. We intend to operate as a meritocracy: the more good code you contribute, the more responsibility you will be given. We believe that to be the only way to continue to remain relevant, and to do the greatest good for the greatest number" ("Who Is Mozilla.org?"), with the Netscape corporation only one among that number, and a contributor amongst many. Netscape itself intends to release browsers based on the Mozilla source code, with some individual proprietary additions and the benefits corporate structures allow (printed manuals, helplines, and the like), but -- so it seems -- it is giving up its unlimited hold over the course of development of the browser. Such actions afford an almost prophetic quality to Barlow's observation that "familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be the case that the best thing you can do to raise the demand for your product is to give it away". The use of examples from the computer world should not be seen to mean that the consensual, collaborative use of intellectual property suggested here is limited only to software -- it is, however, no surprise that a computer-based medium would first be put to use to support computer-based development projects. Producers and artists from other fields can profit from networking with their peers and clients just as much: artists can stay in touch with their audience and one another, working on collaborative projects such as the brilliant Djam Karet CD Collaborator (see Taylor's review in Gibraltar), professional interest groups can exchange information about the latest developments in their field as well as link with the users of their products to find out about their needs or problems, and the use of the Net as a medium of communication for academic researchers was one of its first applications, of course. In many such cases, consensual collaboration would even speed up the development process and help iron out remaining glitches, beating the efforts of traditional institutions with their severely guarded intellectual property rights. As Raymond sees it, for example, "no commercial developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem", and so "perhaps in the end the free-software culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software 'hoarding' is morally wrong ... , but simply because the commercial world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with free-software communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem" (10). Realising the Fiction There remains the problem that even the members of such development communities must make a living somehow -- a need to which their efforts in the community not only don't contribute, but the pursuit of which even limits the time available for the community efforts. The apparent impossibility of reconciling these two goals has made the consensual collaborative approach appear little more than a utopian fiction so far, individual successes like Linux or (potentially) Mozilla notwithstanding. However, there are ways of making money from the communal work even if due to the abolition of copyright laws mere royalty payments are impossible -- as the example of Netscape's relation to the Mozilla project shows, the added benefits that corporate support can bring will still seem worth paying for, for many users. Similarly, while music and artwork may be freely available on the Net, many music fans will still prefer to get the entire CD package from a store rather than having to burn the CD and print the booklet themselves. The changes to producer/user relations suggested here do have severe implications for corporate and legal structures, however, and that is the central reason why particularly the major corporate intellectual property holders (or, hoarders) and their armies of lawyers are engaged in such a fierce defensive battle. Needless to say, the changeover from the still-powerful fiction of enforcible intellectual property copyrights to the new vision of open, consensual collaboration that gives credit for individual contributions, but has no concept of an exclusive ownership of ideas, will not take place overnight. Intellectual property will continue to be guarded, trade secrets will keep being kept, for some time yet, but -- just as is the case with the established practice of patenting particular ideas just so competitors can't use them, but without ever putting them to use in one's own work -- eventually such efforts will prove to be self-defeating. Shutting one's creative talents off in a quiet cathedral will come to be seen as less productive than engaging in the creative cooperation occuring in the global bazaar, and solitary directives of central executives will be replaced by consensual decisions of the community of producers and users. As Raymond points out, "this is not to say that individual vision and brilliance will no longer matter; rather, ... the cutting edge ... will belong to people who start from individual vision and brilliance, then amplify it through the effective construction of voluntary communities of interest" (10). Such communal approaches may to some seem much like communism, but this, too, is a misconception. In fact, in this new system there is much more exchange, much more give and take going on than in the traditional process of an exchange of money for product between user and producer -- only the currency has changed. "This explains much of the collective 'volunteer' work which fills the archives, newsgroups, and databases of the Internet. Its denizens are not working for 'nothing,' as is widely believed. Rather they are getting paid in something besides money. It is an economy which consists almost entirely of information" (Barlow). And with the removal of the many barriers to the free flow of information and obstacles to scientific and artistic development that traditional copyright has created, the progress of human endeavour itself is likely to be sped up. In the end, then, it all comes down to what fictions we choose to believe or reject. In the light of recent developments, and considering the evidence that suggests the viability, even superiority of alternative approaches, it is becoming increasingly hard to believe that traditional copyright can, and much less, should be sustained. Other than the few major copyright holders, few stand to gain from upholding these rights. On the other hand, were we to lift copyright restrictions and use the ideas and information thus made available freely in a cooperative, consensual, and most of all productive way, we all might profit. As various projects have shown, that fiction is already in the process of being realised. References Barlow, John Perry. "Selling Wine without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net." 1993. 26 Jan. 1999 <www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/idea_economy_article.php>. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 1984. Raymond, Eric S. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." 1998. 26 Jan. 1999 <http://www.redhat.com/redhat/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar.php>. Taylor, Mike. "Djam Karet, Jeff Greinke, Tim Song Jones, Nick Peck, Kit Watkins." Gibraltar 5.12 (22 Apr. 1995). 10 Feb. 1999 <http://www.progrock.net/gibraltar/issues/Vol5.Iss12.htm>. "Who Is Mozilla.org?" Mozilla.org Website. 1998. 26 Jan. 1999 <http://www.mozilla.org/about.php>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "The Fiction of Copyright: Towards a Consensual Use of Intellectual Property." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "The Fiction of Copyright: Towards a Consensual Use of Intellectual Property," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1999) The fiction of copyright: towards a consensual use of intellectual property. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php> ([your date of access]).

