Online@AsiaPacific

Mobile, Social and Locative Media in the Asia–Pacific

Larissa Hjorth, Michael Arnold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136657610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

Media across the Asia-Pacific region are at once social, locative and mobile. Social in that these media facilitate public and interpersonal interaction, locative in that this social communication is geographically placed, and mobile in so much as the media is ever-present. The Asia–Pacific region has been pivotal in the production, shaping and consumption of personal new media technologies and through social and mobile media we can see emerging certain types of personal politics that are inflected by the local.

The six case studies that inform this book—Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Manila, Singapore and Melbourne—offer a range of economic, socio-cultural, and linguistic differences, enabling the authors to provide new insights into specific issues pertaining to mobile media in each city. These include social, mobile and locative media as a form of crisis management in post 3/11 Tokyo; generational shifts in Shanghai; political discussion and the shifting social fabric in Singapore; and the erosion of public and private, and work and leisure paradigms in Melbourne. Through its striking case studies, this book sheds new light on how the region and its contested and multiple identities are evolving, and concludes by revealing the impact of mobile media on how place is shaped, as well as shaping, practices of mobility, intimacy and a sense of belonging.

Employing comprehensive, cross-disciplinary frameworks from theoretical approaches such as media sociology, ethnography, cultural studies and media and communication studies, Online@AsiaPacific will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian culture and society, cybercultures, new media studies, communication studies and internet studies.

1 Introduction

Mobile, social and locative media @ Asia-Pacific

Sitting in a Shinchon cafe in the busy neighbourhood of Seoul, Hyunjin uses her iPhone to log onto the Korean social network site (SNS) Cyworld minihompy while waiting for her friend, Soohyun. Remembering that Soohyun now prefers Facebook, she quickly migrates there to see that Soohyun, according to Facebook Places, has just arrived at Shinchon station. Hyunjin quickly takes a camera phone picture of her coffee and uploads it onto Facebook with the title ‘waiting’. The next minute, a laughing Soohyun is in front of Hyunjin holding her phone with Facebook open on it, showing the reply ‘Not anymore’.

Meanwhile, in Tokyo, Machiko is reading a keitai shōsetsu (mobile novel) as she rides the train from work. She is happy to see that her favourite author has released a new novel. She wants to share the excitement and quickly sends the link to her best friend, Mariko, using the Japanese SNS, Mixi. Mariko immediately replies with a smiley face and both girls read the story simultaneously while occupying two different spaces. In an ambiguity common to mobile, social and locative media, they are both together and apart. Alternatively, in post-3/11 Japan, young adult Toshi has taken to using the locative media game Foursquare so that he and his friends might always know where each other are.

In Manila, José misses his cousin Xavier, who has just moved to Hong Kong with a scholarship to study at the City University. On his PC he sees that Xavier has just changed his relationship status on Facebook to ‘it’s complicated’. Burning with curiosity, José pokes Xavier who then appears online and the boys immediately start to instant message (IM) about Xavier’s new (imaginary or real) girlfriend.

Over in Shanghai, Jia misses her daughter, Yuewen, who has just moved away for university work placement. Before she left, Yuewen thoughtfully installed the most up-to-date software on her mum’s ‘pirate’ smartphone (shanzhai) — that is, a less expensive, unlicensed copy of a branded smartphone. As instructed by her mum, Yuewen registered her for all the most popular games, especially social media games like the farm simulation Happy Farm — for even though the game had its hey-day in 2009, it is still played by millions. Each day Jia logs onto China’s version of Facebook, Renren, and signs onto Happy Farm. Seeing that Yuewen is not online protecting her crops, Jia uses the most popular IM, QQ, to send a message to Yuewen to see if she has time for a quick play in Happy Farm. Yuewen is typical of China’s Generation Y (ba ling hou) in that location-based service (LBS) mobile games like Jiepang, along with microblog Weibo, are her favourite media. However, reading her mum’s message she quickly signed into Happy Farm to catch up on gossip with her mum.

Sitting in Starbucks in Singapore, Jenny is looking at Facebook on her Samsung Galaxy when she comes across an unflattering picture of herself taken at a party on Saturday. She then takes a moment to look at her reflection in her Galaxy tablet and puffs up her hair. Jenny then holds the tablet above her head, a known strategy for making ‘flattering’ pictures, puckers up her lips and takes a picture. Happy with the image she then uploads to it to Facebook making it her new profile picture.

These are but a few of the millions of intimate vignettes deploying media across the Asia-Pacific region that are at once mobile, social and locative — mobile in so much as the media is ever-present, social in that these media facilitate public and interpersonal interaction and locative in that this social communication is geographically placed. With the uneven but increasing rise of smartphones across the region, mobile media are increasingly becoming sites for growing social media use through SNS like Facebook and locative services like Google Maps and Foursquare. In this phenomenon, what constitutes the mobile, social and locative are determined by the local as multiple modes of presence (net-presence, co-presence, tele-presence) move across platforms, contexts and media. Across numerous technical platforms, personal and cultural contexts, and through a wide variety of social media, people young and old are using mobile, social and locative media to rehearse earlier forms of ritual and, at the same time, create new forms of intimacy and different contexts for the expression of sociality. Regional cities such as Seoul and Tokyo have long been centres of innovation in the invention and popularisation of mobile media — the transistor radio of the 1960s and the Walkman of the 1980s being early examples. In these locations, the relationship between personal, mobile, social and locative media is quotidian and, for the most part, tacit in its familiarity. In other locations like Australia, China or India, convergence through smartphones is more novel. Mobile social media are a global phenomenon, but they are also local at every point.

