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Emerging Practices In Cyberculture And Social Networking Daniel Riha

Emerging Practices In Cyberculture And Social Networking Daniel Riha Emerging Practices In Cyberculture And Social Networking Daniel Riha Emerging Practices In Cyberculture And Social Networking Daniel Riha

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Emerging Practices in Cyberculture and Social Networking
At the Interface Probing the Boundaries Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Daniel Riha Advisory Board Volume 69 A volume in the Critical Issues series ‘Cybercultures’ Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr Wayne Cristaudo Dr Mira Crouch Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Professor Asa Kasher Owen Kelly Dr Peter Mario Kreuter Dr Martin McGoldrick Revd Stephen Morris Professor John Parry Dr Paul Reynolds Professor Peter L. Twohig Professor S Ram Vemuri Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Emerging Practices in Cyberculture and Social Networking Edited by Daniel Riha and Anna Maj
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3082-4 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3083-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands
Table of Contents Introduction vii Daniel Riha & Anna Maj PART I Access, Power and Social Marginalisation in Cyberculture This Time It’s Personal: Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management 3 Nils Gustafsson Anthropology of Accessibility: Further Reflections on the Perceptual Problems of Human-Computer Interactions 25 Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski Politics and Social Software: Recommendations for Inclusive ICTs 41 Christina Neumayer, Celina Raffl and Robert M. Bichler PART II Cyber-Governance, Cyber-Communities, Cyber-Bodies Governance and the Global Metaverse 65 Melissa de Zwart and David Lindsay Hybrid Communities to Digital Arts Festivals: From Online Discussions to Offline Gatherings 83 Donata Marletta PART III New Concepts in Education and Entertainment Playing Games as an Art Experience: How Videogames Produce Meaning through Narrative and Play 99 Jef Folkerts
The 3-D Virtual Library as a Value-Added Library Service 119 Daniel Riha Learning New Literacies through Machinima 135 Theodoros Thomas PART IV Web 2.0 and Social Networking Youth Connecting Online: From Chat Rooms to Social Networking Sites 151 Natalia Waechter, Kaveri Subrahmanyam, Stephanie M. Reich and Guadalupe Espinoza Cybergrace among Eating Disorder Survivors in Singapore 179 Chand Somaiah
Introduction Daniel Riha & Anna Maj The chapters in this volume are a selection of the most significant research presented during the 4th Global Conference on Cybercultures: Exploring Critical Issues, held as a part of Cyber Hub activity in Salzburg, Austria in March 2009. This multi-disciplinary conference project is a successful rebirth of the 2003-2005 conferences held previously in Prague in the frames of the ID.net Critical Issues research project. The enriched materials presented here are the results of in-conference discussions as well as later research and further reflections on the topics covered. Being a contemporary dominating cultural paradigm, cyberculture is an important subject for a wide range of researchers representing various disciplines. Thus, the idea of the interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge through presenting results of diversified research projects seems to be crucial for their further development at both local and global levels. The research problems connected with cyberculture (or rather cybercultures) nowadays are those arising in the field of philosophy, psychology, sociology, culture, media and game studies, IT studies, engineering, design and law. One of the fundamental topics raised during the conference was the issue of access analysed at various levels, especially users’ access to information and technology with regard to the notion of diversified competencies, knowledge and disabilities as well as accessibility of the content and interface. The question of access has become a serious political issue. Moreover, it concerns not only the never-to-be-solved problems of geo- economic nature such as ‘digital divide’ or those of socio-psychological provenance such as ‘competence gap’. In the networked paradigm of global economy, the access to certain vulnerable data may provoke serious political or economic crises as well. It is no longer possible to feel safe and keep the ideal of isolation when everything is connected to everything else, every citizen of the global village has potential access to powerful tools which can make him/her an important source of information or its transmitter and amplifier. Politics today is more about moderating than about controlling - or at least it is evolving into this direction. Yet, on the other hand, viral politics - as viral marketing - is commencing to prevail. Gradually one can observe political actors becoming fully conscious of the situation and using this knowledge. Sometimes it is positive for citizens, and sometimes it is not. It gives new hope for social communication, disrupting the old top-to-bottom model and changing it into a bottom-to-top one. But on the other hand, it is sometimes a new threat for an individual. New communication tools can have
Introduction ______________________________________________________________ viii democratising potential but this power is understood by the authoritarian leaders, who are afraid of people and of the freedom encapsulated in new technologies. The result of a systemic reaction can be very painful for society and this sad side of emergence of cyberculture can be noticed in some parts of the world. Access also means accessibility and usability of content, various technologies, communication systems and devices. It is an important tool of inclusion of all marginalised groups of society: the elderly, children, poor, stigmatised or disabled. It is an important problem for contemporary responsible design, especially web and interaction design. The issue concerns designing assistive technologies but also social networking environments and various possibilities of social interaction, wiping out the stigmas or ‘communication gaps’. This is, of course, an important issue for contemporary pedagogy, e-learning and for the entertainment business. Therefore, open access and user-friendly architecture can be also a good marketing formula to attract attention of new target groups. The other important issue is the user’s involvement in the process of development of technologies and devices - client’s incorporation into the creative process and the idea of user-friendly interfaces as well as their implementation. The issue refers to the growing competencies and will of interaction, especially connected with the so-called ‘Net generation’ that is beginning to enter the job market and business. This generation is the one that was raised in the environment of digital technologies, especially computer games. This is the result of earlier emergence of personal computers at home, which built a creative environment of work, education and entertainment and programmed users for other interactive needs. Individuals, who are eager to cooperate with a service provider if the goal is beneficial for the whole community, now express this demand clearly and globally. But on the other hand, it results in the emergence of grassroots projects and actions, which develop information and communication possibilities of all Internet and mobile devices users. These issues are connected with the problems of gaining control, maintaining control, and the lack of control as associated with privacy and its loss. This subject implies ideas of control over the dispersed and decentralised system of the Net itself and of the content distribution in the context of Web 2.0 architecture and the cultural trend of sharing. Grassroots journalism, sharism, social tagging, bookmarking or networking are evoking many positive processes but also provoking an unprecedented loss of privacy. This implies the possibilities of personal data stealing or abuse of intimate information. The problem lies in the unawareness of possible malicious usage of social media and the need to emphasise advantages and disadvantages of social networking. This
Introduction ______________________________________________________________ ix consciousness will emerge, but it first needs to be tested. But digital maturing of virtual communities is in process. It will result also in collecting the knowledge on system vulnerabilities, and will teach to what extent digital traces should be treated as digital footprints, and to what degree one’s privacy could be revealed and to what degree it should be protected. These issues provoke questions on changes in education and the increasing need to provide cyber-education for various groups within society in view of their specified profiles. The necessity to broaden the abilities of an average user and the demand to constantly increase teachers’ competencies are the challenges for educational systems. These problems are widely analysed in the presented book with reference to interesting local examples of different forms of implementation of new ideas and methods of creative teaching of media and through media, i.e. with the use of 3D environments, games, machinima and social networking websites. The questions of evolution of competences in media and information literacy are today fundamental for the future of educational system and therefore - for the shape of future society. The changes are necessary, as the old paradigm of literacy has been loosing its ground to new generations of ‘digital natives’. The relation between the real and the virtual is the next important issue raised in the book. Crucial terms analysed in various contexts became ‘interaction’ and ‘interactivity’. The problem concerns virtual environments, game design and human-computer interaction, user-generated content connected with the ideas of openness, folksonomies and wikinomics. The ontological questions are transforming today into judicial or psychological problems concerning our existence in both real and virtual environments. Digital data loss or an attack on an avatar - may be seen as nothing serious, but in fact it can be felt as a real harm, despite the digital nature of its object. The virtual is therefore no longer the opposition of the real, it is its aspect, even if it still sounds strange. We perceive them both through our senses and through our bodies. These questions should be taken into consideration also by designers of virtual environments, video games and communication systems. Both the constantly emerging and growing virtual communities and the convergence of new media create new possibilities of communication. The current situation enables media users to develop, often subconsciously, their skills and various types of communication behaviour, which results in new models of perception and thinking - thus, new patterns of culture and new forms of society. On the other hand members of this new society design new technologies, software, devices and communication solutions that change world even more quickly, rebuilding interrelations between the elements of the social system. This opens possibilities for new visions of cyberculture and humanity.
Introduction ______________________________________________________________ x However, cyberculture, being shaped by global and information marketing provided by major IT companies, largely depends on the Web users’ willingness and their access to the global information product. Web 2.0 can be, without any hesitation, regarded as such a product - moreover, a successful one. But the label ‘2.0’ quickly changes into ‘3.0’, as the novelty is one of the priorities of marketing. What does it mean for the users and for future communication? The authors specialising in various disciplines try to find answers to these and other important questions of our contemporariness and future. Concluding, we should remember that even if potentially well- known and mature, cyberculture is still vivid, paradoxical and hybrid. Therefore, it is not easy to indicate the most important problems from anthropological, sociological, psychological, pedagogical, political or judicial perspective. Although today very important, tomorrow our problems may seem to be naive. But cyberculture will never become old; it will rather disappear or evolve to a different form of culture. There are multiple emerging issues and each day introduces new solutions, every new software or device gives new hopes and raises new questions about the future. And in this perspective the content of this book is not going to fade away with new inventions - now it presents challenges of emerging cyberculture issues, one day it will become the record of our times, interesting from anthropological or archaeological reasons. This book consists of ten chapters and has been organised into four parts which are dedicated to four important aspects of emerging practices in cyberculture and social networking: PART I: Access, Power and Social Marginalisation in Cyberculture PART II: Cyber-Governance, Cyber-Communities, Cyber-Bodies PART III: New Concepts in Education and Entertainment PART IV: Web 2.0 and Social Networking The first part is comprised of three articles on topics of access and power as well as on different aspects of domination and marginalisation, which are of great importance for contemporary societies and future development of digital media. Nils Gustafsson explores the borders of social tendencies and viral politics in his essay ‘This Time It’s Personal: Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management’. Social media are analysed here from the point of view of identity design and management, whereas social networks are regarded as a form of collective gatekeeping of information and a post- institutional way of civic self-organisation. The author proposes a new model of political viral campaigning using social media and operational terms as
Introduction ______________________________________________________________ xi ‘viral politics’ and ‘temporal elites’, which are fundamental for the understanding of this communication process. Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski in their essay ‘Anthropology of Accessibility: Further Reflections on the Perceptual Problems of Human-Computer Interactions’, show the context of accessible design, especially for people with visual impairments but also for other groups of users that can be marginalised by the process of acceleration of the development of technology. The authors emphasise the fact that nowadays competencies to operate technologies have become fundamental cultural competencies. Problems connected with the ‘proper’ design, which means openness, standardisation, usability and accessibility are analysed here with the background of some influential technological solutions and inventions, and is regarded as an anthropological problem of communication process and information flow. Christina Neumayer, Celina Raffl and Robert M. Bichler in their essay ‘Politics and Social Software: Recommendations for Inclusive ICTs’, reflect on social media’s potential to strengthen citizen movements through disseminating patterns of collaborative creation. The authors suggest that social networking can be more effectively used as a powerful tool for political and ideological purposes and for struggling with the digital divide or other forms of social marginalisation. The authors focus on the inclusive use of new media increasing social power due to various tools such as social software that may have impact on political activism enabling a participatory attitude to social issues. The second part of this book presents two articles focused on three important levels of the digital order - cyber-governance, cyber-communities and cyber-body, which enormously influences our digital existence. Melissa de Zwart and David Lindsay in the essay ‘Governance and the Global Metaverse’ analyse an issue of increasing importance- multidimensional coexistence of juridical systems and digital culture. The authors examine various problems, such as ideas and methods of governance, legitimacy and power distribution in the context of 3-D virtual worlds, games and social networking websites, raising questions on the conditions and implications of the ways in which cyberlaw functions in different digital environments and also in offline reality of state law. These issues are crucial for global culture and cybersociety as they concern questions of the code being the law itself, freedom of users (or its lack) and the power of service providers. Donata Marletta in her essay ‘Hybrid Communities to Digital Arts Festivals: From Online Discussions to Offline Gatherings’ shows the possibilities for anthropology of cyberculture or ethnography of media, science and design. The author examines new forms of connectivity and modes of community forming, especially those connected with the Internet
Introduction ______________________________________________________________ xii communication and a wide spectrum of new media festivals, digital art competitions and conferences on ICT and its social impact. The research perspective presented here sheds new light on parallel online and offline existences of digital communities. The essay indicates important factors of the evolution of the meaning of virtual communities and cyberspace itself. Part three examines emerging ideas in the field of education and entertainment, which are connected with new modes of learning, perception and cognition as well as new communication practices and competencies connected with creativity and the knowledge of specific tools: Jef Folkerts concentrates on the issues of perception, interaction and semiosis in the essay ‘Playing Games as an Art Experience: How Videogames Produce Meaning through Narrative and Play’. Game design and playing are regarded here as an important semiotic activity where meaning is constructed by designers and constantly reconstructed by players. The issue of imagination produced by games is the core problem analysed by the author in the context of other kinds of cultural mass production. Games are regarded here as the following step of evolution of artificial environments used for creation and recreation of social and personal imagination. Daniel Riha ‘The 3-D Virtual Library as a Value-Added Library Service’, discusses the functionalities the Library 2.0 shall deliver with the focus on 3-D library service and analyses the assumptions for the establishing of the long-term user community from the wider historical perspective. The concept of the 3-D Virtual Library, realised in 2004 for the University of Constance Library is compared against the actual 3-D library concepts. Theodoros Thomas in his essay ‘Cyberculture: Learning New Literacies through Machinima’ concentrates on cyberculture teaching, a new context of education process and alternative, participatory forms of knowledge distribution. Basing on realisation of an educational project concerning cyberculture and digital literacy, the author analyses problems and challenges of teaching new media skills. The knowledge of cyberspace, virtual communities and environment, basics of image, video and sound processing and digital storytelling skills which was acquired during the academic course, were later applied by students to prepare their own machinima projects. The fourth part of this book, presenting papers concerned with the various aspects of the development of Web 2.0 trends and the global rise of social networking practices, gives three interesting local examples of the social use of digital media: Natalia Waechter, Kaveri Subrahmanyam, Stephanie M. Reich and Guadalupe Espinoza in their essay ‘Youth Connecting Online: From Chat Rooms to Social Networking Sites’, presents results of empirical research on social networking of American teenage users and the modes of their activity. Teenagers are eager to use social networking websites as well as other
Introduction ______________________________________________________________ xiii communication tools which expand their offline social networks but also let them create online social networks. The researchers study behaviour, attitudes and needs of young Internet users in order to understand the dependencies between their online activity and psycho-sociological development of emerging adults. Chand Somaiah’s ‘Cybergrace among Eating Disorder Survivors in Singapore’ considers the implications for ethical storytelling. Illness has been understood as learning to cope with lost control. Cyberspace then to the author might serve as a medium for semblance of lost control. The potential impact of online eating disorder support groups and blogs for shaping individual and collective identities has been examined.
PART I Access, Power and Social Marginalisation in Cyberculture
This Time It’s Personal: Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management Nils Gustafsson Abstract This chapter deals with political mobilisation and participation in social media. The main focus is on the importance of Internet-mediated social networks in providing a ‘media filter’, functioning as a kind of collective gatekeeper to spread news and information perceived as important, in contrast to the image of the single individual media consumer faced with an insurmountable mass of information. I argue that by investing one’s personal ethos in spreading information and encourage peers in the personal social network to political participation, vital news and calls for action spread quickly. A form of viral politics ensues that, in concordance with traditional types of mediation and formation of political opinion, might provide a basis for a new type of political elite in competitive democracy. Drawing on earlier research concerning the effect of social capital created by weak ties on political participation, I argue that social networks organised online provide a new type of post-organisational weak ties, functioning as maintained social capital building institutions, encouraging to and organising actions of civic engagement. I also argue that, contrary to the common belief that various forms of Internet-mediated political mobilisation constitute a more inclusive, emancipatory and egalitarian politics, it could also be the case that the growing importance of viral politics reinforces the traditional inequality in political participation and influence in society. More specifically, a case is made for the need for more thorough conceptualisation of new modes of participation: spontaneous, individualised, ‘unorganised’ forms of action. Two concepts, ‘temporal elites’ and ‘viral politics’ are developed for describing how social network membership and density determine how people are recruited to political campaigns. The theoretical assumptions are further illustrated by the preliminary empirical findings of an ongoing study of Swedish Facebook users and their attitudes and behaviour concerning political participation in social media. Key Words: Social Networks, Political Participation, Virtual Mobilisation, Facebook, Social Capital, Elite Theory. ***** 1. Introduction This chapter starts with a short background of the academic discussion in the field and giving a rationale for why new concepts are
Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 4 needed. After a brief introduction to the phenomenon of social media and social network sites, the concepts of viral politics and temporal elites are developed and explained. The chapter ends with an empirical illustration of viral politics at the individual level, reporting the results of a study on Swedish Facebook users. An ongoing discussion in democracy research is concerned with the question of whether the level of political participation in the industrialised or post-industrial countries is sinking or not. The reason for why a high level of participation in society is perceived as important is that it is thought to be an essential part of well-functioning democracy, at least by proponents of the lines of thought in democratic theory associated with concepts like participatory, deliberative, or ‘strong’ democracy and theorists like J. S. Mill, Benjamin Barber and David Held. By participating, citizens learn and grow as individuals, thereby bettering and emancipating themselves as human beings and contributing to better governance.1 Mass participation is not seen as a sine qua non by all democratic theorists. Proponents of what David Held calls competitive elitist democracy, like Max Weber, Robert Michels and Joseph Schumpeter, underline the need for a competent political elite and restrict the role of the masses to voting, in effect selecting between competing elitist groups.2 As I will argue below, participation in internet- mediated social networks, viral politics might be interpreted as the emergence of a new type of political elite rather than mass participation. An academic debate concerning political participation in post- industrial countries has been going on for the last few decades. The main idea is that social capital, as theorised by among others Bourdieu, is correlated to the level of participation.3 The debate goes in two lines of argumentation. The line championed by, among others, Robert Putnam, maintains that political participation is decreasing as the level of social capital in society wanes with increasing individualisation and political apathy.4 Another line, represented by, among others, Russell J. Dalton and Pippa Norris5 , argues contrarily that the forms of participation are merely changing and are taking on new forms, as post-materialist values become more salient.6 Instead of enrolling in political parties and other formal organisations, citizens are now to a greater extent canalising their engagement through various types of protest, such as boycotts and buycotts, civil disobedience, internet activism and through the means of informal networks.7 These tendencies arguably run parallel to the global nature of several contemporary political issues, as well as the circumscribed autonomy of the nation state and increasing complexity of governance relationships.8 Another debate of interest for this chapter concerns the effects of the ever more dispersed and advanced use of digital communications technologies - e-mail, web pages, mobile phones, social media - on political mobilisation and participation. Within political science, this discussion tends
Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 5 to be focused either on the causal effects of such technologies on the level and type of social capital, which is thought to spur participation, or on the effects of social or ‘new’ media use on political knowledge and attitudes, also thought to spur participation.9 However, it is also important to remember that technology itself cannot be taken as a given. The design of social media is deeply related to existing social structures and ideologies in society. Services might contribute to increased elitism, surveillance and competitiveness. The interfaces they use might be produced by and for certain types of people - stereotypically young, web-savvy, able-bodied people. Thus, whether social media platforms will have beneficial or adversarial effects on grassroots mobilisation depends in part on active choices of designers.10 The discussion about social media and social capital is also linked to assumptions of the increased importance of social networks in late modern society.11 In this case it is also possible to distinguish between different strains of thought present in the debate. On the one hand it is argued that the dominant effect is a decrease in social capital; on the other hand it is argued that new communications technologies in combination with a waxing network society are in fact contributing to an increase in social capital. A third position maintains that the internet and other arenas of digital communication function as a useful compliment to traditional types of social capital.12 Concerning the effect of social media on political knowledge - together with education an important factor behind political participation - the discussion also divides into an optimistic and a pessimistic strain. Some researchers have found causal effects of social media on political knowledge and participation in empirical investigations, explaining the effect with the ‘surprise effect’ of unexpected political social media content, offsetting the effect of already politically interested people actively searching for political information on the internet.13 Others have pointed to how social and other digital media correct mistakes in traditional mass media, reinvigorate the public sphere and provide a base for a more diverse political discourse, peer production, citizen journalism, and so on.14 Empirical evidence has, however, also been provided for the hypothesis that social media in combination with other types of media, producing an overall wider media choice for consumers, have resulted in a larger knowledge gap between politically interested and disinterested citizens, most strikingly so in the work of Markus Prior.15 The American political scientist Matthew Hindman presents convincing empirical evidence for that in the blurry field of ‘Internet politics’, there is a strong tendency to winner-takes-all behaviour, power law distributions and a reinforced influence for traditionally strong groups in society in his book ‘The Myth of Digital Democracy’, deploying terms like ‘Googlearchy’ to describe how a
Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 6 few heavily linked web sites completely dominate discourse in the American political universe.16 It is fair to say that there will be no consensus on whether social network sites and other forms of social media, or the internet in general, are ‘bad’ or ‘good’ for ‘democracy’, whether that means a more oligopolistic or more fragmented public sphere, a more or less emancipated electorate, centralised or decentralised decision making, etc. Soon enough, the technologies will become so ubiquitous that they turn invisible to us, and the amount of new research dedicated to establish causal relations between ‘the Internet’ and ‘democracy’, or between ‘social media’ and ‘democracy’ will decrease.17 However, a few unclarities must be sorted out. In the debate between techno-utopians and techno-dystopians, false dichotomies are abundant. Social media does not make everything new. Old hierarchies remain. But still, everything is not quite the same. The inequalities in representative democracy prevail, but are transformed as political strife and discourse take on new shapes and new actors are involved. It is also important to distinguish between what is, what could be, and what ought to be.18 Proponents of deliberative democracy would like to see an informed public evolve through a more inclusive digital public sphere, but if what we actually have is an elitist competitive democracy, that should be taken into account. And empirical research departing from a competitive democratic model should not be confused with saying that there ought not be a more egalitarian political system or that it is not possible for the digital public sphere to facilitate informed deliberation on public issues. It is my strong belief that students of Internet-mediated politics, as in all other fields, must be aware of that. That this chapter departs from a view of representative democracy in post-industrial countries as unequal and that political mobilisation aided by social network sites might even increase power inequality does not mean that I as an author support elitism. I am actually a huge fan of egalitarianism. As much as the field of political participation and mobilisation aided by social media is emerging as an interesting and important field of research in the social sciences, it is still an under researched field. It lacks standard definitions and it though the interdisciplinarity of web research makes it fascinating and vital, it is also a crossroads for heaps of theories and classic literature in so many established disciplines. As a web researcher, it is difficult to know all. The reason for why I have chosen to develop new concepts for network-driven political mobilisation (viral politics) and for the emerging sub-group of people in the stratas of political power using this phenomenon as a successful way to political influence (the temporal elites) is that I do not find that there are really good concepts available for talking about these things. I believe that taking parts from classic democratic theory and classic elite theory and using them in combination with newer work on
Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 7 the information flows in social networks for interpreting this confusing world of Twittering rebels and Facebooking anarchists is a productive way of moving forwards. The next section will give a short introduction to social network sites and develop the concept of viral politics. 2. Social Networks, Social Network Sites and Viral Politics Social network sites are a prominent type of the various forms of user-generated social media that sometimes are grouped under the term ‘Web 2.0’.19 Quoting the by now minor classic 2007 article on social network sites by Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison, they are: web-based services that (1) construct a public or semi- public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.20 By using social network sites, it is possible to maintain off-line connections in an on-line environment, making it possible to communicate with close friends as well as casual acquaintances regardless of where they happen to be situated in time or space. It is also possible to form more or less contemporary groups, connecting people from different networks on the basis of common interests, membership in formal organisations, sharing jokes or promoting political and social causes. Another typical feature of social network sites is the interconnectedness with other types of social and mainstream media. It is easy to upload or link to media content, post it to your personal profile or to a group, or forwarding it to the contacts in your network, as well as integrating your personal profiles in different types of social media. To take an example: someone draws your attention to a funny video clip of a politician making a fool of her- or himself on television. You favourite it on your personal YouTube page, post it on your blog with a comment, tag it (assign a label to it in order to find it easily later) and store it on your del.ici.ous folksonomy page, forward the blog post to your Facebook profile, post a tweet (write a short blog post on the microblogging site Twitter) with a link to your blog post about the video clip, pass it along to your friends via e-mail, through Facebook, an SMS, etc. Your friends will in their turn assess whether they think that the clip is worthy of passing on, forwarding it or not. Someone might edit the original footage, adding music, snippets of other clips, texts, thereby creating a mash-up, a new piece of media, which in its turn might be passed around.21 Different tools allow the interactive audience to discuss and see how other people have interpreted and rated the media content. There are special services available that collect the
Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 8 forms of media content that are most circulated at the time. In the end, the sharing of the media content might in itself be a story worthy of mentioning in mainstream media, thereby creating a feedback loop between the different forms of media. In effect, your social network provides a media filter for you, passing on media content that are found to be especially interesting. This is the art of viral sharing, one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary media structure. Perhaps most applied to the logic of new marketing techniques, it is also a concept most useful to describe how post- organisational political mobilisation might occur through activist mediation. The buzz word concept of viral marketing came into use in the mid 90s and was connected with marketing strategies on the Internet.22 The basic idea is that in a world where the Internet makes it possible for anyone to be a publisher, it is difficult, if even possible, to shout down the immense mass of information produced. Thus, the best way to reach out is to make consumers themselves do the advertising by sharing information about products with their friends.23 An early well-known example was the way that Hotmail automatically attached the line ‘Get your free email at Hotmail’ to every outgoing message sent by a Hotmail user. The recipient then knew that ‘the sender was a Hotmail user, and that this new free email seemed to work for them’.24 Campaigns for the Google webmail service Gmail and the music streaming service Spotify used the social networks of their customers in that it was only possible to sign up for the service through invitation from a user. The metaphor of the virus builds on the notion that the spreading of the information is similar to the adoption pattern of a virus, with ‘spatial and network locality’, only with a much wider scope and velocity than had been possible in the pre-Internet era. Viruses ‘thrive on weak ties’.25 Viral sharing can be defined as ‘getting the right idea into the right heads at the right time’.26 The features needed for any media content to be truly viral are evocative images and consistency with existing world views in the minds of the audience. In the field of political and social activism, I call this phenomenon viral politics. The use of the term ‘viral’ in this context is not uncontroversial. According to Henry Jenkins, the concept of viral media pictures transmitters of viral messages as passive individuals passing on unchanged pieces of information - involuntary hosts infected by an evil virus. In reality, a core feature of so-called viral sharing is that transmitters are empowered to change the message and fill it with new meanings. And while viruses replicate themselves, communication depends on acts of human will. Instead, Jenkins suggests a new concept, spreadable media, which would basically mean the same phenomenon but with a strong focus on the active role of consumers/citizens.27 The reason I choose to keep viral as a concept is basically that it has been used for describing the phenomenon of my interest in other spheres of
Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 9 human communication for more than a decade. Although I admit that the metaphor does not hold all the way through - Jenkins is right in his critique - I do not find using ‘spreadable politics’ a viable way to create a functioning concept. That would take an even greater effort to explain what the concept contains. Taking into account the weaknesses of the wording, I thus suggest viral politics to mean the rapid sharing of evoking media content in social networks online in the realm of political and social activism. The place of social network sites in relation to other media is complex. On the one hand, the high-modern media structure of the 19th and 20th centuries, characterised by the sharp boundary between consumers and producers of media content and the professionalisation of journalism, seem to give way to an ecological media structure characterised by a blurring of boundaries between producers and consumers and the rise of citizen journalism.28 On the other hand, the monopolistic tendencies of media concentration and cultural homogenisation become more articulated as generic content flourishes in movie theatres, television, radio, newspapers, magazines and bestsellers. A defining characteristic of this ecological media structure is convergence.29 Much of the content passed around in social media sites emanate from traditional media outlets. YouTube started out as a channel for purely user-generated content, but ever since the beginning, users have uploaded large amounts of copyrighted content.30 The reverse is also true: mainstream media try in various ways to reach out to their audience by inviting readers, viewers and listeners to comment, share, upload own media content or rework existing content.31 Thus, it is not correct to describe or define social network sites or social media in general as the opposite of traditional or mainstream media. That is also true in the realm of politics. Although social media sometimes are viewed as a playground for grassroots mobilisation, traditional political actors like political parties and interest groups are using these new communication tools for enhancing the internal organisation, political advertisements, and tapping into new mobilising structures. The effects of sharing political media content on political participation using social media is an under researched field. Previous research has established a strong connection between social capital and political participation; in particular, the link between weak ties and participation. According to Mark S. Granovetter, ‘people rarely act on mass- media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties; otherwise one has no particular reason to think that an advertised product or an organisation should be taken seriously.’32 This relationship has been found in the political field in several empirical studies. Jan Teorell’s 2003 study found that as the number of weak ties increases, the likelihood of participation also increases. Although education is a very strong predictor for engagement in societal affairs, people still have to be recruited. If a person’s
Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 10 social network is large, the chance that he or she will be asked to participate is higher.33 The importance of the personal dissemination of media content and calls for action is not new. The qualitative difference with social network sites and social media is the efficiency with which information can be spread. Organising weak ties in social network sites allows for an individual to stay connected to brief acquaintances also when moving to another geographical area, thereby creating maintained social capital. This offsets the deterioration of social capital in society as a product of increased mobility.34 Online relationships are provisional, but off-line relationships in an on-line setting are not.35 This affects the size of the network. As the size of social networks increases, the chance for any two people being connected to each other also increases. The Small World Pattern explains the expression ‘It’s a small world’ exclaimed by ‘newly introduced individuals upon finding that they have common acquaintances’.36 Small World networks are composed both of small groups of people dense ties and of larger groups with weaker ties. Important for networks to grow extremely large is the existence of individuals with a wildly disproportionate amount of connections, being able to connect a large number of smaller dense groups with one another: ‘In fact, social networks are not held together by the bulk of people with hundreds of connections but by the few people with tens of thousands.’37 New communication technology enhances the stability of these networks, making it easier to connect to other social networks. The velocity of viral sharing implies that millions of people can be reached through word of mouth in a matter of days. Whereas meeting in person, phone chains, or other older methods of spreading rumours or information, took days and months to pass on media content to a larger group of people, social media reduces this time to a matter of minutes. Spreading a message through your personal network through social media will, by the logics of maintained social capital and the small world pattern, through viral sharing reach a global crowd at short notice (provided that the message is attractive enough to be virally shared, which is an essential part of viral politics.). The social forces behind viral politics are, as stated above, not new. I would like to point this out one more time because it is often assumed that technology is changing human behaviour in revolutionising ways. However, human culture and basic biologic factors tend to change slowly. The reason that viral politics can be seen as a partly new and potentially transforming factor in political life is the increased velocity and scope of the communication. In spreading media content to their personal network, individuals manifest their commitment to their existing beliefs and move closer to political action. They also invest their personal status as an acquaintance -
Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 11 their ethos - in forwarding a message through their social network. This is probably just as much a strategy of identity management - what kind of person do I want to be in the eyes of my peers and what does this piece of information tell them about me? - as a will of influencing society. I will return to this in the final part of this chapter. By finally reaching into mainstream media, the content will reach people who already does not share that commitment.38 Through the electronic organising of social networks, the ‘personal’ information flow increases and the threshold for participation is lowered. 3. Temporal Elites The era of the Internet - first during the 1.0 wave in the 90s and later during the 2.0 wave in the mid- and late 2000s - has sometimes been seen as heralding a new dawn for inclusive, non-hierarchical politics. In some ways, the increased importance of social media has led to the dilution of the power of traditional political actors, at least when it comes to opinion formation. However, I would like to argue that the dynamics of social media does not merely change existing structures in society: old rules of thumb for who participates - and thus has influence over agenda-setting and political outcomes - still apply. It can be the case, quite contrarily to some popular notions of the age of social media, that networked politics of the kind described in this chapter might actually increase elitism in society as well- connected social networks, political knowledge and technical skills become more even important to build effective campaigns. In this section, I try to provide a preliminary sketch of how a partly novel group of highly skilled people in the network society becomes increasingly more influential as viral politics becomes a political strategy in the everyday life. I call this group of people ‘temporal elites’ to denote their limited influence to certain fields and the highly unpredictable success in exerting influence over policy outcomes and agenda-setting. Viral politics emanates from political entrepreneurs, that most often will be directly affected people of a certain event or phenomenon (the ‘victims’) and/or groups and organisations, both NGOs and political parties devoted to this particular cause (Burma Action Committee, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, United Nations, Oxfam, political parties or politicians). In some cases, they will be individuals acting only on behalf of themselves, but usually being a part of a wider network of people sharing views and notions of political strategy. These individuals spread information and media content by word of mouth to wider groups of people through personal interconnectedness. If successful, the content/information will catch on and spread rapidly through the mechanism of viral politics, influencing the formal political system directly through personal contacts with political
Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 12 representatives and indirect through the feedback loop provided by mainstream media. The political entrepreneurs of a successful campaign of viral politics form, together with temporary supporters of the cause to be found in interconnected social networks, a temporal elite, having the necessary knowledge, skills and (perhaps above all) the motivation to promote the cause. Sometimes, the concept of elite is put in opposition to the concept of democracy. It can however also be seen as an important part of well- functioning democracy, as in the tradition associated with competitive democracy, where the electorate is seen as fairly passive between elections, choosing between political alternatives depending on track record or promises, thus legitimating political representatives: a small group of political leaders […] with perhaps an intermediate section of more active citizens, who transmit demands and information between the mass and the leadership.39 The political entrepreneurs serving as a backbone of the temporal elite associated with viral politics are a group of people that fit well into this description of the intermediate section of David Miller’s competitive elitist democracy model evident in the quote above. I would argue, though, that to the group of key political entrepreneurs in viral politics should be added a wider group of people, also belonging to the elite in the respect that they help spreading the campaign and provide a bandwagoning force for a successful cause to break into the traditional mass media outlets, but distinguished from the ‘mass’ by their political interest, knowledge and activism. In order to bring this group of people into our understanding of the temporal elites, I would like to point to Robert Putnam’s classical model of political stratification. In the model, based on empirical studies of national elites in various countries in the 1970s, the citizenry is divided into six strata, organised to form a pyramid of power:40 1. Proximate decision makers: incumbents in key official posts. This is normally a very small group of people. 2. Influentials: powerful opinion makers and people to who decision makers look for advice - high-level bureaucrats, interest group leaders. This is also a small group.
Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 13 3. Activists: This stratum is made up of the group of citizens who take active part in politics - as members of a political party or on a more private level. This is a larger group of people. 4. Still larger is the stratum of the attentive public, which consists of citizens who follow the political debates as some kind of spectator sports. They rarely do something actively. 5. The big bulk of citizens are the voters who have very limited, if any, political influence. They vote and that is it. 6. Finally, the nonparticipants do not even vote and have no politic power what so ever. The temporal elites would therefore serve to modify the second and third stratas, where the political entrepreneurs, or the core of the temporal elites, fit into Putnam’s group of influentials, while the wider group of activists neatly fit into the group of activists. The major difference posed to this model of political stratification by the concept of temporal elites proposed here is that the political entrepreneurs of the temporal elites contain people who would not normally be counted as influentials. The initiative taker of, for instance, the 2007 Support the Monk’s Protests in Burma campaign, a Canadian exchange student, was very influential in that the campaign gained hundreds of thousands of followers globally and forced governments and corporations to rethink their policies towards Burma/Myanmar, but a Canadian exchange student would not normally be counted to the group of ‘powerful opinion makers’. The activist’s stratum is also challenged by the temporal elites as they are made up by individuals participating in politics in a plethora of ways: organised, unorganised, postorganised. According to Karl Deutsch’s concept of the ‘Opinion Cascade’, the flow of information and persuasion between these political strata flow from the top down: emanating in the political and socioeconomic elite, transmitted by the mass media and opinion leaders to the mass public.41 Could it be the case that the stability of the downward flow of information might be distorted by the rise of digital media, rising levels of education, post-materialist values, and that ‘opinion leaders’ should be constructed in a more inclusive way, and also that influence might flow upstream as well as downstream? The concept of temporal elites would point in that direction. This new concept of elites does not mean that classic elites are not important; on the contrary. Financial and political elites are becoming increasingly powerful in an era of multilevel governance, ruling through
Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 14 networks, hiding behind markets, making power invisible where there used to be a throne, although it is also true that power elites are not as stable as before.42 The temporal elites might instead be seen as a potential counter- force, or at least complementing traditional elites in democracy. The brave new world of viral politics, networked individualism, and general social media carnivale, might not be a quick-fix for the problem with the unequal power distribution in representative democracies, but it is also not a reason to prophesy doom for all mankind: new developments should be compared to the status quo, not to an unattainable democratic ideal of total inclusivity. It is, however, also important to point out that, for those who have an ideal cherishing democratic equality, the potentially disproportional representation of a young, well-educated generation of native born citizens might widen the political elite in society, but also put more influence firmly in the hands of the well-off. Having said that, studies of political participation conducted in the past five decades have consistently shown that well-educated people with a high socio-economic status are more likely to participate than others. Technology alone will not offset this structure. I would like to finish this section by elaborating on how the flexibility of Internet-mediated communication might lead to more people being able to join the ranks of ‘activists’. An often-mentioned sociological phenomenon in the field of Internet sociology is the power law distribution. When analysing, for example, the contributions to a Wikipedia page, one of the most characteristic features is the huge difference between contributors in the number of contributions made and the size of each individual contribution. Some individuals contribute substantially more than others, and the ‘normal’ contribution is typically very small in size (compare with the discussion above on small world networks). There is no point in analysing average contributions, because the number and size of contributions among contributors is not normally distributed. Instead, the nth position has 1/nth of the first person’s rank.43 The same is true for civic engagement in the setting of the post- organisational viral politics of social networks. A few individuals (political entrepreneurs) invest a very large amount of time in a political or social cause. These individuals constitute the inner core of the temporal elite associated with the cause in question. As they spread information about the cause in their social networks, some people will feel encouraged to invest an equal amount of time and join a temporal elite, some people will invest less, and most people will do little or nothing. The possibility of flexible engagement makes it attractive to more people to engage, as they can easily adapt the work effort put down to their personal priorities.44 The total sum of engagement may be equal or even higher than before, despite decreasing levels of membership in formal organisations
Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 15 devoted to social and political causes. The emergence of temporal elites and viral politics might in this way save democracy, although what will be saved is not the egalitarian ideal model of democracy, but the elitist realist model we actually live in. 4. Identity Management and Annoyed Participation In a 2008 study, a small number of Swedish Facebook users were interviewed, using virtual focus groups, about their attitudes towards political content and mobilisation on the social networking site.45 The participants were divided into two groups, one of which consisted of individuals who are active or have recently been active members of formal political organisations, while the other group consisted of individuals not having a formal political engagement. I will cite a few of the results here in order to put some light on how complicated motives and actions of participants in viral politics are, and how further research must take that into account. There were no major differences between the answers from the politically active participants and the non-active participants concerning the attitudes to political mobilisation in Facebook, except for the fact that several politically active participants reported that they have incorporated Facebook among other forms of communication in their formal political engagement. The participants in the focus groups had generally a sceptical view towards political campaigns in Facebook. Many of them maintained the notion that participating in political campaigns online in various forms filled mainly two functions: building your public or semi-public identity by expressing political views and concerns; and being an excuse not for taking a more active part in a campaign. Off-line activity was viewed in general as being more important or real: To me, most Facebook causes seem utterly pointless as political/opinion forming tools. My impression is that they function more like markers for a group or an attitude that the user wants to identify with. Quite simply they become statements that you pose with on your Facebook page. It’s really the same function as the summary of facts on the user profile, although they give a more active and engaged impression. (Participant)
Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 16 The respondents also complained about the large number of requests for support from political campaigns, among an enormous number of other types of requests and invitations, leading to Facebook fatigue and a general reluctance toward any type of action. However, most participants reported that they had actually taken part in off-line activities as a direct result of mobilisation using Facebook. They also reported, without exceptions, that they were indeed members of various groups on Facebook supporting political and social causes. One participant described this seemingly paradoxical behaviour as ‘annoyed participation’.46 It was also clear, interestingly enough considering the importance of recruitment through social networks traditionally found in network studies and political participation studies, that who sent you a request to participate was just as important for whether one of the participants would join a cause or campaign as the subject itself. This might be an indicator for people engaging in viral politics might not be aware of their own importance for a successful campaign and that empirical evaluation of the proposed model must be aware of this. 5. Conclusions This chapter has tried to establish two new concepts in the academic debate over the development of political participation in the light of changing uses of computer-mediated communication. Viral politics, with connections to viral marketing and network theory, is used to describe a way of dispersing information through social networks, evident in later years and possibly an important ingredient in political participation in an era of networked individualism. Temporal elites, with connections to classic elite theory and to elitist democratic theory, denotes the people behind viral politics: a group of individuals, well-connected, well-educated and motivated to take an active part in politics, but not necessarily through joining political parties or even interest groups. It is my hope that these concepts might be found useful as the study of viral politics and of political participation in social media takes a much-needed empirical turn, informed by developing political theory. Notes 1 These propositions are made by a score of democratic theorists. Pippa Norris lists Rousseau, James Madison, J. S. Mill, Robert Dahl, Benjamin Barber, David Held and John Dryzak in P Norris, Democratic Phoenix. Reinventing Political Activism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 5. 2 D Held, Models of Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 125-157.
Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 17 3 P Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in Education: Culture, Economy and Society, A H Halsey, H Lauder, P Brown & A Stuart Wells (eds), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, pp. 46-58. 4 R Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000. 5 R J Dalton, ‘Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation’, Political Studies, vol. 56, 2008, pp. 76-98; Norris. See also B O’Neill, ‘Indifferent or Just Different? The Political and Civic Engagement of Young People in Canada.’ Canadian Policy Research Networks Research Report, 2007. 6 R Inglehart, The Silent Revolution. Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1977, esp. pp. 262-321. 7 M Micheletti, Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2003. 8 G Stoker, ‘Governance as Theory: Five Propositions’, International Social Science Journal, vol. 50(155), 1998, pp. 17-28. 9 M Cantijoch, L Jorba, and Gallego, A, ‘Exposure to Political Information in New and Old Media: which Impact on Political Participation?’ Paper presented for delivery at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 28-21, 2008, viewed on 10 August 2008, <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/8/0/1/0/p 280108_index.html>. 10 see C Neumayer & C Raffl and A Maj & M Derda-Nowakowski in this volume. 11 M Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge (MA, USA), 1996. 12 B Wellman, A Q Haase, J Witte and K Hampton, ‘Does the Internet Increase, Decrease or Supplement Social Capital? Social Networks, Participation, and Community Comitment’, American Behavioral Scientist vol. 45(3), 2001 pp. 437-456. See also J Boase, J B Horrigan, B Wellman, and L Rainie, ‘The Strength of Internet Ties’, Pew Internet and American Life Project, viewed on 10 August 2009, <http://www.pewinternet. org/pdfs/PIP_Internet_ties.pdf>. 13 Cantijoch et al., p. 8; K Sweetser and K L Lee, ‘Stealth Soapboxes: Political Information Efficacy, Cynicism and Uses of Celebrity Weblogs among Readers’, New Media & Society, vol. 10(1), 2008, pp. 67-90. 14 Y Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007, esp. pp. 176-272.
Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 18 15 M Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007. 16 M Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy, Princeton University Press, Prinecton, 2008. 17 On the invisibleness of established technologies, see D Beer & R Burrows, ‘Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations’, Sociological Research Online, vol. 12(5), 2007, viewed on 12 August 2009, <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/5/17.html>. For an early influential example of a study linking the mere existence of the Internet to democratisation, see C Kedzie, ‘Democracy and Network Connectivity’, Proceedings of the INET’95 International Networking Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1995, viewed on 12 August 2009, <http://www.isoc.org/ inet95/proceedings/PAPER/134/html/paper.html>. 18 R Putnam, The Comparative Study of Political Elites, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1976, p. 3; L Lundqvist, Det vetenskapliga studiet av politik, Studentlitteratur, Lund, 1992, pp. 60-63. 19 The expression Web 2.0 is, of course, controversial and disputed. For one summary discussion, see Beer & Burrows. 20 D Boyd and N B Ellison, ‘Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 13(1), 2007. 21 The history of the mash-up is described in S Howard-Spink, ‘Grey Tuesday, Online Cultural Activism and the Mash-up of Music and Politics’, First Monday, Special Issue # 1: Music and the Internet, 2005-07-04, viewed on 17 August 2009, <http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index. php/fm/article/viewArticle/1460/1375#h5>. 22 Two early magazine articles made use of the term: J Rayport, ‘The Virus of Marketing’, Fast Company, Issue 6/December 1996, viewed on 17 August 2009, <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/virus.html>; S Jurvetson and J Draper, ‘Viral Marketing’, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, 1997-01-01, viewed on 17 August 2009, 2, <http://www.dfj.com/news/article_26.shtml>. 23 J Leskovec, L Adamic, and B Huberman, ‘The Dynamics of Viral Marketing’. ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 1(1), Article 5, May 2007, p. 2. viewed on 18 August 2009, <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1232722. 1232727>. 24 Jurvetson and Draper, p. 1. 25 ibid; Rayport, p. 3. 26 H Jenkins, Convergence. Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, New York, 2006. pp. 206-7.
Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 19 27 H Jenkins, ‘If it Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead’ Confessions of an Aca/Fan, 2009-02-16, viewed on 26 August 2009, <http://henryjenkins.org /2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html>. 28 R Silverstone, Media and Morality. On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 90. 29 H Jenkins, ‘The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence’, International Journal of Culture Studies, vol. 7(1), 2004, pp. 33-43. 30 A Webb, ‘Interactive TV: Viewing Rights’, New Media Age, 2007-03-18, p. 23. 31 H Jenkins, Convergence. 32 M Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 78(6), 1973, p. 1374. 33 J Teorell, ‘Linking Social Capital to Political Participation: Voluntary Associations and Networks of Recruitment in Sweden’, Scandinavian Political Studies, vol. 26(1), 2003. 34 N B Ellison, C Steinfeld and C Lampe, ‘The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Network Sites’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 12(4), 2007. 35 R Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 117. 36 Granovetter, p. 1368. 37 C Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Penguin Press, New York, 2008, p. 217. 38 A Chadwick, Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communications Technology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, p. 27. 39 D Miller, ‘The Competitive Model of Democracy’ in Democratic Theory and Practice, G Duncan (ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p. 134. 40 R Putnam, The Comparative Study of Political Elites, pp. 8-15. 41 ibid., p. 13. 42 U Bjereld and M Demker, ‘The Power of Knowledge and New Political Cleavages in a Globalized World’, International Review of Sociology, vol. 16(3), 2006, p. 501. 43 C Shirky, pp. 122-130. 44 M Joyce, ‘Civic Engagement and the Internet: Online Volunteers’, Internet and Democracy Blog, 2007-11-18, viewed on 1 March 2009, <http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ idblog/ 2007/11/18/civic-engagement-and-the- internet-online-volunteers/>. 45 N Gustafsson and M Wahlström, ‘Virtual Mobilisation? Linking On-line and Off-line Political Participation among Swedish Facebook Users: Courtesy and Irritation’, paper presented to the XV NOPSA Conference,
Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 20 Tromsö, Norway, 5-7 August, 2008. This study will be followed up by a more extensive round of focus group interviews in late 2009. 46 ibid., p. 12. Bibliography Bjereld, U. and M. Demker, ‘The Power of Knowledge and New Political Cleavages in a Globalized World’. International Review of Sociology vol. 16 (3), pp. 499-515. Beer, D. and R. Burrows, ‘Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations’, Sociological Research Online, vol. 12(5), 2007, viewed on 12 August 2009, <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/5/17.html>. Benkler, Y., The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale Univerity Press, New Haven, 2007. Boase, J., Horrigan, J. B., Wellman B., and L. Rainie, ‘The Strength of Internet Ties’, Pew Internet and American Life Project, viewed on 10 August 2009, <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Internet_ties.pdf>. Bourdieu, P., ‘The Forms of Capital’, in Education: Culture, Economy and Society, A. H. Halsey, H. Lauder, P. Brown & A .Stuart Wells (eds), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997. Boyd, D. and N. B. Ellison, ‘Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship’. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 13(1), 2007, article 1 (unpaginated). Castells, M., The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge (MA, USA), 1996. Chadwick, A., Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communications Technology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006. Dalton, R. J., ‘Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation’. Political Studies, vol. 56, 2008, pp. 76-98.
Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 21 Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C. and C. Lampe, ‘The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Network Sites’. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 12(4), 2007, article 1 (unpaginated). Granovetter, M. S., ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 78 (6), 1973, pp. 1360-1380. Gustafsson, N. and M. Wahlström, ‘Virtual Mobilisation?: Linking On-line and Off-line Political Participation among Swedish Facebook Users: Courtesy and Irritation’. Paper presented to the XV NOPSA Conference, Tromsö, Norway, 5-9 August 2008. Available via the author’s website: <www.svet.lu.se?ngu>. Held, D., Models of Democracy. 3rd edition. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006. Hindman, M., The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008. Howard-Spink, S., ‘Grey Tuesday: Online Cultural Activism and the Mash- up of Music and Politics’. First Monday, Special Issue # 1: Music and the Internet, 2005-07-04, viewed on 17 August 2009, <http://firstmonday. org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1460/1375#h5>. Inglehart, R., The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1977. Jenkins, H., ‘The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence’. International Journal of Culture Studies, vol. 7(1), 2004, pp. 33-43. _______ , Convergence: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, New York, 2006. _______ , ‘If it Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead’, in Confessions of an Aca/Fan , 2009- 02-16, viewed on 26 August 2009. <http://henryjenkins.org/2009/02 if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html>. Joyce, M., ‘Civic Engagement and the Internet: Online Volunteers’. Internet and Democracy Blog, 2007-11-18, viewed on 1 March 2009,<http://blogs .law.harvard.edu/idblog/2007/1118/civic-engagement-and-the-internetonline- volunteers>.
Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 22 Jurvetson, S. and J. Draper, ‘Viral Marketing’, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, 1997-01-01, viewed on 2 December 2009, <http://www.dfj.com/news/ article_26.shtml>. Kedzie, C., ‘Democracy and Network Connectivity’, in Proceedings of the INET’95 International Networking Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1995, viewed on 12 August 2009, <http://www.isoc.org/inet95/proceedings /PAPER/134/html/paper.html>. Leskovec, J., Adamic, J., and B. Huberman, ‘The Dynamics of Viral Marketing’. ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 1(1), Article 5, May 2007, 39 pages, viewed on 18 August 2009, <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/ 1232722.1232727>. Lundquist, L., Det vetenskapliga studiet av politik. Studentlitteratur, Lund, 1992. Maj, A. & M. Derda-Nowakowski, ‘Anthopology of Accessibility. The Perceptual Problem of Human Computer Interaction’ in this volume. Micheletti. M., Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2003. Miller, D., ‘The Competitive Model of Democracy’ in Democratic Theory and Practice. D. Graeme (ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983. Neumayer, C., & Raffl, C. ‘Politics and Social Software: Recommendations for Inclusive ICTs’ in this volume. Norris, P., Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. O’Neill, B., ‘Indifferent or Just Different?: The Political and Civic Engagement of Young People in Canada.’ Canadian Policy Research Networks Research Report, 2007. Prior, M., Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007.
Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 23 Putnam, R., Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000. _______ , The Comparative Study of Political Elites. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1976. Rayport, R., ‘The Virus of Marketing’. Fast Company, Issue 6/December 1996, viewed on 17 August 2009, <http://www.fastcompany.com/ magazine/06/virus.html>. Shirky, C., Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Press, New York, 2008. Silverstone, R., Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007. Stoker, G., ‘Governance as Theory: Five Propositions’. International Social Science Journal, vol. 50(155), 1998, pp. 17-28. Sweetser, K. and K. L. Lee, ‘Stealth Soapboxes: Political Information Efficacy, Cynicism and Uses of Celebrity Weblogs among Readers’. New Media & Society, vol. 10(1), 2008, pp. 67-90. Teorell, J., ‘Linking Social Capital to Political Participation: Voluntary Associations and Networks of Recruitment in Sweden’. Scandinavian Political Studies vol. 26 (1), 2003, pp. 49-66. Webb, A., ‘Interactive TV: Viewing Rights’, New Media Age, 2007-03-08, p. 23. Wellman, B., Haase, A. Q., Witte, J. and K. Hampton, ‘Does the Internet Increase, Decrease or Supplement Social Capital?: Social Networks, Participation, and Community Comitment’. American Behavioral Scientist vol. 45(3), 2001, pp. 437-456. Nils Gustafsson is a Ph. D. Candidate at the Department of Political Science, Lund University. His dissertation project, Viral Politics (working title), is a study in the effects of social media on political participation.
Anthropology of Accessibility: Further Reflections on the Perceptual Problems of Human-Computer Interactions Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski Abstract One of the most important problems which appeared in the computer mediated civilisation is the usability of content for people with limited abilities of perception and interaction. Digital communication has shown all inconveniences of hitherto prevailing ‘interfaces to knowledge’ and of communication devices in the range of their usability and accessibility. Traditional ergonomics ensured comfort of using the devices mainly to users without disabilities. The Net revealed the existence of the vast global community of disabled people who wants to come out of the ghetto of their own dysfunctions and participate in other communities. The Internet is often the only chance to cross the barriers of this specific exclusion. The Web design should take into account the aspect of various disabilities of the users. There exist both formal and informal instructions of accessible design. In some milieu of designers of interfaces and internet applications and content managers publishing of content and materials which are accessible is even a sign of ‘good manners’. Therefore, there is a grassroots discourse of accessibility, which is conditioned socially. It is often contradictory to the discourse of global corporations, embodying their own non-standardised solutions. The struggle of the ‘able-bodied’ community for the accessibility of the content for people with dysfunctions of perception is a new form of global thinking about creation and maintenance of communication standards. It is often connected with the generation of open access to the content referring to Creative Commons licenses and technologies of Open Source. The chapter analyses some procedures of improving the effectiveness of communication and interaction with computer in the process of web designing. It shows some examples of community initiatives connected with accessibility and everyday problems of disabled people. Ideologists and designers of usability and accessibility within the range of human-computer interaction are precursors of this new way of thinking about the needs of online communities which are aiming at the ‘noble simplicity’ enabling to encode complicated symbolic content - simplexity. Usability understood in this way exceeds the limitations of political correctness with its compulsory necessity of double coding and decoding of meanings.
Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 26 Key Words: Accessibility, Usability, Assistive Technologies, Design, Simplexity, Human-Computer Interactions, Perception Disabilities, User- friendly Interface, Cultural Competencies. ***** 1. Introduction Ideologists and designers of usability and accessibility within the range of human-computer interaction are precursors of the new way of thinking about the needs of online communities which are aiming at the ‘noble simplicity’ enabling to encode complicated symbolic content - simplexity. Usability understood in this way exceeds the limitations of political correctness with its compulsory necessity of double coding and decoding of meanings. Such anthropological situation may become a natural bridge between the world of those who can see and those who are blind or other communities with limited access to the content. The reflection on the roles of mechanisms of social content-generation and visualisations of communication obstacles, both on-line and off-line, is necessary. There are various artistic and scientific projects, which resulted in real changes of architectural solutions or development of their accessibility. The change in accessibility in symbolic and mediated communication is also a chance for revolution in thinking about the physical space. Thus, the Net impacts not only the architecture of information but also the architecture in traditional meaning. This way of thinking about the Network, communities and the new ergonomics of communication is therefore a kind of introduction to the reflection on new society lacking communication obstacles and on further evolution of humans connected to the computer, active in social terms due to technological interfaces and independent of limitations stemming from biology or traditionally understood dysfunctions. In both perceiving and visually representing the natural organisation of objects, we are supported by the mind’s powerful ability to detect and form patterns. With matters of the visual mind, the school of Gestalt psychology is particularly relevant. Gestalt psychologists believe that there are a variety of mechanisms inside the brain that lend to pattern-forming. […] Humans are organisation animals. We can’t help but to group and categorise what we see. […] The principles of Gestalt to seek the most appropriate conceptual ‘fit’ are important not only for survival, but lie at the very heart of the discipline of design.1
Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 27 John Maeda, a new media artist, researcher and designer develops his narration about simplicity and design telling the story of development of iPod menu - its three phases: the first model of the interface (a jog dial with four buttons located circularly around), its complication into four buttons and a jog dial (separated) and simplification (integrated into one scroll dial). The last step - simplification led to its limits - provoked both the commercial success and marked new trends of interface design. It should be noticed here that this kind of simplicity contribute to economise maximally the activities of the user. Most often such a design is favourable for a contemporary user. However, this kind of usability is not so simple to use. Maeda shows the example of good quality design failure on the level of the user inability to use the device. He recalls his brother-in-law’s lack of competencies in using the newest iPod just after getting it as a Christmas present. This situation can be regarded as a result of design, which demands from the user the knowledge of the previous interfaces and the ability to manipulate them. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is in fact a kind of cultural competence. Being one of the most important abilities in contemporary information society, paradoxically it is not taught anywhere; a user needs to acquire the knowledge by himself. There are no ideal interfaces - as we still need to ‘learn machines’ - but the good ones are stemming from the specific patterns of culture. Machines are learning these paradigms but also teach them to us, becoming the interpreters of humanity. This is the part of cyborgisation of culture, described as early as in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan in his classical idea of the extensions of man.2 2. Social Networks and their Users The fundamental problem arising in cyberculture in the context of human and machine interactions was symbolically captured by an anthropologist, Michael Wesch, in the title of his popular YouTube film: The Machine is Us/ing Us.3 Therefore, the question of designing interfaces and devices regarding the users’ needs and abilities is not marginal. The report of Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that the presence of older generations in Internet is lower than the young (over half of Internet users is between 18 and 44 years old) - but within 10 years (with ageing boomers generation) the situation may change. The biggest increase in Internet use since 2005 can be seen in the 70-75 year-old age group. While just over one-fourth (26%) of 70-75 year olds were online in 2005, 45% of that age group is currently online. […] Instant messaging, social networking and blogging have gained ground as communications tools, but email remains the most popular
Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 28 online activity, particularly among older Internet users. Fully 74% of Internet users age 64 and older send and receive email, making email the most popular online activity for this age group.4 The problem of cultural competencies in human-computer interactions is central to contemporary design, which needs to be the anthropology as well. Sometimes users’ activity crosses the imagination of the designer. That was the case of Nasza-klasa.pl [Our-Class.pl] - Polish social networking website similar to Classmates - where a person who wanted to become a new user had to ask directly the website designers to broaden the age categories for potential users. The given categories were prepared for the users aged up to 90, whereas the asking person was 95 years old5 . The two young designers did not predict in their economy of thinking about human-computer interaction that also this age group can perform such an activity as social networking. This situation lets us suggest that web design is mainly directed to young people, which seems to be logical regarding the Pew Internet research quoted above but possibly is not a good rule for the next decade. Thus, web design should develop in the direction of diversification of the potential users. There are of course such interfaces as smart homes, which support the users, especially aged and with disabilities, but these are not only pure interfaces but also habitats. HCI design is de facto the problem of technological imagination concerning target groups. It depends on multiple functionalities built in the interface. The idea of usability of interfaces is at the moment one of the most significant matters within the ideology of ‘proper design’. Functionalities of interfaces and the necessity of usability are the ideas connected with anthropological problems of Web 2.0 design. In fact, the rules of HCI are a kind of web design savoir-vivre and cultural competencies. Designers in a form of ritualised competition watch each other in order to maintain the standards of usability and develop more user-friendly interfaces. From the anthropological perspective, we can see in this process both the patterns of culture drifting into the direction of political correctness and ‘the battle for standards’. One of the main assumptions of design 2.0 is separation of content, appearance and user’s behaviour. This separation makes websites more accessible to users and more visible for bots of search engines. These are issues located between creative thinking and social practices connected with technology standards. It is a vast territory for quality research on humans in cyberspace.
Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 29 3. Knowledge Transfer and Interface Design According to the tradition of technological determinism a state of civilisation depends on a predominant medium. From the perspective of culture it is important how data transmission is performed. However, paradigms of knowledge transfer are far more important. From this point of view even such a traditional form of organising data as a book is a kind of interface. This interface has produced certain forms of perception connected with the educational system and knowledge processing. It resulted in the appearance of specific cultural modes of thinking, restructured perceptual and cognitive processes. Simultaneously, the art of typesetting and theory of book design was developed. From the times of Gutenberg and his battle for perfect typesetting, which ruined him, the question of balance between the form and the meaning of the text has been a main issue in typographers’ efforts. However, more than 500 years of typographic tradition is also the history of inaccessibility for blind users. The real change in the development of book interface came with modernism. The idea of readability and usability prevailed in 20th century discourse on book design. But modernism did not raise the discussion to the aspect of accessibility of a book as an interface. Inaccessibility is a general problem connected with analogue interfaces, which usually enable only one-channel communication whereas digital ones often include built-in multi-channel possibilities of perception. In case of analogue interfaces it was necessary to construct alternative means of perception (i.a. visual, voice and tactile). Digital channels have potential interoperability, which means using the same data in different ways connected with a type of perception. Theory of accessibility is thus connected with digital media. Another issue is usability as a standard of communication. It is neither readability nor accessibility. Usability was actually born in Bauhaus as a mental concept for modernist humankind. It shifted from habitat architecture to architecture of information but it still means functionality of design. We can trace this idea in Marcel Breuer’s concept of the ideal of a chair, when he was saying: ‘In the end we will sit on resilient columns of air’6 . This metaphor reveals designer’s consciousness of the body of the user of a piece of furniture. It also suggests the need to reduce an interface to those features that are necessary for its functionality, arguing with the idea that form is the main problem of design. The comfort understood as user’s experience becomes the leading interest of a designer. As we know, an ideal chair is the one that our bodies wouldn’t feel at all, the one that is invisible, untouchable and non-existing. The important task for a designer is approaching to such an ideal in the process of designing. New media art searches for new opportunities to diagnose abilities of human body and mind in the context of machines. This basic assumption leads to the conclusion that a technology user is also a participant and this is
Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 30 a new perceptual paradigm. Creative process becomes an interaction design area where the needs of various social groups are transformed into artistic objects. The prehistory of HCI can be traced back not only in engineering but also in artistic works of Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau and others. The good example here is David Rokeby’s work, Very Nervous System, which was described as adding new meaning to the term ‘interactivity’. The active ingredient of the work is its interface. The interface is unusual because it is invisible and very diffuse, occupying a large volume of space, whereas most interfaces are focused and definite. Though diffuse, the interface is vital and strongly textured through time and space. The interface becomes a zone of experience, of multi-dimensional encounter. The language of encounter is initially unclear, but evolves as one explores and experiences. The installation is a complex but quick feedback loop. The feedback is not simply ‘negative’ or ‘positive’, inhibitory or reinforcing; the loop is subject to constant transformation as the elements, human and computer, change in response to each other. The two interpenetrate, until the notion of control is lost and the relationship becomes encounter and involvement. […] The installation could be described as a sort of instrument that you play with your body but that implies a level of control, which I am not particularly interested in. I am interested in creating a complex and resonant relationship between the interactor and the system.7 Very Nervous System is the interactive circuit, which may be seen as a beyond-language conversation of human and computer. It is very similar to contemporary systems, which enable controlling computer with the eye movement or body gestures without VR equipment. Various inventions concerning the use of brain waves to control interfaces, even 3D virtual environment of Second Life, have been developed for several years in multiple research centres (e.g. Keio University).8 Such technologies can serve Internet users with movement disabilities helping them to control computer and interact with other Internet users. But what is also important is the social networking of people with disabilities. These are two main aspects of accessibility. They concern different communication obstacles - the first refers to the use of technology, the second to social exclusion.
Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 31 4. Selected Examples of User-oriented Design It is worth to mention here several selected examples of user- oriented design which designate positive directions. Projects described below are both of artistic and scientific nature; some are experiments in mediated social interaction, some - explore the possibilities of new assistive technologies and propose new ways of inclusion of users with various disabilities (physical, sensory and cognitive). Antoni Abad, a Spanish artist, founded Zexe.net website. It is an artistic project connecting various groups of marginalised people from different cities, e.g. Gypsies, prostitutes, taxi drivers, etc. One part of the website, called *Canal Accessible, serves people with movement disabilities who create their own wikimap of Barcelona where they mark all places in the city space which are not accessible for people on wheel chairs9 . The users are documenting their work with photographs taken with mobile phone cameras. In fact, this is not only the common map of physical obstacles in their daily life, but also a communication canal for discussions on various themes and a kind of exhibition area showing their problems to other Internet users. This work can be defined as a space for creating the discourse of marginalised groups. Such wikimap, being the user-generated content service, is not only the interface of HCI, but also of social symbolic relations helping to redefine the meaning of the real space. WinkBall is a videochat system allowing users to communicate in a most natural way, using facial expressions, natural language and video recording or video streaming. The target user is described as a user of all ages - which means that system is user-friendly, easy to operate and encouraging also for older persons to use it. What is more important, WinkBall is actually a tool designed for deaf users, allowing them social networking. This system was developed as cooperation project of Goldsmiths University in London by Assistive Technologies Group at IT Department, Deaf@x and WinkBall. WinkBall allows deaf users to create signed videos, signed blogs and signed forums, which means that it allows for a full social networking activity, with no need of simplification of facial expression and signed language to symbols or alphabet. James Ohene-Djan, leading designer, researcher and founder of WinkBall, concludes that the main aim was to create the situation, when ‘people within deaf community can communicate with each other online, using their native languages’10 . The interface is very easy. It also has push to talk function, which means that during a conversation the person who is signing is automatically detected as a speaker and shown on the screen without interrupting the conversation. This allows users to follow the conversation naturally, without a need to stop it, and without misunderstandings, which could be provoked by the fact that interactors do not hear each other.
Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 32 The interesting aspect of interaction via WinkBall appeared in the phase of introducing the tool to potential users at schools for deaf children. Teachers and students realised that video chat increased their abilities in facial self-expression and in signing and thus expanded their possibilities of communicative interaction with other people. This is an interesting situation when mediated communication teaches people to understand each other better in situations of interpersonal not-mediated communication. Thus, a computer becomes a mirror, enabling people to talk with each other. User- oriented design in this case results in a paradoxical situation, which was not predicted by a designer. A user, being the first subject and the cause of a tool design, starts to find himself/herself in this tool. The design is such a perfect image of the user that he or she starts to learn from this mirror how to communicate with other persons similar to him/her. Design is thus a reflection of the user. On the other hand, the computer - which is here only a medium, is also a basic tool for social communication, and the possibility to communicate via WinkBall is only one of its multiple functionalities. All this means that a communicative situation being the embodiment of Narcissus story, is at the same time paradoxically opposite to what Marshall McLuhan said about it: For if Narcissus is numbed by his self-amputated image, there is a very good reason for the numbness. There is a close parallel of response between the patterns of physical and psychic trauma or shock (...) Any invention of technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios of new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.11 On the contrary, via WinkBall a user does not experience the self-amputation of the body. He/she starts to learn his/her body from the beginning. He learns his face and gestures in the process of confrontation with computer. This opposition may be a result of the fact that computer-mediated interaction is actually social, and computer itself forwards us to the others. But McLuhan is not wrong about the electronic media - his assumptions about media as ‘the extensions of man’ has just been proved by recent neurophysiologist research conducted by Erica Michael and Marcel Just from Carnegie Mellon University. Researchers have scanned brains while using various media. The results are astonishingly in accordance with McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ - in example, listening and reading of the same text cause completely different mental reactions and memory effects.12
Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 33 5. Selected Examples of Assistive Technologies, Systems and Devices HCI is connected strongly with researches on the perceptual apparatus and cognitive process. It results in the emergence of completely new ideas concerning possible ways of perceiving. New inventions and interfaces of totally new types have been created for people with sight or hearing impairment. Some of such interfaces are based on the idea of the replacement of senses. The vOICe is Peter Meijer’s project stemming from the concept of ‘seeing with ears’. Device consists of a camera mounted in spectacles, connected with headphones and completed by the software processing the optical signals and changing them into the soundscape. It means that the process of seeing is exchanged for hearing. The video image is analysed by the device as the stream of visual data and transformed into a stream of audial data. The vOICe recognises obstacles located close to the user and warns him by emitting sound representation of objects. This is the process of scanning space and creating a soundscape. The volume represents the brightness of objects with continuous monitoring of the close environment13 . It should be noticed that this process is highly abstract and does not let the user operate the device in an intuitive way. It demands at least three months of specialised training and there is no evidence that the results will lead to full success in every case. Technically, The vOICe sensory substitution and synthetic vision approach provides access to any visual information through an auditory display. A theoretical possibility is that it can not only be used for practical purposes in various visual tasks, but that it may - through education and extensive immersive use with conscious and subconscious visual processing - also lead to vivid and truly visual sensations, a ‘visual awakening’, by exploiting the neural plasticity of the human brain. However, very little is known about the prospects, and learning to see requires much effort on behalf of the blind user, possibly comparable to mastering a foreign language, and without guarantees for worthwhile results.14 The perceptual apparatus needs to be prepared and taught to understand the stream of audial data but the problem lies in the physical properties of audio channel perceived by humans which has low information capacity in comparison to visual channel. This kind of sensorial substitution can be seen
Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 34 as a process of translation of the visual in order to build alternative experience for the blind users. The necessity of this kind of translation opens new demands for interface design and engineering. The process of design is therefore closely interconnected with the quickly developing state-of-art in neurophysiology, psychology and electronics. HCI has to turn towards both anthropology and electronics. Whereas anthropology analyses patterns of culture, electronics aims at constructing databases of the patterns of perception. Assistive technologies are created on the crossing of the patterns of perception embedded in machines and patterns of cultures embedded in human cognition. The vOICe requires constructing databases of 3D objects with all possible perspectives from the most probable points of view of a potential user. This modelling includes the ‘use cases’ which depict scenario of users’ communication activities with total surrounding. In this way, location and detection mean also cognition and interpretation of environment. It is a new dimension of accessibility of the world to the blind. This is a new type of communication situations, which is only possible with the mediation of technology. The problem of ‘the extensions of man’ is also concerned today with new senses that have never been discussed earlier in the context of technology. The mediation between environment and body often shifts to the body itself. Runner Oscar Pistorius is an example of the analogue cyborgisation of human being and extended possibilities of the body. His case provoked a discussion on the subject of human body extensions and their influence on sport results. Today, assistive technologies and prosthetics come to the point where disabled body equipped with prosthesis gains better results than abled-body. But prostheses are the solution only to the problem of the lack of certain part of body: an arm, a hand or a leg, they can not solve the problem of the lack of a certain sense: sight or hearing. On the other hand, assistive technologies are focused first of all on developing ‘prostheses’ of senses by sensorial substitution. However, AT design may also mean creating totally new paths for sensing the environment via media. This is the case of Cabboots, a project developed by Martin Frey from Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. The device consists of shoes whose soles are equipped with infrared sensors and electromechanical elements changing the angulations of the shoe while using it. Cabboots create an intuitive interface to the environment on the level of mediated touch of the ground (a certain path that can be programmed). The change in surface (real or simulated) is represented as a change of angulation of the shoe which causes a natural effect of changing the angulation of the foot (which means that a user is turning).
Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 35 The device is therefore using the sense of touch, the sense of balance and it is also extending the idea of a shoe as an extension of our perception. But in this case a shoe is not a kind of a barrier, protecting a foot from the environment. In Cabboots a shoe is also a connector to the environment, it is a tool of interaction, a tool of communication with the path, a tool for seeing. It is because of the infrared sensor that is actually a kind of eye. On the other hand Cabboots animate our tactility, and thanks to that the whole body becomes a sensible sensor, and the user becomes a sensitive self. The design of this device is intuitive, and thus it can be used both by people with memory problems (in Alzheimer disease) or by people with vision impairment. The prototypes of the device become more and more mobile and functional. They let users program the device to remember a specific track, i.e. a route back home. Cabboots are therefore paradoxically both the metaphor of ‘seven mile shoes’ and let the user quite safely ‘lose his head’ as they are leading him to the programmed location. They see and they remember - so the users do not have to do it by themselves. This device raises the question of intelligent objects and the limits of their influence on future life of people. Shoes are directly controlling movements of the user. Thus using Cabboots means being controlled by one’s own shoes. The question is what would happen if such smart devices are managed by a wearable personal computer connected to the Internet and opened for hacking. But the fact that objects are gaining intelligence does not necessarily mean that people have to lose it. However, it is clear that analogue high-end prostheses (like Pistorius’ ones) are fully controlled by the user and digital ones (like Cabboots) - are not. Regarding the aspect of Cabboots design, there are several additional remarks, which should be done here. While the technological aspect of controlling the device seems to be complex, the perceptual and cognitive aspect of its usage is simple. The designer’s idea was to give a kind of intuitive interface, which can be operated by anyone, without a long training. The goal has been reached as the use of Cabboots demands only a natural use of body balance, which reminds walking on a well-trodden path whose borders are felt by the foot because of its slightly different angulation. In other words, the idea of simplicity of use and natural interaction was reached here by the designer employing complex technologies, which are not noticed by the device user. Finally, it is worth to shortly mention Roberto Manduchi who develops similar but still completely different project. His ‘electronic cane’ is a kind of assistive technology device, which uses laser beam and spatial sensors. It finds obstacles in space, measures the distance, depth and size of objects and informs the user about it via the sound interface. The prototype tester, Lucia Florez, confirms the invention being intuitive and compares it to ‘skin perception’15 .
Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 36 Electronic cane as well as The vOICe and Cabboots are inventions based on sensory substitution but perform it differently. It should be noticed here that the ideas are simple but to reach this simplicity the technology needs to be complex. Therefore, the design for people with visual impairments needs to blend both, complexity and simplicity - the previously mentioned simplexity. 6. Conclusion Concluding, the result of the process of interfaces design for people without disabilities is augmented perception, even if we think only about the level of symbolic communication and the extensions of body and mind. But the final effect of designing interfaces for people with disabilities is first and foremost the process of reducing perceptual deficiency and sensory substitution. This can be regarded as a process parallel to media convergence - sensorial convergence. Derrick de Kerckhove, rethinking Marshall McLuhan, concludes: There is clearly more to design than containment and seduction. In a very large sense, design plays a metaphorical role, translating functional benefits into sensory and cognitive modalities. Design finds its shape and its place as a kind of overtone, as an echo of technology. Design often echoes the specific character of technology and corresponds to its basic pulse. Being the visible, audible or textural outer shape of cultural artifacts, design emerges as what can be called the ‘skin of culture’.16 The contemporary ‘skin of culture’ seems to be hybrid: design means at the same time screenology, projecting interactions and augmenting perception. The design, which Derrick de Kerckhove was writing about in middle 90’s, was concentrated on the shape and appearance of things and objects. Today, design is mainly projecting a user’s experience, behaviours and feelings. It is closer to body and mind, develops cognitive processes and, in fact, programs a new user. Thus, it can be called the ‘skin of a user’ - which is taking us back to Marshall McLuhan thought17 , but in the completely new cultural context.
Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 37 Notes 1 J Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life, MIT, Massachusetts, 2006, pp. 17-18. 2 M McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, MIT Press, Massachusetts CA, 1994. 3 M Wesch’s personal website, [viewed on 3rd November 2008]. URL: <http://www.ksu.edu/sasw/anthro/wesch.htm>. M. Wesch: ‘The Machine is US/ing US’ in YouTube, [viewed on 3rd November 2008]. URL: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE>. 4 S Jones, S. Fox, ‘Generations Online in 2009’, Pew Internet Project Data Memo [report], Pew Internet and American Life Project, 28th January 2009 [viewed on 13th February 2009], p. 2-3, URL: <http://www.pewinternet. org/Reports/2009/Generations-Online-in-2009.aspx?r=1>. 5 3 /LSLĔVNL µ0LOLRQHU ] 1DV]HM .ODV¶ µ$ 0LOOLRQHU IURP 2XU ODVV¶@ Interview with Maciej Popowicz, the creator of Nasza-Klasa website'XĪ Format: Dodatek do Gazety Wyborczej [online]. 20th May 2008, URL: http://wyborcza.pl/1,75480,5222854,Milioner_z_Naszej_Klasy.html. 6 Bauhaus, 1919-1928. H Bayer, W Gropius, I Gropius (eds), Museum of Modern Art [New York 1938], Arno Press, New York 1972, p. 130. 7 D Rokeby, ‘Installations: Very Nervous System (1986-1990)’ in David Rokeby Website, 12 November 2000 [viewed on 14th February 2009], URL: http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/vns.html. 8 ‘Using Brainwaves To Chat And Stroll Through Second Life: World’s First’, in Science Daily, 16th June 2008 [viewed 14th February 2009], URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080613163213.htm. 9 Canal *Accessible, URL: http://www.zexe.net/BARCELONA. 10 J Ohene-Djan from WinkBall on SEE HEAR, Wednesday 20th January 1pm, BBC2 [viewed on 20th January 2010]. In: YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAWddylqPpgfeature=autofb. 11 M McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, Massachusetts CA 1994, pp. 44-45. 12 D Tapscott, Grown up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2009, p. 104. 13 Vision Technology for the Totally Blind [project website], 7th February 2009 [viewed on 14th February 2009], URL: http://www.Seeingwith sound. com. 14 P B L Meijer, ‘VOICE. Self-Training Paradigm for the vOICe. Training’ [viewed on 10th March 2009]. URL: http://www.seeingwithsound. com/training.htm. 15 A Coombs, ‘Researchers engineering better Technologies for the Blind’ in San Francisco Chronicle [online], 27th November 2005 [viewed on 14th
Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 38 February 2009], URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/ 2005/ 11/27/ING3TFS91M1.DTL. 16 D de Kerckhove, The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality, Ch Dewdney (ed), Somerville House Publishing, Toronto, 1995, p. 154. 17 McLuhan, op. cit., p. 47. Bibliography Bauhaus, 1919-1928. H. Bayer, W. Gropius and I. Gropius (eds). Museum of Modern Art [New York, 1938], Arno Press, New York, 1972. Canal *Accessible, [viewed 14th February 2009], URL: http://www.zexe.net/BARCELONA. Coombs, A., ‘Researchers engineering better Technologies for the Blind’. San Francisco Chronicle [online], 27th November 2005 [viewed on 14th February 2009], URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/ 2005/11/27/ING3TFS91M1.DTL. *DGĪHW SRSNXOWXU 6SRáHF]QH ĪFLH SU]HGPLRWyZ. [Pop-Culture Gadgets: The Social Life of Things@:*RG]LFDQG0ĩDNRZVNL HGV :GDZQLFWZD Akademickie i Profesjonalne, Warszawa, 2007. Jones, S. and S. Fox, ‘Generations Online in 2009’, Pew Internet Project Data Memo [report], Pew Internet and American Life Project, 28th January 2009 [viewed on 13th February 2009], URL: http://www.pew internet.org/Reports/2009/Generations-Online-in-2009.aspx?r=1. Kerckhove de, D., Connected Intelligence: The Arrival of the Web Society. W. Rowland (ed). Somerville House, Toronto, 1997. ______ , The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality, Ch. Dewdney (ed), Somerville House Publishing, Toronto, 1995. Kody McLuhana: Topografia nowych mediów. [McLuhan’s Codes: Topography of New Media]. A. Maj and M. Derda-Nowakowski (eds), with Derrick de Kerckhove’s participation. Wydawnictwo Naukowe ExMachina, Katowice, 2009.
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fires upon youth's altars have all died out—youth is dead, and the man who was young only yesterday fancies that he might as well be dead also. What is there left for him? Can there be any charm in this life when the looker-on has grey hair and wrinkles? Having nothing in life to do except seek his own pleasure and spend his ample income, Angus Hamleigh had naturally taken the time of life's march prestissimo. He had never paused in his rose-gathering to wonder whether there might not be a few thorns among the flowers, and whether he might not find them—afterwards. And now the blossoms were all withered, and he was beginning to discover the lasting quality of the thorns. They were such thorns as interfered somewhat with the serenity of his days, and he was glad to turn his face westward, away from everybody he knew, or who knew anything about him. My character will present itself to Mrs. Tregonell as a blank page, he said to himself; I wonder what she would think of me if one of my club gossips had enjoyed a quiet evening's talk with her beforehand. A dear friend's analysis of one's character and conduct is always so flattering to both; and I have a pleasant knack of offending my dearest friends! Mr. Hamleigh began to look about him a little when the train had left Plymouth. The landscape was wild and romantic, but had none of that stern ruggedness which he expected to behold on the Cornish Border. Deep glens, and wooded dells, with hill-sides steep and broken, but verdant to their topmost crest, and the most wonderful oak coppices that he ever remembered to have seen. Miles upon miles of oak, as it seemed to him, now sinking into the depth of a valley, now mounting to the distant sky line, while from that verdant undulating surface of young wood there stood forth the giants of the grove—wide-spreading oak and towering beech, the mighty growth of many centuries. Between Lidford and Launceston the scenery grew tamer. He had fancied those deep ravines and wooded heights the prelude to a vast and awful symphony, but Mary Tavy and Lifton
showed him only a pastoral landscape, with just so much wood and water as would have served for a Creswick or a Constable, and with none of those grand Salvatoresque effects which he had admired in the country round Tavistock. At Launceston he found Mrs. Tregonell's landau waiting for him, with a pair of powerful chestnuts, and a couple of servants, whose neat brown liveries had nothing of that unsophisticated semi-savagery which Mr. Hamleigh had expected in a place so remote. Do you drive that way? he asked, pointing to the almost perpendicular street. Yes, sir, replied the coachman. Then I think I'll stroll to the top of the hill while you are putting in my portmanteaux, he said, and ascended the rustic street at a leisurely pace, looking about him as he went. The thoroughfare which leads from Launceston Station to the ruined castle at the top of the hill is not an imposing promenade. Its architectural features might perhaps be best described like the snakes of Ireland as nil—but here and there an old-fashioned lattice with a row of flower-pots, an ancient gable, or a bit of cottage garden hints at the picturesque. Any late additions to the domestic architecture of Launceston favour the unpretending usefulness of Camden Town rather than the aspiring æstheticism of Chelsea or Bedford Park; but to Mr. Hamleigh's eye the rugged old castle keep on the top of the hill made amends. He was not an ardent archæologist, and he did not turn out of his way to see Launceston Church, which might well have rewarded him for his trouble. He was content to have spared those good-looking chestnuts the labour of dragging him up the steep. Here they came springing up the hill. He took his place in the carriage, pulled the fur rug over his knees, and ensconced himself comfortably in the roomy back seat. This is a sybaritish luxury which I was not prepared for, he said to himself. I'm afraid I shall be rather more bored than I expected. I
thought Mrs. Tregonell and her surroundings would at least have the merit of originality. But here is a carriage that must have been built by Peters, and liveries that suggest the sartorial excellence of Conduit Street or Savile Row. He watched the landscape with a critical eye, prepared for disappointment and disillusion. First a country road between tall ragged hedges and steep banks, a road where every now and then the branches of the trees hung low over the carriage and threatened to knock the coachman's hat off. Then they came out upon the wide waste of moorland, a thousand feet above the sea level, and Mr. Hamleigh, acclimatized to the atmosphere of club-houses, buttoned his overcoat, drew the black fur rug closer about him, and shivered a little as the keen breath of the Atlantic, sweeping over far-reaching tracts of hill and heather, blew round him. Far and wide as his gaze could reach, he saw no sign of human habitation. Was the land utterly forsaken? No; a little farther on they passed a hamlet so insignificant, so isolated, that it seemed rather as if half a dozen cottages had dropped from the sky than that so lonely a settlement could be the result of deliberate human inclination. Never in Scotland or Ireland had Mr. Hamleigh seen a more barren landscape or a poorer soil; yet those wild wastes of heath, those distant tors were passing beautiful, and the air he breathed was more inspiring and exhilarating than the atmosphere of any vaunted health-resort which he had ever visited. I think I might live to middle age if I were to pitch my tent on this Cornish plateau, he thought; but, then, there are so many things in this life that are worth more than mere length of days. He asked the names of the hamlets they passed. This lonely church, dedicated to St. David—whence, oh! whence came the congregation —belonged to the parish of Davidstowe; and here there was a holy well; and here a Vicarage; and there—oh! crowning evidence of civilization—a post-office; and there a farmhouse; and that was the end of Davidstowe. A little later they came to cross roads, and the coachman touched his hat, and said, This is Victoria, as if he were
naming a town or settlement of some kind. Mr. Hamleigh looked about him, and beheld a low-roofed cottage, which he assumed to be some kind of public-house, possibly capable of supplying beer and tobacco; but other vestige of human habitation there was none. He leant back in the carriage, looking across the hills, and saying to himself, Why, Victoria? Was that unpretentious and somewhat dilapidated hostelry the Victoria Hotel? or the Victoria Arms? or was Royalty's honoured name given, in an arbitrary manner, to the cross roads and the granite finger-post? He never knew. The coachman said shortly, Victoria, and as Victoria he ever after heard that spot described. And now the journey was all downhill. They drove downward and downward, until Mr. Hamleigh began to feel as if they were travelling towards the centre of the earth—as if they had got altogether below the outer crust of this globe, and must be gradually nearing the unknown gulfs beneath. Yet, by some geographical mystery, when they turned out of the high road and went in at a lodge gate, and drove gently upward along an avenue of elms, in whose rugged tops the rooks were screaming, Mr. Hamleigh found that he was still high above the undulating edges of the cliffs that overtopped the Atlantic, while the great waste of waters lay far below, golden with the last rays of the setting sun. They drove, by a gentle ascent, to the stone porch of Mount Royal, and here Mrs. Tregonell stood, facing the sunset, with an Indian shawl wrapped round her, waiting for her guest. I heard the carriage, Mr. Hamleigh, she said, as Angus alighted; I hope you do not think me too impatient to see what change twelve years have made in you? I'm afraid they have not been particularly advantageous to me, he answered, lightly, as they shook hands. How good of you to receive me on the threshold! and what a delightful place you have here! Before I got to Launceston, I began to be afraid that Cornwall was commonplace—and now I am enchanted with it. Your moors and hills are like fairy-land to me!
It is a world of our own, and we are very fond of it, said the widow; I shall be sorry if ever a railway makes Boscastle open to everybody. And what a noble old house! exclaimed Angus, as he followed his hostess across the oak-panelled hall, with its wide shallow staircase, curiously carved balustrades, and lantern roof. Are you quite alone here? Oh, no; I have my niece, and a young lady who is a companion to both of us. Angus Hamleigh shuddered. Three women! He was to exist for a fortnight in a house with three solitary females. A niece and a companion! The niece, rustic and gawky; the companion sour and frumpish. He began, hurriedly, to cast about in his mind for a convenient friend, to whom he could telegraph to send him a telegram, summoning him back to London on urgent business. He was still meditating this, when the butler opened the door of a spacious room, lined from floor to ceiling with books, and he followed Mrs. Tregonell in, and found himself in the bosom of the family. The simple picture of home-comfort, of restfulness and domestic peace, which met his curious gaze as he entered, pleased him better than anything he had seen of late. Club life—with its too studious indulgence of man's native selfishness and love of ease—fashionable life, with its insatiable craving for that latter-day form of display which calls itself Culture, Art, or Beauty— had afforded him no vision so enchanting as the wide hearth and high chimney of this sober, book-lined room, with the fair and girlish form kneeling in front of the old dogstove, framed in the glaring light of the fire. The tea-table had been wheeled near the hearth, and Miss Bridgeman sat before the bright red tea-tray, and old brass kettle, ready to administer to the wants of the traveller, who would be hardly human if he did not thirst for a cup of tea after driving across
the moor. Christabel knelt in front of the fire, worshipping, and being worshipped by, a sleek black-and-white sheep-dog, native to the soil, and of a rare intelligence—a creature by no means approaching the Scotch colley in physical beauty, but of a fond and faithful nature, born to be the friend of man. As Christabel rose and turned to greet the stranger, Mr. Hamleigh was agreeably reminded of an old picture —a Lely or a Kneller, perhaps. This was not in any wise the rustic image which had flashed across his mind at the mention of Mrs. Tregonell's niece. He had expected to see a bouncing, countryfied maiden—rosy, buxom, the picture of commonplace health and vigour. The girl he saw was nearer akin to the lily than the rose—tall, slender, dazzlingly fair—not fragile or sickly in anywise—for the erect figure was finely moulded, the swan-like throat was round and full. He was prepared for the florid beauty of a milkmaid, and he found himself face to face with the elegance of an ideal duchess, the picturesque loveliness of an old Venetian portrait. Christabel's dark brown velvet gown and square point lace collar, the bright hair falling in shadowy curls over her forehead, and rolled into a loose knot at the back of her head, sinned in no wise against Mr. Hamleigh's notions of good taste. There was a picturesqueness about the style which indicated that Miss Courtenay belonged to that advanced section of womankind which takes its ideas less from modern fashion-plates than from old pictures. So long as her archaism went no further back than Vandyke or Moroni he would admire and approve; but he shuddered at the thought that to- morrow she might burst upon him in a mediæval morning-gown, with high-shouldered sleeves, a ruff, and a satchel. The picturesque idea was good, within limits; but one never knew how far it might go. There was nothing picturesque about the lady sitting before the tea- tray, who looked up brightly, and gave him a gracious bend of her small neat head, in acknowledgment of Mrs. Tregonell's introduction —Mr. Hamleigh, Miss Bridgeman! This was the companion—and the companion was plain: not unpleasantly plain, not in any manner
repulsive, but a lady about whose looks there could be hardly any compromise. Her complexion was of a sallow darkness, unrelieved by any glow of colour; her eyes were grey, acute, honest, friendly, but not beautiful; her nose was sharp and pointed—not at all a bad nose; but there was a hardness about nose and mouth and chin, as of features cut out of bone with a very sharp knife. Her teeth were good, and in a lovelier mouth might have been the object of much admiration. Her hair was of that nondescript monotonous brown which has been unkindly called bottle-green, but it was arranged with admirable neatness, and offended less than many a tangled pate, upon whose locks of spurious gold the owner has wasted much time and money. There was nothing unpardonable in Miss Bridgeman's plainness, as Angus Hamleigh said of her later. Her small figure was neatly made, and her dark-grey gown fitted to perfection. I hope you like the little bit of Cornwall that you have seen this afternoon, Mr. Hamleigh, said Christabel, seating herself in a low chair in the shadow of the tall chimney-piece, fenced in by her aunt's larger chair. I am enraptured with it! I came here with the desire to be intensely Cornish. I am prepared to believe in witches—warlocks—— We have no warlocks, said Christabel. They belong to the North. Well, then, wise women—wicked young men who play football on Sunday, and get themselves turned into granite—rocking stones— magic wells—Druids—and King Arthur. I believe the principal point is to be open to conviction about Arthur. Now, I am prepared to swallow everything—his castle—the river where his crown was found after the fight—was it his crown, by-the-by, or somebody else's? which he found—his hair-brushes—his boots—anything you please to show me. We will show you his quoit to-morrow, on the road to Tintagel, said Miss Bridgeman. I don't think you would like to swallow that
actually. He hurled it from Tintagel to Trevalga in one of his sportive moods. We shall be able to give you plenty of amusement if you are a good walker, and are fond of hills. I adore them in the abstract, contemplated from one's windows, or in a picture; but there is an incompatibility between the human anatomy and a road set on end, like a ladder, which I have never yet overcome. Apart from the outside question of my legs—which are obvious failures when tested by an angle of forty-five degrees—I'm afraid my internal machinery is not quite so tough as it ought to be for a thorough enjoyment of mountaineering. Mrs. Tregonell sighed, ever so faintly, in the twilight. She was thinking of her first lover, and how that fragility, which meant early death, had showed itself in his inability to enjoy the moorland walks which were the delight of her girlhood. The natural result of bad habits, said Miss Bridgeman, briskly. How can you expect to be strong or active, when I dare say you have spent the better part of your life in hansom cabs and express trains! I don't mean to be impertinent, but I know that is the general way with gentlemen out of the shooting and hunting season. And as I am no sportsman, I am a somewhat exaggerated example of the vice of laziness fostered by congenial circumstances, acting on a lymphatic temperament. If you write books, as I believe most ladies do now-a-days, you should put me into one of them, as an awful warning. I don't write books, and, if I did, I would not flatter your vanity by making you my model sinner, retorted Jessie; but I'll do something better for you, if Christabel will help me. I'll reform you. A million thanks for the mere thought! I hope the process will be pleasant. I hope so, too. We shall begin by walking you off your legs.
They are so indifferent as a means of locomotion that I could very well afford to lose them, if you could hold out any hope of my getting a better pair. A week hence, if you submit to my treatment, you will be as active as the chamois hunter in 'Manfred.' Enchanting—always provided that you and Miss Courtenay will follow the chase with me. Depend upon it, we shall not trust you to take your walks alone, unless you have a pedometer which will bear witness to the distance you have done, and which you will be content to submit to our inspection on your return, replied Jessie, sternly. I am afraid you are a terribly severe high priestess of this new form of culture, said Mr. Hamleigh, looking up from his teacup with a lazy smile, almost as bad as the Dweller on the Threshold, in Bulwer's 'Zanoni.' There is a dweller on the threshold of every science and every admirable mode of life, and his name is Idleness, answered Miss Bridgeman. The vis inertiæ, the force of letting things alone, said Angus; yes, that is a tremendous power, nobly exemplified by vestries and boards of works—to say nothing of Cabinets, Bishops, and the High Court of Chancery! I delight in that verse of Scripture, 'Their strength is to sit still.' There shall be very little sitting still for you if you submit yourself to Christabel and me, replied Miss Bridgeman. I have never tried the water-cure—the descriptions I have heard from adepts have been too repellent; but I have an idea that this system of yours must be rather worse than hydropathy, said Angus, musingly—evidently very much entertained at the way in which Miss Bridgeman had taken him in hand.
I was not going to let him pose after Lamartine's poëte mourant, just because his father died of lung disease, said Jessie, ten minutes afterwards, when the warning gong had sounded, and Mr. Hamleigh had gone to his room to dress for dinner, and the two young women were whispering together before the fire, while Mrs. Tregonell indulged in a placid doze. Do you think he is consumptive, like his father? asked Christabel, with a compassionate look; he has a very delicate appearance. Hollow-cheeked, and prematurely old, like a man who has lived on tobacco and brandy-and-soda, and has spent his nights in club- house card-rooms. We have no right to suppose that, said Christabel, since we know really nothing about him. Major Bree told me he has lived a racketty life, and that if he were not to pull up very soon he would be ruined both in health and fortune. What can the Major know about him? exclaimed Christabel, contemptuously. This Major Bree was a great friend of Christabel's; but there are times when one's nearest and dearest are too provoking for endurances. Major Bree has been buried alive in Cornwall for the last twenty years. He is at least a quarter of a century behind the age, she said, impatiently. He spent a fortnight in London the year before last, said Jessie; it was then that he heard such a bad account of Mr. Hamleigh. Did he go about to clubs and places making inquiries, like a private detective? said Christabel, still contemptuous; I hate such fetching and carrying!
Here he comes to answer for himself, replied Jessie, as the door opened, and a servant announced Major Bree. Mrs. Tregonell started from her slumbers at the opening of the door, and rose to greet her guest. He was a very frequent visitor, so frequent that he might be said to live at Mount Royal, although his nominal abode was a cottage on the outskirts of Boscastle—a stone cottage on the crest of a steep hill-side, with a delightful little garden, perched, as it were, on the edge of a verdant abyss. He was tall, stout, elderly, grey, and florid—altogether a comfortable-looking man, clean-shaved, save for a thin grey moustache with the genuine cavalry droop, iron grey eyebrows, which looked like a repetition of the moustache on a somewhat smaller scale, keen grey eyes, a pleasant smile, and a well set-up figure. He dressed well, with a sobriety becoming his years, and was always the pink of neatness. A man welcome everywhere, on account of an inborn pleasantness, which prompted him always to say and do the right thing; but most of all welcome at Mount Royal, as a first cousin of the late Squire's, and Mrs. Tregonell's guide, philosopher, and friend in all matters relating to the outside world, of which, despite his twenty years' hybernation at Boscastle, the widow supposed him to be an acute observer and an infallible judge. Was he not one of the few inhabitants of that western village who took in the Times newspaper? Well! exclaimed Major Bree, addressing himself generally to the three ladies, he has come—what do you think of him? He is painfully like his poor father, said Mrs. Tregonell. He has a most interesting face and winning manner, and I'm afraid we shall all get ridiculously fond of him, said Miss Bridgeman, decisively. Christabel said nothing. She knelt on the hearthrug, playing with Randie, the black-and-white sheep-dog. And what have you to say about him, Christabel? asked the Major.
Nothing. I have not had time to form an opinion, replied the girl; and then lifting her clear blue eyes to the Major's friendly face, she said, gravely, but I think, Uncle Oliver, it was very unkind and unfair of you to prejudice Jessie against him before he came here. Unkind!—unfair! Here's a shower of abuse! I prejudice! Oh! I remember. Mrs. Tregonell asked me what people thought of him in London, and I was obliged to acknowledge that his reputation was— well—no better than that of the majority of young men who have more money than common sense. But that was two years ago— Nous avons changé tout cela! If he was wicked then, he must be wicked now, said Christabel. Wicked is a monstrously strong word! said the Major. Besides, that does not follow. A man may have a few wild oats to sow, and yet become a very estimable person afterwards. Miss Bridgeman is tremendously sharp—she'll be able to find out all about Mr. Hamleigh from personal observation before he has been here a week. I defy him to hide his weak points from her. What is the use of being plain and insignificant if one has not some advantage over one's superior fellow-creatures? asked Jessie. Miss Bridgeman has too much expression to be plain, and she is far too clever to be insignificant, said Major Bree, with a stately bow. He always put on a stately manner when he addressed himself to Jessie Bridgeman, and treated her in all things with as much respect as if she had been a queen. He explained to Christabel that this was the homage which he paid to the royalty of intellect; but Christabel had a shrewd suspicion that the Major cherished a secret passion for Miss Bridgeman, as exalted and as hopeless as the love that Chastelard bore for Mary Stuart. He had only a small pittance besides his half-pay, and he had a very poor opinion of his own merits; so it was but natural that, at fifty-five, he should hesitate to offer himself to a young lady of six-and-twenty, of whose sharp tongue he had a wholesome awe.
