Nick Couldry

Culture and citizenship The missing link?

Keywords: citizenship, cultural studies, culture, media consumption, public connection

This article argues that, instead of assuming that we know what 'cultural citizenship' involves, we should investigate more closely the uncertainties about what constitutes the 'culture' (or cultures) of citizenship.

The article argues for the distinctive contribution of cultural studies to the problem of democratic engagement, as usually framed within political science. It then reports some preliminary findings from the recently completed 'Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection' project, which focus on the importance of social opportunities for talk about public issues, the possibilities of withdrawal from news because it presents issues which people can do nothing about, and alternative forms of collective connection through media (such as celebrity culture) which exhibit no effective link to public issues.

Introduction

The sphere of 'political communication' has as its foundation the series of inclusions and exclusions, on the basis of which only the private, domestic experiences of some categories of people are connected (or 'mediated') to the sphere of citizenship and its 'moralities' . . . We must be particularly attentive to the processes of 'framing', which constitute the limits (and shape) of the picture we see within the frame of television's 'window on the world'. It makes all the difference in the world if, for some people, that window is wide open, while for others it is double-glazed to keep out the noise, or perhaps even nailed shut. (Morley, 1999: 203-4) What is at stake in the term 'culture' when applied to the area of citizenship? This article will make a sharp distinction between the notion of 'cultural citizenship' (about which I am cautious) and investigating studying the 'culture' of citizenship (which, it is suggested, is more productive).

The term 'cultural citizenship' [START_REF] Hermes | Cultural Citizenship and Popular Fiction[END_REF][START_REF] Stevenson | Globalisation, National Cultures and Cultural Citizenship[END_REF][START_REF] Turner | The Erosion of Citizenship[END_REF] has been used to make sense of the arguments for including new groups of people as citizens in contemporary polities, or including new types of claim or conflict within civic or political space. Often the arguments made in support of these inclusions are based on claims about 'culture' or 'cultures', and certainly cultural difference is not a good reason within a diverse polity for excluding someone from citizenship. But this does not mean that such claims establish a new type of citizenship which is best called 'cultural' (rather than, say, political, social or economic), only that exclusions from citizenship based on invalid arguments from cultural difference have been defeated. It is a little unclear in such cases what the word 'cultural' adds to our understanding of 'citizenship'.

This point about 'cultural citizenship' is being pressed here but only to suggest that using the term too freely may obscure a more interesting set of questions. Initially, the relationship between culture and citizenship seems unproblematic. There is the traditional notion that a shared 'culture', specifically a shared national culture, is an essential lubricant of the wheels of citizenship and indeed politics. While this idea goes right back to the beginning of cultural analysis by Herder and others, it remains important in T.H. Marshall's post-Second World War analysis (what he calls 'the great expansion [in the 20th century] of the area of common culture and common experience'; Marshall, 1992: 44). We find traces of this notion in Nick [START_REF] Stevenson | Globalisation, National Cultures and Cultural Citizenship[END_REF] early discussion of cultural citizenship and Bryan Turner's (2002: 12) definition of 'cultural citizenship' as 'the capacity to participate effectively, creatively and successfully within a national culture'. 1 But this apparently straightforward notion of cultural citizenship -as cultural entitlement -quickly runs into two major problems, as [START_REF] Turner | Outline of a General Theory of Cultural Citizenship[END_REF] himself notes. First, in an era of global movement, we are no longer clear about the scale on which such cultural entitlements should be thought about (certainly 'the nation' can be assumed no longer to be the only scale relevant here; [START_REF] Hermes | Cultural Citizenship and Popular Fiction[END_REF]see Beck, 2000). Second, this notion of 'cultural citizenship' seems to be entirely about rights, not obligations, so contradicting one of the basic features of citizenship as 'a bundle of rights and obligations that formally define the legal status of a person' (Turner, 2002: 11, emphasis added). We might try to get round the first of these problems by arguing that, while cultural entitlement is a vital component of citizenship, it operates across a range of scales to match people's actual mobility. But this still assumes we can identify readily a scale and shared frame of reference for belonging.

These questions are posed to suggest not that the idea of 'shared culture' is misguided or that the notion of cultural citizenship is in principle unhelpful (quite the contrary), but only to suggest that it is too easy to assume that we know what it looks like, and -even if we do -that we know how and on what scale 'shared culture' might contribute to the practice of citizenship. Interestingly, Nick [START_REF] Stevenson | Cultural Citizenship in the "Cultural" Society: A Cosmopolitan Approach[END_REF] recent work on cultural citizenship loosens its ties to the idea of a shared national culture and develops a cosmopolitan approach. As he puts it, 'cultural citizenship above all is the attempt to foster dialogue, complexity and communication in place of silence and homogeneity ' (2003: 345). This is a valuable point, but it remains at a normative level. It is unclear how it can guide us in confronting the 'curious emptiness at the heart of everyday political talk' that Joke [START_REF] Hermes | Hidden Debates, Invisible Citizens[END_REF] found in Holland in the weeks after the murder of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. For, as Hermes suggests, such emptiness disrupts the whole space in which we think about culture and citizenship together, even if it is specifically politics that is directly challenged: 'in politics, home of the citizenships with a capital C, what those citizenships stand for, what meaning they have concretely to many is absolutely unclear' (Hermes, 2005: 9). It is significant perhaps that Stevenson addresses normatively and Hermes empirically the same challenge of listening to voices from outside the mainstream ethnic majority. It is in such cases, as Etienne Balibar has argued, that particular frameworks of citizenship are most challenged, requiring a rethinking that he calls a 'politics of politics ' (2004: 115). Surely such a rethinking of the substance of politics must affect how we think about the culture of citizenship as well.

Perhaps we need to adopt a less prescriptive approach to the possible interrelations between 'culture' and 'citizenship' (bracketing the term 'cultural citizenship' for now), making room to ask: what would a culture of citizenship look like? Is it perhaps the absence of such a 'culture' that underlies the often-feared decline of politics? Or, more positively, what new cultures of citizenship might be emerging, and where or how can we best look for them empirically?

After exploring further the theoretical setting for these questions, an approach to this difficult question will be introduced in the second half of this article. 2

Cultural citizenship/the 'culture' of citizenship

The 'cultural' citizen: chimaera or reality?

It is risky to say of a literature as huge as political science and political sociology that it has gaps, but it could be argued that there has been a significant gap in studying the experiential dimensions of citizenship, studying what it actually feels like to be a citizen (see [START_REF] Leblanc | Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife[END_REF].

The relative inattention to the 'feel' of citizenship, especially in mainstream political science, is made more serious by recent uncertainties about the scales and reference points by which citizenship should be understood in the era of globalization: 'what does it mean to belong to society?' asks Nick Stevenson (2002: 4); 'what counts as community and solidarity?' asks Anthony Elliott (2002: 55). Thomas Janoski and Brian Gras make the same 323 point more formally when they argue that 'theories of citizenship need to be developed to provide the informal aspects of citizenship integrating both the public and private sphere ' (2002: 42). What are the practices that link private action to the public sphere, beyond the obvious act of walking down to the polling station to cast a vote? Some in cultural studies would respond sceptically that there are no such practices and the whole notion of 'the citizen' is a chimaera [START_REF] Miller | Television and Citizenship: A New International Division of Labour[END_REF]. Some sociologists would argue, certainly, that those connecting practices between public and private spheres presupposed by citizenship are disappearing. Bryan [START_REF] Turner | The Erosion of Citizenship[END_REF] writes of 'the erosion of citizenship' by many factors including the changing organization of work and families; as a result, taken-for-granted contexts of civic action have been lost, although some others have been gained (see [START_REF] Bennett | The Uncivic Culture: Communication, Identity, and the Rise of Lifestyle Politics[END_REF]. The political sociologist Danilo [START_REF] Zolo | Biographical note Nick Couldry is Reader in Media, Communications and Culture at the London School of Economics and the author or editor of six books, including Inside Culture (Sage, 2000) and Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics and Agency in an Uncertain World[END_REF] argues that in complex societies the increasing demands on private citizens' finite attention-span demanded by media messages about politics reduce in absolute terms the likelihood of traditional civic engagement, because that engagement requires too large a quantity of a scarce resource: attention. Others see the problem in the displacement of public discussion. Leon Mayhew analyses the contemporary crisis of politics in terms of 'a chronic, socially structured inflation produced by the dissociation of public discussion and unifying issues of public concern' (1997: 236; emphasis added), while Nina [START_REF] Eliasoph | Avoiding Politics[END_REF] study of where political talk between private citizens occurs in America suggests that this dissociation may be played out also in the spatial organization of everyday socialization (with 'political' talk being excluded by definition from all but the most private settings).

Of course, while not everyone is so negative (for example, [START_REF] Schudson | The Good Citizen[END_REF], there are sufficient uncertainties to undermine any claims to certainty about who or where the 'cultural' citizen is.