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“...children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents...” — Stephen Kline, The Making of Children’s Culture We live in a world saturated by design and through design artefacts, one can glean unique insights into a culture's values and norms. In fact, some academics, such as British media and film theorist Ben Highmore, see the two areas so inextricably intertwined as to suggest a wholesale “re-branding of the cultural sciences as design studies” (14). Too often, however, everyday objects are marginalised or overlooked as objects of scholarly attention. The field of material culture studies seeks to change that by focussing on the quotidian object and its ability to reveal much about the time, place, and culture in which it was designed and used. This article takes on one such object, a mid-century children's toy tea set, whose humble journey from 1968 Sears catalogue to 2014 thrift shop—and subsequently this author’s basem*nt—reveals complex rhetorical messages communicated both visually and verbally. As material culture studies theorist Jules Prown notes, the field’s foundation is laid upon the understanding “that objects made ... by man reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged” (1-2). In this case, the objects’ material and aesthetic characteristics can be shown to reflect some of the pervasive stereotypes and gender roles of the mid-century and trace some of the prevailing tastes of the American middle class of that era, or perhaps more accurately the type of design that came to represent good taste and a modern aesthetic for that audience. A wealth of research exists on the function of toys and play in learning about the world and even the role of toy selection in early sex-typing, socialisation, and personal identity of children (Teglasi). This particular research area isn’t the focus of this article; however, one aspect that is directly relevant and will be addressed is the notion of adult role-playing among children and the role of toys in communicating certain adult practices or values to the child—what sociologist David Oswell calls “the dedifferentiation of childhood and adulthood” (200). Neither is the focus of this article the practice nor indeed the ethicality of marketing to children. Relevant to this particular example I suggest, is as a product utilising messaging aimed not at children but at adults, appealing to certain parents’ interest in nurturing within their child a perceived era and class-appropriate sense of taste. This was fuelled in large part by the curatorial pursuits of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, coupled with an interest and investment in raising their children in a design-forward household and a desire for toys that reflected that priority; in essence, parents wishing to raise modern children. Following Prown’s model of material culture analysis, the tea set is examined in three stages, through description, deduction and speculation with each stage building on the previous one. Figure 1: Porcelain Toy Tea Set. Description The tea set consists of twenty-six pieces that allows service for six. Six cups, saucers, and plates; a tall carafe with spout, handle and lid; a smaller vessel with a spout and handle; a small round bowl with a lid; a larger oval bowl with a lid, and a coordinated oval platter. The cups are just under two inches tall and two inches in diameter. The largest piece, the platter is roughly six inches by four inches. The pieces are made of a ceramic material white in colour and glossy in texture and are very lightweight. The rim or edge of each piece is decorated with a motif of three straight lines in two different shades of blue and in different thicknesses, interspersed with a set of three black wiggly lines. Figure 2: Porcelain Toy Tea Set Box. The set is packaged for retail purposes and the original box appears to be fully intact. The packaging of an object carries artefactual evidence just as important as what it contains that falls into the category of a “‘para-artefact’ … paraphernalia that accompanies the product (labels, packaging, instructions etc.), all of which contribute to a product’s discourse” (Folkmann and Jensen 83). The graphics on the box are colourful, featuring similar shades of teal blue as found on the objects, with the addition of orange and a silver sticker featuring the logo of the American retailer Sears. The cover features an illustration of the objects on an orange tabletop. The most prominent text that confirms that the toy is a “Porcelain Toy Tea Set” is in an organic, almost psychedelic style that mimics both popular graphics of this era—especially album art and concert posters—as well as the organic curves of steam that emanate from the illustrated teapot’s spout. Additional messages appear on the box, in particular “Contemporary DESIGN” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. Along the edges of the box lid, a detail of the decorative motif is reproduced somewhat abstracted from what actually appears on the ceramic objects. Figure 3: Sears’s Christmas Wishbook Catalogue, page 574 (1968). Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Sears) is well-known for its over one-hundred-year history of producing printed merchandise catalogues. The catalogue is another important para-artefact to consider in analysing the objects. The tea set first appeared in the 1968 Sears Christmas Wishbook. There is no date or copyright on the box, so only its inclusion in the catalogue allows the set to be accurately dated. It also allows us to understand how the set was originally marketed. Deduction In the deduction phase, we focus on the sensory aesthetic and functional interactive qualities of the various components of the set. In terms of its function, it is critical that we situate the objects in their original use context, play. The light weight of the objects and thinness of the ceramic material lends the objects a delicate, if not fragile, feeling which indicates that this set is not for rough use. Toy historian Lorraine May Punchard differentiates between toy tea sets “meant to be used by little girls, having parties for their friends and practising the social graces of the times” and smaller sets or doll dishes “made for little girls to have parties with their dolls, or for their dolls to have parties among themselves” (7). Similar sets sold by Sears feature images of girls using the sets with both human playmates and dolls. The quantity allowing service for six invites multiple users to join the party. The packaging makes clear that these toy tea sets were intended for imaginary play only, rendering them non-functional through an all-capitals caution