Small Surfaces

The Australian Media/Culture Journal has an omnibus issue dedicated the use of mobile technology in the Asia Pacific region. Lots and lots of very interesting stuff. Here’s an excerpt from the editorial summary of all the articles:

“The first four papers by Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Gerard Raiti, Yasmin Ibrahim, and Collette Snowden & Kerry Green highlight some of the key concepts and phenomena associated with mobile media in the region. Choi’s paper provides a wonderful introduction to the culture of mobile technologies in East Asia, focusing largely on South Korea, China and Japan. She problematises the rhetoric surrounding technological fetishism and techno-orientalism in definitions of ‘mobile’ and ‘digital’ East Asia and raises important questions regarding the transformation and future of East Asia’s mobile cultures.

“Gerard Raiti examines the behemoth of globalization from the point of view of personal intimacy. He asks us to reconsider notions of intimacy in a period marked by co-presence; particularly in light of the problematic conflation between love and technological intimacy.

“Yasmin Ibrahim considers the way the body is increasingly implicated through the personalisation of mobile technologies and becomes a collaborator in the creation of media events. Ibrahim argues that what she calls the ‘personal gaze’ of the consumer is contributing to the visual narratives of global and local events. What we have is a figure of the mediated mobile body that participates in the political economy of events construction.

“The paradoxical role of mobile technologies as both pushing and pulling us, helping and hindering us (Arnold) is taken up in Collette Snowden and Kerry Green’s paper on the role of media reporting, mobility and trauma. Extending some of Ibrahim’s comments in the specific case of the reporting of traumatic events, Snowden and Green provide a wonderful companion piece about how media reporting is being transformed by contemporary mobile practices. As an integral component of contemporary visual cultures, camera phone practices are arguably both extending and creating emerging ways of seeing and representing.

“In the second section, we begin our case studies exploring the socio-cultural particularities of various adaptations of mobile media within specific locations in the Asia-Pacific. Randy Jay C. Solis elaborates on Gerard Raiti’s discussion of intimacy and love by exploring how the practice of ‘texting’ has contributed to the development of romantic relationships in the Philippines in terms of its convenience and affordability. Lee Humphreys and Thomas Barker further extend this discussion by investigating the way Indonesians use the mobile phone for dating and sex. As in Solis’s article, the authors view the mobile phone as a tool of communication, identity management and social networking that mediates new forms of love, sex and romance in Indonesia, particularly through mobile dating software and mobile pornography.

“Li Li’s paper takes the playful obsession the Chinese and South Koreans have with lucky numbers and locates its socio-cultural roots. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, the author traces this use of lucky mobile numbers to the rise of consumerism in China and views this so-called ‘superstition’ in terms of the entry into modernity for both China and South Korea.

“Chih-Hui Lai’s paper explores the rise of Web 2.0. in Taiwan, which, in comparison to other locations in the region, is still relatively under-documented in terms of its usage of mobile media. Here Lai addresses this gap by exploring the burgeoning role of mobile media to access and engage with online communities through the case study of EzMoBo.

“In the final section we problematise Australia’s place in the Asia-Pacific and, in particular, the nation’s politically and culturally uncomfortable relationship with Asia. Described as ‘west in Asia’ by Rao, and as ‘South’ of the West by Gibson, Yue, and Hawkins, Australia’s uneasy relationship with Asia deserves its own location. We begin this section with a paper by Mariann Hardey that presents a case study of Australian university students and their relationship to, and with, the mobile phone, providing original empirical work on the country’s ‘iGeneration’.

“Next Linda Leung’s critique of mobile telephony in the context of immigration detention centres engages with the political dimensions of technology and difference between connection and contact. Here we reminded of the luxury of mobile technologies that are the so-called necessity of contemporary everyday life. We are also reminded of the ‘cost’ of different forms of mobility and immobility – technological, geographic, physical and socio-cultural. Leung’s discussion of displacement and mobility amongst refugees calls upon us to reconsider some of the conflations occurring around mobile telephony and new media outside the comfort of everyday urbanity.

“The final paper, by Peter B. White and Naomi Rosh White, addresses the urban and rural divide so pointed in Australia (with 80% of the population living in urban areas) by discussing an older, though still relevant mobile technology, the CB radio. This paper reminds us that despite the technological fetishism of urban Australia, once outside of urban contexts, we are made acutely aware of Australia as a land containing a plethora of black spots (in which mobile phones are out of range).”

Link: Media/Culture Journal (media-culture.org.au)