Models and absences

More recently, writers have begun to move beyond general claims about the absence or presence of the public-private connections that make citizenship meaningful towards modelling in much greater detail what exactly the practical preconditions are for active citizenship and a wellfunctioning democratic politics. Drawing critically on a well-known earlier literature [START_REF] Almond | The Civic Culture[END_REF], Peter Dahlgren has re-examined the notion of 'civic culture':

[C]ivic culture points to those features of the socio-cultural world -dispositions, practices, processes -that constitute pre-conditions for people's actual participation in the public sphere, in civil and political society . . . civic culture is an analytic construct that seeks to identify the possibilities of people acting in the role of citizens. (Dahlgren, 2003: 154-5) The multidimensional model that Dahlgren offers of civic culture involves a 'circuit' of six interlocking processes (values, affinity, knowledge, practices, identities and discussion), but what is most striking about this model is the multiple and often uncertain relation it suggests between the imagining and understanding of civic life and its practice (both acts and talk). This multidimensional approach is present also in Ken [START_REF] Plummer | Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues[END_REF] identification of five 'generic processes' through which new public spheres can appear:

• imagining/empathizing;

• vocalizing;

• investing identities through narrative;

• creating social worlds and communities of support; and

• creating a culture of public problems.

These are important advances on previous normative accounts of civic engagement (the public sphere and deliberative democracy theories: see [START_REF] Dahlgren | The Internet, Public Spheres and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation[END_REF], because they grasp the multiple dimensions which must be articulated if a stable 'culture' of citizenship is to be created. At the same time, some questions need to be raised; here, let us concentrate on Dahlgren's model in particular. 3 First, we might ask with regard to the circuit of civic culture, whether it is really a 'circuit'. This term implies a required order in which you must go round the circuit and the equal weight of every element in the circuit (so that you can enter it at any point). But we might doubt this: is discussion as fundamental as 'practice', for example? Are 'values' a key causal element in stabilizing the wider circuit or are they a dispensable epiphenomenon? Is there a natural grouping of the six elements into three: values, identities/affinity/knowledge and practices/discussion? Second, there are some uncertainties of reference in Dahlgren's model. While some civic practices such as voting are clearly important in all circumstances, the role of other practices is less clear; also we must ask whether certain other practices, or domains of practice, undermine the circuit. Third, the question of scale is left unspecified: is the circuit positive regardless of what scale it first appears on, with a circuit on one scale automatically generating circuits on other scales, or can an achieved circuit on one scale (say the local) undermine the possibility of a circuit on another scale (say, the national)? Fourth, the role of media consumption in this circuit needs further delineation. It seems to contribute to a number of elements (affinity, knowledge, discussion) but it is unclear to what extent in each case media are a satisfactory substitute for face-to-face actions and experience -sometimes they may be, but at other times perhaps not. Fifth, is the circuit of civic culture (once established for an individual or group) then stable or is it liable to decline and, if so, which elements contribute most to that risk of 325 decline? What element in the circuit makes most difference by its absence?

That said, Peter Dahlgren's model has been of crucial importance for us in orientating the empirical research project to which this article will shortly turn. First, however, some broader links will be made to cultural studies' research on agency and politics.

The contribution of cultural studies

By a 'cultural studies' approach here, is meant not only an emphasis on cultural consumption or popular culture (although the significance of those is taken for granted in what follows), but more an approach that is loyal to cultural studies' concern with the deep inequalities that structure how individuals emerge as speaking subjects at all (whether they speak as citizens or as audiences or as employees). The concern with symbolic inequality [START_REF] Grossberg | We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture[END_REF][START_REF] Probyn | Sexing the Self[END_REF][START_REF] Steedman | Landscape for a Good Woman[END_REF][START_REF] Walkerdine | Daddy's Girl[END_REF] is by no means exclusive to cultural studies, but it has been relatively rare in the wider sociological literature (Bourdieu's and Sennett's work being major exceptions: [START_REF] Bourdieu | Pascalian Meditations[END_REF][START_REF] Sennett | The Hidden Injuries of Class[END_REF]; see [START_REF] Lembo | Thinking Through Television[END_REF][START_REF] Skeggs | Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable[END_REF][START_REF] Young | The Exclusive Society[END_REF]. 4 Whether citizens feel they have a voice, or the space in which effectively to exercise a voice, is crucial to their possibilities of acting as citizens. The quote from David Morley with which this article began raises the question eloquently, but at the same time sets the stakes very high. How can we develop a sensitive enough methodology to capture such subtle forms of exclusion and the positive 'culture' that might counteract such exclusion? Of course, the concern with how political and civic space is structured in advance around certain deep forms of exclusion has been a major concern of feminist political theory [START_REF] Benhabib | Towards a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy[END_REF][START_REF] Fraser | Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy[END_REF][START_REF] Pateman | Participation and Democratic Theory[END_REF][START_REF] Young | Inclusion and Democracy[END_REF]. Also, it has been powerfully recognized -if only at the margins -by some political sociologists (see [START_REF] Croteau | Politics and the Class Divide[END_REF][START_REF] Gamson | Talking Politics[END_REF] on working-class exclusion from US politics). At the end of the 1960s an important article by Marvin [START_REF] Olsen | Two Categories of Political Alienation[END_REF] distinguished between two dimensions of alienation: 'forced alienation' (based on the realization that the system objectively prevents you from participating effectively in wider life) and 'voluntary alienation' (based on a subjective feeling that the social world is simply 'not worth participating in'). Once again, tracking these dimensions of alienation from politics requires a sensitive methodology that addresses both material and symbolic exclusions (recalling the multidimensional nature of Dahlgren's and Plummer's models).

Another respect in which cultural studies may have a distinctive contribution to make in understanding the 'culture' of citizenship is by studying not only the language and practices of citizenship but how each, and their interrelation, emerges in individual reflection. Individual possibilities of 'reflection' themselves are structured by the inequalities of class [START_REF] Skeggs | Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable[END_REF] and the public and civic spheres generally, but this does not mean that we can safely ignore the traces of people's reflexivity about their status as citizens -quite the opposite. And here there is an overlap with some versions of mainstream political communications research, particularly the 'constructionist' approach [START_REF] Barnhurst | Politics in the Fine Meshes: Young Citizens, Power and Media[END_REF][START_REF] Gamson | Talking Politics[END_REF][START_REF] Neuman | Common Knowledge[END_REF], which examines 'the subtle interaction between what the mass media convey and how people come to understand the world beyond their immediate life space' [START_REF] Neuman | Common Knowledge[END_REF] xv; emphasis added). 5 The Public Connection project How then might this sceptical approach to understanding the 'culture' of citizenship be applied in empirical research? During the rest of the article this will be illustrated by drawing upon the Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection project, on which this author has been working with London School of Economics colleagues Sonia Livingstone and Tim Markham since autumn 2003. There is space here only to select some themes that bear upon the theoretical question from which this article began: how can we understand the preconditions of a 'culture' of citizenship? 6 First, some background will be provided on the project's design and its methodology.

The idea of the project

The aims in the Public Connection project are explained best by reference to two connected and widely-made assumptions about democratic politics. First, that in a democracy such as Britain, most people share an orientation to a public world where matters of common concern are addressed, or at least should be (we call this orientation 'public connection'). Second, that this public connection is focused principally on mediated versions of that public world (so that 'public connection' is sustained principally by a convergence in media consumption, resulting in 'mediated public connection').

Most writers about politics make both assumptions, although they are detachable from each other. Some believe the first without believing the second, arguing that public connection is unlikely to be served by people's use of media (Robert Putnam's well-known Bowling Alone thesis takes this position for television). Generally, however, writers assume both -or at least that is our contention (defending our view of the literature is outside the scope of this article). Can we find evidence for those assumptions in how citizens think and act?

The first assumption is important because it underlies most models of democracy; consent to political authority requires that people's attention to the public world can be assumed, or at least that we can assume an orientation to the public world which, from time to time, results in actual 327 attention. Of course, the word 'public' is notoriously difficult, since it has a range of conflicting meanings [START_REF] Weintraub | Public and Private in Thought and Practice[END_REF]. When talking of 'public connection', we mean 'things or issues which are regarded as being of shared concern, rather than of purely private concern', matters that in principle citizens need to discuss in a world of limited shared resources. However much people differ over exactly what counts as the public world and what does not, most people, we suspect, at least make sense of the difference between 'public' and 'private'. Our working assumption, then, is that the public/private boundary remains meaningful in spite of many other levels of disagreement over the content and definition of politics. Once again, defending this working assumption is outside the scope of this article, but it could be suggested that even political theory that emphasizes the fluidity and multivalence of the public/private boundary still ends up by reaffirming its significance (for example, [START_REF] Geuss | Public Goods, Private Goods[END_REF]. In addition, the famous feminist slogan 'The personal is political' can be seen as not undermining the public/private boundary completely, but rather offering a specific rethinking of where it should be drawn. As Jean [START_REF] Elshtain | The Displacement of Politics[END_REF] points out, few live on the basis that absolutely everything they do is -and should be -open to public scrutiny.