declaiming “IMPORTANT: Do not use near heat”. The walls and handles of the cups are so thin one can imagine that they would quickly become dangerous if filled with a hot liquid. Nevertheless, the lid of the oval bowl has a tan stain or watermark which suggests actual use. The box is broken up by pink cardboard partitions dividing it into segments sized for each item in the set. Interestingly even the small squares of unfinished corrugated cardboard used as cushioning between each stacked plate have survived. The evidence of careful re-packing indicates that great care was taken in keeping the objects safe. It may suggest that even though the set was used, the children or perhaps the parents, considered the set as something to care for and conserve for the future. Flaws in the glaze and applique of the design motif can be found on several pieces in the set and offer some insight as to the technique used in producing these items. Errors such as the design being perfectly evenly spaced but crooked in its alignment to the rim, or pieces of the design becoming detached or accidentally folded over and overlapping itself could only be the result of a print transfer technique popularised with decorative china of the Victorian era, a technique which lends itself to mass production and lower cost when compared to hand decoration. Speculation In the speculation stage, we can consider the external evidence and begin a more rigorous investigation of the messaging, iconography, and possible meanings of the material artefact. Aspects of the set allow a number of useful observations about the role of such an object in its own time and context. Sociologists observe the role of toys as embodiments of particular types of parental messages and values (Cross 292) and note how particularly in the twentieth century “children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents” (Kline 96). Throughout history children’s toys often reflected a miniaturised version of the adult world allowing children to role-play as imagined adult-selves. Kristina Ranalli explored parallels between the practice of drinking tea and the play-acting of the child’s tea party, particularly in the nineteenth century, as a gendered ritual of gentility; a method of socialisation and education, and an opportunity for exploratory and even transgressive play by “spontaneously creating mini-societies with rules of their own” (20). Such toys and objects were available through the Sears mail-order catalogue from the very beginning at the end of the nineteenth century (McGuire). Propelled by the post-war boom of suburban development and homeownership—that generation’s manifestation of the American Dream—concern with home décor and design was elevated among the American mainstream to a degree never before seen. There was a hunger for new, streamlined, efficient, modernist living. In his essay titled “Domesticating Modernity”, historian Jeffrey L. Meikle notes that many early modernist designers found that perhaps the most potent way to “‘domesticate’ modernism and make it more familiar was to miniaturise it; for example, to shrink the skyscraper and put it into the home as furniture or tableware” (143). Dr Timothy Blade, curator of the 1985 exhibition of girls’ toys at the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Gallery—now the Goldstein Museum of Design—described in his introduction “a miniaturised world with little props which duplicate, however rudely, the larger world of adults” (5). Noting the power of such toys to reflect adult values of their time, Blade continues: “the microcosm of the child’s world, remarkably furnished by the miniaturised props of their parents’ world, holds many direct and implied messages about the society which brought it into being” (9). In large part, the mid-century Sears catalogues capture the spirit of an era when, as collector Thomas Holland observes, “little girls were still primarily being offered only the options of glamour, beauty and parenthood as the stuff of their fantasies” (175). Holland notes that “the Wishbooks of the fifties [and, I would add, the sixties] assumed most girls would follow in their mother’s footsteps to become full-time housewives and mommies” (1). Blade grouped toys into three categories: cooking, cleaning, and sewing. A tea set could arguably be considered part of the cooking category, but closer examination of the language used in marketing this object—“little hostesses”, et cetera—suggests an emphasis not on cooking but on serving or entertaining. This particular category was not prevalent in the era examined by Blade, but the cultural shifts of the mid-twentieth century, particularly the rapid popularisation of a suburban lifestyle, may have led to the use of entertaining as an additional distinct category of role play in the process of learning to become a “proper” homemaker. Sears and other retailers offered a wide variety of styles of toy tea sets during this era. Blade and numerous other sources observe that children’s toy furniture and appliances tended to reflect the style and aesthetic qualities of their contemporary parallels in the adult world, the better to associate the child’s objects to its adult equivalent. The toy tea set’s packaging trumpets messages intended to appeal to modernist values and identity including “Contemporary Design” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. The use of this coded marketing language, aimed particularly at parents, can be traced back several decades. In 1928 a group of American industrial and textile designers established the American Designers' Gallery in New York, in part to encourage American designers to innovate and adopt new styles such as those seen in the L’ Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925) in Paris, the exposition that sparked international interest in the Art Deco or Art Moderne aesthetic. One of the gallery founders, Ilonka Karasz, a Hungarian-American industrial and textile designer who had studied in Austria and was influenced by the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, publicised her new style of nursery furnishings as “designed for the very modern American child” (Brown 80). Sears itself was no stranger to the appeal of such language. The term “contemporary design” was ubiquitous in catalogue copy of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, used to describe everything from draperies (1959) and bedspreads (1961) to spice racks (1964) and the Lady Kenmore portable dishwasher (1961). An emphasis on the role of design in one’s life and surroundings can be traced back to efforts by MoMA. The museum’s interest in modern design hearkens back almost to the institution’s inception, particularly in relation to industrial design and the aestheticisation of everyday objects (Marshall). Through exhibitions and in partnership with mass-market magazines, department stores and manufacturer showrooms, MoMA curators evangelised the importance of “good design” a term that can be found in use as early as 1942. What Is Good Design? followed the pattern of prior exhibitions such as What Is Modern Painting? and situated modern design at the centre of exhibitions that toured the United States in the first half of the nineteen-fifties. To MoMA and its partners, “good design” signified the narrow identification of proper taste in furniture, home decor and accessories; effectively, the establishment of a design canon. The viewpoints enshrined in these exhibitions and partnerships were highly influential on the nation’s perception of taste for decades to come, as the trickle-down effect reached a much broader segment of consumers than those that directly experienced the museum or its exhibitions (Lawrence.) This was evident not only at high-end shops such as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Even mass-market retailers sought out well-known figures of modernist design to contribute to their offerings. Sears, for example, commissioned noted modernist designer and ceramicist Russel Wright to produce a variety of serving ware and decor items exclusively for the company. Notably for this study, he was also commissioned to create a toy tea set for children. The 1957 Wishbook touts the set as “especially created to delight modern little misses”. Within its Good Design series, MoMA exhibitions celebrated numerous prominent Nordic designers who were exploring simplified forms and new material technologies. In the 1968 Wishbook, the retailer describes the Porcelain Toy Tea Set as “Danish-inspired china for young moderns”. The reference to Danish design is certainly compatible with the modernist appeal; after the explosion in popularity of Danish furniture design, the term “Danish Modern” was commonly used in the nineteen-fifties and sixties as shorthand for pan-Scandinavian or Nordic design, or more broadly for any modern furniture design regardless of origin that exhibited similar characteristics. In subsequent decades the notion of a monolithic Scandinavian-Nordic design aesthetic or movement has been debunked as primarily an economically motivated marketing ploy (Olivarez et al.; Fallan). In the United States, the term “Danish Modern” became so commonly misused that the Danish Society for Arts and Crafts called upon the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to legally restrict the use of the labels “Danish” and “Danish Modern” to companies genuinely originating in Denmark. Coincidentally the FTC ruled on this in 1968, noting “that ‘Danish Modern’ carries certain meanings, and... that consumers might prefer goods that are identified with a foreign culture” (Hansen 451). In the case of the Porcelain Toy Tea Set examined here, Sears was not claiming that the design was “Danish” but rather “Danish-inspired”. One must wonder, was this another coded marketing ploy to communicate a sense of “Good Design” to potential customers? An examination of the formal qualities of the set’s components, particularly the simplified geometric forms and the handle style of the cups, confirms that it is unlike a traditional—say, Victorian-style—tea set. Punchard observes that during this era some American tea sets were actually being modelled on coffee services rather than traditional tea services (148). A visual comparison of other sets sold by Sears in the same year reveals a variety of cup and pot shapes—with some similar to the set in question—while others exhibit more traditional teapot and cup shapes. Coffee culture was historically prominent in Nordic cultures so there is at least a passing reference to that aspect of Nordic—if not specifically Danish—influence in the design. But what of the decorative motif? Simple curved lines were certainly prominent in Danish furniture and architecture of this era, and occasionally found in combination with straight lines, but no connection back to any specific Danish motif could be found even after consultation with experts in the field from the Museum of Danish America and the Vesterheim National Norwegian-American Museum (personal correspondence). However, knowing that the average American consumer of this era—even the design-savvy among them—consumed Scandinavian design without distinguishing between the various nations, a possible explanation could be contained in the promotion of Finnish textiles at the time. In the decade prior to the manufacture of the tea set a major design tendency began to emerge in the United States, triggered by the geometric design motifs of the Finnish textile and apparel company Marimekko. Marimekko products were introduced to the American market in 1959 via the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based retailer Design Research (DR) and quickly exploded in popularity particularly after would-be First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy appeared in national media wearing Marimekko dresses during the 1960 presidential campaign and on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. (Thompson and Lange). The company’s styling soon came to epitomise a new youth aesthetic of the early nineteen sixties in the United States, a softer and more casual predecessor to the London “mod” influence. During this time multiple patterns were released that brought a sense of whimsy and a more human touch to classic mechanical patterns and stripes. The patterns Piccolo (1953), Helmipitsi (1959), and Varvunraita (1959), all designed by Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi offered varying motifs of parallel straight lines. Maija Isola's Silkkikuikka (1961) pattern—said to be inspired by the plumage of the Great Crested Grebe—combined parallel serpentine lines with straight and angled lines, available in a variety of colours. These and other geometrically inspired patterns quickly inundated apparel and decor markets. DR built a vastly expanded Cambridge flagship store and opened new locations in New York in 1961 and 1964, and in San Francisco in 1965 fuelled in no small part by the fact that they remained the exclusive outlet for Marimekko in the United States. It is clear that Marimekko’s approach to pattern influenced designers and manufacturers across industries. Design historian Lesley Jackson demonstrates that Marimekko designs influenced or were emulated by numerous other companies across Scandinavia and beyond (72-78). The company’s influence grew to such an extent that some described it as a “conquest of the international market” (Hedqvist and Tarschys 150). Subsequent design-forward retailers such as IKEA and Crate and Barrel continue to look to Marimekko even today for modern design inspiration. In 2016 the mass-market retailer Target formed a design partnership with Marimekko to offer an expansive limited-edition line in their stores, numbering over two hundred items. So, despite the “Danish” misnomer, it is quite conceivable that designers working for or commissioned by Sears in 1968 may have taken their aesthetic cues from Marimekko’s booming work, demonstrating a clear understanding of the contemporary high design aesthetic of the time and coding the marketing rhetoric accordingly even if incorrectly. Conclusion The Sears catalogue plays a unique role in capturing cross-sections of American culture not only as a sales tool but also in Holland’s words as “a beautifully illustrated diary of America, it’s [sic] people and the way we thought about things” (1). Applying a rhetorical and material culture analysis to the catalogue and the objects within it provides a unique glimpse into the roles these objects played in mediating relationships, transmitting values and