Glen Fuller

Shane Warne versus hoon cyclists: affect and celebrity in a new media event

Abstract In January 2012 a moral panic about ‘hoon cyclists’ erupted after sports celebrity Shane Warne had an altercation with a cyclist on St Kilda Road, Melbourne. Warne took to Twitter and posted an account of the event. The altercation served to focus tensions around the positioning of the cyclist in Australian automobility. The concept of ‘acute event’ is combined with a longer history of other kinds of media event, such as ‘moral panics’, to better understand events that are discursively mediated. The role of Warne in the resulting ‘cyclist hoon’ moral panic acute event is an example of the organisational role of ‘celebrity’ in participatory media. Warne’s account of cycling affectively resonates with the other car drivers as the privileged subjects of Australian automobility. This affective resonance organised the discursive field of the moral panic acute event. In this case, the techniques of social media celebrity (to produce an authentic ‘ordinariness’) also produce an affective resonance of Warne’s experience of cyclists as a driver. The folk devil figure of the ‘hoon cyclist’ challenges the hegemonic norms of car-based automobility.

‘There is no Zyzz’: the subcultural celebrity and bodywork project of Aziz Shavershian

ABSTRACT Aziz ‘Zyzz’ Shavershian was an Australian bodybuilder and internet micro-celebrity who died tragically at the age of 22. Shavershian was famous for his body and his internet-based practices of self-representation. This article will examine Shavershian’s practices of representation in terms of his online persona, ‘Zyzz’, as a celebrity bodywork project. We argue that ‘Zyzz’ is the aspirational ‘image’ that Shavershian himself embodied and expressed. Followers and fans of ‘Zyzz’ do not simply want his ‘body’, they want to live his aspirational bodywork project. We engage with and critically analyse the bodywork project as a unique discursive object characterised by the circulation of affect and enacted through embodied activity. Of interest to us is thinking beyond the individual Aziz Shavershian to appreciating ‘Zyzz’ as a shared homosocial project that we map in terms of an ‘aspirational’ trajectory out of the conditions of ‘protest masculinity’. The resonant singularities of the ‘Zyzz’ project circulate in this homosocial cultural context as thresholds of qualitative transformation: there is a transformation of the ‘worked’ body, a mobilisation of the ‘enthusiastic’ body, and a valorisation of the ‘respected’ body.

IN THE GARAGE: assemblage, opportunity and techno-aesthetics

Abstract: How can a properly relational and anti-substantialist conception of masculinity be understood as belonging to the territorialising assemblage of the garage? Focusing on the relation between the suburban garage and masculinity, this article develops the concept of “opportunity” as part of a gendered passage of action. Two examples of the garage-assemblage are examined through their popular cultural myths. The first involves the example of disaffected working-class male youth working on cars as represented in the Australian film Metal Skin. The second belongs to the “two-guys-in-a-garage start-up” allegory of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture in the popular narrative accounts of the Apple computer. These examples are used to explore how different cultural contexts can have a shared but differentially attuned sense of a techno-aesthetic appreciation of the relation between technology and masculine action.

Malcolm Turnbull’s conversational career on Twitter: the case of the Australian Prime Minister and the NBN:

Politicians’ use of Twitter during election periods has been extensively researched. There has been less scholarly focus on the way politicians’ use of Twitter changes depending on their political circumstances. This article reports on an analysis of Malcolm Turnbull’s Twitter account from October 2008 to July 2016 examining his ‘engagement’ in terms of ‘conversations’ with political journalists, specialist technology writers and other Twitter users. It found Turnbull ‘conversed’ with the general public more than elites and revealed heated exchanges with specialist technology writers about the National Broadband Network (NBN) and more genial ‘banter’ with political journalists. It also showed a peak in ‘conversations’ when he was Shadow Minister for Communications and a sharp decline once he became Minister for Communications and then Prime Minister. This article points to the need for further long-duration research to better understand the impact of changing political contexts on politicians’ use of social media.

The #tay4hottest100 new media event: discourse, publics and celebrity fandom as connective action

ABSTRACT In January 2015, there was a media-led fan campaign known by its hashtag #tay4hottest100 to vote Taylor Swift’s track ‘Shake it off’ into the Hottest 100 music poll. The campaign developed and cascaded across multiple personal networks into a larger new media event. As a result of this, the #tay4hottest100 campaign involved multiple publics that were separate because of fan-like investments in different social positions and the critical reflexivity afforded by these investments. A key gap exists in existing work in theories of publics, networks, and new media events: what is the relation between the personalised action frame of participatory practice in ‘connective action’ and the reflexive circulation of discourse that characterises networked publics? There is a mediated relation here between two overlapping contexts: the personal action frame in networked connective action and the participatory action of discourse publics that draws on larger discursive formations to make sense of the present. This article argues that there is an affective resonance, associated in this context with ‘Taylor Swift’ celebrity fandom, between the personalised action frames circulating in networked publics and the contextual affective contours of the broader new media event.

Digital news report: Australia 2015

This report gives a clear picture of how the Australian news consumer compares to eleven other countries surveyed in 2015: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain, UK, USA and urban Brazil. The Digital News Report: Australia is part of a global survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Further in-depth analysis of Australian digital news consumption has been conducted and published by the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra.