A history of the Department of Chemistry, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1843-1975

Cover title

Pleasure and meaningful discourse: an overview of research issues

The concept of pleasure has emerged as a multi-faceted social and cultural phenomenon in studies of media audiences since the 1980s. In these studies different forms of pleasure have been identified as explaining audience activity and commitment. In the diverse studies pleasure has emerged as a multi-faceted social and cultural concept that needs to be contextualized carefully. Genre and genre variations, class, gender, (sub-)cultural identity and generation all seem to be instrumental in determining the kind and variety of pleasures experienced in the act of viewing. This body of research has undoubtedly contributed to a better understanding of the complexity of audience activities, but it is exactly the diversity of the concept that is puzzling and poses a challenge to its further use. If pleasure is maintained as a key concept in audience analysis that holds much explanatory power, it needs a stronger theoretical foundation. The article maps the ways in which the concept of pleasure has been used by cultural theorists, who have paved the way for its application in reception analysis, and it goes on to explore the ways in which the concept has been used in empirical studies. Central to our discussion is the division between the ‘public knowledge’ and the ‘popular culture’ projects in reception analysis which, we argue, have major implications for the way in which pleasure has come to be understood as divorced from politics, power and ideology. Finally, we suggest ways of bridging the gap between these two projects in an effort to link pleasure to the concepts of hegemony and ideology

Suppression of costimulation by human cytomegalovirus promotes evasion of cellular immune defenses.

CD58 is an adhesion molecule that is known to play a critical role in costimulation of effector cells and is intrinsic to immune synapse structure. Herein, we describe a virally encoded gene that inhibits CD58 surface expression. Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) UL148 was necessary and sufficient to promote intracellular retention of CD58 during HCMV infection. Blocking studies with antagonistic anti-CD58 mAb and an HCMV UL148 deletion mutant (HCMV∆UL148) with restored CD58 expression demonstrated that the CD2/CD58 axis was essential for the recognition of HCMV-infected targets by CD8+ HCMV-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs). Further, challenge of peripheral blood mononuclear cells ex vivo with HCMV∆UL148 increased both CTL and natural killer (NK) cell degranulation against HCMV-infected cells, including NK-driven antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity, showing that UL148 is a modulator of the function of multiple effector cell subsets. Our data stress the effect of HCMV immune evasion functions on shaping the immune response, highlighting the capacity for their potential use in modulating immunity during the development of anti-HCMV vaccines and HCMV-based vaccine vectors

ADAM17 targeting by human cytomegalovirus remodels the cell surface proteome to simultaneously regulate multiple immune pathways

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a major human pathogen whose life-long persistence is enabled by its remarkable capacity to systematically subvert host immune defenses. In exploring the finding that HCMV infection up-regulates tumor necrosis factor receptor 2 (TNFR2), a ligand for the pro-inflammatory antiviral cytokine TNFα, we found that the underlying mechanism was due to targeting of the protease, A Disintegrin And Metalloproteinase 17 (ADAM17). ADAM17 is the prototype ‘sheddase’, a family of proteases that cleaves other membrane-bound proteins to release biologically active ectodomains into the supernatant. HCMV impaired ADAM17 surface expression through the action of two virally-encoded proteins in its UL/b’ region, UL148 and UL148D. Proteomic plasma membrane profiling of cells infected with an HCMV double-deletion mutant for UL148 and UL148D with restored ADAM17 expression, combined with ADAM17 functional blockade, showed that HCMV stabilized the surface expression of 114 proteins (P < 0.05) in an ADAM17-dependent fashion. These included reported substrates of ADAM17 with established immunological functions such as TNFR2 and jagged1, but also numerous unreported host and viral targets, such as nectin1, UL8, and UL144. Regulation of TNFα-induced cytokine responses and NK inhibition during HCMV infection were dependent on this impairment of ADAM17. We therefore identify a viral immunoregulatory mechanism in which targeting a single sheddase enables broad regulation of multiple critical surface receptors, revealing a paradigm for viral-encoded immunomodulation

Lost in space : television's missing publics

Television today is a multi-headed hydra, a medium with multiple lives and diverse modes of connection with its viewers – it is a medium in perpetual transition. As broadcast TV it offers news, entertainment and advertising in a magazine format. As Cable TV it offers thematic or genre-based product flows. As Internet TV it offers pay per view and program downloads, chat and other interactive options. As mobile tv it offers program alerts, mobisodes, TV program highlight downloads and special offers from program sponsors. While the digital platforms have been slow to develop original content modes, those now being developed are shaped by a convergence process that is changing fundamentally the nature of the tacit ‘contract’ between audiences and entertainment. This change, the change from free-to-air services to pay-services that involve multiple contractual arrangements between clients and providers, means that television’s capacity to communicate the public sphere to the masses can no longer be taken for granted

Australia : Disney and the Australian cultural imaginary

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The cameraphone and online image sharing

The cameraphone and the cell phone together create a commercially exploitable mobile communications environment, yet there is evidence that the mobile communications industries find encouraging a culture of online cameraphone image sharing difficult. According to M:Metrics (2006a), ‘cameraphone ownership and usage is climbing across the U.S. and Europe’, but it is unclear that this is in response to user demand. Rather, it reflects the now almost ubiquitous bundling of camera and cell phone. A user survey by Lyra Research of 525 cameraphone users in the United States, conducted in April/May 2006 indicated that 72 per cent of users share images ‘on phone’, 28 per cent use MMS to send images, 31 per cent send images using e-mail, and 33 per cent save images to their PC, but only 12 per cent share their images online. This suggests that the cameraphone is most used for highly personal activities that involve the least additional cost to the user, and that online sharing of images does not yet register as a mainstream component of mobile culture (Lyra, 2006). Unfortunately for cameraphone users, the industry has been slow to address the reasons for this lack of interest, and so only a few sites, most notably Flickr, have risen to the ‘social networking’ challenge

The cultural revolution in audience research

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Contemporary television audiences : publics, markets, communities, and fans

There are several competing and sometimes overlapping ways of understanding audiences. Publics, markets, communities, and fans are the main terms used to describe people when they are "being an audience." This chapter will explore these audiences conceptually, using a variety of empirical examples