Mobile Media

Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Sarah,

Kristen Sharp and Linda Williams 2016
 Themes
 Internet, mobile phones and nationalism in Korea
 Mobile phone genres
 Co-presence and audience involvement
 Technology and gender

 E-waste and environmental issues

 Amateur and professional mobile phone coverage of disaster
 Digital art and the environment
 Korea’s techno-nationalism
 Korea: 48 million people
 Third-largest economy in East Asia

 IT industry produces over 15 per

cent of Gross Domestic Product

 2005-2007 tourism slogan ‘dynamic

Korea’
 Combing technological innovation

with nationalism
 In 2006, Koreans approx. 13 hours

on-line per week

 Virtual communities had over 18

million members
 for instance, ‘Cyworld mini-

hompy’

http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/country/northkorea.html
 Cyworld
http://thenextweb.com/asia/2011/11/08/koreas-cyworld-takes-second-shot-at-going-global-but-service-issues-still-linger/
 Cyworld

 Cyworld web communities in the US, China, Japan, Taiwan

 In 2006, annual profit figures of 100 million US dollars / year
 three times the revenue of MySpace
 In Korea, over 90 percent of 20-29 year olds had ‘mini-hompys’
 Equivalent to MySpace
 More dynamic and interpersonal than individual homepages
 Service ended in 2015
 Data leakage, competition from Facebook and smartphones
Identity and social life in Cyworld
http://soulfly83.wordpress.com/2006/11/30/cyworld/
 On-line/off-line co-presence
 Friends are called ilchon
 ‘a concept once used to denote one degree of distance
from family members in a traditional Korean kinship’
 Ilchon can gain access to their fellow ilchon information
and be invited to visit their cyber-room
 Non-ilchon can only gain cursory access
 Emphasis on community rather than 'networked
individualism’
 Reinforcing sociality

 In general, participants are faithful to their off-line

identity
 Friends can buy each other music or cyber-gifts for
their mini-room with the currency dotori (acorns)
 Reflecting existing customs of generosity and
hospitality that are considered key to traditional
Korean identity
 The camera phone revolution

 March 2006: Samsung released a ten mega-pixel camera

phone
 Closing the gap between camera phones and stand-alone
digital cameras
 Also sharing facilities such as MMS, Bluetooth, Whatsapp,
Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and uploading to blogs
 Blurring the world between amateur and professional
digital photography
 Camera phone
genres and aesthetics
 Forms of digital storytelling
 Everyday life
 Special occasions
 Places
 Friendship/family
 Self-portraiture / ‘selfie’
 Favourites
 Low-quality DIY-aesthetics of camera phone imagery and web-cam
 Seemingly unedited, immediate, authentic
 Various dimensions of ‘sharing, storing and saving’
 ‘Reality aesthetics’
 Similar to the hand-held camera in television, film, and internet communities such as
Cyworld, MySpace and YouTube
 Geo-tagging
 Geotagging in camera phone apps like Instagram
 Apps play an active role in how places are conceptualised, mapped,
and experienced
 Camera phone images are not only of the physical world but also part
of the digital environment
 The geotagging of camera phone images locates them within digital
maps
 themselves representations of the world
 traversing digital and material-physical environments
 Co-presence
 Sharing presence online with other people
 Camera phone images can generate forms of being together online among
users
 While not being together physically in a material locality
 For instance, through images that are shared on social media platforms
 The concept of co-presence focuses on the mediated nature of all
interactions
 Rather than privileging face-to-face contact
 User-Created Content and dialogue
 User-Created Content (UCC) through camera phone
photography and mobile media information
 For instance, Instagram and GPS data to make
alternative world maps

 Creating new knowledge through audience participation

and dialogue
 Fast-forwarding the present

 The person taking the picture cannot fully enjoy the event
 Experiencing ‘temporal disjuncture’
 Users sometimes feel compelled to keep up, keep
connected and keep updated
 Risk of living in cyberspace rather than using the online to
reflect on offline relationships
 Gender and the mobile phone
 In Korea, customisation of the phone usually done by the female
partner
 The phone is a reminder of the female partner’s presence
 Humanisation/feminisation of technology

 Signifying new gender and family roles?

 Sign of female control over the relationship?
 Or symbol of women as prime consumers?
Mobile phone customisation
http://www.tradekorea.com
 Mobile phone ‘colouring’
 Colouring: a musical tune that replaces the dial sound that
the caller hears
 ‘contextualising the identity and feelings of the user for
the incoming caller’

 Impact on conversations and relationships

 a wrong colouring could give a wrong impression to the
incoming caller
 The politics of ‘cuteness’
 Reflecting the importance of emotion to Korean national
culture
 A struggle ‘to humanise social technological spaces’ and
‘to reassert intimacy regardless of technological
interference’
 A sign that females engage in previously male-dominated
areas
 For instance gaming
 Not just as players/consumers but also as producers of
content
 Cuteness in Cyworld
http://metrohoney.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/cyworld-ends-its-american-run/
Samsung Anycall advertisements
oh-dara.com / www.flickr.com
 Women as gatekeepers
 Women influence the types of images that are taken, shared and saved

 Growing importance of ‘emotional labour’ in the cultures and

currencies of mobile media

 A continuation of the exploitation of 'female' labour?