While our work has been located in the Asia-Pacific, much of the Anglophone literature on SNS to date has focused upon its use by young people in Western contexts (boyd and Ellison 2008; McLelland and Goggin 2009). As SNS are becoming globally quotidian sites for emerging forms of familial interaction, socialising, relationship management and identity construction (Bennett 2008; Bennett et al. 2009; Ito et al. 2008; Madianou and Miller 2012; Rheingold 2008), we need to attend to difference as well as commonality and, in particular, to the difference that place makes. We must then, in turn, pay attention to the way in which place, as one of the most contested notions in this field (Wilken and Goggin 2012a), is being redefined by the multiple and micro politics of presence and co-presence afforded by social and mobile media.

With the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East, we have seen ways in which social and mobile media can be used to help mobilise new forms of politics at the same time as amplifying paradoxes around media effects and affects. For example, the control/freedom paradox of the online that has been addressed by Wendy Chun (2006) can be seen in the recent ‘liberation technology’ (Christensen 2011; Diamond and Plattner 2012) rhetoric of the Arab Spring in which media can both be a site for emancipation (in the case of Egypt and Tunisia) and the reinforcement of the authoritarian state (Iran). This paradoxical dynamic around the role of new media and emerging forms of politics is most evident in the ‘ambivalent’ and yet ‘situated’ context of the Asia-Pacific. From demonstrations against the government in post-3/11 Japan, to the political deployment of Facebook in Singapore, to the use of locative media for corporate surveillance in South Korea (Lee 2011), we are seeing social and mobile media being utilised to both reinforce older forms of politics while also creating more intimate and micro politics. While older forms of demonstration have attracted focus through the use of social and mobile media, it is the social, the private, the intimate that we seek to explore in Online@AsiaPacific. We argue that in the ambivalent but situated (Wilson and Dirlik 1995) context of the Asia-Pacific region we can find various micro and intimate social and political formations that are played out through social mobile media practices. Specifically, we reflect upon how mobile media practices are affording new types of personal and political performativity, as well as how they amplify existing social and political nuances. We see these emergent practices as best understood through the collisions between intimate, mobile and social publics.

In particular, we differentiate ‘intimate publics’ (that are tightly bound and share common emotional ground), from ‘social publics’ (that also share emotional affinities but are broader and less tightly bound by those affinities), and ‘social networks’ (that are not constituted in common affect but are instrumentally related in interconnected and ramified ego-based formations). By deploying the notion of intimate publics and social publics as distinct from social networks, we argue that performances of affective interpersonal intimacy reflect an emerging approach to identity and collectivity, and the man-agement of the social labour required to engage with others in this new public sphere.

In all of the examples we explore throughout the book, we see a variety of socialities, mobilities and immobilities across technological, geographic and psychological spaces. Each vignette highlights the importance that place — both lived and imagined — takes in informing mobile media practices. In each scenario we see that media that are at once mobile, social and locative are mediating a different experience of each of these phenomena, as well as producing a new meaning of what it is to be intimate.

Accordingly, we argue that these mobile media practices are defined first by their relationship to, and redefinition of, sociality, intimacy and place. In these practices, that entail various and sometimes conflicting forms of presence, (co, tele, net), we find an array of engagements and distractions that are shaped by the social, the mobile and the intimate in relation to place. Drawing on our own empirical work and calling on the work of Lauren Berlant (1998), danah boyd (2010), Anne Galloway (2010), Mimi Sheller (2004), Michael Warner (2002) and others, we see that being social, being intimate and being public are not straightforward, mutually exclusive social binaries, and we see that being mobile and being in a place can be complementary. This requires us to revisit definitions of sociality, intimacy, mobility and public in relation to place, context and presence. This phenomenon suggests a need for conceptualising emergent and minute forms of politics through mobile, social and locative media as being anything but trivial.

While social media might in a sense encourage collapsing contexts (boyd 2010) and presence bleed (Gregg 2011), mobile media also amplifies the various dimensions of place as lived and imagined, as geographic, social and psychological (Hjorth 2005; Ito 2002). Increasingly, mobile media highlight the multiple forms of presence that form, inform and transform places into a series of entanglements (Ingold 2008). The ‘collapsed context’ — in the sense of a novel combination of publics — is situated in any particular example of mobile social media use. It is its own context, and in that sense its own space, inward facing and constituted by the actions of the occupants of the space, and, at the same time, outwardly linked in its connection to other contexts — through media and through culture. In being so connected, presence does ‘bleed’ from one context to another — but is this not always the case? What presence in context is hermetically sealed? In this temporal-spatial ‘piano accordion dynamic’, place, mobility, publics and intimates become new sites for different social performances and provide new resources for different social performances in the Asia-Pacific region. These performances hinge upon the emotional and social labour required to make social connection with people, to generate and distribute user-created content (UCC) and all of the attendant ‘vernacular creativity’ (Burgess 2008) that goes into these emergent forms of immaterial labour. From keitai shōsetsu and camera phone images to ‘check ins’ and ‘pokes’, mobile media is providing new ways to make and share various forms of sociality.