But our project's understanding of the public/private boundary is not prescriptive. The point of our research has been to ask people what lies on the other side of the line from things they regard as being of only private concern; what makes up their public world? How are they connected to that world? How are media involved (or not) in sustaining that connection to a public world (as they understand it)? These are the questions we aimed to explore -first, by asking a small group of 37 people to write a diary for three months during 2004 which reflected on their relation to a public world via media; second, by interviewing those diarists, both before and after their diary production, individually and in some cases also in focus groups; and finally, by broadening out the themes from this necessarily small group to a nationwide survey (targeted at a sample of 1000 respondents) conducted in summer 2005. 7 Our research was based on the hunch that the 'culture' of citizenship (whatever it is) may intersect with people's media consumption in a wide range of ways, whose meaning can be grasped only by listening closely to individuals' reflexive accounts of their practice. There is of course a tradeoff between the intensive research process necessary to obtain such finegrained detail and claims to representativeness, but here there is no space to consider the nationwide survey that we conducted to address this issue. The article concentrates on the qualitative phase of the project.

So, why diaries? There is nothing new about using them in social research. But our questions for diarists were rather different from those normally addressed in diary-based research. Some research uses 'diaries'often daily or even every few hours -to find out about people's pain levels or moods, specific forms of consumption or time use. This often involves ticking boxes or giving short responses to specific questions and can generate in a relatively short space of time a great deal of data, mainly quantitative. While perfectly valid, this does not allow for people's subjective reflections about whatever is being measured, or how they understand the questions being addressed. More importantly, the frequent, highly structured, 'minimal' diary method is too intrusive to be feasible for long unless there are close pre-existing links with the people being researched; as a result, generally this high-intensity diary method cannot be used to track changes over a longer period. But our aim was to understand how people's thinking about the public world developed as they reflected for an extended period, and the tensions about the citizen's position in the mediated public sphere that emerged over time, 8 so a weekly diary was our preferred choice.

We were well aware that our choice of the diary method might have different implications for different respondents. There may be genderrelated or other issues that affect whether a diary seems an appropriate or natural form of self-expression for different people [START_REF] Bird | The Audience in Everyday Life[END_REF]. Therefore, we gave the diarists a choice of media in which to record their thoughts -not just a traditional written diary, but also email, phone message or voice recorder, any of which could be supplemented by press cuttings or whatever else the diarist wished to submit. Five people used voice recorders and many used emails to supplement or replace hard copy diaries. However, to round out the process of reflection we interviewed the diarists a few months after their diary was completed (more than threequarters agreed to this), and at the end of the second interview process, by now almost a year after initial recruitment, one-third of the diarists participated in local focus groups -overall, a good rate of attrition. 9

Emergent themes

Our project focused on one of the preconditions of civic culture (the orientation to a public world we call 'public connection'), not civic culture overall. So we did not address explicitly all the dimensions of Peter Dahlgren's civic culture model, although our data ranged across aspects of both the background practices which sustain public connection (talk, knowledge acquisition and use) and the articulated public values or affinities isolated in his model. Indeed, it was the possible connections -or disconnections -between elements that interested us: we suspected that the conditions that undermine or weaken public connection are subtle, perhaps not articulated, and as much to do with how particular publicoriented practices are articulated with the rest of daily life as with how people think explicitly about the world beyond the private.

Many of the diarists, particularly the older diarists and especially the retired, had routines of media consumption which guaranteed them some 329 orientation to a public world every day. For others time was a key constraint, but much less so than we had expected from the pilot study. While time might be a factor restricting involvement in civic activities, it was unlikely to prevent diarists from achieving a level of media consumption sufficient to sustain an orientation to a public world. There is enough media around of many sorts for most individuals to access the level of information that they feel they need (even if quality is more difficult to control).

Social opportunities

A more important factor for the quality of people's 'mediated public connection' was the availability of social opportunities to put to use elsewhere the public knowledge or information gained from media consumption. Throughout the fieldwork the diarists were asked about whether they talked with others on any of the public-type issues that they raised. In a number of cases, the lack of a social context for discussing public issues was raised by the diarists as an issue: I wouldn't bother my ass to sort of stand up and argue about it because I've become so cynical. It's a sad point, sad state of affairs but I've been in situations where people you know, you speak about politics at work and then people get on their high horse and you just think . . . but then I don't speak to politics about my parents, with my parents or my family . . . my sister . . . she's totally not interested. I think people, I don't know, it's quite scary to see how people are disinterested in it, particularly this generation. (Man, 23, university administrator, west-London suburb, diary) 10 An older man commenting on his son and daughter implied that he too lacked the chance to discuss with family the public issues in which he was interested:

My own children, I have to say really, [are] not interested [in media news]. They don't -nothing has much impact on them outside their own little bubble, as it were. My daughter would be interested because of the effect of the [Iraq War] on the price of petrol but, er, she wouldn't be interested in any other impact of Iraq at all. And I mean they're both bright, they went to university and so forth, but they, yeah, they are insular, both of them. (Man, 64, retired financial services chief executive, northern suburb) Such judgements about others' public connection tended to be made by men, not women, but this does not necessarily mean that women always had social contexts in which to talk about public issues, only perhaps that women tended to be less judgemental about the implications of the absence of such a context. One local government worker explained why it was enjoyable for her to go along to focus group-type public consultation meetings organized by her local authority, since this was the type of discussion that generally she did not get at home: A similar picture emerges, but without complaint, from this primary school teacher, asked whether she had discussed the Iraq war with others either at work or socially:

We've got very limited time in the staffroom so, I mean, it tends to be, you know, stupid things [we talk] about: what you've watched on telly or something lighthearted and fun . . . So I can't say I've had a conversation with anyone at school about Iraq. I mean, I'll talk to [my boyfriend] about things sometimes but you don't tend to talk to your friends about it really. (Woman, 30, primary school teacher, northern suburb) Most of our diarists had some opportunity to talk about public-related issues but, as [START_REF] Eliasoph | Avoiding Politics[END_REF] has argued, it was the distribution of those opportunities that was as important as the opportunity per se. This distribution is related to social status: a retired businessperson, for example, may have the opportunity to discuss public issues at the magistrates' court where they sit as a magistrate, whereas a retired manual worker may lack such outlets.

In special cases, work could provide a sort of 'public sphere' operating in parallel to people's media consumption, as in this description of a west London newsagents' shop by its owner: This diarist made clear, however, that this was mainly conversation that happened around her, rather than something to which she felt able to contribute, let alone direct.

Obviously, the availability of particular types of talk-context varies greatly between individuals. But there is a larger pattern in what our diarists told us: a near-complete absence of talk which (as reported to us, at least) led to any action involving public-type issues. 11 This suggests that 331 talk and practice (two elements of Dahlgren's linked circuit of civic culture) may operate almost independently from each other. This is not to say that talk or deliberation that led to action would be insignificant, if it occurred -the point is that this seems to be the exception rather than the norm.

Drawing back from the news

As people produced their diaries, a number of factors emerged which reduced their media consumption about public-related issues or led them to keep it isolated from the rest of their life. The sense that the news was too awful to watch regularly, or to reflect on in detail in a diary, was common both among men and women:

Not listened to Radio 4 today, but had our local radio station on instead, mainly because the world news is too depressing. So I had daft and light entertainment today. (Woman, 46, hospitality events organizer, second northern suburb, diary) I am afraid that I am in danger of becoming bad news-weary and developing an ostrich attitude. (Man, 67, retired printer, second northern suburb, diary) Sometimes it was celebrity culture, not depressing international news, from which people wanted to escape:

Have avoided newspapers, because as I predicted they are full of the Beckhams and real news is taking a back seat! (Woman, 39, unemployed, south-east London, diary)

In rare cases this push-pull process led to more general reflections about the place of media in people's lives:

The media is here to stay, love it or leave it, but I can't help wondering whether it was better to live in an age when you only knew what was happening in the next street or maybe village. (Woman, 34, part-time teaching assistant, urban south England, diary)

There was an important contextual factor for the common desire to escape from the news: the period of diary-writing (staggered across 37 diarists) lasted from February to August 2004, with the majority of diarists writing in the period March to April 2004, which was dominated by the unresolved US/UK conquest of Iraq and scandalous revelations from Abu-Ghraib jail, as well as the Madrid bombing. Interestingly, the same period coincided with the height of speculation about David Beckham's extramarital affairs, and the relative priority that the media accorded to these two types of stories provoked much critical reflection.

There are overlaps here between people's reasons for withdrawing from media consumption and explanations for people's withdrawal from interest in politics (see [START_REF] Croteau | Politics and the Class Divide[END_REF]: feelings of the pointlessness of one's own actions, but also a fear of involvement that stems lack of knowledge:

Woman: Yeah, I've always felt if I cast my vote, you know, that could be the one casting vote to swing the vote when I wouldn't know exactly what I was talking about and I could be doing absolutely the worst thing. Interviewer: So you don't feel that you're quite qualified in a way? Woman: Yeah, or well informed enough to make that choice. (Woman,33,hairdresser,urban south England) Or take this comment from a focus group:

There's really very little an individual can do. In fact, nothing that an individual can do. I could feel as strongly as I like about an issue and my wife's always complaining that I do feel strongly about an issue and do nothing about it because there's nothing you can do about it. Well, I suppose I could do, I could stand in the middle of [city name] and spout but nobody'd take a bit of notice, would they? (Man, 64, retired financial services chief executive, northern suburb)

Alongside constraints to connection, we must place also alternative forms of public connection.

Other forms of 'public connection'

In the research we tried to avoid the assumption that media were the only way in which people could sustain public connection. Diarists were encouraged to write or speak about public issues that had arisen for them otherwise than in the media; some did, although for many diarists it appeared difficult to think about public issues in any other context than what arose daily in the media. With a few diarists, there was a strong sense of social networks that were considerably more important than the media in sustaining their sense of connection to a public world (whether church or ethnic, women's or sport organizations). Very often, however, it was these same people who had difficulty completing the diary after the initial weeks because of these other commitments.

Certainly, it would be misleading to ignore that, for some diarists, the media provide a vivid sense of a collective connection which is not 'public' in the sense of relating to issues about shared resources of concerns that need resolution. Sometimes it is music that provides this space, as registered (both positively and negatively) in the diary of the hairdresser: Sport is ambiguous here. For many it is pure entertainment, and this entertainment may be purely individual in focus, not linking to any wider collective sense. For one diarist, however, a 25-year-old marketing student from a southern town, the world of sport was literally coterminous with the public world for him: there was nothing public he referred to over 12 weeks or in our interview that was not sport-related.

Celebrity and reality TV also provided a clear focus of collective involvement for some diarists, even those with little other sense of a collective world beyond the private sphere: As Big Brother started on Friday it now seems the 'official' start of summer and when it ends all my friends always comment, 'Well, that's summer over.' A bit sad really, that over the last few years we measure the summer by when Big Brother is on. (Woman, 34, administration clerk, rural Midlands) However, we did not find any case where this sense of collective connection through media -important pleasure though it may be, we make no judgement on that -connected with any discussion, action or thought about issues of public concern. This runs contrary to the hopes of some [START_REF] Coleman | A Tale of Two Houses[END_REF] that if politicians could connect with 'reality TV' viewers' engagement with politics might be broadened.

Summary

Even though media provide many flexible opportunities for sustaining public connection, the Public Connection study suggests that the space of civic culture is stratified, constrained and shaped as much by disconnections as connections. Media are important, but not always in a way that sustains public connection. Finding such disconnections is perhaps another way of registering the 'emptiness' that Joke Hermes found at the heart of everyday political discourse in Holland.

Conclusion

Where does this leave us in relation to our original question about how to identify a 'culture' of citizenship? Disconnection, we might argue, arises at the level of individual trajectories through the complex web of private and public worlds; perhaps it represents a rational individual choice, given the profound disinterest of democratic governments in the detailed opinions of their populations. 12 Is that all there is to say? If so, the search for a 'culture' of citizenship would indeed be a search for a chimaera, as Toby Miller suspected.

However, there remains a great deal more to say, because the space of civic culture is crossed by misrecognitions that are not 'natural' or even necessary, but constructed and contingent. Here is a 27-year-old marketing executive from a northern suburb who loves Big Brother and celebrity culture. Here, she describes without prompting a work-related conference (she markets a software package to a major UK public service in the context of New Labour's neoliberal strategy of marketization): This diarist freely admitted her disinterest in politics and intermittent engagement with any world of public issues, but talked passionately about the marketing mission of her company and strategy for winning over customers in the public service to which it was a supplier. Her language is the language of political mobilization, but the ends are private not political -a gulf whose strangeness, as she told the story, did not escape her.

We are not claiming to put this and the other material presented here together into a neat and coherent picture of how a 'culture' of citizenship is enacted in contemporary British lives. Instead, adapting a phrase of Adorno's, this article has presented at best some 'torn' fragments of a larger, highly fractured space: the uncertain space where people engage with, or disengage from, public worlds through the media that they consume. In considering how that space is 'torn', we must note fragmentations of discourse (the emptiness of which Hermes writes) but also 335 fragmentations of (the space of) action: actions which look as if they are part of a public connection and yet cannot in practice be understood that way. In that sense, the dimension of 'practice' in Dahlgren's (2003) circuit of 'civic culture' is hardly simple. Even if public connection (a basic precondition for civic culture or a 'culture' of citizenship) exists, people still need somewhere they can put acquired knowledge about a public world to use or, if they lack that space, some residual social status that somehow underwrites the meaningfulness of consuming media to connect to a world beyond the private. Such opportunities are unevenly shared, not because individuals make free choices, but because they are positioned differently in a wider distribution of resources.

As one respondent in the pilot research, a retired female nurse, put it memorably (in response to the questions we asked of the UK Mass Observation Panel): 13 If my views counted for nothing after 50 years doing the job I knew about, why should they count about other things I know less about? (Couldry and Langer, 2005: 244) 9. For more details on our sample and methodology, see Couldry et al. (forthcoming, 2007) or visit the project website (www.publicconnection.org). 10. Quotes are from interviews unless indicated otherwise. Most of the quotes have been sourced from interviews, not diaries, because diary material is more complex to interpret than the interviews, and there is no space here to discuss the specific interpretative issues the diaries raise (see Couldry et al., forthcoming, 2007). 11. We found one case: people talking at a party who then decided to lobby for local recycling support and collections. 12. This argument has been made powerfully in relation to citizens under 18 [START_REF] Buckingham | Making Citizens[END_REF]. 13. [START_REF] Couldry | Media Consumption and Public Connection: Towards a Typology of the Dispersed Citizen[END_REF] provide further background on the methodology of this pilot research and the context of this response.

  If I didn't speak to everyone at work -during the week, I wouldn't speak to anyone. [Her husband works at night.] I mean the kids -my son's never here . . . [my daughter] goes to bed at 9, 10 o'clock at night. (Woman, 45, two children, local government worker, south-east London)

  It's like a village shop, so I know my customers, they know me . . . And you talk about the weather, and what's been done and . . . ask about the family, they ask me about my family . . . And what's the main issue, everyday issue. About the government or . . . any kind of things, you know? So it all depends on . . . what kind of customers I get . . . So we discuss all sorts of things. (Woman, 51, shop owner with grown-up children, suburban west London)

  Usher's single 'Oh Yeah' is No. 1 in the Top 40 charts as heard on Radio 1 on Sunday and Top of the Pops, I'm glad about this as me and all the girls who love to get up and dance to it, favourite song at the moment . . . Very unlike me this week. I don't what is No. 1 in the music charts. Hopefully next week I will have more to write.(Woman, 33, hairdresser, urban south England, diary)

  I would say that I do keep up to date with what's going on. Maybe mainly the gossipy side of the media, you know, like Heat and OK magazine, yes, I get those every week. So I tend to keep up with who's doing what with who and where and what have you. What girl isn't into that, really? (Woman, 29, airport administrator, northern suburb)

  Yes, it's very, very interesting actually seeing how the [user group] react[s] to what we're putting across to them . . . Recently, this last September, we did our usual annual national user group conference and [name of boss] did a very sort of rousing speech and [name], who's chair of the national user group, got up -very rousing speech, saying 'Write to your MPs', you've got to write to your MPs, get involved, you know, show support. If you want to choose your system, if you want control over . . . what you do on your day-to-day, write. And a lot of people are saying, well, you know it's going to happen anyway . . . what's the point? And a lot of people [said] yes, I've written to my MP and I'm gonna go see him. It's very interesting, seeing whether people believe that you can affect what's going to happen or whether it's going to happen anyway, despite what you think.

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c o u l d ry: c u lt u r e a n d c i t i z e n s h i p

Acknowledgements

This article began life as a paper presented at the Making Sense of Culture Conference, Institute of Cultural Theory, University of Manchester, January 2005. Thanks to the organizers, to Joke Hermes for suggesting the panel, and to the audience for their comments. The 'Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection Project', conducted at the London School of Economics, was funded under the ESRC/AHRC Cultures of Consumption programme (project number RES-143-25-0011), whose financial support is gratefully acknowledged.


How much truth is there to Dutch ethnic stereotypes of the Indo-Surinamese as diligent, hardworking and socially mobile, and Afro-Surinamese as stagnating and associated with poverty? Van Niekerk begins this comparative anthropological study with these images and suggests that contrary to researchers' proclivity to attribute migrants' social mobility to either structure or culture, social mobility is in reality a mixture of both. The argument is that the historically and geographically-specific employment and education opportunities, social mobility strategies, family structures and gender relations that East-Indians and Creoles employed in Surinam influence their social mobility in the Netherlands. This proposal, that culture matters, inserts the study into the politicized debate about the relevance of culture to poverty, a debate in which post-1960s critiques Oscar Lewis' culture of poverty theory has meant that researchers have tended to focus on structure and opportunity, rather than whether and how groups contribute to their own marginalization.