Mr. Hamleigh came back before much more could be said about him, and a few minutes afterwards they all went in to dinner, and in the brighter lamplight of the dining-room Major Bree and the three ladies had a better opportunity of forming their opinion as to the external graces of their guest. He was good-looking—that fact even malice could hardly dispute. Not so handsome as the absent Leonard, Mrs. Tregonell told herself complacently; but she was constrained at the same time to acknowledge that her son's broadly moulded features and florid complexion lacked the charm and interest which a woman's eye found in the delicate chiselling and subdued tones of Angus Hamleigh's countenance. His eyes were darkest grey, his complexion was fair and somewhat pallid, his hair brown, with a natural curl which neither fashion nor the barber could altogether suppress. His cheeks were more sunken than they should have been at eight-and- twenty, and the large dark eyes were unnaturally bright. All this the three ladies and Major Bree had ample time for observing, during the leisurely course of dinner. There was no flagging in the conversation, from the beginning to the end of the repast. Mr. Hamleigh was ready to talk about anything and everything, and his interest in the most trifling local subjects, whether real or assumed, made him a delightful companion. In the drawing-room, after dinner, he proved even more admirable; for he discovered a taste for, and knowledge of, the best music, which delighted Jessie and Christabel, who were both enthusiasts. He had read every book they cared for— and a wide world of books besides—and was able to add to their stock of information upon all their favourite subjects, without the faintest touch of arrogance. I don't think you can help liking him, Jessie, said Christabel, as the two girls went upstairs to bed. The younger lingered a little in Miss Bridgeman's room for the discussion of their latest ideas. There was a cheerful fire burning in the large basket grate, for autumn nights were chill upon that wild coast. Christabel assumed her favourite attitude in front of the fire, with her faithful Randie winking and
blinking at her and the fire alternately. He was a privileged dog— allowed to sleep on a sheepskin mat in the gallery outside his mistress's door, and to go into her room every morning, in company with the maid who carried her early cup of tea; when, after the exchange of a few remarks, in baby language on her part, and expressed on his by a series of curious grins and much wagging of his insignificant apology for a tail, he would dash out of the room, and out of the house, for his morning constitutional among the sheep upon some distant hill—coming home with an invigorated appetite, in time for the family breakfast at nine o'clock. I don't think you can help liking him—as—as a casual acquaintance! repeated Christabel, finding that Jessie stood in a dreamy silence, twisting her one diamond ring—a birthday gift from Miss Courtenay—round and round upon her slender finger. I don't suppose any of us can help liking him, Jessie answered at last, with her eyes on the fire. All I hope is, that some of us will not like him too much. He has brought a new element into our lives—a new interest—which may end by being a painful one. I feel distrustful of him. Why distrustful? Why, Jessie, you who are generally the very essence of flippancy—who make light of almost everything in life— except religion—thank God, you have not come to that yet!—you to be so serious about such a trifling matter as a visit from a man who will most likely be gone back to London in a fortnight—gone out of our lives altogether, perhaps: for I don't suppose he will care to repeat his experiences in a lonely country-house. He may be gone, perhaps—yes—and it is quite possible that he may never return—but shall we be quite the same after he has left us? Will nobody regret him—wish for his return—yearn for it—sigh for it —die for it—feeling life worthless—a burthen, without him? Why, Jessie, you look like a Pythoness.
Belle, Belle, my darling, my innocent one, you do not know what it is to care—for a bright particular star—and know how remote it is from your life—never to be brought any nearer! I felt afraid to-night when I saw you and Mr. Hamleigh at the piano—you playing, he leaning over you as you played—both seeming so happy, so united by the sympathy of the moment! If he is not a good man—if—— But we have no reason to think ill of him. You remember what Uncle Oliver said—he had only been—a—a little racketty, like other young men, said Christabel, eagerly; and then, with a sudden embarrassment, reddening and laughing shyly, she added, and indeed, Jessie, if it is any idea of danger to me that is troubling your wise head, there is no need for alarm. I am not made of such inflammable stuff—I am not the kind of girl to fall in love with the first comer. With the first comer no! But when the Prince comes in a fairy tale, it matters little whether he come first or last. Fate has settled the whole story beforehand. Fate has had nothing to say about me and Mr. Hamleigh. No, Jessie, believe me, there is no danger for me—and I don't suppose that you are going to fall in love with him? Because I am so old? said Miss Bridgeman, still looking at the fire; no, it would be rather ridiculous in a person of my age, plain and passée, to fall in love with your Alcibiades. No, Jessie, but because you are too wise ever to be carried away by a sentimental fancy. But why do you speak of him so contemptuously? One would think you had taken a dislike to him. We ought at least to remember that he is my aunt's friend, and the son of some one she once dearly loved. Once, repeated Jessie, softly; does not once in that case mean always?
She was thinking of the Squire's commonplace good looks and portly figure, as represented in the big picture in the dining-room—the picture of a man in a red coat, leaning against the shoulder of a big bay horse, and with a pack of harriers fawning round him—and wondering whether the image of that dead man, whose son was in the house to-night, had not sometimes obtruded itself upon the calm plenitude of Mrs. Tregonell's domestic joys. Don't be afraid that I shall forget my duty to your aunt or your aunt's guest, dear, she said suddenly, as if awaking from a reverie. You and I will do all in our power to make him happy, and to shake him out of lazy London ways, and then, when we have patched up his health, and the moorland air has blown a little colour into his hollow cheeks, we will send him back to his clubs and his theatres, and forget all about him. And now, good-night, my Christabel, she said, looking at her watch; see! it is close upon midnight—dreadful dissipation for Mount Royal, where half-past ten is the usual hour. Christabel kissed her and departed, Randie following to the door of her chamber—such a pretty room, with old panelled walls painted pink and grey, old furniture, old china, snowy draperies, and books— a girl's daintily bound books, selected and purchased by herself—in every available corner; a neat cottage piano in a recess, a low easy- chair by the fire, with a five-o'clock tea-table in front of it; desks, portfolios, work-baskets—all the frivolities of a girl's life; but everything arranged with a womanly neatness which indicated industrious habits and a well-ordered mind. No scattered sheets of music—no fancy-work pitch-and-tossed about the room—no slovenliness claiming to be excused as artistic disorder. Christabel said her prayers, and read her accustomed portion of Scripture, but not without some faint wrestlings with Satan, who on this occasion took the shape of Angus Hamleigh. Her mind was overcharged with wonder at this new phenomenon in daily life, a man so entirely different from any of the men she had ever met hitherto—so accomplished, so highly cultured; yet taking his
accomplishments and culture as a thing of course, as if all men were so. She thought of him as she lay awake for the first hour of the still night, watching the fire fade and die, and listening to the long roll of the waves, hardly audible at Mount Royal amidst all the commonplace noises of day, but heard in the solemn silence of night. She let her fancies shape a vision of her aunt's vanished youth —that one brief bright dream of happiness, so miserably broken!— and wondered and wondered how it was possible for any one to outlive such a grief. Still more incredible did it seem that any one who had so loved and so lost could ever listen to another lover; and yet the thing had been done, and Mrs. Tregonell's married life had been called happy. She always spoke of the Squire as the best of men—was never weary of praising him—loved to look up at his portrait on the wall—preserved every unpicturesque memorial of his unpicturesque life—heavy gold and silver snuff-boxes, clumsy hunting crops, spurs, guns, fishing-rods. The relics of his murderous pursuits would have filled an arsenal. And how fondly she loved the son who resembled that departed father—save in lacking some of his best qualities! How she doated on Leonard, the most commonplace and unattractive of young men! The thought of her cousin set Christabel on a new train of speculation. If Leonard had been at home when Mr. Hamleigh came to Mount Royal, how would they two have suited each other? Like fire and water, like oil and vinegar, like the wolf and the lamb, like any two creatures most antagonistic by nature. It was a happy accident that Leonard was away. She was still thinking when she fell asleep, with that uneasy sense of pain and trouble in the future which was always suggested to her by Leonard's image—a dim unshapen difficulty waiting for her somewhere along the untrodden road of her life—a lion in the path.
CHAPTER III. TINTAGEL, HALF IN SEA, AND HALF ON LAND. There was no sense of fear or trouble of any kind in the mind of anybody next morning after breakfast, when Christabel, Miss Bridgeman, and Mr. Hamleigh started, in the young lady's own particular pony carriage, for an exploring day, attended by Randie, who was intensely excited, and furnished with a picnic basket which made them independent of the inn at Trevena, and afforded the opportunity of taking one's luncheon under difficulties upon a windy height, rather than with the commonplace comforts of an hotel parlour, guarded against wind and weather. They were going to do an immense deal upon this first day. Christabel, in her eagerness, wanted to exhibit all her lions at once. Of course, you must see Tintagel, she said; everybody who comes to this part of the world is in a tremendous hurry to see King Arthur's castle. I have known people set out in the middle of the night. And have you ever known any one of them who was not just a little disappointed with that stupendous monument of traditional royalty? asked Miss Bridgeman, with her most prosaic air. They expect so much—halls, and towers, and keep, and chapel—and find only ruined walls, and the faint indication of a grave-yard. King Arthur is a name to conjure with, and Tintagel is like Mont Blanc or the Pyramids. It can never be so grand as the vision its very name has evoked. I blush to say that I have thought very little about Tintagel hitherto, said Mr. Hamleigh; it has not been an integral part of my
existence; so my expectations are more reasonable than those of the enthusiastic tourist. I promise to be delighted with your ruins. Oh, but you will pretend, said Christabel, and that will be hateful! I would rather have to deal with one of those provoking people who look about them blankly, and exclaim, 'Is this all?' and who stand in the very centre of Arthur's Hall, and ask, 'And, pray, where is Tintagel?—when are we to see the castle?' No! give me the man who can take in the grandeur of that wild height at a glance, and whose fancy can build up those ruined walls, re-create those vanished towers, fill the halls with knights in shining armour, and lovely ladies—see Guinevere herself upon her throne—clothed in white samite—mystic, wonderful! And with Lancelot in the background, said Mr. Hamleigh. I think the less we say about Guinevere the better, and your snaky Vivien, and your senile Merlin, your prying Modred. What a disreputable set these Round Table people seem to have been altogether—they need have been dead thirteen hundred years for us to admire them! They were driving along the avenue by this time, the stout chestnut cob going gaily in the fresh morning air—Mr. Hamleigh sitting face to face with Christabel as she drove. What a fair face it was in the clear light of day! How pure and delicate every tone, from the whiteness of the lily to the bloom of the wild rose! How innocent the expression of the large liquid eyes, which seemed to smile at him as he talked! He had known so many pretty women—his memory was like a gallery of beautiful faces; but he could recall no face so completely innocent, so divinely young. It is the youthfulness of an unsullied mind, he said to himself; I have known plenty of girls as young in years, but not one perfectly pure from the taint of worldliness and vanity. The trail of the serpent was over them all! They drove down hill into Boscastle, and then straightway began to ascend still steeper hills upon the other side of the harbour.
You ought to throw a viaduct across the valley, said Mr. Hamleigh —something like Brunel's bridge at Saltash; but perhaps you have hardly traffic enough to make it pay. They went winding up the new road to Trevena, avoiding the village street, and leaving the Church of the Silent Tower on its windy height on their right hand. The wide Atlantic lay far below them on the other side of those green fields which bordered the road; the air they breathed was keen with the soft breath of the sea. But autumn had hardly plucked a leaf from the low storm-beaten trees, or a flower from the tall hedgerows, where the red blossom of the Ragged Robin mixed with the pale gold of the hawk-weed, and the fainter yellow of the wild cistus. The ferns had hardly begun to wither, and Angus Hamleigh, whose last experiences had been among the stone walls of Aberdeenshire, wondered at the luxuriance of this western world, where the banks were built up and fortified with boulders of marble-veined spar. They drove through the village of Trevalga, in which there is never an inn or public-house of any kind—not even a cottage licensed for the sale of beer. There was the wheelwright, carpenter, builder, Jack- of-all-trades, with his shed and his yard—the blacksmith, with his forge going merrily—village school—steam threshing-machine at work—church—chapel; but never a drop of beer—and yet the people at Trevalga are healthy, and industrious, and decently clad, and altogether comfortable looking. Some day we will take you to call at the Rectory, said Christabel, pointing skywards with her whip. Do you mean that the Rector has gone to Heaven? asked Angus, looking up into the distant blue; or is there any earthly habitation higher than the road on which we are driving. Didn't you see the end of the lane, just now? asked Christabel, laughing; it is rather steep—an uphill walk all the way; but the views are lovely.
We will walk to the Rectory to-morrow, said Miss Bridgeman; this lazy mode of transit must not be tolerated after to-day. Even the drive to Trevena was not all idleness; for after they had passed the entrance to the path leading to the beautiful waterfall of St. Nectan's Kieve, hard by St. Piran's chapel and well—the former degraded to a barn, and the latter, once of holy repute, now chiefly useful as a cool repository for butter from the neighbouring dairy of Trethevy Farm—they came to a hill, which had to be walked down; to the lowest depth of the Rocky Valley, where a stone bridge spans the rapid brawling stream that leaps as a waterfall into the gorge at St. Nectan's Kieve, about a mile higher up the valley. And then they came to a corresponding hill, which had to be walked up—because in either case it was bad for the cob to have a weight behind him. Indeed, the cob was so accustomed to consideration in this matter, that he made a point of stopping politely for his people to alight at either end of anything exceptional in the way of a hill. I'm afraid you spoil your pony, said Mr. Hamleigh, throwing the reins over his arm, and resigning himself to a duty which made him feel very much like a sea-side flyman, earning his day's wages toilsomely, and saving his horse with a view to future fares. Better that than to spoil you, answered Miss Bridgeman, as she and Christabel walked briskly beside him. But if you fasten the reins to the dashboard, you may trust Felix. Won't he run away? Not he, answered Christabel. He knows that he would never be so happy with anybody else as he is with us. But mightn't he take a fancy for a short run; just far enough to allow of his reducing that dainty little carriage to match-wood? A well-fed underworked pony so thoroughly enjoys that kind of thing. Felix has no such diabolical suggestions. He is a conscientious person, and knows his duty. Besides, he is not underworked. There
is hardly a day that he does not carry us somewhere. Mr. Hamleigh surrendered the reins, and Felix showed himself worthy of his mistress's confidence, following at her heels like a dog, with his honest brown eyes fixed on the slim tall figure, as if it had been his guiding star. I want you to admire the landscape, said Christabel, when they were on the crest of the last hill; is not that a lovely valley? Mr. Hamleigh willingly admitted the fact. The beauty of a pastoral landscape, with just enough of rugged wildness for the picturesque, could go no further. Creswick has immortalized yonder valley by his famous picture of the mill, said Miss Bridgeman, but the romantic old mill of the picture has lately been replaced by that large ungainly building, quite out of keeping with its surroundings. Have you ever been in Switzerland? asked Angus of Christabel, when they had stood for some moments in silent contemplation of the landscape. Never. Nor in Italy? No. I have never been out of England. Since I was five years old I have hardly spent a year of my life out of Cornwall. Happy Cornwall, which can show so fair a product of its soil! Well, Miss Courtenay, I know Italy and Switzerland by heart, and I like this Cornish landscape better than either. It is not so beautiful—it would not do as well for a painter or a poet; but it comes nearer an Englishman's heart. What can one have better than the hills and the sea? Switzerland can show you bigger hills, ghostly snow-shrouded pinnacles that mock the eye, following each other like a line of phantoms, losing themselves in the infinite; but Switzerland cannot show you that.
He pointed to the Atlantic: the long undulating line of the coast, rocky, rugged, yet verdant, with many a curve and promontory, many a dip and rise. It is the most everlasting kind of beauty, is it not? asked Christabel, delighted at this little gush of warm feeling in one whose usual manner was so equable. One could never tire of the sea. And I am always proud to remember that our sea is so big—stretching away and away to the New World. I should have liked it still better before the days of Columbus, when it led to the unknown! Ah! sighed Angus, youth always yearns for the undiscovered. Middle age knows that there is nothing worth discovering! On the top of the hill they paused for a minute or so to contemplate the ancient Borough of Bossiney, which, until disfranchised in 1832, returned two members to Parliament, with a constituency of little more than a dozen, and which once had Sir Francis Drake for its representative. Here Mr. Hamleigh beheld that modest mound called the Castle Hill, on the top of which it was customary to read the writs before the elections. An hour later they were eating their luncheon on that windy height where once stood the castle of the great king. To Christabel the whole story of Arthur and his knights was as real as if it had been a part of her own life. She had Tennyson's Arthur and Tennyson's Lancelot in her heart of hearts, and knew just enough of Sir Thomas Mallory's prose to give substance to the Laureate's poetic shadows. Angus amused himself a little at her expense, as they ate their chicken and salad on the grassy mounds which were supposed to be the graves of heroes who died before Athelstane drove the Cornish across the Tamar, and made his victorious progress through the country, even to the Scilly Isles, after defeating Howel, the last King of Cornwall. Do you really think that gentlemanly creature in the Laureate's epic —that most polished and perfect and most intensely modern English
gentleman, self-contained, considerate of others, always the right man in the right place—is one whit like that half-naked sixth century savage—the real Arthur—whose Court costume was a coat of blue paint, and whose war-shriek was the yell of a Red Indian? What can be more futile than our setting up any one Arthur, and bowing the knee before him, in the face of the fact that Great Britain teems with monuments of Arthurs—Arthur's Seat in Scotland, Arthur's Castle in Wales, Arthur's Round Table here, there, and everywhere? Be sure that Arthur—Ardheer—the highest chief—was a generic name for the princes of those days, and that there were more Arthurs than ever there were Cæsars. I don't believe one word you say, exclaimed Christabel, indignantly, there was only one Arthur, the son of Uther and Ygerne, who was born in the castle that stood on this very cliff, on the first night of the year, and carried away in secret by Merlin, and reared in secret by Sir Anton's wife—the brave good Arthur—the Christian king—who was killed at the battle of Camlan, near Slaughter Bridge, and was buried at Glastonbury. And embalmed by Tennyson. The Laureate invented Arthur—he took out a patent for the Round Table, and his invention is only a little less popular than that other product of the age, the sewing- machine. How many among modern tourists would care about Tintagel if Tennyson had not revived the old legend? The butler had put up a bottle of champagne for Mr. Hamleigh—the two ladies drinking nothing but sparkling water—and in this beverage he drank hail to the spirit of the legendary prince. I am ready to believe anything now you have me up here, he said, for I have a shrewd idea that without your help I should never be able to get down again. I should live and die on the top of this rocky promontory—sweltering in the summer sun—buffeted by the winter winds—an unwilling Simeon Stylites.
Do you know that the very finest sheep in Cornwall are said to be grown on that island, said Miss Bridgeman gravely, pointing to the grassy top of the isolated crag in the foreground, whereon once stood the donjon keep. I don't know why it should be so, but it is a tradition. Among butchers? said Angus. I suppose even butchers have their traditions. And the poor sheep who are condemned to exile on that lonely rock—the St. Helena of their woolly race—do they know that they are achieving a posthumous perfection—that they are straining towards the ideal in butcher's meat? There is room for much thought in the question. The tide is out, said Christabel, looking seaward; I think we ought to do Trebarwith sands to-day. Is Trebarwith another of your lions? asked Angus, placidly. Yes. Then, please save him for to-morrow. Let me drink the cup of pleasure to the dregs where we are. This champagne has a magical taste, like the philter which Tristan and Iseult were so foolish as to drink while they sailed across from Ireland to this Cornish shore. Don't be alarmed, Miss Bridgeman, I am not going to empty the bottle. I am not an educated tourist—have read neither Black nor Murray, and I am very slow about taking in ideas. Even after all you have told me, I am not clear in my mind as to which is the castle and which the chapel, and which the burial-ground. Let us finish the afternoon dawdling about Tintagel. Let us see the sun set from this spot, where Arthur must so often have watched it, if the men of thirteen hundred years ago ever cared to watch the sun setting, which I doubt. They belong to the night-time of the world, when civilization was dead in Southern Europe, and was yet unborn in the West. Let us dawdle about till it is time to drive back to Mount Royal, and then I shall carry away an impression. I am very slow at taking impressions.
I think you want us to believe that you are stupid, said Christabel, laughing at the earnestness with which he pleaded. Believe me, no. I should like you to think me ever so much better than I am. Please, let us dawdle. They dawdled accordingly. Strolling about upon the short sea-beaten grass, so treacherous and slippery a surface in summer time, when fierce Sol has been baking it. They stumbled against the foundations of long-vanished walls, they speculated upon fragments of cyclopean masonry, and talked a great deal about the traditions of the spot. Christabel, who had all the old authorities—Leland, Carew, and Norden—at her fingers' ends, was delighted to expound the departed glories of this British fortress. She showed where the ancient dungeon keep had reared its stony walls upon that high terrible crag, environed with the sea; and how there had once been a drawbridge uniting yonder cliff with the buildings on the mainland—now divorced, as Carew says, by the downfallen steep cliffs, on the farther side, which, though it shut out the sea from his wonted recourse, hath yet more strengthened the island; for in passing thither you must first descend with a dangerous declining, and then make a worse ascent by a path, through his stickleness occasioning, and through his steepness threatening, the ruin of your life, with the falling of your foot. She told Mr. Hamleigh how, after the Conquest, the castle was the occasional residence of some of our Princes, and how Richard, King of the Romans, Earl of Cornwall, son of King John, entertained here his nephew David, Prince of Wales, how, in Richard the Second's time, this stronghold was made a State prison, and how a certain Lord Mayor of London was, for his unruly mayoralty, condemned thither as a perpetual penitentiary; which seems very hard upon the chief magistrate of the city, who thus did vicarious penance for the riot of his brief reign. And then they talked of Tristan and Iseult, and the tender old love- story, which lends the glamour of old-world fancies to those bare ruins of a traditional past. Christabel knew the old chronicle through
Matthew Arnold's poetical version, which gives only the purer and better side of the character of the Knight and Chatelaine, at the expense of some of the strongest features of the story. Who, that knew that romantic legend, could linger on that spot without thinking of King Marc's faithless queen! Assuredly not Mr. Hamleigh, who was a staunch believer in the inventor of sweetness and light, and who knew Arnold's verses by heart. What have they done with the flowers and the terrace walks? he said,—the garden where Tristan and his Queen basked in the sunshine of their days; and where they parted for ever?— 'All the spring time of their love Is already gone and past, And instead thereof is seen Its winter, which endureth still Tyntagel, on its surge-beat hill, The pleasaunce walks, the weeping queen, The flying leaves, the straining blast, And that long wild kiss—their last.' And where—oh, where—are those graves in the King's chapel in which the tyrant Marc, touched with pity, ordered the fated lovers to be buried? And, behold! out of the grave of Tristan there sprung a plant which went along the walls, and descended into the grave of the Queen, and though King Marc three several times ordered this magical creeper to be cut off root and branch, it was always found growing again next morning, as if it were the very spirit of the dead knight struggling to get free from the grave, and to be with his lady- love again! Show me those tombs, Miss Courtenay. You can take your choice, said Jessie Bridgeman, pointing to a green mound or two, overgrown with long rank grass, in that part of the hill which was said to be the kingly burial-place. But as for your magical tree, there is not so much as a bramble to do duty for poor Tristan.
If I were Duke of Cornwall and Lord of Tintagel Castle, I would put up a granite cross in memory of the lovers; though I fear there was very little Christianity in either of them, said Angus. And I would come once a year and hang a garland on it, said Christabel, smiling at him with Eyes of deep, soft, lucent hue— Eyes too expressive to be blue, Too lovely to be grey. He had recalled those lines more than once when he looked into Christabel's eyes. Mr. Hamleigh had read so much as to make him an interesting talker upon any subject; but Christabel and Jessie noticed that of his own life, his ways and amusements, his friends, his surroundings, he spoke hardly at all. This fact Christabel noticed with wonder, Jessie with suspicion. If a man led a good wholesome life, he would surely be more frank and open—he would surely have more to say about himself and his associates. They dawdled, and dawdled, till past four o'clock, and to none of the three did the hours so spent seem long; but they found that it would make them too late in their return to Mount Royal were they to wait for sundown before they turned their faces homewards; so while the day was still bright, Mr. Hamleigh consented to be guided by steep and perilous paths to the base of the rocky citadel, and then they strolled back to the Wharncliffe Arms, where Felix had been enjoying himself in the stable, and was now desperately anxious to get home, rattling up and down hill at an alarming rate, and not hinting at anybody's alighting to walk. This was only one of many days spent in the same fashion. They walked next day to Trebarwith sands, up and down hills, which Mr. Hamleigh declared were steeper than anything he had ever seen in Switzerland; but he survived the walk, and his spirits seemed to rise
with the exertion. This time Major Bree went with them—a capital companion for a country ramble, being just enough of a botanist, archæologist, and geologist, to leaven the lump of other people's ignorance, without being obnoxiously scientific. Mr. Hamleigh was delighted with that noble stretch of level sand, with the long rollers of the Atlantic tumbling in across the low rocks, and the bold headlands behind—spot beloved of marine painters—spot where the gulls and the shags hold their revels, and where man feels himself but a poor creature face to face with the lonely grandeur of sea, and cliff, and sky. So rarely is that long stretch of yellow sand vulgarized by the feet of earth's multitudes, that one half expects to see a procession of frolicsome sea-nymphs come dancing out of yonder cave, and wind in circling measures towards the crested wavelets, gliding in so softly under the calm clear day. These were halcyon days—an Indian summer—balmy western zephyrs—sunny noontides—splendid sunsets—altogether the most beautiful autumn season that Angus Hamleigh had known, or at least, so it seemed to him—nay, even more than this, surely the most beautiful season of his life. As the days went on, and day after day was spent in Christabel's company—almost as it were alone with her, for Miss Bridgeman and Major Bree were but as figures in the background—Angus felt as if he were at the beginning of a new life—a life filled with fresh interests, thoughts, hopes, desires, unknown and undreamed of in the former stages of his being. Never before had he lived a life so uneventful—never before had he been so happy. It surprised him to discover how simple are the elements of real content—how deep the charm of a placid existence among thoroughly loveable people! Christabel Courtenay was not the loveliest woman he had ever known, nor the most elegant, nor the most accomplished, nor the most fascinating; but she was entirely different from all other women with whom his lot had been cast. Her innocence, her unsophisticated enjoyment of all earth's purest joys, her transparent
purity, her perfect trustfulness—these were to him as a revelation of a new order of beings. If he had been told of such a woman he would have shrugged his shoulders misbelievingly, or would have declared that she must be an idiot. But Christabel was quite as clever as those brilliant creatures whose easy manners had enchanted him in days gone by. She was better educated than many a woman he knew who passed for a wit of the first order. She had read more, thought more, was more sympathetic, more companionable, and she was delightfully free from self- consciousness or vanity. He found himself talking to Christabel as he had never talked to any one else since those early days at the University, the bright dawn of manhood, when he confided freely in that second self, the chosen friend of the hour, and believed that all men lived and moved according to his own boyish standard of honour. He talked to her, not of the actualities of his life, but of his thoughts and feelings—his dreamy speculations upon the gravest problems which hedge round the secret of man's final destiny. He talked freely of his doubts and difficulties, and the half-belief which came so near unbelief—the wide love of all creation—the vague yet passionate yearning for immortality which fell so far short of the Gospel's sublime certainty. He revealed to her all the complexities of a many-sided mind, and she never failed him in sympathy and understanding. This was in their graver moods, when by some accidental turn of the conversation they fell into the discussion of those solemn questions which are always at the bottom of every man and woman's thoughts, like the unknown depths of a dark water-pool. For the most part their talk was bright and light as those sunny autumn days, varied as the glorious and ever-changing hues of sky and sea at sunset. Jessie was a delightful companion. She was so thoroughly easy herself that it was impossible to feel ill at ease with her. She played her part of confidante so pleasantly, seeming to think it the most natural thing in the world that those two should be absorbed in each other, and should occasionally lapse into complete forgetfulness of her existence. Major Bree when he joined in their rambles was
obviously devoted to Jessie Bridgeman. It was her neatly gloved little hand which he was eager to clasp at the crossing of a stile, and where the steepness of the hill-side path gave him an excuse for assisting her. It was her stout little boot which he guided so tenderly, where the ways were ruggedest. Never had a plain woman a more respectful admirer—never was beauty in her peerless zenith more devoutly worshipped! And so the autumn days sped by, pleasantly for all: with deepest joy —joy ever waxing, never waning—for those two who had found the secret of perfect sympathy in thought and feeling. It was not for Angus Hamleigh the first passion of a spotless manhood; and yet the glamour and the delight were as new as if he had never loved before. He had never so purely, so reverently loved. The passion was of a new quality. It seemed to him as if he had ascended into a higher sphere in the universe, and had given his heart to a creature of a loftier race. Perhaps it is the good old lineage which makes the difference, he said to himself once, while his feelings were still sufficiently novel and so far under his control as to be subject to analysis. The women I have cared for in days gone by have hardly got over their early affinity with the gutter; or when I have admired a woman of good family she has been steeped to the lips in worldliness and vanity. Mr. Hamleigh, who had told himself that he was going to be intensely bored at Mount Royal, had been Mrs. Tregonell's guest for three weeks, and it seemed to him as if the time were brief and beautiful as one of those rare dreams of impossible bliss which haunt our waking memories, and make actual life dull and joyless by contrast with the glory of shadowland. No word had yet been spoken —nay, at the very thought of those words which most lovers in his position would have been eager to speak, his soul sickened and his cheek paled; for there would be no joyfulness in the revelation of his love—indeed, he doubted whether he had the right to reveal it— whether duty and honour did not alike constrain him to keep his
converse within the strict limits of friendship, to bid Christabel good- bye, and turn his back upon Mount Royal, without having said one word more than a friend might speak. Happy as Christabel had been with him—tenderly as she loved him—she was far too innocent to have considered herself ill-treated in such a case. She would have blamed herself alone for the weakness of mind which had been unable to resist the fascination of his society—she would have blushed and wept in secret for her folly in having loved unwooed. Has the eventful question been asked? Jessie inquired one night, as Christabel lingered, after her wont, by the fire in Miss Bridgeman's bedroom. You two were so intensely earnest to-day as you walked ahead of the Major and me, that I said to myself, 'now is the time—the crisis has arrived!' There was no crisis, answered Christabel, crimsoning; he has never said one word to me that can imply that I am any more to him than the most indifferent acquaintance. What need of words when every look and tone cries 'I love you?' Why he idolizes you, and he lets all the world see it. I hope it may be well for you—both! Christabel was on her knees by the fire. She laid her cheek against Jessie's waistband, and drew Jessie's arm round her neck, holding her hand lovingly. Do you really think he—cares for me? she faltered, with her face hidden. Do I really think that I have two eyes, and something which is at least an apology for a nose! ejaculated Jessie, contemptuously. Why, it has been patent to everybody for the last fortnight that you two are over head and ears in love with each other. There never was a more obvious case of mutual infatuation. Oh, Jessie! surely I have not betrayed myself. I know that I have been very weak—but I have tried so hard to hide——
And have been about as successful as the ostrich. While those drooping lashes have been lowered to hide the love-light in your eyes, your whole countenance has been an illuminated calendar of your folly. Poor Belle! to think that she has not betrayed herself, while all Boscastle is on tiptoe to know when the wedding is to take place. Why the parson could not see you two sitting in the same pew without knowing that he would be reading your banns before he was many Sundays older. And you—really—like him? faltered Christabel, more shyly than before. Yes, answered Jessie, with a provoking lack of enthusiasm. I really like him. I can't help feeling sorry for Mrs. Tregonell, for I know she wanted you to marry Leonard. Christabel gave a little sigh, and a faint shiver. Poor dear Leonard! I wonder what traveller's hardships he is enduring while we are so snug and happy at Mount Royal? she said, kindly. He has an excellent heart—— Troublesome people always have, I believe, interjected Jessie. It is their redeeming feature, the existence of which no one can absolutely disprove. And I am very much attached to him—as a cousin—or as an adopted brother; but as to our ever being married—that is quite out of the question. There never were two people less suited to each other. Those are the people who usually come together, said Jessie; the Divorce Court could hardly be kept going if it were not so. Jessie, if you are going to be cynical I shall say good-night. I hope there is no foundation for what you said just now. I hope that Auntie has no foolish idea about Leonard and me.
She has—or had—one prevailing idea, and I fear it will go hard with her when she has to relinquish it, answered Jessie, seriously. I know that it has been her dearest hope to see you and Leonard married, and I should be a wretch if I were not sorry for her disappointment, when she has been so good to me. But she never ought to have invited Mr. Hamleigh to Mount Royal. That is one of those mistakes the consequences of which last for a lifetime. I hope he likes me—just a little, pursued Christabel, with dreamy eyes fixed on the low wood fire; but sometimes I fancy there must be some mistake—that he does not really care a straw for me. More than once, when he has began to say something that sounded—— Business-like, suggested Jessie, as the girl hesitated. He has drawn back—seeming almost anxious to recall his words. Once he told me—quite seriously—that he had made up his mind never to marry. Now, that doesn't sound as if he meant to marry me. That is not an uncommon way of breaking ground, answered Jessie, with her matter-of-fact air. A man tells a girl that he is going to die a bachelor—which makes it seem quite a favour on his part when he proposes. All women sigh for the unattainable; and a man who distinctly states that he is not in the market, is likely to make a better bargain when he surrenders. I should be sorry to think Mr. Hamleigh capable of such petty ideas, said Christabel. He told me once that he was like Achilles. Why should he be like Achilles? He is not a soldier. Perhaps, it is because he has a Grecian nose, suggested Miss Bridgeman. How can you imagine him so vain and foolish, cried Christabel, deeply offended. I begin to think you detest him? No, Belle, I think him charming, only too charming, and I had rather the man you loved were made of sterner metal—not such a
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Emerging Practices In Cyberculture And Social Networking Daniel Riha

  • 1.
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  • 7.
    At the Interface Probingthe Boundaries Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Daniel Riha Advisory Board Volume 69 A volume in the Critical Issues series ‘Cybercultures’ Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr Wayne Cristaudo Dr Mira Crouch Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Professor Asa Kasher Owen Kelly Dr Peter Mario Kreuter Dr Martin McGoldrick Revd Stephen Morris Professor John Parry Dr Paul Reynolds Professor Peter L. Twohig Professor S Ram Vemuri Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E
  • 8.
    Amsterdam - NewYork, NY 2010 Emerging Practices in Cyberculture and Social Networking Edited by Daniel Riha and Anna Maj
  • 9.
    The paper onwhich this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3082-4 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3083-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands
  • 10.
    Table of Contents Introductionvii Daniel Riha & Anna Maj PART I Access, Power and Social Marginalisation in Cyberculture This Time It’s Personal: Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management 3 Nils Gustafsson Anthropology of Accessibility: Further Reflections on the Perceptual Problems of Human-Computer Interactions 25 Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski Politics and Social Software: Recommendations for Inclusive ICTs 41 Christina Neumayer, Celina Raffl and Robert M. Bichler PART II Cyber-Governance, Cyber-Communities, Cyber-Bodies Governance and the Global Metaverse 65 Melissa de Zwart and David Lindsay Hybrid Communities to Digital Arts Festivals: From Online Discussions to Offline Gatherings 83 Donata Marletta PART III New Concepts in Education and Entertainment Playing Games as an Art Experience: How Videogames Produce Meaning through Narrative and Play 99 Jef Folkerts
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    The 3-D VirtualLibrary as a Value-Added Library Service 119 Daniel Riha Learning New Literacies through Machinima 135 Theodoros Thomas PART IV Web 2.0 and Social Networking Youth Connecting Online: From Chat Rooms to Social Networking Sites 151 Natalia Waechter, Kaveri Subrahmanyam, Stephanie M. Reich and Guadalupe Espinoza Cybergrace among Eating Disorder Survivors in Singapore 179 Chand Somaiah
  • 12.
    Introduction Daniel Riha &Anna Maj The chapters in this volume are a selection of the most significant research presented during the 4th Global Conference on Cybercultures: Exploring Critical Issues, held as a part of Cyber Hub activity in Salzburg, Austria in March 2009. This multi-disciplinary conference project is a successful rebirth of the 2003-2005 conferences held previously in Prague in the frames of the ID.net Critical Issues research project. The enriched materials presented here are the results of in-conference discussions as well as later research and further reflections on the topics covered. Being a contemporary dominating cultural paradigm, cyberculture is an important subject for a wide range of researchers representing various disciplines. Thus, the idea of the interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge through presenting results of diversified research projects seems to be crucial for their further development at both local and global levels. The research problems connected with cyberculture (or rather cybercultures) nowadays are those arising in the field of philosophy, psychology, sociology, culture, media and game studies, IT studies, engineering, design and law. One of the fundamental topics raised during the conference was the issue of access analysed at various levels, especially users’ access to information and technology with regard to the notion of diversified competencies, knowledge and disabilities as well as accessibility of the content and interface. The question of access has become a serious political issue. Moreover, it concerns not only the never-to-be-solved problems of geo- economic nature such as ‘digital divide’ or those of socio-psychological provenance such as ‘competence gap’. In the networked paradigm of global economy, the access to certain vulnerable data may provoke serious political or economic crises as well. It is no longer possible to feel safe and keep the ideal of isolation when everything is connected to everything else, every citizen of the global village has potential access to powerful tools which can make him/her an important source of information or its transmitter and amplifier. Politics today is more about moderating than about controlling - or at least it is evolving into this direction. Yet, on the other hand, viral politics - as viral marketing - is commencing to prevail. Gradually one can observe political actors becoming fully conscious of the situation and using this knowledge. Sometimes it is positive for citizens, and sometimes it is not. It gives new hope for social communication, disrupting the old top-to-bottom model and changing it into a bottom-to-top one. But on the other hand, it is sometimes a new threat for an individual. New communication tools can have
  • 13.
    Introduction ______________________________________________________________ viii democratising potential butthis power is understood by the authoritarian leaders, who are afraid of people and of the freedom encapsulated in new technologies. The result of a systemic reaction can be very painful for society and this sad side of emergence of cyberculture can be noticed in some parts of the world. Access also means accessibility and usability of content, various technologies, communication systems and devices. It is an important tool of inclusion of all marginalised groups of society: the elderly, children, poor, stigmatised or disabled. It is an important problem for contemporary responsible design, especially web and interaction design. The issue concerns designing assistive technologies but also social networking environments and various possibilities of social interaction, wiping out the stigmas or ‘communication gaps’. This is, of course, an important issue for contemporary pedagogy, e-learning and for the entertainment business. Therefore, open access and user-friendly architecture can be also a good marketing formula to attract attention of new target groups. The other important issue is the user’s involvement in the process of development of technologies and devices - client’s incorporation into the creative process and the idea of user-friendly interfaces as well as their implementation. The issue refers to the growing competencies and will of interaction, especially connected with the so-called ‘Net generation’ that is beginning to enter the job market and business. This generation is the one that was raised in the environment of digital technologies, especially computer games. This is the result of earlier emergence of personal computers at home, which built a creative environment of work, education and entertainment and programmed users for other interactive needs. Individuals, who are eager to cooperate with a service provider if the goal is beneficial for the whole community, now express this demand clearly and globally. But on the other hand, it results in the emergence of grassroots projects and actions, which develop information and communication possibilities of all Internet and mobile devices users. These issues are connected with the problems of gaining control, maintaining control, and the lack of control as associated with privacy and its loss. This subject implies ideas of control over the dispersed and decentralised system of the Net itself and of the content distribution in the context of Web 2.0 architecture and the cultural trend of sharing. Grassroots journalism, sharism, social tagging, bookmarking or networking are evoking many positive processes but also provoking an unprecedented loss of privacy. This implies the possibilities of personal data stealing or abuse of intimate information. The problem lies in the unawareness of possible malicious usage of social media and the need to emphasise advantages and disadvantages of social networking. This
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    Introduction ______________________________________________________________ ix consciousness will emerge,but it first needs to be tested. But digital maturing of virtual communities is in process. It will result also in collecting the knowledge on system vulnerabilities, and will teach to what extent digital traces should be treated as digital footprints, and to what degree one’s privacy could be revealed and to what degree it should be protected. These issues provoke questions on changes in education and the increasing need to provide cyber-education for various groups within society in view of their specified profiles. The necessity to broaden the abilities of an average user and the demand to constantly increase teachers’ competencies are the challenges for educational systems. These problems are widely analysed in the presented book with reference to interesting local examples of different forms of implementation of new ideas and methods of creative teaching of media and through media, i.e. with the use of 3D environments, games, machinima and social networking websites. The questions of evolution of competences in media and information literacy are today fundamental for the future of educational system and therefore - for the shape of future society. The changes are necessary, as the old paradigm of literacy has been loosing its ground to new generations of ‘digital natives’. The relation between the real and the virtual is the next important issue raised in the book. Crucial terms analysed in various contexts became ‘interaction’ and ‘interactivity’. The problem concerns virtual environments, game design and human-computer interaction, user-generated content connected with the ideas of openness, folksonomies and wikinomics. The ontological questions are transforming today into judicial or psychological problems concerning our existence in both real and virtual environments. Digital data loss or an attack on an avatar - may be seen as nothing serious, but in fact it can be felt as a real harm, despite the digital nature of its object. The virtual is therefore no longer the opposition of the real, it is its aspect, even if it still sounds strange. We perceive them both through our senses and through our bodies. These questions should be taken into consideration also by designers of virtual environments, video games and communication systems. Both the constantly emerging and growing virtual communities and the convergence of new media create new possibilities of communication. The current situation enables media users to develop, often subconsciously, their skills and various types of communication behaviour, which results in new models of perception and thinking - thus, new patterns of culture and new forms of society. On the other hand members of this new society design new technologies, software, devices and communication solutions that change world even more quickly, rebuilding interrelations between the elements of the social system. This opens possibilities for new visions of cyberculture and humanity.
  • 15.
    Introduction ______________________________________________________________ x However, cyberculture, beingshaped by global and information marketing provided by major IT companies, largely depends on the Web users’ willingness and their access to the global information product. Web 2.0 can be, without any hesitation, regarded as such a product - moreover, a successful one. But the label ‘2.0’ quickly changes into ‘3.0’, as the novelty is one of the priorities of marketing. What does it mean for the users and for future communication? The authors specialising in various disciplines try to find answers to these and other important questions of our contemporariness and future. Concluding, we should remember that even if potentially well- known and mature, cyberculture is still vivid, paradoxical and hybrid. Therefore, it is not easy to indicate the most important problems from anthropological, sociological, psychological, pedagogical, political or judicial perspective. Although today very important, tomorrow our problems may seem to be naive. But cyberculture will never become old; it will rather disappear or evolve to a different form of culture. There are multiple emerging issues and each day introduces new solutions, every new software or device gives new hopes and raises new questions about the future. And in this perspective the content of this book is not going to fade away with new inventions - now it presents challenges of emerging cyberculture issues, one day it will become the record of our times, interesting from anthropological or archaeological reasons. This book consists of ten chapters and has been organised into four parts which are dedicated to four important aspects of emerging practices in cyberculture and social networking: PART I: Access, Power and Social Marginalisation in Cyberculture PART II: Cyber-Governance, Cyber-Communities, Cyber-Bodies PART III: New Concepts in Education and Entertainment PART IV: Web 2.0 and Social Networking The first part is comprised of three articles on topics of access and power as well as on different aspects of domination and marginalisation, which are of great importance for contemporary societies and future development of digital media. Nils Gustafsson explores the borders of social tendencies and viral politics in his essay ‘This Time It’s Personal: Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management’. Social media are analysed here from the point of view of identity design and management, whereas social networks are regarded as a form of collective gatekeeping of information and a post- institutional way of civic self-organisation. The author proposes a new model of political viral campaigning using social media and operational terms as
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    Introduction ______________________________________________________________ xi ‘viral politics’ and‘temporal elites’, which are fundamental for the understanding of this communication process. Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski in their essay ‘Anthropology of Accessibility: Further Reflections on the Perceptual Problems of Human-Computer Interactions’, show the context of accessible design, especially for people with visual impairments but also for other groups of users that can be marginalised by the process of acceleration of the development of technology. The authors emphasise the fact that nowadays competencies to operate technologies have become fundamental cultural competencies. Problems connected with the ‘proper’ design, which means openness, standardisation, usability and accessibility are analysed here with the background of some influential technological solutions and inventions, and is regarded as an anthropological problem of communication process and information flow. Christina Neumayer, Celina Raffl and Robert M. Bichler in their essay ‘Politics and Social Software: Recommendations for Inclusive ICTs’, reflect on social media’s potential to strengthen citizen movements through disseminating patterns of collaborative creation. The authors suggest that social networking can be more effectively used as a powerful tool for political and ideological purposes and for struggling with the digital divide or other forms of social marginalisation. The authors focus on the inclusive use of new media increasing social power due to various tools such as social software that may have impact on political activism enabling a participatory attitude to social issues. The second part of this book presents two articles focused on three important levels of the digital order - cyber-governance, cyber-communities and cyber-body, which enormously influences our digital existence. Melissa de Zwart and David Lindsay in the essay ‘Governance and the Global Metaverse’ analyse an issue of increasing importance- multidimensional coexistence of juridical systems and digital culture. The authors examine various problems, such as ideas and methods of governance, legitimacy and power distribution in the context of 3-D virtual worlds, games and social networking websites, raising questions on the conditions and implications of the ways in which cyberlaw functions in different digital environments and also in offline reality of state law. These issues are crucial for global culture and cybersociety as they concern questions of the code being the law itself, freedom of users (or its lack) and the power of service providers. Donata Marletta in her essay ‘Hybrid Communities to Digital Arts Festivals: From Online Discussions to Offline Gatherings’ shows the possibilities for anthropology of cyberculture or ethnography of media, science and design. The author examines new forms of connectivity and modes of community forming, especially those connected with the Internet
  • 17.
    Introduction ______________________________________________________________ xii communication and awide spectrum of new media festivals, digital art competitions and conferences on ICT and its social impact. The research perspective presented here sheds new light on parallel online and offline existences of digital communities. The essay indicates important factors of the evolution of the meaning of virtual communities and cyberspace itself. Part three examines emerging ideas in the field of education and entertainment, which are connected with new modes of learning, perception and cognition as well as new communication practices and competencies connected with creativity and the knowledge of specific tools: Jef Folkerts concentrates on the issues of perception, interaction and semiosis in the essay ‘Playing Games as an Art Experience: How Videogames Produce Meaning through Narrative and Play’. Game design and playing are regarded here as an important semiotic activity where meaning is constructed by designers and constantly reconstructed by players. The issue of imagination produced by games is the core problem analysed by the author in the context of other kinds of cultural mass production. Games are regarded here as the following step of evolution of artificial environments used for creation and recreation of social and personal imagination. Daniel Riha ‘The 3-D Virtual Library as a Value-Added Library Service’, discusses the functionalities the Library 2.0 shall deliver with the focus on 3-D library service and analyses the assumptions for the establishing of the long-term user community from the wider historical perspective. The concept of the 3-D Virtual Library, realised in 2004 for the University of Constance Library is compared against the actual 3-D library concepts. Theodoros Thomas in his essay ‘Cyberculture: Learning New Literacies through Machinima’ concentrates on cyberculture teaching, a new context of education process and alternative, participatory forms of knowledge distribution. Basing on realisation of an educational project concerning cyberculture and digital literacy, the author analyses problems and challenges of teaching new media skills. The knowledge of cyberspace, virtual communities and environment, basics of image, video and sound processing and digital storytelling skills which was acquired during the academic course, were later applied by students to prepare their own machinima projects. The fourth part of this book, presenting papers concerned with the various aspects of the development of Web 2.0 trends and the global rise of social networking practices, gives three interesting local examples of the social use of digital media: Natalia Waechter, Kaveri Subrahmanyam, Stephanie M. Reich and Guadalupe Espinoza in their essay ‘Youth Connecting Online: From Chat Rooms to Social Networking Sites’, presents results of empirical research on social networking of American teenage users and the modes of their activity. Teenagers are eager to use social networking websites as well as other
  • 18.
    Introduction ______________________________________________________________ xiii communication tools whichexpand their offline social networks but also let them create online social networks. The researchers study behaviour, attitudes and needs of young Internet users in order to understand the dependencies between their online activity and psycho-sociological development of emerging adults. Chand Somaiah’s ‘Cybergrace among Eating Disorder Survivors in Singapore’ considers the implications for ethical storytelling. Illness has been understood as learning to cope with lost control. Cyberspace then to the author might serve as a medium for semblance of lost control. The potential impact of online eating disorder support groups and blogs for shaping individual and collective identities has been examined.
  • 19.
    PART I Access, Powerand Social Marginalisation in Cyberculture
  • 20.
    This Time It’sPersonal: Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management Nils Gustafsson Abstract This chapter deals with political mobilisation and participation in social media. The main focus is on the importance of Internet-mediated social networks in providing a ‘media filter’, functioning as a kind of collective gatekeeper to spread news and information perceived as important, in contrast to the image of the single individual media consumer faced with an insurmountable mass of information. I argue that by investing one’s personal ethos in spreading information and encourage peers in the personal social network to political participation, vital news and calls for action spread quickly. A form of viral politics ensues that, in concordance with traditional types of mediation and formation of political opinion, might provide a basis for a new type of political elite in competitive democracy. Drawing on earlier research concerning the effect of social capital created by weak ties on political participation, I argue that social networks organised online provide a new type of post-organisational weak ties, functioning as maintained social capital building institutions, encouraging to and organising actions of civic engagement. I also argue that, contrary to the common belief that various forms of Internet-mediated political mobilisation constitute a more inclusive, emancipatory and egalitarian politics, it could also be the case that the growing importance of viral politics reinforces the traditional inequality in political participation and influence in society. More specifically, a case is made for the need for more thorough conceptualisation of new modes of participation: spontaneous, individualised, ‘unorganised’ forms of action. Two concepts, ‘temporal elites’ and ‘viral politics’ are developed for describing how social network membership and density determine how people are recruited to political campaigns. The theoretical assumptions are further illustrated by the preliminary empirical findings of an ongoing study of Swedish Facebook users and their attitudes and behaviour concerning political participation in social media. Key Words: Social Networks, Political Participation, Virtual Mobilisation, Facebook, Social Capital, Elite Theory. ***** 1. Introduction This chapter starts with a short background of the academic discussion in the field and giving a rationale for why new concepts are
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    Social Networks, ViralPolitics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 4 needed. After a brief introduction to the phenomenon of social media and social network sites, the concepts of viral politics and temporal elites are developed and explained. The chapter ends with an empirical illustration of viral politics at the individual level, reporting the results of a study on Swedish Facebook users. An ongoing discussion in democracy research is concerned with the question of whether the level of political participation in the industrialised or post-industrial countries is sinking or not. The reason for why a high level of participation in society is perceived as important is that it is thought to be an essential part of well-functioning democracy, at least by proponents of the lines of thought in democratic theory associated with concepts like participatory, deliberative, or ‘strong’ democracy and theorists like J. S. Mill, Benjamin Barber and David Held. By participating, citizens learn and grow as individuals, thereby bettering and emancipating themselves as human beings and contributing to better governance.1 Mass participation is not seen as a sine qua non by all democratic theorists. Proponents of what David Held calls competitive elitist democracy, like Max Weber, Robert Michels and Joseph Schumpeter, underline the need for a competent political elite and restrict the role of the masses to voting, in effect selecting between competing elitist groups.2 As I will argue below, participation in internet- mediated social networks, viral politics might be interpreted as the emergence of a new type of political elite rather than mass participation. An academic debate concerning political participation in post- industrial countries has been going on for the last few decades. The main idea is that social capital, as theorised by among others Bourdieu, is correlated to the level of participation.3 The debate goes in two lines of argumentation. The line championed by, among others, Robert Putnam, maintains that political participation is decreasing as the level of social capital in society wanes with increasing individualisation and political apathy.4 Another line, represented by, among others, Russell J. Dalton and Pippa Norris5 , argues contrarily that the forms of participation are merely changing and are taking on new forms, as post-materialist values become more salient.6 Instead of enrolling in political parties and other formal organisations, citizens are now to a greater extent canalising their engagement through various types of protest, such as boycotts and buycotts, civil disobedience, internet activism and through the means of informal networks.7 These tendencies arguably run parallel to the global nature of several contemporary political issues, as well as the circumscribed autonomy of the nation state and increasing complexity of governance relationships.8 Another debate of interest for this chapter concerns the effects of the ever more dispersed and advanced use of digital communications technologies - e-mail, web pages, mobile phones, social media - on political mobilisation and participation. Within political science, this discussion tends
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    Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 5 to befocused either on the causal effects of such technologies on the level and type of social capital, which is thought to spur participation, or on the effects of social or ‘new’ media use on political knowledge and attitudes, also thought to spur participation.9 However, it is also important to remember that technology itself cannot be taken as a given. The design of social media is deeply related to existing social structures and ideologies in society. Services might contribute to increased elitism, surveillance and competitiveness. The interfaces they use might be produced by and for certain types of people - stereotypically young, web-savvy, able-bodied people. Thus, whether social media platforms will have beneficial or adversarial effects on grassroots mobilisation depends in part on active choices of designers.10 The discussion about social media and social capital is also linked to assumptions of the increased importance of social networks in late modern society.11 In this case it is also possible to distinguish between different strains of thought present in the debate. On the one hand it is argued that the dominant effect is a decrease in social capital; on the other hand it is argued that new communications technologies in combination with a waxing network society are in fact contributing to an increase in social capital. A third position maintains that the internet and other arenas of digital communication function as a useful compliment to traditional types of social capital.12 Concerning the effect of social media on political knowledge - together with education an important factor behind political participation - the discussion also divides into an optimistic and a pessimistic strain. Some researchers have found causal effects of social media on political knowledge and participation in empirical investigations, explaining the effect with the ‘surprise effect’ of unexpected political social media content, offsetting the effect of already politically interested people actively searching for political information on the internet.13 Others have pointed to how social and other digital media correct mistakes in traditional mass media, reinvigorate the public sphere and provide a base for a more diverse political discourse, peer production, citizen journalism, and so on.14 Empirical evidence has, however, also been provided for the hypothesis that social media in combination with other types of media, producing an overall wider media choice for consumers, have resulted in a larger knowledge gap between politically interested and disinterested citizens, most strikingly so in the work of Markus Prior.15 The American political scientist Matthew Hindman presents convincing empirical evidence for that in the blurry field of ‘Internet politics’, there is a strong tendency to winner-takes-all behaviour, power law distributions and a reinforced influence for traditionally strong groups in society in his book ‘The Myth of Digital Democracy’, deploying terms like ‘Googlearchy’ to describe how a
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    Social Networks, ViralPolitics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 6 few heavily linked web sites completely dominate discourse in the American political universe.16 It is fair to say that there will be no consensus on whether social network sites and other forms of social media, or the internet in general, are ‘bad’ or ‘good’ for ‘democracy’, whether that means a more oligopolistic or more fragmented public sphere, a more or less emancipated electorate, centralised or decentralised decision making, etc. Soon enough, the technologies will become so ubiquitous that they turn invisible to us, and the amount of new research dedicated to establish causal relations between ‘the Internet’ and ‘democracy’, or between ‘social media’ and ‘democracy’ will decrease.17 However, a few unclarities must be sorted out. In the debate between techno-utopians and techno-dystopians, false dichotomies are abundant. Social media does not make everything new. Old hierarchies remain. But still, everything is not quite the same. The inequalities in representative democracy prevail, but are transformed as political strife and discourse take on new shapes and new actors are involved. It is also important to distinguish between what is, what could be, and what ought to be.18 Proponents of deliberative democracy would like to see an informed public evolve through a more inclusive digital public sphere, but if what we actually have is an elitist competitive democracy, that should be taken into account. And empirical research departing from a competitive democratic model should not be confused with saying that there ought not be a more egalitarian political system or that it is not possible for the digital public sphere to facilitate informed deliberation on public issues. It is my strong belief that students of Internet-mediated politics, as in all other fields, must be aware of that. That this chapter departs from a view of representative democracy in post-industrial countries as unequal and that political mobilisation aided by social network sites might even increase power inequality does not mean that I as an author support elitism. I am actually a huge fan of egalitarianism. As much as the field of political participation and mobilisation aided by social media is emerging as an interesting and important field of research in the social sciences, it is still an under researched field. It lacks standard definitions and it though the interdisciplinarity of web research makes it fascinating and vital, it is also a crossroads for heaps of theories and classic literature in so many established disciplines. As a web researcher, it is difficult to know all. The reason for why I have chosen to develop new concepts for network-driven political mobilisation (viral politics) and for the emerging sub-group of people in the stratas of political power using this phenomenon as a successful way to political influence (the temporal elites) is that I do not find that there are really good concepts available for talking about these things. I believe that taking parts from classic democratic theory and classic elite theory and using them in combination with newer work on
  • 24.
    Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 7 the informationflows in social networks for interpreting this confusing world of Twittering rebels and Facebooking anarchists is a productive way of moving forwards. The next section will give a short introduction to social network sites and develop the concept of viral politics. 2. Social Networks, Social Network Sites and Viral Politics Social network sites are a prominent type of the various forms of user-generated social media that sometimes are grouped under the term ‘Web 2.0’.19 Quoting the by now minor classic 2007 article on social network sites by Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison, they are: web-based services that (1) construct a public or semi- public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.20 By using social network sites, it is possible to maintain off-line connections in an on-line environment, making it possible to communicate with close friends as well as casual acquaintances regardless of where they happen to be situated in time or space. It is also possible to form more or less contemporary groups, connecting people from different networks on the basis of common interests, membership in formal organisations, sharing jokes or promoting political and social causes. Another typical feature of social network sites is the interconnectedness with other types of social and mainstream media. It is easy to upload or link to media content, post it to your personal profile or to a group, or forwarding it to the contacts in your network, as well as integrating your personal profiles in different types of social media. To take an example: someone draws your attention to a funny video clip of a politician making a fool of her- or himself on television. You favourite it on your personal YouTube page, post it on your blog with a comment, tag it (assign a label to it in order to find it easily later) and store it on your del.ici.ous folksonomy page, forward the blog post to your Facebook profile, post a tweet (write a short blog post on the microblogging site Twitter) with a link to your blog post about the video clip, pass it along to your friends via e-mail, through Facebook, an SMS, etc. Your friends will in their turn assess whether they think that the clip is worthy of passing on, forwarding it or not. Someone might edit the original footage, adding music, snippets of other clips, texts, thereby creating a mash-up, a new piece of media, which in its turn might be passed around.21 Different tools allow the interactive audience to discuss and see how other people have interpreted and rated the media content. There are special services available that collect the
  • 25.
    Social Networks, ViralPolitics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 8 forms of media content that are most circulated at the time. In the end, the sharing of the media content might in itself be a story worthy of mentioning in mainstream media, thereby creating a feedback loop between the different forms of media. In effect, your social network provides a media filter for you, passing on media content that are found to be especially interesting. This is the art of viral sharing, one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary media structure. Perhaps most applied to the logic of new marketing techniques, it is also a concept most useful to describe how post- organisational political mobilisation might occur through activist mediation. The buzz word concept of viral marketing came into use in the mid 90s and was connected with marketing strategies on the Internet.22 The basic idea is that in a world where the Internet makes it possible for anyone to be a publisher, it is difficult, if even possible, to shout down the immense mass of information produced. Thus, the best way to reach out is to make consumers themselves do the advertising by sharing information about products with their friends.23 An early well-known example was the way that Hotmail automatically attached the line ‘Get your free email at Hotmail’ to every outgoing message sent by a Hotmail user. The recipient then knew that ‘the sender was a Hotmail user, and that this new free email seemed to work for them’.24 Campaigns for the Google webmail service Gmail and the music streaming service Spotify used the social networks of their customers in that it was only possible to sign up for the service through invitation from a user. The metaphor of the virus builds on the notion that the spreading of the information is similar to the adoption pattern of a virus, with ‘spatial and network locality’, only with a much wider scope and velocity than had been possible in the pre-Internet era. Viruses ‘thrive on weak ties’.25 Viral sharing can be defined as ‘getting the right idea into the right heads at the right time’.26 The features needed for any media content to be truly viral are evocative images and consistency with existing world views in the minds of the audience. In the field of political and social activism, I call this phenomenon viral politics. The use of the term ‘viral’ in this context is not uncontroversial. According to Henry Jenkins, the concept of viral media pictures transmitters of viral messages as passive individuals passing on unchanged pieces of information - involuntary hosts infected by an evil virus. In reality, a core feature of so-called viral sharing is that transmitters are empowered to change the message and fill it with new meanings. And while viruses replicate themselves, communication depends on acts of human will. Instead, Jenkins suggests a new concept, spreadable media, which would basically mean the same phenomenon but with a strong focus on the active role of consumers/citizens.27 The reason I choose to keep viral as a concept is basically that it has been used for describing the phenomenon of my interest in other spheres of
  • 26.
    Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 9 human communicationfor more than a decade. Although I admit that the metaphor does not hold all the way through - Jenkins is right in his critique - I do not find using ‘spreadable politics’ a viable way to create a functioning concept. That would take an even greater effort to explain what the concept contains. Taking into account the weaknesses of the wording, I thus suggest viral politics to mean the rapid sharing of evoking media content in social networks online in the realm of political and social activism. The place of social network sites in relation to other media is complex. On the one hand, the high-modern media structure of the 19th and 20th centuries, characterised by the sharp boundary between consumers and producers of media content and the professionalisation of journalism, seem to give way to an ecological media structure characterised by a blurring of boundaries between producers and consumers and the rise of citizen journalism.28 On the other hand, the monopolistic tendencies of media concentration and cultural homogenisation become more articulated as generic content flourishes in movie theatres, television, radio, newspapers, magazines and bestsellers. A defining characteristic of this ecological media structure is convergence.29 Much of the content passed around in social media sites emanate from traditional media outlets. YouTube started out as a channel for purely user-generated content, but ever since the beginning, users have uploaded large amounts of copyrighted content.30 The reverse is also true: mainstream media try in various ways to reach out to their audience by inviting readers, viewers and listeners to comment, share, upload own media content or rework existing content.31 Thus, it is not correct to describe or define social network sites or social media in general as the opposite of traditional or mainstream media. That is also true in the realm of politics. Although social media sometimes are viewed as a playground for grassroots mobilisation, traditional political actors like political parties and interest groups are using these new communication tools for enhancing the internal organisation, political advertisements, and tapping into new mobilising structures. The effects of sharing political media content on political participation using social media is an under researched field. Previous research has established a strong connection between social capital and political participation; in particular, the link between weak ties and participation. According to Mark S. Granovetter, ‘people rarely act on mass- media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties; otherwise one has no particular reason to think that an advertised product or an organisation should be taken seriously.’32 This relationship has been found in the political field in several empirical studies. Jan Teorell’s 2003 study found that as the number of weak ties increases, the likelihood of participation also increases. Although education is a very strong predictor for engagement in societal affairs, people still have to be recruited. If a person’s
  • 27.
    Social Networks, ViralPolitics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 10 social network is large, the chance that he or she will be asked to participate is higher.33 The importance of the personal dissemination of media content and calls for action is not new. The qualitative difference with social network sites and social media is the efficiency with which information can be spread. Organising weak ties in social network sites allows for an individual to stay connected to brief acquaintances also when moving to another geographical area, thereby creating maintained social capital. This offsets the deterioration of social capital in society as a product of increased mobility.34 Online relationships are provisional, but off-line relationships in an on-line setting are not.35 This affects the size of the network. As the size of social networks increases, the chance for any two people being connected to each other also increases. The Small World Pattern explains the expression ‘It’s a small world’ exclaimed by ‘newly introduced individuals upon finding that they have common acquaintances’.36 Small World networks are composed both of small groups of people dense ties and of larger groups with weaker ties. Important for networks to grow extremely large is the existence of individuals with a wildly disproportionate amount of connections, being able to connect a large number of smaller dense groups with one another: ‘In fact, social networks are not held together by the bulk of people with hundreds of connections but by the few people with tens of thousands.’37 New communication technology enhances the stability of these networks, making it easier to connect to other social networks. The velocity of viral sharing implies that millions of people can be reached through word of mouth in a matter of days. Whereas meeting in person, phone chains, or other older methods of spreading rumours or information, took days and months to pass on media content to a larger group of people, social media reduces this time to a matter of minutes. Spreading a message through your personal network through social media will, by the logics of maintained social capital and the small world pattern, through viral sharing reach a global crowd at short notice (provided that the message is attractive enough to be virally shared, which is an essential part of viral politics.). The social forces behind viral politics are, as stated above, not new. I would like to point this out one more time because it is often assumed that technology is changing human behaviour in revolutionising ways. However, human culture and basic biologic factors tend to change slowly. The reason that viral politics can be seen as a partly new and potentially transforming factor in political life is the increased velocity and scope of the communication. In spreading media content to their personal network, individuals manifest their commitment to their existing beliefs and move closer to political action. They also invest their personal status as an acquaintance -
  • 28.
    Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 11 their ethos- in forwarding a message through their social network. This is probably just as much a strategy of identity management - what kind of person do I want to be in the eyes of my peers and what does this piece of information tell them about me? - as a will of influencing society. I will return to this in the final part of this chapter. By finally reaching into mainstream media, the content will reach people who already does not share that commitment.38 Through the electronic organising of social networks, the ‘personal’ information flow increases and the threshold for participation is lowered. 3. Temporal Elites The era of the Internet - first during the 1.0 wave in the 90s and later during the 2.0 wave in the mid- and late 2000s - has sometimes been seen as heralding a new dawn for inclusive, non-hierarchical politics. In some ways, the increased importance of social media has led to the dilution of the power of traditional political actors, at least when it comes to opinion formation. However, I would like to argue that the dynamics of social media does not merely change existing structures in society: old rules of thumb for who participates - and thus has influence over agenda-setting and political outcomes - still apply. It can be the case, quite contrarily to some popular notions of the age of social media, that networked politics of the kind described in this chapter might actually increase elitism in society as well- connected social networks, political knowledge and technical skills become more even important to build effective campaigns. In this section, I try to provide a preliminary sketch of how a partly novel group of highly skilled people in the network society becomes increasingly more influential as viral politics becomes a political strategy in the everyday life. I call this group of people ‘temporal elites’ to denote their limited influence to certain fields and the highly unpredictable success in exerting influence over policy outcomes and agenda-setting. Viral politics emanates from political entrepreneurs, that most often will be directly affected people of a certain event or phenomenon (the ‘victims’) and/or groups and organisations, both NGOs and political parties devoted to this particular cause (Burma Action Committee, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, United Nations, Oxfam, political parties or politicians). In some cases, they will be individuals acting only on behalf of themselves, but usually being a part of a wider network of people sharing views and notions of political strategy. These individuals spread information and media content by word of mouth to wider groups of people through personal interconnectedness. If successful, the content/information will catch on and spread rapidly through the mechanism of viral politics, influencing the formal political system directly through personal contacts with political
  • 29.