 Or unofficial imaging communities that feed into future imagined
communities or national ideologies?
 Mobile media
and environmental disaster

 How do camera phones affect our understanding of the environment?

 Tension between amateur and professional media art, developed and
developing nations, distance and intimacy

 How do artists use mobile media to reflect on climate change and

environmental crisis in their work?
 Paradox of mobile media
 Implicated in environmental costs
 Associated with their manufacture and the introduction of e-waste
 Smartphones and apps contribute to the perpetuation of the consumer society
 A main contributor to climate change
 An astounding quantity of digital data is produced and needs to be stored every year
 Due to apps like Instagram

 But also use of mobile media among political activists and campaigners
 Uses of mobile media for democratic civic participation and in development and aid
programs
 Everyday consumers also reject the impulse to always have the latest model
 Professional coverage of
Typhoon Yolanda
 Superstorm Typhoon Yolanda hit the Philippines in November 2013
 Affecting some of the poorest areas in the Philippines
 With 40 percent of the population under the poverty line 
 Many affected people shared one mobile phone among a family
 Most of these phones did not have cameras
 The images of the disaster were by professional photojournalists
 Well conceived in terms of the conventions of photojournalism
 Attention to composition and highly contrived
 Not the personal, intimate DIY images associated with mobile media
 The contrast with the coverage of Fukushima 3/11 exposes how differently the image of
disaster can be visualised
 It brings to the fore the unequal ways in which technologies are experienced in and affect
different Asia-Pacific populations
 ‘Professional’ coverage
http://www.focolare.org/gb/files/2014/11/2014-11-12TyphoonPhilippines3.jpg
 Amateur coverage of Fukushima 3/11
 March 2011: Earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster
 Established national broadcast media like NHK withheld important information about
the Fukushima disaster
 under instruction from the Japanese government
 Millions of Japanese turned away from broadcast media in favour of mobile media
 such as Twitter, lnstagram and Line
 Mobile phones were used extensively to capture and disseminate images around the
globe
 Twitter messages and still/moving images taken with camera phones embodied the
effect and affect of the disaster
 They became the repository for various forms of personal and communal grief and
bereavement
 ‘Amateur’ coverage
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/tsunami-breeches-an-embankment-in-miyako.jpg/4632016
 Emplaced and intimate visualities in digital
photography
 ‘Emplaced visualities’
 The relationship between the photographer and her or his environment
 Everyday users can make camera phone images public
 Attending closely to how various types of environments are constructed
and interconnected

 ‘Intimate visualities’
 Camera phone images engender contact and closeness at a personal level
 Users' personal journeys and forms of self-expression
 Bringing individuals, communities, localities and experiences together
 Remediation

 Artists appropriate communication media into art

forms
 Bringing together, combining, and remixing old
and new media into new configurations
 Using new and remediated media to rethink the
relationship between community, the urban
environment and sustainability
 Involving the public
 Artists use digital media and platforms to connect with the world and
the people and nonhumans in it
 Critical interventions to involve publics in debating and contesting
climate change issues
 Camera phone apps and images can potentially bridge the gap between
amateur and artist images
 Bringing agency and activity of publics into spaces traditionally
reserved only for artist-produced works
 Mobile games, art
and the environment

 Mobile games: new forms of engagement

 For instance, Shibuya: Underground Streams project
 A visuality that also involves other intimate and "sticky"
practices such as the haptic (touch)
 Centred on a type of intimacy in which the visual is no
longer defined through twentieth-century paradigms such
as the gaze (film) or the glance (TV)
 ‘Keitai Mizu’ (2013)
http://www.creativetransformations.asia/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/keitai_mizu.jpg
 Keitai mizu (Larissa Hjorth)
 The artists wanted to make audiences aware of the hidden water cartographies
in Tokyo through the process of gameplay
 Participants became aware that the city is made up of numerous little rivers
and local water species beneath its train lines and roads
 The game space intentionally blurred online and off-line spaces with
Instagram and Twitter
 Digitally co-present friends were co-opted into the game space by trying to
help their friends solve the game
 enabling digitally co-present friends to share the experiences and images
 images are taken "on the move" and engage with embodied and affective relations
of place
 they also form part of a larger, imagined transnationalism
 Questions
 How are technology, nationalism and family interrelated in Korea?
 Which photo genres are facilitated by the mobile phone?
 How do mobile phones cross digital and physical environments?
 To what extent do mobile phones connect and disconnect people from the world?
 How is mobile phone use shaping and being shaped by gender identity in Korea?
 What is some of the negative impact of digital technology on the natural environment?
 What are the differences between professional and amateur coverage of natural
disasters?
 How have artist engaged with mobile phones and other digital technology to reflect on
urban development and environmental destruction?
 Discuss a few artistic examples from Indonesia, China, India, Japan and Australia.