Still seeking the audience

The changing capacities to connect generated through contemporary media have implications for an understanding of the idea of ‘audience’. This paper begins a new search for an understanding of the contemporary audience and seeks this through an engagement with a few key ideas that sign-post a reconsideration of my own understanding of what an audience might become. Massumi’s idea of intensity, Bennett’s use of assemblage and the focus on event to emphasize the dynamic nature of an audience help to guide my trajectory. Finally I attempt to apply these ideas to a personal experience of becoming an audience to see how useful they might be as I continue to question my own habituated conceptualisations

Who laughs? A moment of laughter in Shortbus

In his essay On Laughter, first published in France in 1900, Henri Bergson suggested that “our laughter is always the laughter of the group” (2003:5). With this observation in mind, I have to ask: who laughs when we watch a movie? Who is it that we hear when laughter fills the theatre even if momentarily

The Effect of Income on Recycling Behavior in the Presence of a Bottle Law: New Empirical Results

Eleven U.S. states have enacted “bottle laws” and they are one of the few examples of a policy that takes advantage of the price system to ameliorate environmental damage. A deposit-refund program on beverage containers is a consumption tax combined with a disposal rebate that is the equivalent of a Pigouvian tax. Using individual level data I have collected on observed cash recycling behavior, this paper shows that an unintended consequence of bottle laws is that they have the potential to increase the incomes of very low wage workers. If states set the bottle deposit high enough, harvesting recyclables becomes viable employment. The use of a price system as an environmental remedy is often criticized on the grounds that it leads to lower incomes for the poor. In this case deposit-refund recycling laws may provide a way to improve resource allocation using the appropriate Pigouvian tax, and simultaneously provide a way to increase the income of low wage workers. The first section of this paper I estimate the determinants of recycling behavior in the presence of a bottle law. This provides some insights into the characteristics of those who cash recycle. In particular I find that low income households are much more likely to recycle for cash than are high income households. The second section of this paper uses the dataset of recyclers to examine the importance of recycling income to low income households. The data show the surprising result that recycling income does indeed provide a substantial supplemental income to a certain group of low-income cash recyclers.

Cash Recycling as an Efficiency Enhancing Anti-Poverty Program

While there are many descriptive articles about cash recyclers this is the first empirical study of people recycling for cash. A new survey shows that cash recycling is an important part of the income of the working poor and that an astonishing twenty percent of the income of professional scavengers comes from recycling. At the same time professional and workplace recyclers are responsible for a large amount of new recycling. A rough estimate of the amount of new recycling generated by the recycling redemption centers in Santa Barbara, CA lies between 36% and 51% of all cash recycling. Based on the evidence presented here it is important for policy makers to consider structuring new bottle laws in ways that encourage professional recycling.recycling, deposit-refund, Pigouvian tax