The employment and educational mobility of lower-class first and second generation Indo-Surinamese and Afro-Surinamese living in two cities in the Netherlands is the topic of the book. The introduction defines the research question, qualifies relevant terms and gives a discussion of methodology (a mixture of survey data as well as interviews with 64 extended families). Chapter 2 compares the education and employment position of these two groups of Surinamese who migrated to the Netherlands in the 1970s and around 1980. Here we learn that, contrary to ethnic stereotypes, the Afro-Surinamese in fact are more educated and as often employed as the Indo-Surinamese. Chapter 3 provides a sketch of Creole and East-Indian social and economic positioning in Surinam and the argument is given that the groups' different educational and employment opportunities in Surinam placed the Afro-Surinamese in a better position to meet the needs of the Dutch labour market. We also learn that the same ethnic stereotypes about these groups were in existence in

Surinam as well. Chapter 4 focuses on the first generation of migrants and their mobility trajectories and shows that the Afro-Surinamese, who had a higher level of education, income and urban experience in Surinam, were able to maintain a certain level of continuity after migration to the Netherlands, as their backgrounds 'fitted' employment needs in the new society at the time. The Indo-Surinamese were less of a 'fit' as they came from an agricultural and entrepreneurial background and experienced both a decline in status as well as occupational mobility in the Netherlands. Chapter 5 introduces gender as a variable and shows that men and women have different rates of employment and advance via different 'trajectories of mobility'; Indo-Surinamese women are formally employed less often than Afro-Surinamese women and Afro-Surinamese men have the lowest employment rate. It is here where the pre-migration legacy comes into play most visibly, as the rate of employment differences is linked to enduring family structures and household compositions cultivated in Surinam; for example the Indo-Surinamese 'male breadwinner' ideal and Afro-Surinamese tradition of matrifocality, career women and financial independence and the marginality of Afro-Surinamese men.

In the remaining three chapters, Van Niekerk discusses the second generation and the somewhat static culture concept becomes more dynamic. These chapters in particular may be of interest to sociology of education researchers and students as they engage the relevance of social background to the educational mobility of children. For example, Van Niekerk argues that while social background is a good predictor in the case of Dutch children, in the case of Indo-Surinamese children it is not, since although they are not highly educated, these parents still transfer high ambition to their children due to their own schooling, labour market position, family structure and gender roles. However, if the discussion of Indo-Surinamese youths' high educational ambition is convincing, the argument that Afro-Surinamese parents do not transfer ambition to their children due to their culture and, in particular, their more individualistic attitude, open community as well as the intrinsic value given to education, is not as persuasive. Van Niekerk chooses to ignore Afro-Surinamese testimonies of discrimination and links some youths' choices of music and sporting careers over higher status careers and employment not to discrimination, but to culture. It is here that the book's aim of linking culture to structure falters a bit, as the discussion of structure is related only to structural shifts in the employment sector and the culture concept utilized lacks influence by the majority (i.e. ethnic 'Dutch') society either in Surinam or the Netherlands. For example, surely the legacy of the racial, gendered and sexual identities constructed through nation-building efforts both in empire, as well as in the colonies, must have affected both how the Dutch and Indo-and Afro-Surinamese distinguished themselves as culturally different from each other in the Netherlands and in Surinam, as well as the structures in both societies.

In the end, we learn that the ethnic stereotypes with which the book begins are both true and false; the Afro-Surinamese are more often employed than the Indo-Surinamese and hence are not stagnating, but the Indo-Surinamese, while not as often employed, have achieved more social mobility and hence are socially mobile. Yet we never learn why such stereotypes have endured or for whose benefit such stereotypes exist. While the book does a fair job of describing the internal structures of migrant cultures and their relation to social mobility, an inclusion of the culture of structures (for example, as is discussed in the literature on structural discrimination), might have allowed for a more multifarious understanding of the relationship between structures to culture and thus, migrant mobility.

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Susanna Paasonen

This article addresses the representational conventions and gendered forms of address in online pornography through analysis of 366 unsolicited email (spam) messages advertising porn websites. Combining content description with close reading, it considers the terminology, imagery, narrative elements and points of view employed in advertising commercial heterosexual pornography. The spam advertisements create excessive displays of gender difference. It seems that limited female agency is central, especially in messages advertising reality sites structured by gendered relations of control. Arguing that such displays of control should not be automatically translated as displays of power, this article investigates the representational logic of mainstream pornography as one based on binary differences, juxtapositions and easily recognizable types. K E Y W O R D S feminzn research, znternet research pornography, representation, spaim email

The erosion of identity categories such as gender, age, 'race' or class online has been discussed in internet research since the early 1990s. Online communications have been defined as a disembodied game or ex- ploration that challenge the very notion of identity (Stone, 1995; Turkle, 1995). This considered, it is perhaps unsurprising that researchers have found identity play in virtual communities, along with different forms of 'cybersex', 'cyborgasms' and 'e-rotics', to be an intriguing and challenging object of study, while mainstream online pornography and its ties to the offline porn industry have been left with relatively little scholarly attention.' Studies of online pornography have focused on freedom of

mations in th production, distribution and consumption of pornography. Together with video and DVD production, the internet has challenged print media in porn publishing. The 37-year-old Penthouse was declared bankrupt in 2003 after its circulation decreased from the five million in its heyday to a mere 650,000 copies. Other magazines have invested in video production and online services: for example, only 20 percent of Hustlers turnover is connected to the printed magazine. The world wide web enables anonymous access to pornography without the need to visit a newspaper stand, special shop or club. Live performances, pornographic images and narratives once available in print and on video are now online.

Online distribution has made alternative, independent and amateur productions more accessible than ever before. Given that pornography has an $11 billion turnover annually in the United States alone, investments in online content production are hardly marginal in terms of the porn industry or internet usage (Jardin, 2004; Williams, 2004).

Pornography has been considered the first -and perhaps the only - profitable form of online content production (Winston, 1998). It has been equally 'avant-garde' in other media. Pornographic images were distributed as photographs and stereoscope images in the 19th century, and in 8mm and 35mm film, video and Polaroid pictures during the 20th century.

The popularity of video recorders was facilitated by video distribution of porn. The world wide web saw the avalanche of online pornographies in the mid-1990s but pornography was certainly present in the Usenet of the 1980s (Lane, 2001). When Nokia launched its N-Gage gaming mobile phone in 2003, pornographic content was readily downloadable for this platform.

The increasing revenue of the porn industry is connected directly to its increasing visibility in media culture: television, cinema, internet, news- papers, magazines and advertising. Debates on pornography tend to focus on questions of censorship and freedom of speech (especially in the US), whereas the form and content of mainstream pornography is addressed and analyzed more seldomly. This article takes a step in this direction by investigating representational conventions and gendered forms of address in pornographic junk email. The research material consists of 366 unsolicited advertising email messages (spam) archived between October 2002 and February 2004 with screen captures.2 Porn spam is part of an avalanche of unsolicited email that comprises an estimated two-thirds of all global email traffic. This material provides one vignette into commercial online pornography. While it is hardly representative of the variety of available porn, it does document daily encounters with online porn. Spam messages are sent to massive address databases and circulated internationally. They promote a range of products from irresistible mort- gage deals to Viagra and Valium, from pills promising to increase penis size to those promising to melt any extra body fat, from incredible dating 404 opportunities to commercial porn sites. The messages in the sample make use of HTML (Hypertext Mark-Up Language), making it possible to adjust the background colour, layout and text type of the messages, so that emails resemble the graphic interfaces of the web. The messages are adverts for commercial porn sites and, in many cases, are identical to the 'free tour' pages of the sites themselves.3 If the recipient's email client opens the messages in HTML format, images, colours and animated headings open up alongside the text: thus invitations to visit porn sites featuring 'monstrous penises' or 'extreme penetrations' are accompanied by graphic images in full colour.

Marks of gender

Discussions of pornography as a singular entity are bound to fail. Generalizations conflate genres, practices of production and consumption: as porn- ography is homogenized into something always already known, queer pornographies and independent productions in particular tend to disappear from view. Being aware of the problems inherent in this, this article aims to be specific about the pornography that the research addresses and the kinds of arguments that can be made on its basis. In order to map the range of representation involved, the process began with a content description of the 366 messages. This meant coding the messages in terms of genre, pictorial elements, acts and terminology employed, as well as the ways of marking the sender and message recipients. This content description provides a general understanding of the material as predominantly main- stream and heterosexual (Table 1); however, this does not equal analysis as such. In order to study the composition and gendered dynamics of indi- vidual messages, a close reading of narrative elements, points of view and forms of address has been conducted. Oral sex is the most popular of all acts depicted. Within this category, the roles of the 'giver' and 'recipient' are distributed in Table 2.

Depictions of oral sex are often complemented by so-called 'money shots' i.e. male ejaculation targeted at the partner's face, mouth, breast, stomach or back. The sample includes 207 money shots, the maj ority of which are targeted at a female face (93), mouth (73) and breasts (21).

According to Linda Williams' (1989) study of film pornography, money shots were established in the 1970s as compulsory and highly visible signs of sexual climax that both verify sexual pleasure and culminate the sexual act. Ejaculation is presented also as evidence of female orgasm: female ejaculations were depicted in 6 percent of all money shots in the sample.

Of all figures presented in the messages, 72 percent are female. More specifically, these women are thin (98%), young (92%), white (66%), and have long (84%) and blonde (48%) hair. Of all the male figures, 65 percent are present only as penises while rest of the male body has been framed out. Although women have been figured as consumers of porn for some decades, the sample does not include advertisements for sites targeted especially at women. As will be argued later in the more detailed discussion of the material, the recipient addressed is typically male and heterosexual, while spaces of female agency tend to be highly limited. Acts labelled 'lesbian' reproduce the 'girl-on-girl' scenes catering to male consumers and include the possibility of 'joining in'. The highly femi- nine performers of 'girl-on-girl' messages are seen posing together and performing fellatio on plastic dildos while gazing towards the camera. The act implies the penis (or penis-like object) as the assumed primary source of pleasure in lesbian sex while reminding the recipient (or, in narratological terms, the implied reader) of the power of his sexual organ.