    Social Networks, ViralPolitics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 12 representatives and indirect through the feedback loop provided by mainstream media. The political entrepreneurs of a successful campaign of viral politics form, together with temporary supporters of the cause to be found in interconnected social networks, a temporal elite, having the necessary knowledge, skills and (perhaps above all) the motivation to promote the cause. Sometimes, the concept of elite is put in opposition to the concept of democracy. It can however also be seen as an important part of well- functioning democracy, as in the tradition associated with competitive democracy, where the electorate is seen as fairly passive between elections, choosing between political alternatives depending on track record or promises, thus legitimating political representatives: a small group of political leaders […] with perhaps an intermediate section of more active citizens, who transmit demands and information between the mass and the leadership.39 The political entrepreneurs serving as a backbone of the temporal elite associated with viral politics are a group of people that fit well into this description of the intermediate section of David Miller’s competitive elitist democracy model evident in the quote above. I would argue, though, that to the group of key political entrepreneurs in viral politics should be added a wider group of people, also belonging to the elite in the respect that they help spreading the campaign and provide a bandwagoning force for a successful cause to break into the traditional mass media outlets, but distinguished from the ‘mass’ by their political interest, knowledge and activism. In order to bring this group of people into our understanding of the temporal elites, I would like to point to Robert Putnam’s classical model of political stratification. In the model, based on empirical studies of national elites in various countries in the 1970s, the citizenry is divided into six strata, organised to form a pyramid of power:40 1. Proximate decision makers: incumbents in key official posts. This is normally a very small group of people. 2. Influentials: powerful opinion makers and people to who decision makers look for advice - high-level bureaucrats, interest group leaders. This is also a small group.
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    Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 13 3. Activists:This stratum is made up of the group of citizens who take active part in politics - as members of a political party or on a more private level. This is a larger group of people. 4. Still larger is the stratum of the attentive public, which consists of citizens who follow the political debates as some kind of spectator sports. They rarely do something actively. 5. The big bulk of citizens are the voters who have very limited, if any, political influence. They vote and that is it. 6. Finally, the nonparticipants do not even vote and have no politic power what so ever. The temporal elites would therefore serve to modify the second and third stratas, where the political entrepreneurs, or the core of the temporal elites, fit into Putnam’s group of influentials, while the wider group of activists neatly fit into the group of activists. The major difference posed to this model of political stratification by the concept of temporal elites proposed here is that the political entrepreneurs of the temporal elites contain people who would not normally be counted as influentials. The initiative taker of, for instance, the 2007 Support the Monk’s Protests in Burma campaign, a Canadian exchange student, was very influential in that the campaign gained hundreds of thousands of followers globally and forced governments and corporations to rethink their policies towards Burma/Myanmar, but a Canadian exchange student would not normally be counted to the group of ‘powerful opinion makers’. The activist’s stratum is also challenged by the temporal elites as they are made up by individuals participating in politics in a plethora of ways: organised, unorganised, postorganised. According to Karl Deutsch’s concept of the ‘Opinion Cascade’, the flow of information and persuasion between these political strata flow from the top down: emanating in the political and socioeconomic elite, transmitted by the mass media and opinion leaders to the mass public.41 Could it be the case that the stability of the downward flow of information might be distorted by the rise of digital media, rising levels of education, post-materialist values, and that ‘opinion leaders’ should be constructed in a more inclusive way, and also that influence might flow upstream as well as downstream? The concept of temporal elites would point in that direction. This new concept of elites does not mean that classic elites are not important; on the contrary. Financial and political elites are becoming increasingly powerful in an era of multilevel governance, ruling through
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    Social Networks, ViralPolitics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 14 networks, hiding behind markets, making power invisible where there used to be a throne, although it is also true that power elites are not as stable as before.42 The temporal elites might instead be seen as a potential counter- force, or at least complementing traditional elites in democracy. The brave new world of viral politics, networked individualism, and general social media carnivale, might not be a quick-fix for the problem with the unequal power distribution in representative democracies, but it is also not a reason to prophesy doom for all mankind: new developments should be compared to the status quo, not to an unattainable democratic ideal of total inclusivity. It is, however, also important to point out that, for those who have an ideal cherishing democratic equality, the potentially disproportional representation of a young, well-educated generation of native born citizens might widen the political elite in society, but also put more influence firmly in the hands of the well-off. Having said that, studies of political participation conducted in the past five decades have consistently shown that well-educated people with a high socio-economic status are more likely to participate than others. Technology alone will not offset this structure. I would like to finish this section by elaborating on how the flexibility of Internet-mediated communication might lead to more people being able to join the ranks of ‘activists’. An often-mentioned sociological phenomenon in the field of Internet sociology is the power law distribution. When analysing, for example, the contributions to a Wikipedia page, one of the most characteristic features is the huge difference between contributors in the number of contributions made and the size of each individual contribution. Some individuals contribute substantially more than others, and the ‘normal’ contribution is typically very small in size (compare with the discussion above on small world networks). There is no point in analysing average contributions, because the number and size of contributions among contributors is not normally distributed. Instead, the nth position has 1/nth of the first person’s rank.43 The same is true for civic engagement in the setting of the post- organisational viral politics of social networks. A few individuals (political entrepreneurs) invest a very large amount of time in a political or social cause. These individuals constitute the inner core of the temporal elite associated with the cause in question. As they spread information about the cause in their social networks, some people will feel encouraged to invest an equal amount of time and join a temporal elite, some people will invest less, and most people will do little or nothing. The possibility of flexible engagement makes it attractive to more people to engage, as they can easily adapt the work effort put down to their personal priorities.44 The total sum of engagement may be equal or even higher than before, despite decreasing levels of membership in formal organisations
  • 32.
    Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 15 devoted tosocial and political causes. The emergence of temporal elites and viral politics might in this way save democracy, although what will be saved is not the egalitarian ideal model of democracy, but the elitist realist model we actually live in. 4. Identity Management and Annoyed Participation In a 2008 study, a small number of Swedish Facebook users were interviewed, using virtual focus groups, about their attitudes towards political content and mobilisation on the social networking site.45 The participants were divided into two groups, one of which consisted of individuals who are active or have recently been active members of formal political organisations, while the other group consisted of individuals not having a formal political engagement. I will cite a few of the results here in order to put some light on how complicated motives and actions of participants in viral politics are, and how further research must take that into account. There were no major differences between the answers from the politically active participants and the non-active participants concerning the attitudes to political mobilisation in Facebook, except for the fact that several politically active participants reported that they have incorporated Facebook among other forms of communication in their formal political engagement. The participants in the focus groups had generally a sceptical view towards political campaigns in Facebook. Many of them maintained the notion that participating in political campaigns online in various forms filled mainly two functions: building your public or semi-public identity by expressing political views and concerns; and being an excuse not for taking a more active part in a campaign. Off-line activity was viewed in general as being more important or real: To me, most Facebook causes seem utterly pointless as political/opinion forming tools. My impression is that they function more like markers for a group or an attitude that the user wants to identify with. Quite simply they become statements that you pose with on your Facebook page. It’s really the same function as the summary of facts on the user profile, although they give a more active and engaged impression. (Participant)
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    Social Networks, ViralPolitics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 16 The respondents also complained about the large number of requests for support from political campaigns, among an enormous number of other types of requests and invitations, leading to Facebook fatigue and a general reluctance toward any type of action. However, most participants reported that they had actually taken part in off-line activities as a direct result of mobilisation using Facebook. They also reported, without exceptions, that they were indeed members of various groups on Facebook supporting political and social causes. One participant described this seemingly paradoxical behaviour as ‘annoyed participation’.46 It was also clear, interestingly enough considering the importance of recruitment through social networks traditionally found in network studies and political participation studies, that who sent you a request to participate was just as important for whether one of the participants would join a cause or campaign as the subject itself. This might be an indicator for people engaging in viral politics might not be aware of their own importance for a successful campaign and that empirical evaluation of the proposed model must be aware of this. 5. Conclusions This chapter has tried to establish two new concepts in the academic debate over the development of political participation in the light of changing uses of computer-mediated communication. Viral politics, with connections to viral marketing and network theory, is used to describe a way of dispersing information through social networks, evident in later years and possibly an important ingredient in political participation in an era of networked individualism. Temporal elites, with connections to classic elite theory and to elitist democratic theory, denotes the people behind viral politics: a group of individuals, well-connected, well-educated and motivated to take an active part in politics, but not necessarily through joining political parties or even interest groups. It is my hope that these concepts might be found useful as the study of viral politics and of political participation in social media takes a much-needed empirical turn, informed by developing political theory. Notes 1 These propositions are made by a score of democratic theorists. Pippa Norris lists Rousseau, James Madison, J. S. Mill, Robert Dahl, Benjamin Barber, David Held and John Dryzak in P Norris, Democratic Phoenix. Reinventing Political Activism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 5. 2 D Held, Models of Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 125-157.
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    Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 17 3 P Bourdieu,‘The Forms of Capital’, in Education: Culture, Economy and Society, A H Halsey, H Lauder, P Brown & A Stuart Wells (eds), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, pp. 46-58. 4 R Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000. 5 R J Dalton, ‘Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation’, Political Studies, vol. 56, 2008, pp. 76-98; Norris. See also B O’Neill, ‘Indifferent or Just Different? The Political and Civic Engagement of Young People in Canada.’ Canadian Policy Research Networks Research Report, 2007. 6 R Inglehart, The Silent Revolution. Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1977, esp. pp. 262-321. 7 M Micheletti, Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2003. 8 G Stoker, ‘Governance as Theory: Five Propositions’, International Social Science Journal, vol. 50(155), 1998, pp. 17-28. 9 M Cantijoch, L Jorba, and Gallego, A, ‘Exposure to Political Information in New and Old Media: which Impact on Political Participation?’ Paper presented for delivery at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 28-21, 2008, viewed on 10 August 2008, <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/8/0/1/0/p 280108_index.html>. 10 see C Neumayer & C Raffl and A Maj & M Derda-Nowakowski in this volume. 11 M Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge (MA, USA), 1996. 12 B Wellman, A Q Haase, J Witte and K Hampton, ‘Does the Internet Increase, Decrease or Supplement Social Capital? Social Networks, Participation, and Community Comitment’, American Behavioral Scientist vol. 45(3), 2001 pp. 437-456. See also J Boase, J B Horrigan, B Wellman, and L Rainie, ‘The Strength of Internet Ties’, Pew Internet and American Life Project, viewed on 10 August 2009, <http://www.pewinternet. org/pdfs/PIP_Internet_ties.pdf>. 13 Cantijoch et al., p. 8; K Sweetser and K L Lee, ‘Stealth Soapboxes: Political Information Efficacy, Cynicism and Uses of Celebrity Weblogs among Readers’, New Media & Society, vol. 10(1), 2008, pp. 67-90. 14 Y Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007, esp. pp. 176-272.
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    Social Networks, ViralPolitics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 18 15 M Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007. 16 M Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy, Princeton University Press, Prinecton, 2008. 17 On the invisibleness of established technologies, see D Beer & R Burrows, ‘Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations’, Sociological Research Online, vol. 12(5), 2007, viewed on 12 August 2009, <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/5/17.html>. For an early influential example of a study linking the mere existence of the Internet to democratisation, see C Kedzie, ‘Democracy and Network Connectivity’, Proceedings of the INET’95 International Networking Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1995, viewed on 12 August 2009, <http://www.isoc.org/ inet95/proceedings/PAPER/134/html/paper.html>. 18 R Putnam, The Comparative Study of Political Elites, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1976, p. 3; L Lundqvist, Det vetenskapliga studiet av politik, Studentlitteratur, Lund, 1992, pp. 60-63. 19 The expression Web 2.0 is, of course, controversial and disputed. For one summary discussion, see Beer & Burrows. 20 D Boyd and N B Ellison, ‘Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 13(1), 2007. 21 The history of the mash-up is described in S Howard-Spink, ‘Grey Tuesday, Online Cultural Activism and the Mash-up of Music and Politics’, First Monday, Special Issue # 1: Music and the Internet, 2005-07-04, viewed on 17 August 2009, <http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index. php/fm/article/viewArticle/1460/1375#h5>. 22 Two early magazine articles made use of the term: J Rayport, ‘The Virus of Marketing’, Fast Company, Issue 6/December 1996, viewed on 17 August 2009, <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/virus.html>; S Jurvetson and J Draper, ‘Viral Marketing’, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, 1997-01-01, viewed on 17 August 2009, 2, <http://www.dfj.com/news/article_26.shtml>. 23 J Leskovec, L Adamic, and B Huberman, ‘The Dynamics of Viral Marketing’. ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 1(1), Article 5, May 2007, p. 2. viewed on 18 August 2009, <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1232722. 1232727>. 24 Jurvetson and Draper, p. 1. 25 ibid; Rayport, p. 3. 26 H Jenkins, Convergence. Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, New York, 2006. pp. 206-7.
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    Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 19 27 H Jenkins,‘If it Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead’ Confessions of an Aca/Fan, 2009-02-16, viewed on 26 August 2009, <http://henryjenkins.org /2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html>. 28 R Silverstone, Media and Morality. On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 90. 29 H Jenkins, ‘The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence’, International Journal of Culture Studies, vol. 7(1), 2004, pp. 33-43. 30 A Webb, ‘Interactive TV: Viewing Rights’, New Media Age, 2007-03-18, p. 23. 31 H Jenkins, Convergence. 32 M Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 78(6), 1973, p. 1374. 33 J Teorell, ‘Linking Social Capital to Political Participation: Voluntary Associations and Networks of Recruitment in Sweden’, Scandinavian Political Studies, vol. 26(1), 2003. 34 N B Ellison, C Steinfeld and C Lampe, ‘The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Network Sites’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 12(4), 2007. 35 R Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 117. 36 Granovetter, p. 1368. 37 C Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Penguin Press, New York, 2008, p. 217. 38 A Chadwick, Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communications Technology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, p. 27. 39 D Miller, ‘The Competitive Model of Democracy’ in Democratic Theory and Practice, G Duncan (ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p. 134. 40 R Putnam, The Comparative Study of Political Elites, pp. 8-15. 41 ibid., p. 13. 42 U Bjereld and M Demker, ‘The Power of Knowledge and New Political Cleavages in a Globalized World’, International Review of Sociology, vol. 16(3), 2006, p. 501. 43 C Shirky, pp. 122-130. 44 M Joyce, ‘Civic Engagement and the Internet: Online Volunteers’, Internet and Democracy Blog, 2007-11-18, viewed on 1 March 2009, <http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ idblog/ 2007/11/18/civic-engagement-and-the- internet-online-volunteers/>. 45 N Gustafsson and M Wahlström, ‘Virtual Mobilisation? Linking On-line and Off-line Political Participation among Swedish Facebook Users: Courtesy and Irritation’, paper presented to the XV NOPSA Conference,
  • 37.
    Social Networks, ViralPolitics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 20 Tromsö, Norway, 5-7 August, 2008. This study will be followed up by a more extensive round of focus group interviews in late 2009. 46 ibid., p. 12. Bibliography Bjereld, U. and M. Demker, ‘The Power of Knowledge and New Political Cleavages in a Globalized World’. International Review of Sociology vol. 16 (3), pp. 499-515. Beer, D. and R. Burrows, ‘Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations’, Sociological Research Online, vol. 12(5), 2007, viewed on 12 August 2009, <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/5/17.html>. Benkler, Y., The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale Univerity Press, New Haven, 2007. Boase, J., Horrigan, J. B., Wellman B., and L. Rainie, ‘The Strength of Internet Ties’, Pew Internet and American Life Project, viewed on 10 August 2009, <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Internet_ties.pdf>. Bourdieu, P., ‘The Forms of Capital’, in Education: Culture, Economy and Society, A. H. Halsey, H. Lauder, P. Brown & A .Stuart Wells (eds), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997. Boyd, D. and N. B. Ellison, ‘Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship’. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 13(1), 2007, article 1 (unpaginated). Castells, M., The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge (MA, USA), 1996. Chadwick, A., Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communications Technology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006. Dalton, R. J., ‘Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation’. Political Studies, vol. 56, 2008, pp. 76-98.
  • 38.
    Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 21 Ellison, N.B., Steinfield, C. and C. Lampe, ‘The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Network Sites’. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 12(4), 2007, article 1 (unpaginated). Granovetter, M. S., ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 78 (6), 1973, pp. 1360-1380. Gustafsson, N. and M. Wahlström, ‘Virtual Mobilisation?: Linking On-line and Off-line Political Participation among Swedish Facebook Users: Courtesy and Irritation’. Paper presented to the XV NOPSA Conference, Tromsö, Norway, 5-9 August 2008. Available via the author’s website: <www.svet.lu.se?ngu>. Held, D., Models of Democracy. 3rd edition. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006. Hindman, M., The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008. Howard-Spink, S., ‘Grey Tuesday: Online Cultural Activism and the Mash- up of Music and Politics’. First Monday, Special Issue # 1: Music and the Internet, 2005-07-04, viewed on 17 August 2009, <http://firstmonday. org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1460/1375#h5>. Inglehart, R., The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1977. Jenkins, H., ‘The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence’. International Journal of Culture Studies, vol. 7(1), 2004, pp. 33-43. _______ , Convergence: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, New York, 2006. _______ , ‘If it Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead’, in Confessions of an Aca/Fan , 2009- 02-16, viewed on 26 August 2009. <http://henryjenkins.org/2009/02 if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html>. Joyce, M., ‘Civic Engagement and the Internet: Online Volunteers’. Internet and Democracy Blog, 2007-11-18, viewed on 1 March 2009,<http://blogs .law.harvard.edu/idblog/2007/1118/civic-engagement-and-the-internetonline- volunteers>.
  • 39.
    Social Networks, ViralPolitics and Identity Management ______________________________________________________________ 22 Jurvetson, S. and J. Draper, ‘Viral Marketing’, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, 1997-01-01, viewed on 2 December 2009, <http://www.dfj.com/news/ article_26.shtml>. Kedzie, C., ‘Democracy and Network Connectivity’, in Proceedings of the INET’95 International Networking Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1995, viewed on 12 August 2009, <http://www.isoc.org/inet95/proceedings /PAPER/134/html/paper.html>. Leskovec, J., Adamic, J., and B. Huberman, ‘The Dynamics of Viral Marketing’. ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 1(1), Article 5, May 2007, 39 pages, viewed on 18 August 2009, <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/ 1232722.1232727>. Lundquist, L., Det vetenskapliga studiet av politik. Studentlitteratur, Lund, 1992. Maj, A. & M. Derda-Nowakowski, ‘Anthopology of Accessibility. The Perceptual Problem of Human Computer Interaction’ in this volume. Micheletti. M., Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2003. Miller, D., ‘The Competitive Model of Democracy’ in Democratic Theory and Practice. D. Graeme (ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983. Neumayer, C., & Raffl, C. ‘Politics and Social Software: Recommendations for Inclusive ICTs’ in this volume. Norris, P., Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. O’Neill, B., ‘Indifferent or Just Different?: The Political and Civic Engagement of Young People in Canada.’ Canadian Policy Research Networks Research Report, 2007. Prior, M., Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007.
  • 40.
    Nils Gustafsson ______________________________________________________________ 23 Putnam, R.,Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000. _______ , The Comparative Study of Political Elites. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1976. Rayport, R., ‘The Virus of Marketing’. Fast Company, Issue 6/December 1996, viewed on 17 August 2009, <http://www.fastcompany.com/ magazine/06/virus.html>. Shirky, C., Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Press, New York, 2008. Silverstone, R., Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007. Stoker, G., ‘Governance as Theory: Five Propositions’. International Social Science Journal, vol. 50(155), 1998, pp. 17-28. Sweetser, K. and K. L. Lee, ‘Stealth Soapboxes: Political Information Efficacy, Cynicism and Uses of Celebrity Weblogs among Readers’. New Media & Society, vol. 10(1), 2008, pp. 67-90. Teorell, J., ‘Linking Social Capital to Political Participation: Voluntary Associations and Networks of Recruitment in Sweden’. Scandinavian Political Studies vol. 26 (1), 2003, pp. 49-66. Webb, A., ‘Interactive TV: Viewing Rights’, New Media Age, 2007-03-08, p. 23. Wellman, B., Haase, A. Q., Witte, J. and K. Hampton, ‘Does the Internet Increase, Decrease or Supplement Social Capital?: Social Networks, Participation, and Community Comitment’. American Behavioral Scientist vol. 45(3), 2001, pp. 437-456. Nils Gustafsson is a Ph. D. Candidate at the Department of Political Science, Lund University. His dissertation project, Viral Politics (working title), is a study in the effects of social media on political participation.
  • 41.
    Anthropology of Accessibility:Further Reflections on the Perceptual Problems of Human-Computer Interactions Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski Abstract One of the most important problems which appeared in the computer mediated civilisation is the usability of content for people with limited abilities of perception and interaction. Digital communication has shown all inconveniences of hitherto prevailing ‘interfaces to knowledge’ and of communication devices in the range of their usability and accessibility. Traditional ergonomics ensured comfort of using the devices mainly to users without disabilities. The Net revealed the existence of the vast global community of disabled people who wants to come out of the ghetto of their own dysfunctions and participate in other communities. The Internet is often the only chance to cross the barriers of this specific exclusion. The Web design should take into account the aspect of various disabilities of the users. There exist both formal and informal instructions of accessible design. In some milieu of designers of interfaces and internet applications and content managers publishing of content and materials which are accessible is even a sign of ‘good manners’. Therefore, there is a grassroots discourse of accessibility, which is conditioned socially. It is often contradictory to the discourse of global corporations, embodying their own non-standardised solutions. The struggle of the ‘able-bodied’ community for the accessibility of the content for people with dysfunctions of perception is a new form of global thinking about creation and maintenance of communication standards. It is often connected with the generation of open access to the content referring to Creative Commons licenses and technologies of Open Source. The chapter analyses some procedures of improving the effectiveness of communication and interaction with computer in the process of web designing. It shows some examples of community initiatives connected with accessibility and everyday problems of disabled people. Ideologists and designers of usability and accessibility within the range of human-computer interaction are precursors of this new way of thinking about the needs of online communities which are aiming at the ‘noble simplicity’ enabling to encode complicated symbolic content - simplexity. Usability understood in this way exceeds the limitations of political correctness with its compulsory necessity of double coding and decoding of meanings.
  • 42.
    Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 26 KeyWords: Accessibility, Usability, Assistive Technologies, Design, Simplexity, Human-Computer Interactions, Perception Disabilities, User- friendly Interface, Cultural Competencies. ***** 1. Introduction Ideologists and designers of usability and accessibility within the range of human-computer interaction are precursors of the new way of thinking about the needs of online communities which are aiming at the ‘noble simplicity’ enabling to encode complicated symbolic content - simplexity. Usability understood in this way exceeds the limitations of political correctness with its compulsory necessity of double coding and decoding of meanings. Such anthropological situation may become a natural bridge between the world of those who can see and those who are blind or other communities with limited access to the content. The reflection on the roles of mechanisms of social content-generation and visualisations of communication obstacles, both on-line and off-line, is necessary. There are various artistic and scientific projects, which resulted in real changes of architectural solutions or development of their accessibility. The change in accessibility in symbolic and mediated communication is also a chance for revolution in thinking about the physical space. Thus, the Net impacts not only the architecture of information but also the architecture in traditional meaning. This way of thinking about the Network, communities and the new ergonomics of communication is therefore a kind of introduction to the reflection on new society lacking communication obstacles and on further evolution of humans connected to the computer, active in social terms due to technological interfaces and independent of limitations stemming from biology or traditionally understood dysfunctions. In both perceiving and visually representing the natural organisation of objects, we are supported by the mind’s powerful ability to detect and form patterns. With matters of the visual mind, the school of Gestalt psychology is particularly relevant. Gestalt psychologists believe that there are a variety of mechanisms inside the brain that lend to pattern-forming. […] Humans are organisation animals. We can’t help but to group and categorise what we see. […] The principles of Gestalt to seek the most appropriate conceptual ‘fit’ are important not only for survival, but lie at the very heart of the discipline of design.1
  • 43.
    Anna Maj andMichal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 27 John Maeda, a new media artist, researcher and designer develops his narration about simplicity and design telling the story of development of iPod menu - its three phases: the first model of the interface (a jog dial with four buttons located circularly around), its complication into four buttons and a jog dial (separated) and simplification (integrated into one scroll dial). The last step - simplification led to its limits - provoked both the commercial success and marked new trends of interface design. It should be noticed here that this kind of simplicity contribute to economise maximally the activities of the user. Most often such a design is favourable for a contemporary user. However, this kind of usability is not so simple to use. Maeda shows the example of good quality design failure on the level of the user inability to use the device. He recalls his brother-in-law’s lack of competencies in using the newest iPod just after getting it as a Christmas present. This situation can be regarded as a result of design, which demands from the user the knowledge of the previous interfaces and the ability to manipulate them. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is in fact a kind of cultural competence. Being one of the most important abilities in contemporary information society, paradoxically it is not taught anywhere; a user needs to acquire the knowledge by himself. There are no ideal interfaces - as we still need to ‘learn machines’ - but the good ones are stemming from the specific patterns of culture. Machines are learning these paradigms but also teach them to us, becoming the interpreters of humanity. This is the part of cyborgisation of culture, described as early as in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan in his classical idea of the extensions of man.2 2. Social Networks and their Users The fundamental problem arising in cyberculture in the context of human and machine interactions was symbolically captured by an anthropologist, Michael Wesch, in the title of his popular YouTube film: The Machine is Us/ing Us.3 Therefore, the question of designing interfaces and devices regarding the users’ needs and abilities is not marginal. The report of Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that the presence of older generations in Internet is lower than the young (over half of Internet users is between 18 and 44 years old) - but within 10 years (with ageing boomers generation) the situation may change. The biggest increase in Internet use since 2005 can be seen in the 70-75 year-old age group. While just over one-fourth (26%) of 70-75 year olds were online in 2005, 45% of that age group is currently online. […] Instant messaging, social networking and blogging have gained ground as communications tools, but email remains the most popular
  • 44.
    Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 28 onlineactivity, particularly among older Internet users. Fully 74% of Internet users age 64 and older send and receive email, making email the most popular online activity for this age group.4 The problem of cultural competencies in human-computer interactions is central to contemporary design, which needs to be the anthropology as well. Sometimes users’ activity crosses the imagination of the designer. That was the case of Nasza-klasa.pl [Our-Class.pl] - Polish social networking website similar to Classmates - where a person who wanted to become a new user had to ask directly the website designers to broaden the age categories for potential users. The given categories were prepared for the users aged up to 90, whereas the asking person was 95 years old5 . The two young designers did not predict in their economy of thinking about human-computer interaction that also this age group can perform such an activity as social networking. This situation lets us suggest that web design is mainly directed to young people, which seems to be logical regarding the Pew Internet research quoted above but possibly is not a good rule for the next decade. Thus, web design should develop in the direction of diversification of the potential users. There are of course such interfaces as smart homes, which support the users, especially aged and with disabilities, but these are not only pure interfaces but also habitats. HCI design is de facto the problem of technological imagination concerning target groups. It depends on multiple functionalities built in the interface. The idea of usability of interfaces is at the moment one of the most significant matters within the ideology of ‘proper design’. Functionalities of interfaces and the necessity of usability are the ideas connected with anthropological problems of Web 2.0 design. In fact, the rules of HCI are a kind of web design savoir-vivre and cultural competencies. Designers in a form of ritualised competition watch each other in order to maintain the standards of usability and develop more user-friendly interfaces. From the anthropological perspective, we can see in this process both the patterns of culture drifting into the direction of political correctness and ‘the battle for standards’. One of the main assumptions of design 2.0 is separation of content, appearance and user’s behaviour. This separation makes websites more accessible to users and more visible for bots of search engines. These are issues located between creative thinking and social practices connected with technology standards. It is a vast territory for quality research on humans in cyberspace.
  • 45.
    Anna Maj andMichal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 29 3. Knowledge Transfer and Interface Design According to the tradition of technological determinism a state of civilisation depends on a predominant medium. From the perspective of culture it is important how data transmission is performed. However, paradigms of knowledge transfer are far more important. From this point of view even such a traditional form of organising data as a book is a kind of interface. This interface has produced certain forms of perception connected with the educational system and knowledge processing. It resulted in the appearance of specific cultural modes of thinking, restructured perceptual and cognitive processes. Simultaneously, the art of typesetting and theory of book design was developed. From the times of Gutenberg and his battle for perfect typesetting, which ruined him, the question of balance between the form and the meaning of the text has been a main issue in typographers’ efforts. However, more than 500 years of typographic tradition is also the history of inaccessibility for blind users. The real change in the development of book interface came with modernism. The idea of readability and usability prevailed in 20th century discourse on book design. But modernism did not raise the discussion to the aspect of accessibility of a book as an interface. Inaccessibility is a general problem connected with analogue interfaces, which usually enable only one-channel communication whereas digital ones often include built-in multi-channel possibilities of perception. In case of analogue interfaces it was necessary to construct alternative means of perception (i.a. visual, voice and tactile). Digital channels have potential interoperability, which means using the same data in different ways connected with a type of perception. Theory of accessibility is thus connected with digital media. Another issue is usability as a standard of communication. It is neither readability nor accessibility. Usability was actually born in Bauhaus as a mental concept for modernist humankind. It shifted from habitat architecture to architecture of information but it still means functionality of design. We can trace this idea in Marcel Breuer’s concept of the ideal of a chair, when he was saying: ‘In the end we will sit on resilient columns of air’6 . This metaphor reveals designer’s consciousness of the body of the user of a piece of furniture. It also suggests the need to reduce an interface to those features that are necessary for its functionality, arguing with the idea that form is the main problem of design. The comfort understood as user’s experience becomes the leading interest of a designer. As we know, an ideal chair is the one that our bodies wouldn’t feel at all, the one that is invisible, untouchable and non-existing. The important task for a designer is approaching to such an ideal in the process of designing. New media art searches for new opportunities to diagnose abilities of human body and mind in the context of machines. This basic assumption leads to the conclusion that a technology user is also a participant and this is
  • 46.
    Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 30 anew perceptual paradigm. Creative process becomes an interaction design area where the needs of various social groups are transformed into artistic objects. The prehistory of HCI can be traced back not only in engineering but also in artistic works of Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau and others. The good example here is David Rokeby’s work, Very Nervous System, which was described as adding new meaning to the term ‘interactivity’. The active ingredient of the work is its interface. The interface is unusual because it is invisible and very diffuse, occupying a large volume of space, whereas most interfaces are focused and definite. Though diffuse, the interface is vital and strongly textured through time and space. The interface becomes a zone of experience, of multi-dimensional encounter. The language of encounter is initially unclear, but evolves as one explores and experiences. The installation is a complex but quick feedback loop. The feedback is not simply ‘negative’ or ‘positive’, inhibitory or reinforcing; the loop is subject to constant transformation as the elements, human and computer, change in response to each other. The two interpenetrate, until the notion of control is lost and the relationship becomes encounter and involvement. […] The installation could be described as a sort of instrument that you play with your body but that implies a level of control, which I am not particularly interested in. I am interested in creating a complex and resonant relationship between the interactor and the system.7 Very Nervous System is the interactive circuit, which may be seen as a beyond-language conversation of human and computer. It is very similar to contemporary systems, which enable controlling computer with the eye movement or body gestures without VR equipment. Various inventions concerning the use of brain waves to control interfaces, even 3D virtual environment of Second Life, have been developed for several years in multiple research centres (e.g. Keio University).8 Such technologies can serve Internet users with movement disabilities helping them to control computer and interact with other Internet users. But what is also important is the social networking of people with disabilities. These are two main aspects of accessibility. They concern different communication obstacles - the first refers to the use of technology, the second to social exclusion.
  • 47.
    Anna Maj andMichal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 31 4. Selected Examples of User-oriented Design It is worth to mention here several selected examples of user- oriented design which designate positive directions. Projects described below are both of artistic and scientific nature; some are experiments in mediated social interaction, some - explore the possibilities of new assistive technologies and propose new ways of inclusion of users with various disabilities (physical, sensory and cognitive). Antoni Abad, a Spanish artist, founded Zexe.net website. It is an artistic project connecting various groups of marginalised people from different cities, e.g. Gypsies, prostitutes, taxi drivers, etc. One part of the website, called *Canal Accessible, serves people with movement disabilities who create their own wikimap of Barcelona where they mark all places in the city space which are not accessible for people on wheel chairs9 . The users are documenting their work with photographs taken with mobile phone cameras. In fact, this is not only the common map of physical obstacles in their daily life, but also a communication canal for discussions on various themes and a kind of exhibition area showing their problems to other Internet users. This work can be defined as a space for creating the discourse of marginalised groups. Such wikimap, being the user-generated content service, is not only the interface of HCI, but also of social symbolic relations helping to redefine the meaning of the real space. WinkBall is a videochat system allowing users to communicate in a most natural way, using facial expressions, natural language and video recording or video streaming. The target user is described as a user of all ages - which means that system is user-friendly, easy to operate and encouraging also for older persons to use it. What is more important, WinkBall is actually a tool designed for deaf users, allowing them social networking. This system was developed as cooperation project of Goldsmiths University in London by Assistive Technologies Group at IT Department, Deaf@x and WinkBall. WinkBall allows deaf users to create signed videos, signed blogs and signed forums, which means that it allows for a full social networking activity, with no need of simplification of facial expression and signed language to symbols or alphabet. James Ohene-Djan, leading designer, researcher and founder of WinkBall, concludes that the main aim was to create the situation, when ‘people within deaf community can communicate with each other online, using their native languages’10 . The interface is very easy. It also has push to talk function, which means that during a conversation the person who is signing is automatically detected as a speaker and shown on the screen without interrupting the conversation. This allows users to follow the conversation naturally, without a need to stop it, and without misunderstandings, which could be provoked by the fact that interactors do not hear each other.
  • 48.
    Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 32 Theinteresting aspect of interaction via WinkBall appeared in the phase of introducing the tool to potential users at schools for deaf children. Teachers and students realised that video chat increased their abilities in facial self-expression and in signing and thus expanded their possibilities of communicative interaction with other people. This is an interesting situation when mediated communication teaches people to understand each other better in situations of interpersonal not-mediated communication. Thus, a computer becomes a mirror, enabling people to talk with each other. User- oriented design in this case results in a paradoxical situation, which was not predicted by a designer. A user, being the first subject and the cause of a tool design, starts to find himself/herself in this tool. The design is such a perfect image of the user that he or she starts to learn from this mirror how to communicate with other persons similar to him/her. Design is thus a reflection of the user. On the other hand, the computer - which is here only a medium, is also a basic tool for social communication, and the possibility to communicate via WinkBall is only one of its multiple functionalities. All this means that a communicative situation being the embodiment of Narcissus story, is at the same time paradoxically opposite to what Marshall McLuhan said about it: For if Narcissus is numbed by his self-amputated image, there is a very good reason for the numbness. There is a close parallel of response between the patterns of physical and psychic trauma or shock (...) Any invention of technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios of new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.11 On the contrary, via WinkBall a user does not experience the self-amputation of the body. He/she starts to learn his/her body from the beginning. He learns his face and gestures in the process of confrontation with computer. This opposition may be a result of the fact that computer-mediated interaction is actually social, and computer itself forwards us to the others. But McLuhan is not wrong about the electronic media - his assumptions about media as ‘the extensions of man’ has just been proved by recent neurophysiologist research conducted by Erica Michael and Marcel Just from Carnegie Mellon University. Researchers have scanned brains while using various media. The results are astonishingly in accordance with McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ - in example, listening and reading of the same text cause completely different mental reactions and memory effects.12
  • 49.
    Anna Maj andMichal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 33 5. Selected Examples of Assistive Technologies, Systems and Devices HCI is connected strongly with researches on the perceptual apparatus and cognitive process. It results in the emergence of completely new ideas concerning possible ways of perceiving. New inventions and interfaces of totally new types have been created for people with sight or hearing impairment. Some of such interfaces are based on the idea of the replacement of senses. The vOICe is Peter Meijer’s project stemming from the concept of ‘seeing with ears’. Device consists of a camera mounted in spectacles, connected with headphones and completed by the software processing the optical signals and changing them into the soundscape. It means that the process of seeing is exchanged for hearing. The video image is analysed by the device as the stream of visual data and transformed into a stream of audial data. The vOICe recognises obstacles located close to the user and warns him by emitting sound representation of objects. This is the process of scanning space and creating a soundscape. The volume represents the brightness of objects with continuous monitoring of the close environment13 . It should be noticed that this process is highly abstract and does not let the user operate the device in an intuitive way. It demands at least three months of specialised training and there is no evidence that the results will lead to full success in every case. Technically, The vOICe sensory substitution and synthetic vision approach provides access to any visual information through an auditory display. A theoretical possibility is that it can not only be used for practical purposes in various visual tasks, but that it may - through education and extensive immersive use with conscious and subconscious visual processing - also lead to vivid and truly visual sensations, a ‘visual awakening’, by exploiting the neural plasticity of the human brain. However, very little is known about the prospects, and learning to see requires much effort on behalf of the blind user, possibly comparable to mastering a foreign language, and without guarantees for worthwhile results.14 The perceptual apparatus needs to be prepared and taught to understand the stream of audial data but the problem lies in the physical properties of audio channel perceived by humans which has low information capacity in comparison to visual channel. This kind of sensorial substitution can be seen
  • 50.
    Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 34 asa process of translation of the visual in order to build alternative experience for the blind users. The necessity of this kind of translation opens new demands for interface design and engineering. The process of design is therefore closely interconnected with the quickly developing state-of-art in neurophysiology, psychology and electronics. HCI has to turn towards both anthropology and electronics. Whereas anthropology analyses patterns of culture, electronics aims at constructing databases of the patterns of perception. Assistive technologies are created on the crossing of the patterns of perception embedded in machines and patterns of cultures embedded in human cognition. The vOICe requires constructing databases of 3D objects with all possible perspectives from the most probable points of view of a potential user. This modelling includes the ‘use cases’ which depict scenario of users’ communication activities with total surrounding. In this way, location and detection mean also cognition and interpretation of environment. It is a new dimension of accessibility of the world to the blind. This is a new type of communication situations, which is only possible with the mediation of technology. The problem of ‘the extensions of man’ is also concerned today with new senses that have never been discussed earlier in the context of technology. The mediation between environment and body often shifts to the body itself. Runner Oscar Pistorius is an example of the analogue cyborgisation of human being and extended possibilities of the body. His case provoked a discussion on the subject of human body extensions and their influence on sport results. Today, assistive technologies and prosthetics come to the point where disabled body equipped with prosthesis gains better results than abled-body. But prostheses are the solution only to the problem of the lack of certain part of body: an arm, a hand or a leg, they can not solve the problem of the lack of a certain sense: sight or hearing. On the other hand, assistive technologies are focused first of all on developing ‘prostheses’ of senses by sensorial substitution. However, AT design may also mean creating totally new paths for sensing the environment via media. This is the case of Cabboots, a project developed by Martin Frey from Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. The device consists of shoes whose soles are equipped with infrared sensors and electromechanical elements changing the angulations of the shoe while using it. Cabboots create an intuitive interface to the environment on the level of mediated touch of the ground (a certain path that can be programmed). The change in surface (real or simulated) is represented as a change of angulation of the shoe which causes a natural effect of changing the angulation of the foot (which means that a user is turning).
  • 51.
    Anna Maj andMichal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 35 The device is therefore using the sense of touch, the sense of balance and it is also extending the idea of a shoe as an extension of our perception. But in this case a shoe is not a kind of a barrier, protecting a foot from the environment. In Cabboots a shoe is also a connector to the environment, it is a tool of interaction, a tool of communication with the path, a tool for seeing. It is because of the infrared sensor that is actually a kind of eye. On the other hand Cabboots animate our tactility, and thanks to that the whole body becomes a sensible sensor, and the user becomes a sensitive self. The design of this device is intuitive, and thus it can be used both by people with memory problems (in Alzheimer disease) or by people with vision impairment. The prototypes of the device become more and more mobile and functional. They let users program the device to remember a specific track, i.e. a route back home. Cabboots are therefore paradoxically both the metaphor of ‘seven mile shoes’ and let the user quite safely ‘lose his head’ as they are leading him to the programmed location. They see and they remember - so the users do not have to do it by themselves. This device raises the question of intelligent objects and the limits of their influence on future life of people. Shoes are directly controlling movements of the user. Thus using Cabboots means being controlled by one’s own shoes. The question is what would happen if such smart devices are managed by a wearable personal computer connected to the Internet and opened for hacking. But the fact that objects are gaining intelligence does not necessarily mean that people have to lose it. However, it is clear that analogue high-end prostheses (like Pistorius’ ones) are fully controlled by the user and digital ones (like Cabboots) - are not. Regarding the aspect of Cabboots design, there are several additional remarks, which should be done here. While the technological aspect of controlling the device seems to be complex, the perceptual and cognitive aspect of its usage is simple. The designer’s idea was to give a kind of intuitive interface, which can be operated by anyone, without a long training. The goal has been reached as the use of Cabboots demands only a natural use of body balance, which reminds walking on a well-trodden path whose borders are felt by the foot because of its slightly different angulation. In other words, the idea of simplicity of use and natural interaction was reached here by the designer employing complex technologies, which are not noticed by the device user. Finally, it is worth to shortly mention Roberto Manduchi who develops similar but still completely different project. His ‘electronic cane’ is a kind of assistive technology device, which uses laser beam and spatial sensors. It finds obstacles in space, measures the distance, depth and size of objects and informs the user about it via the sound interface. The prototype tester, Lucia Florez, confirms the invention being intuitive and compares it to ‘skin perception’15 .
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    Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 36 Electroniccane as well as The vOICe and Cabboots are inventions based on sensory substitution but perform it differently. It should be noticed here that the ideas are simple but to reach this simplicity the technology needs to be complex. Therefore, the design for people with visual impairments needs to blend both, complexity and simplicity - the previously mentioned simplexity. 6. Conclusion Concluding, the result of the process of interfaces design for people without disabilities is augmented perception, even if we think only about the level of symbolic communication and the extensions of body and mind. But the final effect of designing interfaces for people with disabilities is first and foremost the process of reducing perceptual deficiency and sensory substitution. This can be regarded as a process parallel to media convergence - sensorial convergence. Derrick de Kerckhove, rethinking Marshall McLuhan, concludes: There is clearly more to design than containment and seduction. In a very large sense, design plays a metaphorical role, translating functional benefits into sensory and cognitive modalities. Design finds its shape and its place as a kind of overtone, as an echo of technology. Design often echoes the specific character of technology and corresponds to its basic pulse. Being the visible, audible or textural outer shape of cultural artifacts, design emerges as what can be called the ‘skin of culture’.16 The contemporary ‘skin of culture’ seems to be hybrid: design means at the same time screenology, projecting interactions and augmenting perception. The design, which Derrick de Kerckhove was writing about in middle 90’s, was concentrated on the shape and appearance of things and objects. Today, design is mainly projecting a user’s experience, behaviours and feelings. It is closer to body and mind, develops cognitive processes and, in fact, programs a new user. Thus, it can be called the ‘skin of a user’ - which is taking us back to Marshall McLuhan thought17 , but in the completely new cultural context.
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    Anna Maj andMichal Derda-Nowakowski ______________________________________________________________ 37 Notes 1 J Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life, MIT, Massachusetts, 2006, pp. 17-18. 2 M McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, MIT Press, Massachusetts CA, 1994. 3 M Wesch’s personal website, [viewed on 3rd November 2008]. URL: <http://www.ksu.edu/sasw/anthro/wesch.htm>. M. Wesch: ‘The Machine is US/ing US’ in YouTube, [viewed on 3rd November 2008]. URL: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE>. 4 S Jones, S. Fox, ‘Generations Online in 2009’, Pew Internet Project Data Memo [report], Pew Internet and American Life Project, 28th January 2009 [viewed on 13th February 2009], p. 2-3, URL: <http://www.pewinternet. org/Reports/2009/Generations-Online-in-2009.aspx?r=1>. 5 3 /LSLĔVNL µ0LOLRQHU ] 1DV]HM .ODV¶ µ$ 0LOOLRQHU IURP 2XU ODVV¶@ Interview with Maciej Popowicz, the creator of Nasza-Klasa website'XĪ Format: Dodatek do Gazety Wyborczej [online]. 20th May 2008, URL: http://wyborcza.pl/1,75480,5222854,Milioner_z_Naszej_Klasy.html. 6 Bauhaus, 1919-1928. H Bayer, W Gropius, I Gropius (eds), Museum of Modern Art [New York 1938], Arno Press, New York 1972, p. 130. 7 D Rokeby, ‘Installations: Very Nervous System (1986-1990)’ in David Rokeby Website, 12 November 2000 [viewed on 14th February 2009], URL: http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/vns.html. 8 ‘Using Brainwaves To Chat And Stroll Through Second Life: World’s First’, in Science Daily, 16th June 2008 [viewed 14th February 2009], URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080613163213.htm. 9 Canal *Accessible, URL: http://www.zexe.net/BARCELONA. 10 J Ohene-Djan from WinkBall on SEE HEAR, Wednesday 20th January 1pm, BBC2 [viewed on 20th January 2010]. In: YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAWddylqPpgfeature=autofb. 11 M McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, Massachusetts CA 1994, pp. 44-45. 12 D Tapscott, Grown up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2009, p. 104. 13 Vision Technology for the Totally Blind [project website], 7th February 2009 [viewed on 14th February 2009], URL: http://www.Seeingwith sound. com. 14 P B L Meijer, ‘VOICE. Self-Training Paradigm for the vOICe. Training’ [viewed on 10th March 2009]. URL: http://www.seeingwithsound. com/training.htm. 15 A Coombs, ‘Researchers engineering better Technologies for the Blind’ in San Francisco Chronicle [online], 27th November 2005 [viewed on 14th
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    Anthropology of Accessibility ______________________________________________________________ 38 February2009], URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/ 2005/ 11/27/ING3TFS91M1.DTL. 16 D de Kerckhove, The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality, Ch Dewdney (ed), Somerville House Publishing, Toronto, 1995, p. 154. 17 McLuhan, op. cit., p. 47. Bibliography Bauhaus, 1919-1928. H. Bayer, W. Gropius and I. Gropius (eds). Museum of Modern Art [New York, 1938], Arno Press, New York, 1972. Canal *Accessible, [viewed 14th February 2009], URL: http://www.zexe.net/BARCELONA. Coombs, A., ‘Researchers engineering better Technologies for the Blind’. San Francisco Chronicle [online], 27th November 2005 [viewed on 14th February 2009], URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/ 2005/11/27/ING3TFS91M1.DTL. *DGĪHW SRSNXOWXU 6SRáHF]QH ĪFLH SU]HGPLRWyZ. [Pop-Culture Gadgets: The Social Life of Things@:*RG]LFDQG0ĩDNRZVNL HGV :GDZQLFWZD Akademickie i Profesjonalne, Warszawa, 2007. Jones, S. and S. Fox, ‘Generations Online in 2009’, Pew Internet Project Data Memo [report], Pew Internet and American Life Project, 28th January 2009 [viewed on 13th February 2009], URL: http://www.pew internet.org/Reports/2009/Generations-Online-in-2009.aspx?r=1. Kerckhove de, D., Connected Intelligence: The Arrival of the Web Society. W. Rowland (ed). Somerville House, Toronto, 1997. ______ , The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality, Ch. Dewdney (ed), Somerville House Publishing, Toronto, 1995. Kody McLuhana: Topografia nowych mediów. [McLuhan’s Codes: Topography of New Media]. A. Maj and M. Derda-Nowakowski (eds), with Derrick de Kerckhove’s participation. Wydawnictwo Naukowe ExMachina, Katowice, 2009.
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    fires upon youth'saltars have all died out—youth is dead, and the man who was young only yesterday fancies that he might as well be dead also. What is there left for him? Can there be any charm in this life when the looker-on has grey hair and wrinkles? Having nothing in life to do except seek his own pleasure and spend his ample income, Angus Hamleigh had naturally taken the time of life's march prestissimo. He had never paused in his rose-gathering to wonder whether there might not be a few thorns among the flowers, and whether he might not find them—afterwards. And now the blossoms were all withered, and he was beginning to discover the lasting quality of the thorns. They were such thorns as interfered somewhat with the serenity of his days, and he was glad to turn his face westward, away from everybody he knew, or who knew anything about him. My character will present itself to Mrs. Tregonell as a blank page, he said to himself; I wonder what she would think of me if one of my club gossips had enjoyed a quiet evening's talk with her beforehand. A dear friend's analysis of one's character and conduct is always so flattering to both; and I have a pleasant knack of offending my dearest friends! Mr. Hamleigh began to look about him a little when the train had left Plymouth. The landscape was wild and romantic, but had none of that stern ruggedness which he expected to behold on the Cornish Border. Deep glens, and wooded dells, with hill-sides steep and broken, but verdant to their topmost crest, and the most wonderful oak coppices that he ever remembered to have seen. Miles upon miles of oak, as it seemed to him, now sinking into the depth of a valley, now mounting to the distant sky line, while from that verdant undulating surface of young wood there stood forth the giants of the grove—wide-spreading oak and towering beech, the mighty growth of many centuries. Between Lidford and Launceston the scenery grew tamer. He had fancied those deep ravines and wooded heights the prelude to a vast and awful symphony, but Mary Tavy and Lifton
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    showed him onlya pastoral landscape, with just so much wood and water as would have served for a Creswick or a Constable, and with none of those grand Salvatoresque effects which he had admired in the country round Tavistock. At Launceston he found Mrs. Tregonell's landau waiting for him, with a pair of powerful chestnuts, and a couple of servants, whose neat brown liveries had nothing of that unsophisticated semi-savagery which Mr. Hamleigh had expected in a place so remote. Do you drive that way? he asked, pointing to the almost perpendicular street. Yes, sir, replied the coachman. Then I think I'll stroll to the top of the hill while you are putting in my portmanteaux, he said, and ascended the rustic street at a leisurely pace, looking about him as he went. The thoroughfare which leads from Launceston Station to the ruined castle at the top of the hill is not an imposing promenade. Its architectural features might perhaps be best described like the snakes of Ireland as nil—but here and there an old-fashioned lattice with a row of flower-pots, an ancient gable, or a bit of cottage garden hints at the picturesque. Any late additions to the domestic architecture of Launceston favour the unpretending usefulness of Camden Town rather than the aspiring æstheticism of Chelsea or Bedford Park; but to Mr. Hamleigh's eye the rugged old castle keep on the top of the hill made amends. He was not an ardent archæologist, and he did not turn out of his way to see Launceston Church, which might well have rewarded him for his trouble. He was content to have spared those good-looking chestnuts the labour of dragging him up the steep. Here they came springing up the hill. He took his place in the carriage, pulled the fur rug over his knees, and ensconced himself comfortably in the roomy back seat. This is a sybaritish luxury which I was not prepared for, he said to himself. I'm afraid I shall be rather more bored than I expected. I
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    thought Mrs. Tregonelland her surroundings would at least have the merit of originality. But here is a carriage that must have been built by Peters, and liveries that suggest the sartorial excellence of Conduit Street or Savile Row. He watched the landscape with a critical eye, prepared for disappointment and disillusion. First a country road between tall ragged hedges and steep banks, a road where every now and then the branches of the trees hung low over the carriage and threatened to knock the coachman's hat off. Then they came out upon the wide waste of moorland, a thousand feet above the sea level, and Mr. Hamleigh, acclimatized to the atmosphere of club-houses, buttoned his overcoat, drew the black fur rug closer about him, and shivered a little as the keen breath of the Atlantic, sweeping over far-reaching tracts of hill and heather, blew round him. Far and wide as his gaze could reach, he saw no sign of human habitation. Was the land utterly forsaken? No; a little farther on they passed a hamlet so insignificant, so isolated, that it seemed rather as if half a dozen cottages had dropped from the sky than that so lonely a settlement could be the result of deliberate human inclination. Never in Scotland or Ireland had Mr. Hamleigh seen a more barren landscape or a poorer soil; yet those wild wastes of heath, those distant tors were passing beautiful, and the air he breathed was more inspiring and exhilarating than the atmosphere of any vaunted health-resort which he had ever visited. I think I might live to middle age if I were to pitch my tent on this Cornish plateau, he thought; but, then, there are so many things in this life that are worth more than mere length of days. He asked the names of the hamlets they passed. This lonely church, dedicated to St. David—whence, oh! whence came the congregation —belonged to the parish of Davidstowe; and here there was a holy well; and here a Vicarage; and there—oh! crowning evidence of civilization—a post-office; and there a farmhouse; and that was the end of Davidstowe. A little later they came to cross roads, and the coachman touched his hat, and said, This is Victoria, as if he were
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    naming a townor settlement of some kind. Mr. Hamleigh looked about him, and beheld a low-roofed cottage, which he assumed to be some kind of public-house, possibly capable of supplying beer and tobacco; but other vestige of human habitation there was none. He leant back in the carriage, looking across the hills, and saying to himself, Why, Victoria? Was that unpretentious and somewhat dilapidated hostelry the Victoria Hotel? or the Victoria Arms? or was Royalty's honoured name given, in an arbitrary manner, to the cross roads and the granite finger-post? He never knew. The coachman said shortly, Victoria, and as Victoria he ever after heard that spot described. And now the journey was all downhill. They drove downward and downward, until Mr. Hamleigh began to feel as if they were travelling towards the centre of the earth—as if they had got altogether below the outer crust of this globe, and must be gradually nearing the unknown gulfs beneath. Yet, by some geographical mystery, when they turned out of the high road and went in at a lodge gate, and drove gently upward along an avenue of elms, in whose rugged tops the rooks were screaming, Mr. Hamleigh found that he was still high above the undulating edges of the cliffs that overtopped the Atlantic, while the great waste of waters lay far below, golden with the last rays of the setting sun. They drove, by a gentle ascent, to the stone porch of Mount Royal, and here Mrs. Tregonell stood, facing the sunset, with an Indian shawl wrapped round her, waiting for her guest. I heard the carriage, Mr. Hamleigh, she said, as Angus alighted; I hope you do not think me too impatient to see what change twelve years have made in you? I'm afraid they have not been particularly advantageous to me, he answered, lightly, as they shook hands. How good of you to receive me on the threshold! and what a delightful place you have here! Before I got to Launceston, I began to be afraid that Cornwall was commonplace—and now I am enchanted with it. Your moors and hills are like fairy-land to me!
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    It is aworld of our own, and we are very fond of it, said the widow; I shall be sorry if ever a railway makes Boscastle open to everybody. And what a noble old house! exclaimed Angus, as he followed his hostess across the oak-panelled hall, with its wide shallow staircase, curiously carved balustrades, and lantern roof. Are you quite alone here? Oh, no; I have my niece, and a young lady who is a companion to both of us. Angus Hamleigh shuddered. Three women! He was to exist for a fortnight in a house with three solitary females. A niece and a companion! The niece, rustic and gawky; the companion sour and frumpish. He began, hurriedly, to cast about in his mind for a convenient friend, to whom he could telegraph to send him a telegram, summoning him back to London on urgent business. He was still meditating this, when the butler opened the door of a spacious room, lined from floor to ceiling with books, and he followed Mrs. Tregonell in, and found himself in the bosom of the family. The simple picture of home-comfort, of restfulness and domestic peace, which met his curious gaze as he entered, pleased him better than anything he had seen of late. Club life—with its too studious indulgence of man's native selfishness and love of ease—fashionable life, with its insatiable craving for that latter-day form of display which calls itself Culture, Art, or Beauty— had afforded him no vision so enchanting as the wide hearth and high chimney of this sober, book-lined room, with the fair and girlish form kneeling in front of the old dogstove, framed in the glaring light of the fire. The tea-table had been wheeled near the hearth, and Miss Bridgeman sat before the bright red tea-tray, and old brass kettle, ready to administer to the wants of the traveller, who would be hardly human if he did not thirst for a cup of tea after driving across
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    the moor. Christabelknelt in front of the fire, worshipping, and being worshipped by, a sleek black-and-white sheep-dog, native to the soil, and of a rare intelligence—a creature by no means approaching the Scotch colley in physical beauty, but of a fond and faithful nature, born to be the friend of man. As Christabel rose and turned to greet the stranger, Mr. Hamleigh was agreeably reminded of an old picture —a Lely or a Kneller, perhaps. This was not in any wise the rustic image which had flashed across his mind at the mention of Mrs. Tregonell's niece. He had expected to see a bouncing, countryfied maiden—rosy, buxom, the picture of commonplace health and vigour. The girl he saw was nearer akin to the lily than the rose—tall, slender, dazzlingly fair—not fragile or sickly in anywise—for the erect figure was finely moulded, the swan-like throat was round and full. He was prepared for the florid beauty of a milkmaid, and he found himself face to face with the elegance of an ideal duchess, the picturesque loveliness of an old Venetian portrait. Christabel's dark brown velvet gown and square point lace collar, the bright hair falling in shadowy curls over her forehead, and rolled into a loose knot at the back of her head, sinned in no wise against Mr. Hamleigh's notions of good taste. There was a picturesqueness about the style which indicated that Miss Courtenay belonged to that advanced section of womankind which takes its ideas less from modern fashion-plates than from old pictures. So long as her archaism went no further back than Vandyke or Moroni he would admire and approve; but he shuddered at the thought that to- morrow she might burst upon him in a mediæval morning-gown, with high-shouldered sleeves, a ruff, and a satchel. The picturesque idea was good, within limits; but one never knew how far it might go. There was nothing picturesque about the lady sitting before the tea- tray, who looked up brightly, and gave him a gracious bend of her small neat head, in acknowledgment of Mrs. Tregonell's introduction —Mr. Hamleigh, Miss Bridgeman! This was the companion—and the companion was plain: not unpleasantly plain, not in any manner
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    repulsive, but alady about whose looks there could be hardly any compromise. Her complexion was of a sallow darkness, unrelieved by any glow of colour; her eyes were grey, acute, honest, friendly, but not beautiful; her nose was sharp and pointed—not at all a bad nose; but there was a hardness about nose and mouth and chin, as of features cut out of bone with a very sharp knife. Her teeth were good, and in a lovelier mouth might have been the object of much admiration. Her hair was of that nondescript monotonous brown which has been unkindly called bottle-green, but it was arranged with admirable neatness, and offended less than many a tangled pate, upon whose locks of spurious gold the owner has wasted much time and money. There was nothing unpardonable in Miss Bridgeman's plainness, as Angus Hamleigh said of her later. Her small figure was neatly made, and her dark-grey gown fitted to perfection. I hope you like the little bit of Cornwall that you have seen this afternoon, Mr. Hamleigh, said Christabel, seating herself in a low chair in the shadow of the tall chimney-piece, fenced in by her aunt's larger chair. I am enraptured with it! I came here with the desire to be intensely Cornish. I am prepared to believe in witches—warlocks—— We have no warlocks, said Christabel. They belong to the North. Well, then, wise women—wicked young men who play football on Sunday, and get themselves turned into granite—rocking stones— magic wells—Druids—and King Arthur. I believe the principal point is to be open to conviction about Arthur. Now, I am prepared to swallow everything—his castle—the river where his crown was found after the fight—was it his crown, by-the-by, or somebody else's? which he found—his hair-brushes—his boots—anything you please to show me. We will show you his quoit to-morrow, on the road to Tintagel, said Miss Bridgeman. I don't think you would like to swallow that
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    actually. He hurledit from Tintagel to Trevalga in one of his sportive moods. We shall be able to give you plenty of amusement if you are a good walker, and are fond of hills. I adore them in the abstract, contemplated from one's windows, or in a picture; but there is an incompatibility between the human anatomy and a road set on end, like a ladder, which I have never yet overcome. Apart from the outside question of my legs—which are obvious failures when tested by an angle of forty-five degrees—I'm afraid my internal machinery is not quite so tough as it ought to be for a thorough enjoyment of mountaineering. Mrs. Tregonell sighed, ever so faintly, in the twilight. She was thinking of her first lover, and how that fragility, which meant early death, had showed itself in his inability to enjoy the moorland walks which were the delight of her girlhood. The natural result of bad habits, said Miss Bridgeman, briskly. How can you expect to be strong or active, when I dare say you have spent the better part of your life in hansom cabs and express trains! I don't mean to be impertinent, but I know that is the general way with gentlemen out of the shooting and hunting season. And as I am no sportsman, I am a somewhat exaggerated example of the vice of laziness fostered by congenial circumstances, acting on a lymphatic temperament. If you write books, as I believe most ladies do now-a-days, you should put me into one of them, as an awful warning. I don't write books, and, if I did, I would not flatter your vanity by making you my model sinner, retorted Jessie; but I'll do something better for you, if Christabel will help me. I'll reform you. A million thanks for the mere thought! I hope the process will be pleasant. I hope so, too. We shall begin by walking you off your legs.
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    They are soindifferent as a means of locomotion that I could very well afford to lose them, if you could hold out any hope of my getting a better pair. A week hence, if you submit to my treatment, you will be as active as the chamois hunter in 'Manfred.' Enchanting—always provided that you and Miss Courtenay will follow the chase with me. Depend upon it, we shall not trust you to take your walks alone, unless you have a pedometer which will bear witness to the distance you have done, and which you will be content to submit to our inspection on your return, replied Jessie, sternly. I am afraid you are a terribly severe high priestess of this new form of culture, said Mr. Hamleigh, looking up from his teacup with a lazy smile, almost as bad as the Dweller on the Threshold, in Bulwer's 'Zanoni.' There is a dweller on the threshold of every science and every admirable mode of life, and his name is Idleness, answered Miss Bridgeman. The vis inertiæ, the force of letting things alone, said Angus; yes, that is a tremendous power, nobly exemplified by vestries and boards of works—to say nothing of Cabinets, Bishops, and the High Court of Chancery! I delight in that verse of Scripture, 'Their strength is to sit still.' There shall be very little sitting still for you if you submit yourself to Christabel and me, replied Miss Bridgeman. I have never tried the water-cure—the descriptions I have heard from adepts have been too repellent; but I have an idea that this system of yours must be rather worse than hydropathy, said Angus, musingly—evidently very much entertained at the way in which Miss Bridgeman had taken him in hand.
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    I was notgoing to let him pose after Lamartine's poëte mourant, just because his father died of lung disease, said Jessie, ten minutes afterwards, when the warning gong had sounded, and Mr. Hamleigh had gone to his room to dress for dinner, and the two young women were whispering together before the fire, while Mrs. Tregonell indulged in a placid doze. Do you think he is consumptive, like his father? asked Christabel, with a compassionate look; he has a very delicate appearance. Hollow-cheeked, and prematurely old, like a man who has lived on tobacco and brandy-and-soda, and has spent his nights in club- house card-rooms. We have no right to suppose that, said Christabel, since we know really nothing about him. Major Bree told me he has lived a racketty life, and that if he were not to pull up very soon he would be ruined both in health and fortune. What can the Major know about him? exclaimed Christabel, contemptuously. This Major Bree was a great friend of Christabel's; but there are times when one's nearest and dearest are too provoking for endurances. Major Bree has been buried alive in Cornwall for the last twenty years. He is at least a quarter of a century behind the age, she said, impatiently. He spent a fortnight in London the year before last, said Jessie; it was then that he heard such a bad account of Mr. Hamleigh. Did he go about to clubs and places making inquiries, like a private detective? said Christabel, still contemptuous; I hate such fetching and carrying!
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    Here he comesto answer for himself, replied Jessie, as the door opened, and a servant announced Major Bree. Mrs. Tregonell started from her slumbers at the opening of the door, and rose to greet her guest. He was a very frequent visitor, so frequent that he might be said to live at Mount Royal, although his nominal abode was a cottage on the outskirts of Boscastle—a stone cottage on the crest of a steep hill-side, with a delightful little garden, perched, as it were, on the edge of a verdant abyss. He was tall, stout, elderly, grey, and florid—altogether a comfortable-looking man, clean-shaved, save for a thin grey moustache with the genuine cavalry droop, iron grey eyebrows, which looked like a repetition of the moustache on a somewhat smaller scale, keen grey eyes, a pleasant smile, and a well set-up figure. He dressed well, with a sobriety becoming his years, and was always the pink of neatness. A man welcome everywhere, on account of an inborn pleasantness, which prompted him always to say and do the right thing; but most of all welcome at Mount Royal, as a first cousin of the late Squire's, and Mrs. Tregonell's guide, philosopher, and friend in all matters relating to the outside world, of which, despite his twenty years' hybernation at Boscastle, the widow supposed him to be an acute observer and an infallible judge. Was he not one of the few inhabitants of that western village who took in the Times newspaper? Well! exclaimed Major Bree, addressing himself generally to the three ladies, he has come—what do you think of him? He is painfully like his poor father, said Mrs. Tregonell. He has a most interesting face and winning manner, and I'm afraid we shall all get ridiculously fond of him, said Miss Bridgeman, decisively. Christabel said nothing. She knelt on the hearthrug, playing with Randie, the black-and-white sheep-dog. And what have you to say about him, Christabel? asked the Major.
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    Nothing. I havenot had time to form an opinion, replied the girl; and then lifting her clear blue eyes to the Major's friendly face, she said, gravely, but I think, Uncle Oliver, it was very unkind and unfair of you to prejudice Jessie against him before he came here. Unkind!—unfair! Here's a shower of abuse! I prejudice! Oh! I remember. Mrs. Tregonell asked me what people thought of him in London, and I was obliged to acknowledge that his reputation was— well—no better than that of the majority of young men who have more money than common sense. But that was two years ago— Nous avons changé tout cela! If he was wicked then, he must be wicked now, said Christabel. Wicked is a monstrously strong word! said the Major. Besides, that does not follow. A man may have a few wild oats to sow, and yet become a very estimable person afterwards. Miss Bridgeman is tremendously sharp—she'll be able to find out all about Mr. Hamleigh from personal observation before he has been here a week. I defy him to hide his weak points from her. What is the use of being plain and insignificant if one has not some advantage over one's superior fellow-creatures? asked Jessie. Miss Bridgeman has too much expression to be plain, and she is far too clever to be insignificant, said Major Bree, with a stately bow. He always put on a stately manner when he addressed himself to Jessie Bridgeman, and treated her in all things with as much respect as if she had been a queen. He explained to Christabel that this was the homage which he paid to the royalty of intellect; but Christabel had a shrewd suspicion that the Major cherished a secret passion for Miss Bridgeman, as exalted and as hopeless as the love that Chastelard bore for Mary Stuart. He had only a small pittance besides his half-pay, and he had a very poor opinion of his own merits; so it was but natural that, at fifty-five, he should hesitate to offer himself to a young lady of six-and-twenty, of whose sharp tongue he had a wholesome awe.