embodying social practices, tastes and beliefs of mid-century American consumers. Adult consumers familiar with the characteristics of the culture of “Good Design” potentially could have made a connection between the simplified geometric forms of the components of the toy tea set and say the work of modernist tableware designers such as Kaj Franck, or between the set’s graphic pattern and the modernist motifs of Marimekko and its imitators. But for a much broader segment of the population with a less direct understanding of modernist aesthetics, those connections may not have been immediately apparent. The rhetorical messaging behind the objects’ packaging and marketing used class and taste signifiers such as modern, contemporary and “Danish” to reinforce this connection to effect an emotional and aspirational appeal. These messages were coded to position the set as an effective transmitter of modernist values and to target parents with the ambition to create “appropriately modern” environments for their children. References Ancestry.com. “Historic Catalogs of Sears, Roebuck and Co., 1896–1993.” <http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1670>. Baker Furniture Inc. “Design Legacy: Our Story.” n.d. <http://www.bakerfurniture.com/design-story/ legacy-of-quality/design-legacy/>. Blade, Timothy Trent. “Introduction.” Child’s Play, Woman’s Work: An Exhibition of Miniature Toy Appliances: June 12, 1985–September 29, 1985. St. Paul: Goldstein Gallery, U Minnesota, 1985. Brown, Ashley. “Ilonka Karasz: Rediscovering a Modernist Pioneer.” Studies in the Decorative Arts 8.1 (2000-1): 69–91. Cross, Gary. “Gendered Futures/Gendered Fantasies: Toys as Representatives of Changing Childhood.” American Journal of Semiotics 12.1 (1995): 289–310. Dolansky, Fanny. “Playing with Gender: Girls, Dolls, and Adult Ideals in the Roman World.” Classical Antiquity 31.2 (2012): 256–92. Fallan, Kjetil. Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories. Berg, 2012. Folkmann, Mads Nygaard, and Hans-Christian Jensen. “Subjectivity in Self-Historicization: Design and Mediation of a ‘New Danish Modern’ Living Room Set.” Design and Culture 7.1 (2015): 65–84. Hansen, Per H. “Networks, Narratives, and New Markets: The Rise and Decline of Danish Modern Furniture Design, 1930–1970.” The Business History Review 80.3 (2006): 449–83. Hedqvist, Hedvig, and Rebecka Tarschys. “Thoughts on the International Reception of Marimekko.” Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashions, Architecture. Ed. Marianne Aav. Bard. 2003. 149–71. Highmore, Ben. The Design Culture Reader. Routledge, 2008. Holland, Thomas W. Girls’ Toys of the Fifties and Sixties: Memorable Catalog Pages from the Legendary Sears Christmas Wishbooks, 1950-1969. Windmill, 1997. Hucal, Sarah. "Scandi Crush Saga: How Scandinavian Design Took over the World." Curbed, 23 Mar. 2016. <http://www.curbed.com/2016/3/23/11286010/scandinavian-design-arne-jacobsen-alvar-aalto-muuto-artek>. Jackson, Lesley. “Textile Patterns in an International Context: Precursors, Contemporaries, and Successors.” Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashions, Architecture. Ed. Marianne Aav. Bard. 2003. 44–83. Kline, Stephen. “The Making of Children’s Culture.” The Children’s Culture Reader. Ed. Henry Jenkins. New York: NYU P, 1998. 95–109. Lawrence, Sidney. “Declaration of Function: Documents from the Museum of Modern Art’s Design Crusade, 1933-1950.” Design Issues 2.1 (1985): 65–77. Marshall, Jennifer Jane. Machine Art 1934. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. McGuire, Sheila. “Playing House: Sex-Roles and the Child’s World.” Child’s Play, Woman’s Work: An Exhibition of Miniature Toy Appliances : June 12, 1985–September 29, 1985. St. Paul: Goldstein Gallery, U Minnesota, 1985. Meikel, Jeffrey L. “Domesticating Modernity: Ambivalence and Appropriation, 1920–1940.” Designing Modernity; the Arts of Reform and Persuasion. Ed. Wendy Kaplan. Thames & Hudson, 1995. 143–68. O’Brien, Marion, and Aletha C. Huston. “Development of Sex-Typed Play Behavior in Toddlers.” Developmental Psychology, 21.5 (1985): 866–71. Olivarez, Jennifer Komar, Jukka Savolainen, and Juulia Kauste. Finland: Designed Environments. Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Nordic Heritage Museum, 2014. Oswell, David. The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights. Cambridge UP, 2013. Prown, Jules David. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17.1 (1982): 1–19. Punchard, Lorraine May. Child’s Play: Play Dishes, Kitchen Items, Furniture, Accessories. Punchard, 1982. Ranalli, Kristina. An Act Apart: Tea-Drinking, Play and Ritual. Master's thesis. U Delaware, 2013. Sears Corporate Archives. “What Is a Sears Modern Home?” n.d. <http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/index.htm>. "Target Announces New Design Partnership with Marimekko: It’s Finnish, Target Style." Target, 2 Mar. 2016. <http://corporate.target.com/article/2016/03/marimekko-for-target>. Teglasi, Hedwig. “Children’s Choices of and Value Judgments about Sex-Typed Toys and Occupations.” Journal of Vocational Behavior 18.2 (1981): 184–95. Thompson, Jane, and Alexandra Lange. Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes. Chronicle, 2010.

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Abstract:

'He did what the cipher could not, he rescued himself.' -- Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (23) On many levels, the new Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile is a gritty meditation about different types of End: the eternal relationship cycle of 'fragility, tension, ordeal, fragmentation' (adapted, with apologies to Wilhelm Reich); fin-de-siècle anxiety; post-millennium foreboding; a spectre of the alien discontinuity that heralds an on-rushing future vastly different from the one envisaged by Enlightenment Project architects. In retrospect, it's easy for this perspective to be dismissed as jargon-filled cyber-crit hyperbole. Cyber-crit has always been at its best too when it invents pre-histories and finds hidden connections between different phenomena (like the work of Greil Marcus and early Mark Dery), and not when it is closer to Chinese Water Torture, name-checking the canon's icons (the 'Deleuze/Guattari' tag-team), texts and key terms. "The organization of sound is interpreted historically, politically, socially ... . It subdues music's ambition, reins it in, restores it to its proper place, reconciles it to its naturally belated fate", comments imagineer Kodwo Eshun (4) on how cyber-crit destroys albums and the innocence of the listening experience. This is how official histories are constructed a priori and freeze-dried according to personal tastes and prior memes: sometimes the most interesting experiments are Darwinian dead-ends that fail to make the canon, or don't register on the radar. Anyone approaching The Fragile must also contend with the music industry's harsh realities. For every 10 000 Goth fans who moshed to the primal 'kill-f*ck-dance' rhythms of the hit single "Closer" (heeding its siren-call to fulfil basic physiological needs and build niche-space), maybe 20 noted that the same riff returned with a darker edge in the title track to The Downward Spiral, undermining the glorification of Indulgent hedonism. "The