Women are described with a wider range of adj ectives and nouns than men. Most popular terms for describing women include: 'girl' (31%), 'slut' (22%), 'babe' (10%) and 'lesbian' (7%); while popular adjectives 406 include: 'hot' (33%), 'teen' (22%), ' sexy' (9 %), 'young' (9 %), 'nasty' (4%), 'sweet' (3%) and 'innocent' (3%). Women are described with nouns in 410 accounts, whereas there are only 49 descriptions of men. Their scale is also considerably narrower and homosocial in style: men are referred to as'guys' (64%), 'men' (I0%), 'studs' (8%), 'mates' (6%), 'buddies' (4o%), 'dudes' (40%) and 'brothers' (2%). As a rule, men are not defined with other adjectives than 'horny' except when their penises are described.

Hard/soft, dominant/submissive, aggressive /passive are familiar binary opposites used to schematize masculinity and femininity. Email porn spam makes wide use of this vocabulary in highlighting heterosex as a play of clear-cut differences. The binary gender divide finds resonance in the choice of adj ectives. The most popular terms for male genitalia include: 'big' (45%), 'monster' (17%), 'huge' (12%), 'over 12"' (9o%), 'fat' or 'thick' (8%) and 'massive' (4%). These are juxtaposed with diminutive terminology for female genitalia: 'tight' (730%), 'tiny' (11% ), 'little' (8%o) and 'small' (8 %). This extreme juxtaposition creates a particular vocabu- lary for heterosex. In addition to general terminology of 'fucking', 'sucking', 'banging' and 'swallowing', it includes verbs such as 'stretch', 'stuff, 'nail', 'punish', 'give hard', 'pound', 'gag', 'torture', 'rip', 'split open', 'choke' and 'dilate'. This vocabulary reads like a textbook example of morphology of the body that sees female and male bodies-also known as 'opposite sexes'-as complementing each other all the way to their interconnecting genitalia (Richardson, 1996: 7). Such 'heterosexual structuralism' assumes both gender and sexuality as binary structures. Genders are seen as mutually opposing yet interconnected by heterosexual desire (Butler, 1993). In the framework of heterosexual morphology, gender is understood as a fundamental and binary difference separating men and women, while desire stands primarily for desire for otherness. Female desire is defined as difference from male desire, but also as its complementation and opposite.

All this implies gendered differences and dynamics of control as central in terms of sexual arousal and gratification (Richardson, 1996). Faithful to the logic of heterosexual structuralism, pornography zooms in on body parts marked as primary signifiers of gender difference, such as genitalia, breasts, buttocks, long hair and red painted lips. Gender differences are defined as primarily sexual and culminate in the presentation of genitalia (Kuhn, 1994[1985]).

The terminology of monstrous penises and tiny vaginas, of the 'stuffing' and 'dilating' employed in the porn spam messages, seems to stretch heterosexual morphology to its extremes. Signs of gender difference are heightened and exaggerated to the degree that heterosexual coitus be- comes a near-impossible play of colossal penises and the tiniest of vaginas. In this sense, the material provides abundant possibilities for analyzing the artificiality and compulsive reiteration of gender categories. The messages represents gender as a binary structure in excess, yet these displays of gender 407 difference are also advertisements for commercial porn sites that the recipient is desired to pay to visit.

To the degree that the messages feature the highlights of the sites advertised, the logic of excess and overdrive is connected to titillation and potential arousal -the more elaborate the marks of gender and drastic the gender difference, the more hardcore the representation. What the analytically trained eye easily reads against the grain is also a generic example of mainstream hardcore porn. This evokes questions concerning the analytical force of readings that make evident or render visible the heterosexual structuralism at play -after all, this hardly necessitates much revelation (Sedgwick, 2003). Deconsructive readings are always available, but they little explain the obvious titillation of gendered and sexualized relations of control, or their connections to masturbatory practices.

In the realm of spam pornography, men do the chasing and women accept male desire, but there are also exceptions to the rule. In four mes- sages, the scenario of male hunters and female prey is turned around ('Man Hunters', 25 September 2003, 20 January 2004; 'Porn Stud Search', 21 March 2003; 'Tourist Hunter', 12 July 2003). In all four messages, women take men by surprise in everyday settings such as the street or a tax office, and lure them into sexual acts on the spot. The spam adverts for 'Man Hunters' feature two women, defined as 'lethal' and posing with guns. Despite this framing of danger, the lot of their prey is merely to receive oral sex and have intercourse with the woman on top. Thus fantasies of women taking control do not necessitate any significant changes in the pornographic scenario.

The sample includes 11 messages featuring transgender performers and two with bisexual acts, as well as one message in which a woman pene- trates a man with a dildo. In these cases, the heteronormative narrative is disrupted by a woman as the holder of the thrusting penis, men engaging in oral sex with each other, and displays of highly feminine transbodies (female to male transsexuals are not part of the diet). The possible con- fusion caused by the ambivalent transgender body is soothed with the aid of humour:

You have never seen anything this funny. We get these guys and we set them up for the fall. We take them out and let them pretend they are picking up a normal hot chick and even get them to invite her back to our pad. We let them get comfy and when they make their move that's when the fun starts. This shit will fucking blow your mind, just like it did to those guys who pulled these chicks [sic] panties down and was [sic] shocked to find a cock!!! ('Tranny Surprise', 18 August 2003)4

The message lies heavily on comic relief. The possibility of laughing at somebody else (the male protagonist) while still enjoying the action dispelsor at least suspendsexplicit queer attraction. Indeed, ads for 408 'Tranny Surprise', 'Tranny House', 'He-She Club', 'Tranny Zone', 'Sexy Transsexuals' and 'Shemale Schlongs' declare that male-to-female transsexuals provide 'the best of both worlds' -a feminine body, male genitalia and an understanding of male sexuality (see Kulick, 1998).

A message just for you Pornography addresses its readers in several ways. Forms of address vary from gazes directed at the camera and postures composed for the recipients' eye to direct verbal address. Forms of address are particularly central in email porn spam, as these are simultaneously email messages (with a sender, receiver and subject line) and advertisements (which aim to make the recipient interested enough to click to the service advertised). Of the messages, 55 percent in the sample address users on a general, non-personal level to visit the site or subscribe to it (with calls such as 'click', 'look' or 'join'). Of the others, 31 percent resort to a slightly more personal address ('you can experience', 'you should participate', 'can you imagine') while 14 percent get even more personal ('lusty women are waiting for you', 'command me', 'empty your load on her face'). The target of personal address is male by default, as is evident in references to the recipient's assumed erection and ejaculation when interacting with the site ('spank your monkey on our liveshow slut's face').

The sender is marked as female in the majority of the messages. Slightly less than half of the female sender names are typical female 'porn artist names' such as 'Samantha Cocklovr', 'Shirly Gash', 'Veronica Hotass', 'Jessica Tightho', 'Angelina Whorinto', 'Meg Luvvacock', 'Ashly Gumlicker' or 'Nancy Nutsucker'. These suggest something of the message content before it is even opened. One particularly popular strategy is to mark the subject line as a female invitation or comment: 'Want to get me to spread? Compliment me on my real jugs' ('Pamela Yes', 25 November 2003); 'I suck like a wet vacuum if I can stay rent-free' ('Suzanne Hummer', 12 May 2003), 'My nipples get hard and I get wet down there when Johnny walks in class' ('Joyce Juicycunt', 5 July 2003).

The female narrator is mainly present in the subject line as the narrator of the message is hardly ever female. The narrator's voice is often invisible or refers to the site, however, it can refer to individual men or male groups performing on the site advertised. Women are the focal point in visual and textual depictions alike, whereas the narrator and implied reader tend to be male. Narrators sketch out the sensory pleasures featured on the site.

The advertisement for 'Big Dick Mania' ('Beef Machine', 13 December 2003), addresses the user as one of the boys:

You and I both know little girls like big dicks! They act afraid of the anaconda in our pants but we both know they can't wait to get it inside of their tight little holes! They ride those giant cocks with their sweet little cunts and then wait for the cum when you're done.

The juxtaposition of 'us' and 'little girls', of 'big' and 'tight' produces clear camps that follow the dictates of heterosexual structuralism. The message also addresses the recipient in a flattering fashion as holder of a 'giant anaconda' which, apparently, all men possess. The recipient is invited to join in a male group (of 'us' and 'we') and this is facilitated further by the display of men as penises only in the message images.

In a sense, the recipient can act as an 'extension' of a dismembered yet fully erect member, the collective 'anaconda'. As the male faces remain invisible, their figures stand for 'Joe Averages' into whose shoes viewers may position or imagine themselves.