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    Mr. Hamleigh cameback before much more could be said about him, and a few minutes afterwards they all went in to dinner, and in the brighter lamplight of the dining-room Major Bree and the three ladies had a better opportunity of forming their opinion as to the external graces of their guest. He was good-looking—that fact even malice could hardly dispute. Not so handsome as the absent Leonard, Mrs. Tregonell told herself complacently; but she was constrained at the same time to acknowledge that her son's broadly moulded features and florid complexion lacked the charm and interest which a woman's eye found in the delicate chiselling and subdued tones of Angus Hamleigh's countenance. His eyes were darkest grey, his complexion was fair and somewhat pallid, his hair brown, with a natural curl which neither fashion nor the barber could altogether suppress. His cheeks were more sunken than they should have been at eight-and- twenty, and the large dark eyes were unnaturally bright. All this the three ladies and Major Bree had ample time for observing, during the leisurely course of dinner. There was no flagging in the conversation, from the beginning to the end of the repast. Mr. Hamleigh was ready to talk about anything and everything, and his interest in the most trifling local subjects, whether real or assumed, made him a delightful companion. In the drawing-room, after dinner, he proved even more admirable; for he discovered a taste for, and knowledge of, the best music, which delighted Jessie and Christabel, who were both enthusiasts. He had read every book they cared for— and a wide world of books besides—and was able to add to their stock of information upon all their favourite subjects, without the faintest touch of arrogance. I don't think you can help liking him, Jessie, said Christabel, as the two girls went upstairs to bed. The younger lingered a little in Miss Bridgeman's room for the discussion of their latest ideas. There was a cheerful fire burning in the large basket grate, for autumn nights were chill upon that wild coast. Christabel assumed her favourite attitude in front of the fire, with her faithful Randie winking and
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    blinking at herand the fire alternately. He was a privileged dog— allowed to sleep on a sheepskin mat in the gallery outside his mistress's door, and to go into her room every morning, in company with the maid who carried her early cup of tea; when, after the exchange of a few remarks, in baby language on her part, and expressed on his by a series of curious grins and much wagging of his insignificant apology for a tail, he would dash out of the room, and out of the house, for his morning constitutional among the sheep upon some distant hill—coming home with an invigorated appetite, in time for the family breakfast at nine o'clock. I don't think you can help liking him—as—as a casual acquaintance! repeated Christabel, finding that Jessie stood in a dreamy silence, twisting her one diamond ring—a birthday gift from Miss Courtenay—round and round upon her slender finger. I don't suppose any of us can help liking him, Jessie answered at last, with her eyes on the fire. All I hope is, that some of us will not like him too much. He has brought a new element into our lives—a new interest—which may end by being a painful one. I feel distrustful of him. Why distrustful? Why, Jessie, you who are generally the very essence of flippancy—who make light of almost everything in life— except religion—thank God, you have not come to that yet!—you to be so serious about such a trifling matter as a visit from a man who will most likely be gone back to London in a fortnight—gone out of our lives altogether, perhaps: for I don't suppose he will care to repeat his experiences in a lonely country-house. He may be gone, perhaps—yes—and it is quite possible that he may never return—but shall we be quite the same after he has left us? Will nobody regret him—wish for his return—yearn for it—sigh for it —die for it—feeling life worthless—a burthen, without him? Why, Jessie, you look like a Pythoness.
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    Belle, Belle, mydarling, my innocent one, you do not know what it is to care—for a bright particular star—and know how remote it is from your life—never to be brought any nearer! I felt afraid to-night when I saw you and Mr. Hamleigh at the piano—you playing, he leaning over you as you played—both seeming so happy, so united by the sympathy of the moment! If he is not a good man—if—— But we have no reason to think ill of him. You remember what Uncle Oliver said—he had only been—a—a little racketty, like other young men, said Christabel, eagerly; and then, with a sudden embarrassment, reddening and laughing shyly, she added, and indeed, Jessie, if it is any idea of danger to me that is troubling your wise head, there is no need for alarm. I am not made of such inflammable stuff—I am not the kind of girl to fall in love with the first comer. With the first comer no! But when the Prince comes in a fairy tale, it matters little whether he come first or last. Fate has settled the whole story beforehand. Fate has had nothing to say about me and Mr. Hamleigh. No, Jessie, believe me, there is no danger for me—and I don't suppose that you are going to fall in love with him? Because I am so old? said Miss Bridgeman, still looking at the fire; no, it would be rather ridiculous in a person of my age, plain and passée, to fall in love with your Alcibiades. No, Jessie, but because you are too wise ever to be carried away by a sentimental fancy. But why do you speak of him so contemptuously? One would think you had taken a dislike to him. We ought at least to remember that he is my aunt's friend, and the son of some one she once dearly loved. Once, repeated Jessie, softly; does not once in that case mean always?
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    She was thinkingof the Squire's commonplace good looks and portly figure, as represented in the big picture in the dining-room—the picture of a man in a red coat, leaning against the shoulder of a big bay horse, and with a pack of harriers fawning round him—and wondering whether the image of that dead man, whose son was in the house to-night, had not sometimes obtruded itself upon the calm plenitude of Mrs. Tregonell's domestic joys. Don't be afraid that I shall forget my duty to your aunt or your aunt's guest, dear, she said suddenly, as if awaking from a reverie. You and I will do all in our power to make him happy, and to shake him out of lazy London ways, and then, when we have patched up his health, and the moorland air has blown a little colour into his hollow cheeks, we will send him back to his clubs and his theatres, and forget all about him. And now, good-night, my Christabel, she said, looking at her watch; see! it is close upon midnight—dreadful dissipation for Mount Royal, where half-past ten is the usual hour. Christabel kissed her and departed, Randie following to the door of her chamber—such a pretty room, with old panelled walls painted pink and grey, old furniture, old china, snowy draperies, and books— a girl's daintily bound books, selected and purchased by herself—in every available corner; a neat cottage piano in a recess, a low easy- chair by the fire, with a five-o'clock tea-table in front of it; desks, portfolios, work-baskets—all the frivolities of a girl's life; but everything arranged with a womanly neatness which indicated industrious habits and a well-ordered mind. No scattered sheets of music—no fancy-work pitch-and-tossed about the room—no slovenliness claiming to be excused as artistic disorder. Christabel said her prayers, and read her accustomed portion of Scripture, but not without some faint wrestlings with Satan, who on this occasion took the shape of Angus Hamleigh. Her mind was overcharged with wonder at this new phenomenon in daily life, a man so entirely different from any of the men she had ever met hitherto—so accomplished, so highly cultured; yet taking his
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    accomplishments and cultureas a thing of course, as if all men were so. She thought of him as she lay awake for the first hour of the still night, watching the fire fade and die, and listening to the long roll of the waves, hardly audible at Mount Royal amidst all the commonplace noises of day, but heard in the solemn silence of night. She let her fancies shape a vision of her aunt's vanished youth —that one brief bright dream of happiness, so miserably broken!— and wondered and wondered how it was possible for any one to outlive such a grief. Still more incredible did it seem that any one who had so loved and so lost could ever listen to another lover; and yet the thing had been done, and Mrs. Tregonell's married life had been called happy. She always spoke of the Squire as the best of men—was never weary of praising him—loved to look up at his portrait on the wall—preserved every unpicturesque memorial of his unpicturesque life—heavy gold and silver snuff-boxes, clumsy hunting crops, spurs, guns, fishing-rods. The relics of his murderous pursuits would have filled an arsenal. And how fondly she loved the son who resembled that departed father—save in lacking some of his best qualities! How she doated on Leonard, the most commonplace and unattractive of young men! The thought of her cousin set Christabel on a new train of speculation. If Leonard had been at home when Mr. Hamleigh came to Mount Royal, how would they two have suited each other? Like fire and water, like oil and vinegar, like the wolf and the lamb, like any two creatures most antagonistic by nature. It was a happy accident that Leonard was away. She was still thinking when she fell asleep, with that uneasy sense of pain and trouble in the future which was always suggested to her by Leonard's image—a dim unshapen difficulty waiting for her somewhere along the untrodden road of her life—a lion in the path.
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    CHAPTER III. TINTAGEL, HALFIN SEA, AND HALF ON LAND. There was no sense of fear or trouble of any kind in the mind of anybody next morning after breakfast, when Christabel, Miss Bridgeman, and Mr. Hamleigh started, in the young lady's own particular pony carriage, for an exploring day, attended by Randie, who was intensely excited, and furnished with a picnic basket which made them independent of the inn at Trevena, and afforded the opportunity of taking one's luncheon under difficulties upon a windy height, rather than with the commonplace comforts of an hotel parlour, guarded against wind and weather. They were going to do an immense deal upon this first day. Christabel, in her eagerness, wanted to exhibit all her lions at once. Of course, you must see Tintagel, she said; everybody who comes to this part of the world is in a tremendous hurry to see King Arthur's castle. I have known people set out in the middle of the night. And have you ever known any one of them who was not just a little disappointed with that stupendous monument of traditional royalty? asked Miss Bridgeman, with her most prosaic air. They expect so much—halls, and towers, and keep, and chapel—and find only ruined walls, and the faint indication of a grave-yard. King Arthur is a name to conjure with, and Tintagel is like Mont Blanc or the Pyramids. It can never be so grand as the vision its very name has evoked. I blush to say that I have thought very little about Tintagel hitherto, said Mr. Hamleigh; it has not been an integral part of my
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    existence; so myexpectations are more reasonable than those of the enthusiastic tourist. I promise to be delighted with your ruins. Oh, but you will pretend, said Christabel, and that will be hateful! I would rather have to deal with one of those provoking people who look about them blankly, and exclaim, 'Is this all?' and who stand in the very centre of Arthur's Hall, and ask, 'And, pray, where is Tintagel?—when are we to see the castle?' No! give me the man who can take in the grandeur of that wild height at a glance, and whose fancy can build up those ruined walls, re-create those vanished towers, fill the halls with knights in shining armour, and lovely ladies—see Guinevere herself upon her throne—clothed in white samite—mystic, wonderful! And with Lancelot in the background, said Mr. Hamleigh. I think the less we say about Guinevere the better, and your snaky Vivien, and your senile Merlin, your prying Modred. What a disreputable set these Round Table people seem to have been altogether—they need have been dead thirteen hundred years for us to admire them! They were driving along the avenue by this time, the stout chestnut cob going gaily in the fresh morning air—Mr. Hamleigh sitting face to face with Christabel as she drove. What a fair face it was in the clear light of day! How pure and delicate every tone, from the whiteness of the lily to the bloom of the wild rose! How innocent the expression of the large liquid eyes, which seemed to smile at him as he talked! He had known so many pretty women—his memory was like a gallery of beautiful faces; but he could recall no face so completely innocent, so divinely young. It is the youthfulness of an unsullied mind, he said to himself; I have known plenty of girls as young in years, but not one perfectly pure from the taint of worldliness and vanity. The trail of the serpent was over them all! They drove down hill into Boscastle, and then straightway began to ascend still steeper hills upon the other side of the harbour.
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    You ought tothrow a viaduct across the valley, said Mr. Hamleigh —something like Brunel's bridge at Saltash; but perhaps you have hardly traffic enough to make it pay. They went winding up the new road to Trevena, avoiding the village street, and leaving the Church of the Silent Tower on its windy height on their right hand. The wide Atlantic lay far below them on the other side of those green fields which bordered the road; the air they breathed was keen with the soft breath of the sea. But autumn had hardly plucked a leaf from the low storm-beaten trees, or a flower from the tall hedgerows, where the red blossom of the Ragged Robin mixed with the pale gold of the hawk-weed, and the fainter yellow of the wild cistus. The ferns had hardly begun to wither, and Angus Hamleigh, whose last experiences had been among the stone walls of Aberdeenshire, wondered at the luxuriance of this western world, where the banks were built up and fortified with boulders of marble-veined spar. They drove through the village of Trevalga, in which there is never an inn or public-house of any kind—not even a cottage licensed for the sale of beer. There was the wheelwright, carpenter, builder, Jack- of-all-trades, with his shed and his yard—the blacksmith, with his forge going merrily—village school—steam threshing-machine at work—church—chapel; but never a drop of beer—and yet the people at Trevalga are healthy, and industrious, and decently clad, and altogether comfortable looking. Some day we will take you to call at the Rectory, said Christabel, pointing skywards with her whip. Do you mean that the Rector has gone to Heaven? asked Angus, looking up into the distant blue; or is there any earthly habitation higher than the road on which we are driving. Didn't you see the end of the lane, just now? asked Christabel, laughing; it is rather steep—an uphill walk all the way; but the views are lovely.
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    We will walkto the Rectory to-morrow, said Miss Bridgeman; this lazy mode of transit must not be tolerated after to-day. Even the drive to Trevena was not all idleness; for after they had passed the entrance to the path leading to the beautiful waterfall of St. Nectan's Kieve, hard by St. Piran's chapel and well—the former degraded to a barn, and the latter, once of holy repute, now chiefly useful as a cool repository for butter from the neighbouring dairy of Trethevy Farm—they came to a hill, which had to be walked down; to the lowest depth of the Rocky Valley, where a stone bridge spans the rapid brawling stream that leaps as a waterfall into the gorge at St. Nectan's Kieve, about a mile higher up the valley. And then they came to a corresponding hill, which had to be walked up—because in either case it was bad for the cob to have a weight behind him. Indeed, the cob was so accustomed to consideration in this matter, that he made a point of stopping politely for his people to alight at either end of anything exceptional in the way of a hill. I'm afraid you spoil your pony, said Mr. Hamleigh, throwing the reins over his arm, and resigning himself to a duty which made him feel very much like a sea-side flyman, earning his day's wages toilsomely, and saving his horse with a view to future fares. Better that than to spoil you, answered Miss Bridgeman, as she and Christabel walked briskly beside him. But if you fasten the reins to the dashboard, you may trust Felix. Won't he run away? Not he, answered Christabel. He knows that he would never be so happy with anybody else as he is with us. But mightn't he take a fancy for a short run; just far enough to allow of his reducing that dainty little carriage to match-wood? A well-fed underworked pony so thoroughly enjoys that kind of thing. Felix has no such diabolical suggestions. He is a conscientious person, and knows his duty. Besides, he is not underworked. There
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    is hardly aday that he does not carry us somewhere. Mr. Hamleigh surrendered the reins, and Felix showed himself worthy of his mistress's confidence, following at her heels like a dog, with his honest brown eyes fixed on the slim tall figure, as if it had been his guiding star. I want you to admire the landscape, said Christabel, when they were on the crest of the last hill; is not that a lovely valley? Mr. Hamleigh willingly admitted the fact. The beauty of a pastoral landscape, with just enough of rugged wildness for the picturesque, could go no further. Creswick has immortalized yonder valley by his famous picture of the mill, said Miss Bridgeman, but the romantic old mill of the picture has lately been replaced by that large ungainly building, quite out of keeping with its surroundings. Have you ever been in Switzerland? asked Angus of Christabel, when they had stood for some moments in silent contemplation of the landscape. Never. Nor in Italy? No. I have never been out of England. Since I was five years old I have hardly spent a year of my life out of Cornwall. Happy Cornwall, which can show so fair a product of its soil! Well, Miss Courtenay, I know Italy and Switzerland by heart, and I like this Cornish landscape better than either. It is not so beautiful—it would not do as well for a painter or a poet; but it comes nearer an Englishman's heart. What can one have better than the hills and the sea? Switzerland can show you bigger hills, ghostly snow-shrouded pinnacles that mock the eye, following each other like a line of phantoms, losing themselves in the infinite; but Switzerland cannot show you that.
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    He pointed tothe Atlantic: the long undulating line of the coast, rocky, rugged, yet verdant, with many a curve and promontory, many a dip and rise. It is the most everlasting kind of beauty, is it not? asked Christabel, delighted at this little gush of warm feeling in one whose usual manner was so equable. One could never tire of the sea. And I am always proud to remember that our sea is so big—stretching away and away to the New World. I should have liked it still better before the days of Columbus, when it led to the unknown! Ah! sighed Angus, youth always yearns for the undiscovered. Middle age knows that there is nothing worth discovering! On the top of the hill they paused for a minute or so to contemplate the ancient Borough of Bossiney, which, until disfranchised in 1832, returned two members to Parliament, with a constituency of little more than a dozen, and which once had Sir Francis Drake for its representative. Here Mr. Hamleigh beheld that modest mound called the Castle Hill, on the top of which it was customary to read the writs before the elections. An hour later they were eating their luncheon on that windy height where once stood the castle of the great king. To Christabel the whole story of Arthur and his knights was as real as if it had been a part of her own life. She had Tennyson's Arthur and Tennyson's Lancelot in her heart of hearts, and knew just enough of Sir Thomas Mallory's prose to give substance to the Laureate's poetic shadows. Angus amused himself a little at her expense, as they ate their chicken and salad on the grassy mounds which were supposed to be the graves of heroes who died before Athelstane drove the Cornish across the Tamar, and made his victorious progress through the country, even to the Scilly Isles, after defeating Howel, the last King of Cornwall. Do you really think that gentlemanly creature in the Laureate's epic —that most polished and perfect and most intensely modern English
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    gentleman, self-contained, considerateof others, always the right man in the right place—is one whit like that half-naked sixth century savage—the real Arthur—whose Court costume was a coat of blue paint, and whose war-shriek was the yell of a Red Indian? What can be more futile than our setting up any one Arthur, and bowing the knee before him, in the face of the fact that Great Britain teems with monuments of Arthurs—Arthur's Seat in Scotland, Arthur's Castle in Wales, Arthur's Round Table here, there, and everywhere? Be sure that Arthur—Ardheer—the highest chief—was a generic name for the princes of those days, and that there were more Arthurs than ever there were Cæsars. I don't believe one word you say, exclaimed Christabel, indignantly, there was only one Arthur, the son of Uther and Ygerne, who was born in the castle that stood on this very cliff, on the first night of the year, and carried away in secret by Merlin, and reared in secret by Sir Anton's wife—the brave good Arthur—the Christian king—who was killed at the battle of Camlan, near Slaughter Bridge, and was buried at Glastonbury. And embalmed by Tennyson. The Laureate invented Arthur—he took out a patent for the Round Table, and his invention is only a little less popular than that other product of the age, the sewing- machine. How many among modern tourists would care about Tintagel if Tennyson had not revived the old legend? The butler had put up a bottle of champagne for Mr. Hamleigh—the two ladies drinking nothing but sparkling water—and in this beverage he drank hail to the spirit of the legendary prince. I am ready to believe anything now you have me up here, he said, for I have a shrewd idea that without your help I should never be able to get down again. I should live and die on the top of this rocky promontory—sweltering in the summer sun—buffeted by the winter winds—an unwilling Simeon Stylites.
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    Do you knowthat the very finest sheep in Cornwall are said to be grown on that island, said Miss Bridgeman gravely, pointing to the grassy top of the isolated crag in the foreground, whereon once stood the donjon keep. I don't know why it should be so, but it is a tradition. Among butchers? said Angus. I suppose even butchers have their traditions. And the poor sheep who are condemned to exile on that lonely rock—the St. Helena of their woolly race—do they know that they are achieving a posthumous perfection—that they are straining towards the ideal in butcher's meat? There is room for much thought in the question. The tide is out, said Christabel, looking seaward; I think we ought to do Trebarwith sands to-day. Is Trebarwith another of your lions? asked Angus, placidly. Yes. Then, please save him for to-morrow. Let me drink the cup of pleasure to the dregs where we are. This champagne has a magical taste, like the philter which Tristan and Iseult were so foolish as to drink while they sailed across from Ireland to this Cornish shore. Don't be alarmed, Miss Bridgeman, I am not going to empty the bottle. I am not an educated tourist—have read neither Black nor Murray, and I am very slow about taking in ideas. Even after all you have told me, I am not clear in my mind as to which is the castle and which the chapel, and which the burial-ground. Let us finish the afternoon dawdling about Tintagel. Let us see the sun set from this spot, where Arthur must so often have watched it, if the men of thirteen hundred years ago ever cared to watch the sun setting, which I doubt. They belong to the night-time of the world, when civilization was dead in Southern Europe, and was yet unborn in the West. Let us dawdle about till it is time to drive back to Mount Royal, and then I shall carry away an impression. I am very slow at taking impressions.
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    I think youwant us to believe that you are stupid, said Christabel, laughing at the earnestness with which he pleaded. Believe me, no. I should like you to think me ever so much better than I am. Please, let us dawdle. They dawdled accordingly. Strolling about upon the short sea-beaten grass, so treacherous and slippery a surface in summer time, when fierce Sol has been baking it. They stumbled against the foundations of long-vanished walls, they speculated upon fragments of cyclopean masonry, and talked a great deal about the traditions of the spot. Christabel, who had all the old authorities—Leland, Carew, and Norden—at her fingers' ends, was delighted to expound the departed glories of this British fortress. She showed where the ancient dungeon keep had reared its stony walls upon that high terrible crag, environed with the sea; and how there had once been a drawbridge uniting yonder cliff with the buildings on the mainland—now divorced, as Carew says, by the downfallen steep cliffs, on the farther side, which, though it shut out the sea from his wonted recourse, hath yet more strengthened the island; for in passing thither you must first descend with a dangerous declining, and then make a worse ascent by a path, through his stickleness occasioning, and through his steepness threatening, the ruin of your life, with the falling of your foot. She told Mr. Hamleigh how, after the Conquest, the castle was the occasional residence of some of our Princes, and how Richard, King of the Romans, Earl of Cornwall, son of King John, entertained here his nephew David, Prince of Wales, how, in Richard the Second's time, this stronghold was made a State prison, and how a certain Lord Mayor of London was, for his unruly mayoralty, condemned thither as a perpetual penitentiary; which seems very hard upon the chief magistrate of the city, who thus did vicarious penance for the riot of his brief reign. And then they talked of Tristan and Iseult, and the tender old love- story, which lends the glamour of old-world fancies to those bare ruins of a traditional past. Christabel knew the old chronicle through
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    Matthew Arnold's poeticalversion, which gives only the purer and better side of the character of the Knight and Chatelaine, at the expense of some of the strongest features of the story. Who, that knew that romantic legend, could linger on that spot without thinking of King Marc's faithless queen! Assuredly not Mr. Hamleigh, who was a staunch believer in the inventor of sweetness and light, and who knew Arnold's verses by heart. What have they done with the flowers and the terrace walks? he said,—the garden where Tristan and his Queen basked in the sunshine of their days; and where they parted for ever?— 'All the spring time of their love Is already gone and past, And instead thereof is seen Its winter, which endureth still Tyntagel, on its surge-beat hill, The pleasaunce walks, the weeping queen, The flying leaves, the straining blast, And that long wild kiss—their last.' And where—oh, where—are those graves in the King's chapel in which the tyrant Marc, touched with pity, ordered the fated lovers to be buried? And, behold! out of the grave of Tristan there sprung a plant which went along the walls, and descended into the grave of the Queen, and though King Marc three several times ordered this magical creeper to be cut off root and branch, it was always found growing again next morning, as if it were the very spirit of the dead knight struggling to get free from the grave, and to be with his lady- love again! Show me those tombs, Miss Courtenay. You can take your choice, said Jessie Bridgeman, pointing to a green mound or two, overgrown with long rank grass, in that part of the hill which was said to be the kingly burial-place. But as for your magical tree, there is not so much as a bramble to do duty for poor Tristan.
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    If I wereDuke of Cornwall and Lord of Tintagel Castle, I would put up a granite cross in memory of the lovers; though I fear there was very little Christianity in either of them, said Angus. And I would come once a year and hang a garland on it, said Christabel, smiling at him with Eyes of deep, soft, lucent hue— Eyes too expressive to be blue, Too lovely to be grey. He had recalled those lines more than once when he looked into Christabel's eyes. Mr. Hamleigh had read so much as to make him an interesting talker upon any subject; but Christabel and Jessie noticed that of his own life, his ways and amusements, his friends, his surroundings, he spoke hardly at all. This fact Christabel noticed with wonder, Jessie with suspicion. If a man led a good wholesome life, he would surely be more frank and open—he would surely have more to say about himself and his associates. They dawdled, and dawdled, till past four o'clock, and to none of the three did the hours so spent seem long; but they found that it would make them too late in their return to Mount Royal were they to wait for sundown before they turned their faces homewards; so while the day was still bright, Mr. Hamleigh consented to be guided by steep and perilous paths to the base of the rocky citadel, and then they strolled back to the Wharncliffe Arms, where Felix had been enjoying himself in the stable, and was now desperately anxious to get home, rattling up and down hill at an alarming rate, and not hinting at anybody's alighting to walk. This was only one of many days spent in the same fashion. They walked next day to Trebarwith sands, up and down hills, which Mr. Hamleigh declared were steeper than anything he had ever seen in Switzerland; but he survived the walk, and his spirits seemed to rise
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    with the exertion.This time Major Bree went with them—a capital companion for a country ramble, being just enough of a botanist, archæologist, and geologist, to leaven the lump of other people's ignorance, without being obnoxiously scientific. Mr. Hamleigh was delighted with that noble stretch of level sand, with the long rollers of the Atlantic tumbling in across the low rocks, and the bold headlands behind—spot beloved of marine painters—spot where the gulls and the shags hold their revels, and where man feels himself but a poor creature face to face with the lonely grandeur of sea, and cliff, and sky. So rarely is that long stretch of yellow sand vulgarized by the feet of earth's multitudes, that one half expects to see a procession of frolicsome sea-nymphs come dancing out of yonder cave, and wind in circling measures towards the crested wavelets, gliding in so softly under the calm clear day. These were halcyon days—an Indian summer—balmy western zephyrs—sunny noontides—splendid sunsets—altogether the most beautiful autumn season that Angus Hamleigh had known, or at least, so it seemed to him—nay, even more than this, surely the most beautiful season of his life. As the days went on, and day after day was spent in Christabel's company—almost as it were alone with her, for Miss Bridgeman and Major Bree were but as figures in the background—Angus felt as if he were at the beginning of a new life—a life filled with fresh interests, thoughts, hopes, desires, unknown and undreamed of in the former stages of his being. Never before had he lived a life so uneventful—never before had he been so happy. It surprised him to discover how simple are the elements of real content—how deep the charm of a placid existence among thoroughly loveable people! Christabel Courtenay was not the loveliest woman he had ever known, nor the most elegant, nor the most accomplished, nor the most fascinating; but she was entirely different from all other women with whom his lot had been cast. Her innocence, her unsophisticated enjoyment of all earth's purest joys, her transparent
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    purity, her perfecttrustfulness—these were to him as a revelation of a new order of beings. If he had been told of such a woman he would have shrugged his shoulders misbelievingly, or would have declared that she must be an idiot. But Christabel was quite as clever as those brilliant creatures whose easy manners had enchanted him in days gone by. She was better educated than many a woman he knew who passed for a wit of the first order. She had read more, thought more, was more sympathetic, more companionable, and she was delightfully free from self- consciousness or vanity. He found himself talking to Christabel as he had never talked to any one else since those early days at the University, the bright dawn of manhood, when he confided freely in that second self, the chosen friend of the hour, and believed that all men lived and moved according to his own boyish standard of honour. He talked to her, not of the actualities of his life, but of his thoughts and feelings—his dreamy speculations upon the gravest problems which hedge round the secret of man's final destiny. He talked freely of his doubts and difficulties, and the half-belief which came so near unbelief—the wide love of all creation—the vague yet passionate yearning for immortality which fell so far short of the Gospel's sublime certainty. He revealed to her all the complexities of a many-sided mind, and she never failed him in sympathy and understanding. This was in their graver moods, when by some accidental turn of the conversation they fell into the discussion of those solemn questions which are always at the bottom of every man and woman's thoughts, like the unknown depths of a dark water-pool. For the most part their talk was bright and light as those sunny autumn days, varied as the glorious and ever-changing hues of sky and sea at sunset. Jessie was a delightful companion. She was so thoroughly easy herself that it was impossible to feel ill at ease with her. She played her part of confidante so pleasantly, seeming to think it the most natural thing in the world that those two should be absorbed in each other, and should occasionally lapse into complete forgetfulness of her existence. Major Bree when he joined in their rambles was
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    obviously devoted toJessie Bridgeman. It was her neatly gloved little hand which he was eager to clasp at the crossing of a stile, and where the steepness of the hill-side path gave him an excuse for assisting her. It was her stout little boot which he guided so tenderly, where the ways were ruggedest. Never had a plain woman a more respectful admirer—never was beauty in her peerless zenith more devoutly worshipped! And so the autumn days sped by, pleasantly for all: with deepest joy —joy ever waxing, never waning—for those two who had found the secret of perfect sympathy in thought and feeling. It was not for Angus Hamleigh the first passion of a spotless manhood; and yet the glamour and the delight were as new as if he had never loved before. He had never so purely, so reverently loved. The passion was of a new quality. It seemed to him as if he had ascended into a higher sphere in the universe, and had given his heart to a creature of a loftier race. Perhaps it is the good old lineage which makes the difference, he said to himself once, while his feelings were still sufficiently novel and so far under his control as to be subject to analysis. The women I have cared for in days gone by have hardly got over their early affinity with the gutter; or when I have admired a woman of good family she has been steeped to the lips in worldliness and vanity. Mr. Hamleigh, who had told himself that he was going to be intensely bored at Mount Royal, had been Mrs. Tregonell's guest for three weeks, and it seemed to him as if the time were brief and beautiful as one of those rare dreams of impossible bliss which haunt our waking memories, and make actual life dull and joyless by contrast with the glory of shadowland. No word had yet been spoken —nay, at the very thought of those words which most lovers in his position would have been eager to speak, his soul sickened and his cheek paled; for there would be no joyfulness in the revelation of his love—indeed, he doubted whether he had the right to reveal it— whether duty and honour did not alike constrain him to keep his
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    converse within thestrict limits of friendship, to bid Christabel good- bye, and turn his back upon Mount Royal, without having said one word more than a friend might speak. Happy as Christabel had been with him—tenderly as she loved him—she was far too innocent to have considered herself ill-treated in such a case. She would have blamed herself alone for the weakness of mind which had been unable to resist the fascination of his society—she would have blushed and wept in secret for her folly in having loved unwooed. Has the eventful question been asked? Jessie inquired one night, as Christabel lingered, after her wont, by the fire in Miss Bridgeman's bedroom. You two were so intensely earnest to-day as you walked ahead of the Major and me, that I said to myself, 'now is the time—the crisis has arrived!' There was no crisis, answered Christabel, crimsoning; he has never said one word to me that can imply that I am any more to him than the most indifferent acquaintance. What need of words when every look and tone cries 'I love you?' Why he idolizes you, and he lets all the world see it. I hope it may be well for you—both! Christabel was on her knees by the fire. She laid her cheek against Jessie's waistband, and drew Jessie's arm round her neck, holding her hand lovingly. Do you really think he—cares for me? she faltered, with her face hidden. Do I really think that I have two eyes, and something which is at least an apology for a nose! ejaculated Jessie, contemptuously. Why, it has been patent to everybody for the last fortnight that you two are over head and ears in love with each other. There never was a more obvious case of mutual infatuation. Oh, Jessie! surely I have not betrayed myself. I know that I have been very weak—but I have tried so hard to hide——
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    And have beenabout as successful as the ostrich. While those drooping lashes have been lowered to hide the love-light in your eyes, your whole countenance has been an illuminated calendar of your folly. Poor Belle! to think that she has not betrayed herself, while all Boscastle is on tiptoe to know when the wedding is to take place. Why the parson could not see you two sitting in the same pew without knowing that he would be reading your banns before he was many Sundays older. And you—really—like him? faltered Christabel, more shyly than before. Yes, answered Jessie, with a provoking lack of enthusiasm. I really like him. I can't help feeling sorry for Mrs. Tregonell, for I know she wanted you to marry Leonard. Christabel gave a little sigh, and a faint shiver. Poor dear Leonard! I wonder what traveller's hardships he is enduring while we are so snug and happy at Mount Royal? she said, kindly. He has an excellent heart—— Troublesome people always have, I believe, interjected Jessie. It is their redeeming feature, the existence of which no one can absolutely disprove. And I am very much attached to him—as a cousin—or as an adopted brother; but as to our ever being married—that is quite out of the question. There never were two people less suited to each other. Those are the people who usually come together, said Jessie; the Divorce Court could hardly be kept going if it were not so. Jessie, if you are going to be cynical I shall say good-night. I hope there is no foundation for what you said just now. I hope that Auntie has no foolish idea about Leonard and me.
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    She has—or had—oneprevailing idea, and I fear it will go hard with her when she has to relinquish it, answered Jessie, seriously. I know that it has been her dearest hope to see you and Leonard married, and I should be a wretch if I were not sorry for her disappointment, when she has been so good to me. But she never ought to have invited Mr. Hamleigh to Mount Royal. That is one of those mistakes the consequences of which last for a lifetime. I hope he likes me—just a little, pursued Christabel, with dreamy eyes fixed on the low wood fire; but sometimes I fancy there must be some mistake—that he does not really care a straw for me. More than once, when he has began to say something that sounded—— Business-like, suggested Jessie, as the girl hesitated. He has drawn back—seeming almost anxious to recall his words. Once he told me—quite seriously—that he had made up his mind never to marry. Now, that doesn't sound as if he meant to marry me. That is not an uncommon way of breaking ground, answered Jessie, with her matter-of-fact air. A man tells a girl that he is going to die a bachelor—which makes it seem quite a favour on his part when he proposes. All women sigh for the unattainable; and a man who distinctly states that he is not in the market, is likely to make a better bargain when he surrenders. I should be sorry to think Mr. Hamleigh capable of such petty ideas, said Christabel. He told me once that he was like Achilles. Why should he be like Achilles? He is not a soldier. Perhaps, it is because he has a Grecian nose, suggested Miss Bridgeman. How can you imagine him so vain and foolish, cried Christabel, deeply offended. I begin to think you detest him? No, Belle, I think him charming, only too charming, and I had rather the man you loved were made of sterner metal—not such a
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