Celebrity embodiment: introduction

Companion to Celebrity presents a multi-disciplinary collection of original essays that explore myriad issues relating to the origins, evolution, and current trends in the field of celebrity studies.

Emotional celebrity: introduction

Companion to Celebrity presents a multi-disciplinary collection of original essays that explore myriad issues relating to the origins, evolution, and current trends in the field of celebrity studies.

The publics of celebrity: introduction

Companion to Celebrity presents a multi-disciplinary collection of original essays that explore myriad issues relating to the origins, evolution, and current trends in the field of celebrity studies.

Sensing celebrities

Sensing celebrities involves recognition of the way complementary sensory-based elements come together to create, produce and transmit levels of affect and intensities. This chapter explores celebrity through the lens of sensory aesthetics. It begins by defining sensory aesthetics, linking it to the phenomenology of celebrity, and particularly the work of Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks. The chapter draws upon the unique concept of the celebaesthetic subject to address the intersubjective relationship between fan and celebrity. Using Miley Cyrus as a case study, the chapter draws into the analysis the issue of gender and race, and the way conductive “skin” can be made to function as a sensory stereotype. It highlights that mobilization of the celebrity senses touched by transgression may be best understood to take place through the confession, and in the celebrity carnival.

Global celebrity: introduction

Companion to Celebrity presents a multi-disciplinary collection of original essays that explore myriad issues relating to the origins, evolution, and current trends in the field of celebrity studies.

Polyphony and performance: integrating the theatre into cinema's modernity

My research explores film’s nascent relationship to the late nineteenth century stage. It argues that the emergence of digital culture has seen a focus on the technological rather than performative history of film and new media. This means that what we accept as ‘the cinema’ often denies or elides the theatrical practices that were brought into the nascent media. My interest, in particular, is the narrative theatrical film before World War One. Particularly in Australia, which is credited with having ushered in the longer playing feature film format with the release of The Story of the Kelly Gang, these pre-teen years are fundamental to a proper understanding of our larger contribution to the global film industry.

The Syrian electronic army – a hacktivist group

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to assess the hacktivist group called the Syrian Electronic Army and determine what their motivations in terms of ethical and poetical motivations.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper looks at chronological examples of Syrian Electronic Army activities and assess them using a developed hacktivist criteria to try and gain a greater understanding of the motivations of the Syrian Electronic Army. The paper uses a netnography research approach.
Findings – This paper determines that the Syrian Electronic Army is motivated to protect the Syrian Government. This protection is highlighted by the new media and social media organisations that theSyrian Electronic Army attacks online.
Research limitations/implications – This paper focuses only on one group the Syrian Electronic Army.
Practical implications – A greater understanding of the Syrian Electronic Army.
Social implications – A greater understanding of the development of hacktivism.
Originality/value – A unique study into the motivation of the Syrian Electronic Army.

Use of optical interferometry to measure gold nanoparticle adsorption on silica

Adsorption of metal nanoparticles is at the heart of many chemical and biosensor techniques, but there are few approaches that can provide quantitative characterisation of individual nanoparticle films fabricated at different times and/or under different conditions. Using synthesised gold nanoparticles (Au NPs) as a model, the nanoparticle films were investigated using an optical interferometry technique known as fringes of equal chromatic order (FECO), which was further systematically validated against both in situ quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) and ex situ atomic force microscopy (AFM) measurements. The results indicate that the FECO wavelengths has a quantifiable red shift with increasing particle densities, making it possible to quantify the degree of surface coverage via the analysis of the fringe shift at a fixed fringe order. Moreover, the calculated formula between the FECO shifts and the surface coverage allows quantitative analysis of the whole adsorption kinetics investigated. Particularly, the as-proposed FECO technique can successfully monitor the Au NP adsorption in situ, which could be a new versatile technology platform for “online” monitoring method, for example in biosensor applications using Au NP-tagged analytes.

Editorial: English afloat on a digital sea

In the 21st Century, new technologies, in particular interactive multimedia and the internet, challenge many aspects of our teaching practice and assumptions. What counts as knowledge, what counts as literacy, the ways we teach, and even the relationships we form are coloured and reshaped by changing cultural and social practices, such as global commerce and ICTs. These issues, and the relationships between them, need to be considered anew. Two current frames of reference for thinking about these changes and their implications for subject English are the notion of an "information revolution" (Castells 1996) and the changing nature of literacy, with its shift towards multiliteracies, or thinking of literacy as design (New London Group, 2000). Both frames have significant implications for how we conceptualise English curriculum (for example, literacy, texts and assessment), for how we re-imagine English teaching, and for the ways in which we ask students to work with and within digital culture and new media.

Rhetoric and reality: critical perspectives on education in a 3D virtual world

The emergence of any new educational technology is often accompanied by inflated expectations about its potential for transforming pedagogical practice and improving student learning outcomes. A critique of the rhetoric accompanying the evolution of 3D virtual world education reveals a similar pattern, with the initial hype based more on rhetoric than research demonstrating the extent to which rhetoric matches reality. Addressed are the perceived gaps in the literature through a critique of the rhetoric evident throughout the evolution of the application of virtual worlds in education and the reality based on the reported experiences of experts in the field of educational technology, who are all members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group. The experiences reported highlight a range of effective virtual world collaborative and communicative teaching experiences conducted in members' institutions. Perspectives vary from those whose reality is the actuation of the initial rhetoric in the early years of virtual world education, to those whose reality is fraught with challenges that belie the rhetoric. Although there are concerns over institutional resistance, restrictions, and outdated processes on the one-hand, and excitement over the rapid emergence of innovation on the other, the prevailing reality seems to be that virtual world education is both persistent and sustainable. Explored are critical perspectives on the rhetoric and reality on the educational uptake and use of virtual worlds in higher education, providing an overview of the current and future directions for learning in virtual worlds.

Morbis artis: diseases of the arts

What constitutes life, what counts as a sentient being, and who gets to determine what lives are saved, punished, exploited and destroyed?

Composed of eleven separate but connected installation works, Morbis Artis explores the question of organic life through particular artistic lenses, each taking on the moniker of disease to represent and embody the issues that challenge bare life today.

Drawing upon Frances Stracey, the artists working on this exhibition consider Bio-art to represent ‘a crossover of art and the biological sciences, with living matter, such as genes, cells or animals, as its new media’.

Дэвид Маршалл. Продвижение и предъявление себя: селебрити как символ презентационных медиа

This article explores how the celebrity discourse of the self both presages and works as a pedagogical tool for the burgeoning world of presentational media and its users that is now an elemental part of new media culture. What is often understood as social media via social network sites is also a form of presentation of the self, and it produces a new hybrid of the personal, interpersonal and the mediated — what I call “presentational media.” Via Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Friendster, individuals engage in the expression of the self that, like the celebrity discourse of the self, is not entirely interpersonal in nature, nor is it entirely highly mediated or representational.The middle ground of the self-expression described here (again, partially medi- ated, and partially interpersonal) has produced an expansion of the intertextual zone that has been the bedrock of the celebrity industry for more than half a century, and that has now become the core of social media networks. The article investigates this convergence of presentation of the self through a study of celebrities’ self-presen- tation on social networks and their similarities with patterns of self-presentation among millions of other users. The article relates these forms of presentation to the greater discourses of the self that have informed the production of the celebrity for most of the last century.