'Sucking Sonja' (6 December 2003) advertises the site Suck Me Bitch, which invites the recipient to a position of command: 'Make her feel like a real woman. Just say the magic words . . . Suck Me Bitch.' The message is toned in shades of brown and beige. Its upper part is dominated by a collage including the slogan and images of eight young women sucking penises and with sperm sprayed on their mouths and faces. The images of women and penises become blended to the degree that the nose of a woman depicted on the left corner appears to grow organically into a penis inserted in another woman's mouth. The introductory text advertises the 'deepthroat action' and 'freakishly messy' money shots with text fonts approximating an edgy, hand-drawn style repeated in the frames drawn around the image and text. Suck Me Bitch is 'all amateur oral action', 'raw & uncut real home blowjob videos', 'p.o.v. blowjobs' (i.e. fellatio depicted from a male point of view). 'That's right motherfuckerst This is the downright meanest, nastiest site you'll ever findt', 'These girls love to worship cock and it shows', the message enthuses.

The lower part of the message features a gallery of nine photographs and accompanying text. These feature a young and dark-haired woman named Thiannon, introduced as an 'airport parking slut'. In the largest image Thiannon looks directly at the camera in semi close-up with her mouth open, sporting a tongue piercing and sperm in her mouth. Next to her face an inserted dialogue bubble declares: 'Mmmmt Tastes greatt I want moret' The text box under the image provides a narrative framework for the events depicted in the photographs:

While waiting for her boytoy to arrive, this hot babe was kind enough to assist some poor gentlemen with their so-called locked door. Not only did she assist in openning [sic] the door she gladly release [sic] their stress as well by giving them the best blowjob they have ever had!

In a discussion of depictions of sex acts in cinema, Slavoj [START_REF] Zizek | From Sublime to Ridicule, or, Sexual Act in Cinema[END_REF] argues for the incompatibility of explicit acts and appealing narrative.

According to Zizek, ecstatic sexual acts are impossible to represent, since the outsider observer's 'sober' gaze perceives them as amusing and excessive. Something of this kind seems to be at play in the Suck Me Bitch ad-410 vertisement, that illustrates the fundamental difficulty of representing the sexual act, the partners involved or the pleasures derived from it. The exclamation 'Mmmmt Tastes greatt I want moret' attributed to Thiannon is a highly generic -and perhaps, in Zizek's (1998: 25) terms, 'idiotically comical' -expression of pleasure and desire, especially when presented in the context of a threesome in a cramped passenger car.

The difficulty (or, in Zizek's opinion, impossibility) of combining narrative with sex acts 'showing it all' leads to the paradox that the supposedly most spontaneous human activity (sex) is represented in the most codified and formulaic manner (Zizek, 1998). It is well known that porn- ography reproduces formulaic representational conventions, postures and looks, when marking things out as 'hot' or 'sexy'. Stock characters (such as plumber, horny housewife or cheerleader) and easily recognizable scenes (such as 'the plumber surprises the horny housewife' or 'the cheerleader gives oral sex in a locker room') tend to be equally formulaic. The typical pornographic narrative consists of a series of sketchy scenes surrounding the sex act, providing it with a setting. According to Jennifer Bell (2001), sexual arousal is achieved best through the use of stock characters, since complex and contradictory characters evoking different kinds of emotions tend to decrease and disturb the viewing experience. Stock characters and settings enable quick transition to the sex act itself: 'once the scene is set, pornography can get down to real action' [START_REF] Kuhn | The Power ofthe Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality[END_REF][START_REF] Kuhn | The Power ofthe Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality[END_REF]: 45).

Pornography typifies characters, signs and gestures of arousal and pleasure. Nevertheless, the attraction of porn has been associated with pictorial realism and evidence of sexual pleasure captured by the camera.

In this perspective, pornography is seen more a a question of presentation than representation, of boasting the 'authentic presence' of male arousal and orgasm with the aid of the documentary powers of photography and cinematography (Falk, 1993). It seems that both the representational form and strict conventionality of porn are surprisingly easy to bypass. After all, pornography hardly 'records' acts performed for the camera: acts are staged, performed and lighted especially for the cameras situated under, in front of and between the copulating performers. Reflections on authenticity in pornography tend to bypass these obvious technical aspects.

Male erection and orgasm, verified by money shots, become guarantees of authenticity in the same vein as pornographic texts themselves.

Porn choreography

They layout of the 'Suck Me Bitch' advert discussed above -the combination of headers, slogans, collage, links and galleries -is generic to porn spam. The message presents the site's basic concept and newest addition through images and narrative elements. The layout reproduces a familiar spam format.

The text field and money shot image, located in the lower part of the mes- sage body, are framed on both sides by four smaller images in chronological 411 order. In the first image on the left Thiannon looks into the camera with a faint smile, while next to her a man in sunglasses gestures with his hands.

The second image features a man with a red face and his eyes almost closed. His mouth is open, revealing the lower row of teeth, and he has heavy lines between his eyes. The man's somewhat frightening expression could be one of rage but given the context of the message, it is likely to signify sexual arousal. Based on a stretch of flesh visible in the image, the man seems to be sitting on a backseat with his legs spread. The third image depicts Thiannon's nude behind with white string bikini pulled down, while in the fourth one Thiannon is sucking a penis. Her eyes are closed, she holds the penis with her right hand and the man pushes her head lower towards his groin.

On the right, the first image shows Thiannon smiling at the camera in close-up. Her mouth is open and her teeth are close to the reddish tip of a penis that she is licking. In the next image, Thiannon looks up to a camera above her. The third image, again, shows Thiannon on her back with her neck pushed towards the backdoor of the car, and her white shirt pulled up to reveal a breast. Above her, a man is standing with his legs spread and his penis dangling in front of her face. Thiannon is looking at the penis with raised eyebrows -her neck is tense and the skin of her throat is creased. Together with her tense position, her grin creates an expression of alarm rather than pleasure. Thiannon's left hand is raised to her throat in a gesture that is both submissive and resistant. The fourth and last image provides closure. In a semi close-up, Thiannon is shown with her mouth open and her tongue sticking out. On the left, a man is milking sperm into her mouth. The images are fairly low resolution, as is the norm in spam messages. They are toned into grey and brown, colours repeated in the overall layout of the advert. The message makes evident the basic narrative formula of the site, as well as the spaces of agency available for male and female protagonists. With a few sentences, the text field sketches out a context for the sexual acts specified by the image gallery. The basic act is oral sex, where a woman is servicing several men, and the climax is a money shot targeted at the woman's face and mouth. As in porn more generally, sex acts are not motivated in any particular way: the woman readily agrees, and the men are always willing to have sex.

The point of view in Suck Me Bitch is decidedly male, as emphasized by the site's title and slogan. The 'narrator' encourages a man to command a woman, named bitch, into giving oral sex, while creating a homosocial framework for the action. The images position the camera into the hands of the male performers but, except for one image, men are visible only as their genitalia, hands and legs. The 'cock worship' mentioned in the site's content description is evi- dent in the image gallery: licking and sucking male genitalia or pushing 412 a penis down one's throat are depicted as expressions of female desire, while the woman remains safely under the men and in male control. The fundamental conceptual difference between a penis and a phallus, empha- sized by psychoanalytical theory, appears fluid: a penis is not only a penis, but an always-erect symbol of power and control in front of which women kneel (cf. Black, 2002; Koch, 1993; Williams, 1989). This impression is maintained in images of women looking up to the camera and closing their eyes in enjoyment while men ejaculate on their faces.

Promises of reality and coy plots

During the past few years, reality has been a central genre in television programming and equally in online pornography. Roughly half of the sample advertises reality sites (such as Suck fe Btch) promising glimpses of actual events. The sites assure that their performers are amateur and that the action has not been staged. A documentary sense is achieved by grainy image quality and point-of-view shots that hypothetically could have been recorded by amateurs during their escapades. Generally, the women do not have large silicone implants and the men often lack the large penises otherwise so appreciated in pornography. The adverts depict performers 'hooking up' on streets, hotels or beaches and engaging in casual sexual acts. Scenes are set in mundane spaces such as cars, motel rooms or modestly furnished apartments.

The reality genre bridges the gap between the everyday and the fantasy world of pornography by depicting the most mundane spaces as potential grounds for arousal and copulation. The 'reality effect' supports porn's more general promises of authenticity, of showing everything without any special acting, directing or manipulation of events (cf. [START_REF] Black | The Rea/ity Effect: Fi/m Cu/ture and the Graphic Imperative[END_REF]. In spite of the reality framing, shaky camerawork and (more or less) amateur performers, the scenarios are poorly motivated on the level of narrative. This necessitates a degree of suspension of disbelief, of playing along with the story.

The reality site concept is often a hoax. Spam introductions suggest that the women performing are unaware of being filmed, let alone of the images ending up on the internet. Women's participation is motivated by ungrounded promises of financial gain, a free place to stay, or help with a residency permit in one message after another. The concept of Captain Stabbing is to lure 'anal virgins' on a ship where several men proceed to have anal and oral sex with them. The description remains fairly identical in all the eight adverts in the sample:

Me and my crew go out to find hot young backdoor virgins and get them aboard SS Stabbin for some fun in the sun. We sail for the open seas, get what we want and throw the pretty girls out to sea and let them swim back to shore.