problem with such alternative audiences," notes Disinformation Creative Director Richard Metzger, "is that they are trying to be different -- just like everyone else." According to author Don Webb, "some mature Chaos and Black Magicians reject their earlier Nine Inch Nails-inspired Goth beginnings and are extremely critical towards new adopters because they are uncomfortable with the subculture's growing popularity, which threatens to taint their meticulously constructed 'mysterious' worlds. But by doing so, they are also rejecting their symbolic imprinting and some powerful Keys to unlocking their personal history." It is also difficult to separate Nine Inch Nails from the commercialisation and colossal money-making machine that inevitably ensued on the MTV tour circuit: do we blame Michael Trent Reznor because most of his audience are unlikely to be familiar with 'first-wave' industrial bands including Cabaret Voltaire and the experiments of Genesis P. Orridge in Throbbing Gristle? Do we accuse Reznor of being a plagiarist just because he wears some of his influences -- Dr. Dre, Daft Punk, Atari Teenage Riot, Pink Floyd's The Wall (1979), Tom Waits's Bone Machine (1992), David Bowie's Low (1977) -- on his sleeve? And do we accept no-brain rock critic album reviews who quote lines like 'All the pieces didn't fit/Though I really didn't give a sh*t' ("Where Is Everybody?") or 'And when I suck you off/Not a drop will go to waste' ("Starf*ckers Inc") as representative of his true personality? Reznor evidently has his own thoughts on this subject, but we should let the music speak for itself. The album's epic production and technical complexity turned into a post-modern studio Vision Quest, assisted by producer Alan Moulder, eleventh-hour saviour Bob Ezrin (brought in by Reznor to 'block-out' conceptual and sonic continuity), and a group of assault-technicians. The fruit of these collaborations is an album where Reznor is playing with our organism's time-binding sense, modulating strange emotions through deeply embedded tonal angularities. During his five-year absence, Trent Reznor fought diverse forms of repetitious trauma, from endogenous depression caused by endless touring to the death of his beloved grandmother (who raised him throughout childhood). An end signals a new beginning, a spiral is an open-ended and ever-shifting structure, and so Reznor sought to re-discover the Elder Gods within, a shamanic approach to renewal and secular salvation utilised most effectively by music PR luminary and scientist Howard Bloom. Concerned with healing the human animal through Ordeals that hard-wire the physiological baselines of Love, Hate and Fear, Reznor also focusses on what happens when 'meaning-making' collapses and hope for the future cannot easily be found. He accurately captures the confusion that such dissolution of meaning and decline of social institutions brings to the world -- Francis f*ckuyama calls this bifurcation 'The Great Disruption'. For a generation who experienced their late childhood and early adolescence in Reagan's America, Reznor and his influences (Marilyn Manson and Filter) capture the Dark Side of recent history, unleashed at Altamont and mutating into the Apocalyptic style of American politics (evident in the 'Star Wars'/SDI fascination). The personal 'psychotic core' that was crystallised by the collapse of the nuclear family unit and supportive social institutions has returned to haunt us with dystopian fantasies that are played out across Internet streaming media and visceral MTV film-clips. That such cathartic releases are useful -- and even necessary (to those whose lives have been formed by socio-economic 'life conditions') is a point that escapes critics like Roger Scruton, some Christian Evangelists and the New Right. The 'escapist' quality of early 1980s 'Rapture' and 'Cosmocide' (Hal Lindsey) prophecies has yielded strange fruit for the Children of Ezekiel, whom Reznor and Marilyn Manson are unofficial spokes-persons for. From a macro perspective, Reznor's post-human evolutionary nexus lies, like J.G. Ballard's tales, in a mythical near-future built upon past memory-shards. It is the kind of worldview that fuses organic and morphogenetic structures with industrial machines run amok, thus The Fragile is an artefact that captures the subjective contents of the different mind produced by different times. Sonic events are in-synch but out of phase. Samples subtly trigger and then scramble kinaesthetic-visceral and kinaesthetic-tactile memories, suggestive of dissociated affective states or body memories that are incapable of being retrieved (van der Kolk 294). Perhaps this is why after a Century of Identity Confusion some fans find it impossible to listen to a 102-minute album in one sitting. No wonder then that the double album is divided into 'left' and 'right' discs (a reference to split-brain research?). The real-time track-by-track interpretation below is necessarily subjective, and is intended to serve as a provisional listener's guide to the aural ur-text of 1999. The Fragile is full of encrypted tones and garbled frequencies that capture a world where the future is always bleeding into a non-recoverable past. Turbulent wave-forms fight for the listener's attention with prolonged static lulls. This does not make for comfortable or even 'nice' listening. The music's mind is a snapshot, a critical indicator, of the deep structures brewing within the Weltanschauung that could erupt at any moment. "Somewhat Damaged" opens the album's 'Left' disc with an oscillating acoustic strum that anchor's the listener's attention. Offset by pulsing beats and mallet percussion, Reznor builds up sound layers that contrast with lyrical epitaphs like 'Everything that swore it wouldn't change is different now'. Icarus iconography is invoked, but perhaps a more fitting mythopoeic symbol of the journey that lies ahead would be Nietzsche's pursuit of his Ariadne through the labyrinth of life, during which the hero is steadily consumed by his numbing psychosis. Reznor fittingly comments: 'Didn't quite/Fell Apart/Where were you?' If we consider that Reznor has been repeating the same cycle with different variations throughout all of his music to date, retro-fitting each new album into a seamless tapestry, then this track signals that he has begun to finally climb out of self-imposed exile in the Underworld. "The Day the World Went Away" has a tremendously eerie opening, with plucked mandolin effects entering at 0:40. The main slashing guitar riff was interpreted by some critics as Reznor's attempt to parody himself. For some reason, the eerie backdrop and fragmented acoustic guitar strums recalls to my mind civil defence nuclear war films. Reznor, like William S. Burroughs, has some powerful obsessions. The track builds up in intensity, with a 'Chorus of the Damned' singing 'na na nah' over apocalyptic end-times imagery. At 4:22 the track ends with an echo that loops and repeats. "The Frail" signals a shift to mournful introspectiveness with piano: a soundtrack to faded 8 mm films and dying memories. The piano builds up slowly with background echo, holds and segues into ... "The Wretched", beginning with a savage downbeat that recalls earlier material from Pretty Hate Machine. 'The Far Aways/Forget It' intones Reznor -- it's becoming clear that despite some claims to the contrary, there is redemption in this album, but it is one borne out of a relentless move forward, a strive-drive. 'You're finally free/You could be' suggest Reznor studied Existentialism during his psychotherapy visits. This song contains perhaps the ultimate post-relationship line: 'It didn't turn out the way you wanted it to, did it?' It's over, just not the way you wanted; you can always leave the partner you're with, but the ones you have already left will always stain your memories. The lines 'Back at the beginning/Sinking/Spinning' recall the claustrophobic trapped world and 'eternal Now' dislocation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder victims. At 3:44 a plucked cello riff, filtered, segues into a sludge buzz-saw guitar solo. At 5:18 the cello riff loops and repeats. "We're in This Together Now" uses static as percussion, highlighting the influence of electricity flows instead of traditional rock instrument configurations. At 0:34 vocals enter, at 1:15 Reznor wails 'I'm impossible', showing he is the heir to Roger Waters's self-reflective rock-star angst. 'Until the very end of me, until the very end of you' reverts the traditional marriage vow, whilst 'You're the Queen and I'm the King' quotes David Bowie's "Heroes". Unlike earlier tracks like "Reptile", this track is far more positive about relationships, which have previously resembled toxic-dyads. Reznor signals a delta surge (breaking through barriers at any cost), despite a time-line morphing between present-past-future. At 5:30 synths and piano signal a shift, at 5:49 the outgoing piano riff begins. The film-clip is filled with redemptive water imagery. The soundtrack gradually gets more murky and at 7:05 a subterranean note signals closure. "The Fragile" is even more hopeful and life-affirming (some may even interpret it as devotional), but this love -- representative of the End-Times, alludes to the 'Glamour of Evil' (Nico) in the line 'Fragile/She doesn't see her beauty'. The fusion of synths and atonal guitars beginning at 2:13 summons forth film-clip imagery -- mazes, pageants, bald eagles, found sounds, cloaked figures, ruined statues, enveloping darkness. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Pilgrimage" utilises a persistent ostinato and beat, with a driving guitar overlay at 0:18. This is perhaps the most familiar track, using Reznor motifs like the doubling of the riff with acoustic guitars between 1:12-1:20, march cries, and pitch-shift effects on a 3:18 drumbeat/cymbal. Or at least I could claim it was familiar, if it were not that legendary hip-hop producer and 'edge-of-panic' tactilist Dr. Dre helped assemble the final track mix. "No, You Don't" has been interpreted as an attack on Marilyn Manson and Hole's Courntey Love, particularly the 0:47 line 'Got to keep it all on the outside/Because everything is dead on the inside' and the 2:33 final verse 'Just so you know, I did not believe you could sink so low'. The song's structure is familiar: a basic beat at 0:16, guitars building from 0:31 to sneering vocals, a 2:03 counter-riff that merges at 2:19 with vocals and ascending to the final verse and 3:26 final distortion... "La Mer" is the first major surprise, a beautiful and sweeping fusion of piano, keyboard and cello, reminiscent of Symbolist composer Debussy. At 1:07 Denise Milfort whispers, setting the stage for sometime Ministry drummer Bill Reiflin's jazz drumming at 1:22, and a funky 1:32 guitar/bass line. The pulsing synth guitar at 2:04 serves as anchoring percussion for a cinematic electronica mindscape, filtered through new layers of sonic chiaroscuro at 2:51. 3:06 phase shifting, 3:22 layer doubling, 3:37 outgoing solo, 3:50-3:54 more swirling vocal fragments, seguing into a fading cello quartet as shadows creep. David Carson's moody film-clip captures the end more ominously, depicting the beauty of drowning. This track contains the line 'Nothing can stop me now', which appears to be Reznor's personal mantra. This track rivals 'Hurt' and 'A Warm Place' from The Downward Spiral and 'Something I Can Never Have' from Pretty Hate Machine as perhaps the most emotionally revealing and delicate material that Reznor has written. "The Great Below" ends the first disc with more multi-layered textures fusing nostalgia and reverie: a twelve-second cello riff is counter-pointed by a plucked overlay, which builds to a 0:43 washed pulse effect, transformed by six second pulses between 1:04-1:19 and a further effects layer at 1:24. E-bow effects underscore lyrics like 'Currents have their say' (2:33) and 'Washes me away' (2:44), which a 3:33 sitar riff answers. These complexities are further transmuted by seemingly random events -- a 4:06 doubling of the sitar riff which 'glitches' and a 4:32 backbeat echo that drifts for four bars. While Reznor's lyrics suggest that he is unable to control subjective time-states (like The Joker in the Batman: Dark Knight series of Kali-yuga comic-books), the track constructions show that the Key to his hold over the listener is very carefully constructed songs whose spaces resemble Pythagorean mathematical formulas. Misdirecting the audience is the secret of many magicians. "The Way Out Is Through" opens the 'Right' disc with an industrial riff that builds at 0:19 to click-track and rhythm, the equivalent of a weaving spiral. Whispering 'All I've undergone/I will keep on' at 1:24, Reznor is backed at 1:38 by synths and drums coalescing into guitars, which take shape at 1:46 and turn into a torrential electrical current. The models are clearly natural morphogenetic structures. The track twists through inner storms and torments from 2:42 to 2:48, mirrored by vocal shards at 2:59 and soundscapes at 3:45, before piano fades in and out at 4:12. The title references peri-natal theories of development (particularly those of Stanislav Grof), which is the source of much of the album's imagery. "Into the Void" is not the Black Sabbath song of the same name, but a catchy track that uses the same unfolding formula (opening static, cello at 0:18, guitars at 0:31, drums and backbeat at 1:02, trademark industrial vocals and synth at 1:02, verse at 1:23), and would not appear out of place in a Survival Research Laboratories exhibition. At 3:42 Reznor plays with the edge of synth soundscapes, merging vocals at 4:02 and ending the track nicely at 4:44 alone. "Where Is Everybody?" emulates earlier structures, but relies from 2:01 on whirring effects and organic rhythms, including a flurry of eight beat pulses between 2:40-2:46 and a 3:33 spiralling guitar solo. The 4:26 guitar solo is pure Adrian Belew, and is suddenly ended by spluttering static and white noise at 5:13. "The Mark Has Been Made" signals another downshift into introspectiveness with 0:32 ghostly synth shimmers, echoed by cello at 1:04 which is the doubled at 1:55 by guitar. At 2:08 industrial riffs suddenly build up, weaving between 3:28 distorted guitars and the return of the repressed original layer at 4:16. The surprise is a mystery 32 second soundscape at the end with Reznor crooning 'I'm getting closer, all the time' like a zombie devil Elvis. "Please" highlights spacious noise at 0:48, and signals a central album motif at 1:04 with