In Captain Stabbin young women are disposable goods whose function is to pleasure men: once the climax is over and recorded in money shots, 413 the woman can be disposed. The site concept is humorous, the action is highly staged and the narrative is most obviously a fantasy, but of a sad- istic sort. Throwing women overboard is depicted as a narrative closure ensuing male orgasm, as well as a central source of enj oyment. As another advertisement line has it:

These Girls Have No Idea Of What's In Store For Them When They Get On The Captains [sic] Boat. It's All About The Booty And They Get It In The End!

The narration is in the first person singular: the captain and his crew invite users to follow the action (and the 'newest booty') from the male protagonists' perspective. The men are present primarily as 'disembodied penises', often shown in point-of-view camera shots. This widely used representational strategy is also used in Street Blowlobs. Here, the special gimmick is a camera hidden in the male protagonist's spectacles: 'Hot unsuspecting girls lured into sexual acts I film secretly.' The image galleries in the four Street Blowlobs advertisements provide point-of-view shots of foreplay, oral sex, vaginal penetration and money shots recorded as if through the male protagonist's eyes. Consequently, the viewer is offered a position of visual control and, to a degree, that of the (virtual) holder of the penis. As in Captain Stabbin, the site concept is explained to the user, whereas the female performers are said to have no such knowledge.

Point-of-view cameras are, of course, also used in Suck Me Bitch. The spam message dated 18 January 2004 stars Allura (a 'flea market fuck bunny') as the newest attraction. As in the previous Suck Me Bitch scenario, a young woman is servicing two men with a camera:

We found Allura down at the flea market. It's 2pm on a tues. afternoon and this bitch is in the food court area, drunk off her ass -can you say LOSER!?

The image gallery features Allura, who appears drunk indeed with drooping eyelids: she is performing fellatio in five images, shows her anus for the camera in one, and exhibits sperm dripping from her mouth in another.

Allura is marked as a drunken loser who hangs out at a flea market food court, drinking beer. She obviously fails to match the criteria of respectability, discussed by Beverley Skeggs (1997) as a marker of class and gender. Not only is Allura consuming goods marked as working class (secondhand products, beer), but is inappropriately and unfemininely drunk early in the afternoon as well as willing to engage in sexual acts with strangers without a hint of chastity. If respectability is, as Skeggs suggests, a key mechanism in othering groups of people, then Allura is certainly othered as a lower-class woman and, as the title of 'flea market fuck bunny' suggests, as used goods. Out of control and out of order, Allura 414 'has it coming'.

Pornography represents continuous, abundant and non-committed sex aided by women's assumed insatiability and men's perpetual readiness for sex. As the previous examples illustrate, this does not necessarily imply female agency as anything other than an instrument and mirror of male desire. Women's and men's desire have clearly different structural positions in mainstream heterosexual pornography: women are defined as out of control in their lustiness, as sluts by default, or even as objects of some kind of abuse.

Writing on pornographic magazines, Kaarina Nikunen (1996) critiques the assumption of the viewer as necessarily male, and the women depicted as passive obj ects. According to Nikunen, this is merely a reading convention that situates women in the realm of the 'chaste look' and detaches them from the influence of porn. Since women have not been defined as sexually active agents, it is difficult to find female agency in pornography. However, the question is one of reading conventions and pornographic images can be read differently by defining women as active subjects in control (Nikunen, 1996). In the sample, women can be seen to enjoy sexual acts and enjoy being positioned as objects of gaze, and such readings are definitely encouraged by the narrative elements.

Nevertheless, a more systematic shift of perspective is difficult to achieve. Spaces of female agency are limited on the level of image composition, ways of addressing the user, naming the characters depicted and narrating the flow of events. In fact, it seems that limited female agency is central, especially in messages advertising reality sites: the sites' basic concept is built around gendered relations of control.

Female sexual autonomy is emphasized mainly in advertisements for adult dating. These are also the messages naming women as 'women' or 'dames' rather than 'girls', sluts' or 'babes'. On adult dating sites, women are looking for sex partners:

10000 Horny, 10000 Amateur, 10000 Real. We have every intention of getting you laid. Our female members are motivated by their own sexual needs. They want to fuck and they want to do it now. (EZCheating.com, 4 August 2003) This focus on female sexual agency is rare in the spam material. However, a hyperlink located at the very bottom of the message body seems to undercut the rhetoric of female sexual autonomy: 'Your next door neighbors by day ... Your sexual fuck slaves by night.' In a sudden shift of narration, women looking for sexual partners are transformed from agents of desire to sexual slaves. Furthermore, the male user is offered the position of master of several willing female slaves.

On control and power

Pornography is among the most generic of popular genres. Its conventions are slow to change and are recycled with considerable vigor, especially 415 in the realm of mainstream commercial heterosexual pornography such as that addressed in this article. With its stock characters, vocabulary, accessories, key acts, gestures and positions, pornography works to define sexual scenarios and body styles as arousing and titillating. This results in a catalogue of representational conventions that are circulated further in advertising, music videos, cinema and gaming.

The stock materials and themes of pornography revolve around rela- tions of control. The roles of the active and passive partner, the hunter and prey, the con and conned are easily recognizable and clear-cut. In the vast majority of messages in the sample, women are the ones under control. These scenarios repeat gendered power relations and code them as erotic.

In this sense, the sample does not merely concern the 'titillating' display of sexual acts, nudity, bodily parts or cavities, but also imageries of power and control.

Attention should be paid to both the connections and differences be- tween the concepts of control and power in discussions of pornography, as conflating them is both easy and over-simplifying. All kinds of pornography revolve around scenarios and fantasies of control: the virgin and seducer, the student and teacher, the slave and master reappear in one scenario after another, in straight and queer pornographies alike. This hardly means that all scenarios of control can be translated into reiteration or representationlet alone evidenceof power relations. Doing so leads to a kind of automatism where power is positioned as the self-explanatory outcome of analysis. This, again, does little to explain the representational dynamics of pornography.

In addition to the strict division of male and female positions, porn choreography concerns relations of control articulated in relation to age, 'racer, ethnicity, class and nationality. Porn uses types rather than char- acters and displays acts rather than complex narrative trajectories. All this leads to predictability in terms of settings and story, as well as in normative templates concerning desire and sexual acts. These templates can be altered, elements can be removed and new ones added, texts scripted and styles changed. While templates produce a certain degree of repetition and familiarity, they do not dictate the content or meanings of the text in question. The degree of variation alters, new templates are created and old ones appropriated. Nevertheless, a certain sense of dejaI vu is difficult to avoid. Richard Fung's (1991) notion on gay porn -that 'there is such a limited vision of what constitutes the erotic' -certainly applies to the sample of porn spam email in this research.

In examples such as Suck Me Bitch, Street Blowlobs or Captain Stabbin, gendered positions are rigid. Men are in control and on top and invite other men to join in the action. These examples of reality sites display fantasy scenarios that are difficult to draw apart from gendered relations of power: male dominance and female willingness to serve are featured 416 from the point of view of male protagonists and male pleasure. The pleasures of popular culture have been of central interest to cultural studies: pleasures of viewing and consumption have been read as political and empowering tactics of everyday life, identity work, negotiation and customization of meaning. Case studies have addressed soap operas, popular music, television and film, while -perhaps for obvious reasons - seldom has pornography been included in such explorations. Studying porn necessitates questioning the kinds of scenarios of control and power to which we subscribe while consuming and enjoying products of media culture. Making visible the conditions of viewing pleasure, pornography necessitates a critical reflection of the notion and meaning of pleasure in general.

Addressing the either/or debate that has tended to control feminist discussions on pornography, Lynn Chancer (1998) notes that imageries of control and submission are as real and central as erotic pleasures. A critique of hegemonic heterosexual porn and its choreographies does not foreclose analysis of diverse pleasures derived from pornographic representations. Neither do investigations into commercial sex and traffic in women in any way foreclose reflection on the potential of alternative pornographies.

Rather, it is precisely such interconnections and dual visions that help to push debates further.

The quite predictable spam messages from Nancy Nutsucker bear witness to the conventions and influence of mainstream heterosexual porn. They also make evident the need to address the centrality of control and relations of power for pornographic conventions. All this is crucial in the framework of internet research that has tended to emphasize both freedom and play when discussing sexuality online, and to draw online pornographies apart from their offline variations. The scholarly perspective outlined here is not blind towards questions of pleasure, but highly sensitive to their conditions, to the spaces of agency available to Nancy Nutsucker, her colleagues and the implied recipients of her messages. Notes 1. JoAnn di Filippo (2000) has studied online porn publishing. Susan Herring and Anna Martinson ( 2003) have analysed the US portal Sex

Tracker through systematic content description. The portal in question aims to provide content for women, men and users identifying themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual, although the majority of content caters to a heterosexual audience.

2. I have excluded from the sample all doubles, messages using text only, and ones that failed to open. Also, when traveling, I occasionally deleted all spam from my inbox. Given the large amount of doubles and defective image files, the 366 messages represent roughly one-third or one-quarter of all porn spam received in my university email account during the 17-month period archiving period. 3. The spam messages are not necessarily sent out by the service advertised.

It should be noted that 'free tour' materials are adapted and recycled by 417

spammers aiming to generate traffic with the aid of links email, links, and pop-ups (Bonik and Schaale, 2005).