the line 'Time starts slowing down/Sink until I drown'. The psychic mood of the album shifts with the discovery of Imagination as a liberating force against oppression. The synth sound again is remarkably organic for an industrial album. "Starf*ckers Inc" is the now infamous sneering attack on rock-stardom, perhaps at Marilyn Manson (at 3:08 Reznor quotes Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain'). Jungle beats and pulsing synths open the track, which features the sound-sculpting talent of Pop Will Eat Itself member Clint Mansell. Beginning at 0:26, Reznor's vocals appear to have been sampled, looped and cut up (apologies to Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs). The lines 'I have arrived and this time you should believe the hype/I listened to everyone now I know everyone was right' is a very savage and funny exposure of Manson's constant references to Friedrich Nietzsche's Herd-mentality: the Herd needs a bogey-man to whip it into submission, and Manson comes dangerous close to fulfilling this potential, thus becoming trapped by a 'Stacked Deck' paradox. The 4:08 lyric line 'Now I belong I'm one of the Chosen Ones/Now I belong I'm one of the Beautiful Ones' highlights the problem of being Elect and becoming intertwined with institutionalised group-think. The album version ditches the closing sample of Gene Simmons screaming "Thankyou and goodnight!" to an enraptured audience on the single from KISS Alive (1975), which was appropriately over-the-top (the alternate quiet version is worth hearing also). "The danger Marilyn Manson faces", notes Don Webb (current High Priest of the Temple of Set), "is that he may end up in twenty years time on the 'Tonight Show' safely singing our favourite songs like a Goth Frank Sinatra, and will have gradually lost his antinomian power. It's much harder to maintain the enigmatic aura of an Evil villain than it is to play the clown with society". Reznor's superior musicianship and sense of irony should keep him from falling into the same trap. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "The Big Come Down" begins with a four-second synth/static intro that is smashed apart by a hard beat at 0:05 and kaleidoscope guitars at 0:16. Critics refer to the song's lyrics in an attempt to project a narcissistic Reznor personality, but don't comment on stylistic tweaks like the AM radio influenced backing vocals at 1:02 and 1:19, or the use of guitars as a percussion layer at 1:51. A further intriguing element is the return of the fly samples at 2:38, an effect heard on previous releases and a possible post-human sub-text. The alien mythos will eventually reign over the banal and empty human. At 3:07 the synths return with static, a further overlay adds more synths at 3:45 as the track spirals to its peak, before dissipating at 3:1 in a mesh of percussion and guitars. "Underneath It All" opens with a riff that signals we have reached the album's climatic turning point, with the recurring theme of fragmenting body-memories returning at 0:23 with the line 'All I can do/I can still feel you', and being echoed by pulsing static at 0:42 as electric percussion. A 'Messiah Complex' appears at 1:34 with the line 'Crucify/After all I've died/After all I've tried/You are still inside', or at least it appears to be that on the surface. This is the kind of line that typical rock critics will quote, but a careful re-reading suggests that Reznor is pointing to the painful nature of remanifesting. Our past shapes us more than we would like to admit particularly our first relationships. "Ripe (With Decay)" is the album's final statement, a complex weaving of passages over a repetitive mesh of guitars, pulsing echoes, back-beats, soundscapes, and a powerful Mike Garson piano solo (2:26). Earlier motifs including fly samples (3:00), mournful funeral violas (3:36) and slowing time effects (4:28) recur throughout the track. Having finally reached the psychotic core, Reznor is not content to let us rest, mixing funk bass riffs (4:46), vocal snatches (5:23) and oscillating guitars (5:39) that drag the listener forever onwards towards the edge of the abyss (5:58). The final sequence begins at 6:22, loses fidelity at 6:28, and ends abruptly at 6:35. At millennium's end there is a common-held perception that the world is in an irreversible state of decay, and that Culture is just a wafer-thin veneer over anarchy. Music like The Fragile suggests that we are still trying to assimilate into popular culture the 'war-on-Self' worldviews unleashed by the nineteenth-century 'Masters of Suspicion' (Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche). This 'assimilation gap' is evident in industrial music, which in the late 1970s was struggling to capture the mood of the Industrial Revolution and Charles Dickens, so the genre is ripe for further exploration of the scarred psyche. What the self-appointed moral guardians of the Herd fail to appreciate is that as the imprint baseline rises (reflective of socio-political realities), the kind of imagery prevalent throughout The Fragile and in films like Strange Days (1995), The Matrix (1999) and eXistenZ (1999) is going to get even darker. The solution is not censorship or repression in the name of pleasing an all-saving surrogate god-figure. No, these things have to be faced and embraced somehow. Such a process can only occur if there is space within for the Sadeian aesthetic that Nine Inch Nails embodies, and not a denial of Dark Eros. "We need a second Renaissance", notes Don Webb, "a rejuvenation of Culture on a significant scale". In other words, a global culture-shift of quantum (aeon or epoch-changing) proportions. The tools required will probably not come just from the over-wordy criticism of Cyber-culture and Cultural Studies or the logical-negative feeding frenzy of most Music Journalism. They will come from a dynamic synthesis of disciplines striving toward a unity of knowledge -- what socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson has described as 'Consilience'. Liberating tools and ideas will be conveyed to a wider public audience unfamiliar with such principles through predominantly science fiction visual imagery and industrial/electronica music. The Fragile serves as an invaluable model for how such artefacts could transmit their dreams and propagate their messages. For the hyper-alert listener, it will be the first step on a new journey. But sadly for the majority, it will be just another hysterical industrial album promoted as selection of the month. References Bester, Alfred. The Stars My Destination. London: Millennium Books, 1999. Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. "Trauma and Memory." Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. Eds. Bessel A. van der Kolk et al. New York: Guilford Press, 1996. Nine Inch Nails. Downward Spiral. Nothing/Interscope, 1994. ---. The Fragile. Nothing, 1999. ---. Pretty Hate Machine. TVT, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Alex Burns. "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php>. Chicago style: Alex Burns, "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Alex Burns. (1999) 'This machine is obsolete': a listeners' guide to Nine Inch Nails' The fragile. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]).