However, in an age of data-mining and ever more sophisticated methods of deriving surplus value from immaterial labour, the cartographies of personalisation can take a darker, more exploitative route, and the ‘technological sublime’ (Nye 1994) continues to elude us. As Mark Andrejevic (2011) has eloquently argued (drawing on the work by Tiziana Terranova 2000), the ‘social factory’ of capitalism renders users’ expressions and gestures into a series of profiles that are then sold to marketers. It has become commonplace for companies to use cookies in order to pass on all information gathered about users to advertisers.

For critics such as philosopher Edward Casey (2012), psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle (2011), and media theorist and activist Geert Lovink (2012), social media have flattened the rich tapestry of the social into a mere media activity. Lovink, for example, pleads for a more historically and politically nuanced notion of the social whereby social media are channelled for ‘cause’ (2012). As Lovink notes, ‘the networks without cause are time eaters, and we’re only being sucked deeper into the social cave without knowing what to look for’ (2012: 6). Lovink, Andrejevic, Terranova, Turkle and many other critical commentators are not impressed by the flickering shadows on the analogical cave wall and are searching for non-trivial causes for social networks. In the case of the Asia-Pacific, we see emergent forms of social and political causes around mobile media that both define the social and political as they do the media. Specifically, this takes the forms of intimate, mobile and social publics.

Understanding the emergent mobile, social and locative media convergence requires us to move beyond binaries and paradoxes such as empowerment versus exploitation, control versus freedom, place and no-place, liberation and authoritarian, intimate and public, and instead to focus upon localised notions of intimacy and place situated in contexts that include mobile social media as ‘social actors’ (Latour 2005).

Studies of new media owe a great debt to studies of technology more generally, which in turn are indebted to studies of science. To reach back and draw upon science studies we see that modernity’s epistemological project of ‘purification’ has always involved the production of ‘hybrids’ (Latour 1993). Purification attempted to separate people from things, nature from society, facts from politics, culture from science, and so on, but it is through this effort rather than despite it that hybrids proliferate. Throughout this work we acknowledge the futility of purification and accept the hybridity of our analytic constructs. As Ingrid Richardson puts it ‘… it is obvious, therefore, that in the teleculture of the twenty-first century, it is no longer possible to consider space in terms of dichotomized categories of here/there, near/far, personal/private, inner/outer or presence/absence’ (2011:41). In this model, intimacy is not ‘pure’ but is conceptualised as something that has always been mediated — if not by media technologies then by language, personal objects, gestures, memories and place.

In a similar vein we argue that the politics of social media is not ‘pure’ either — that is, ‘politics’ is not a distinct category of activity that one takes up in particular times and particular places but, rather, is a particular sensibility or a perspective that one might bring to bear on all aspects of daily life. In this sense all of our social performances, our subjectivities and inter-subjectivities, our public lives and our private lives are political. In the same way, our politics are also social, and personal, and public, and private. Politics is thus played out in important ways around the kitchen table and through routine SNS use as well as in the streets and through the ballot box. Now, this claim for what might be called ‘the politics of the prosaic’ is not radical, and it has been made many times before, but is often missing from recent public and academic commentary on the contemporary political role of social media (Colman 2010).

A key factor in this has been the focus on the use of social media in political activity that is anything but prosaic (Christensen 2011; Diamond and Plattner 2012). In recent years, revolutionary movements in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Syria, Bahrain, and other countries in North Africa and the Middle East, have attempted (and in several cases succeeded) in nothing less than the overthrow of the state (Segerberg and Lance Bennett 2011). In the same time period, the ‘Occupy’ movement has been a local and international political phenomenon, first in North America, but then, according to Wikipedia, has spread across some 95 cities in 82 countries. This is clearly politics on a grand scale, and for those with an interest in the political implications and the political potential of social media, this was clearly the place to be looking. However, even here, where the stated objectives are as far-reaching as the overthrow of dictatorship and reformation of capitalism, the political is also personal. To the extent that the social media used by the Arab Spring and Occupy movements were effective in mobilising, coordinating, motivating and informing people, they were effective because they were personal, prosaic, inter-subjective and everyday. They were effective — that is, efficient, fast, cheap, and easily configured and reconfigured for various purposes, but they were also affective — that is, their functionality was structured on what we call social and intimate publics, and had the credibility derived from the social capital accumulated by those publics.

In Online@AsiaPacific we do not focus on the politics of social media through these grand movements, but we do attend to the politics of social media in everyday life. We do so because the politics of family life that is split between Manila and Singapore is important in its own right (Chapters 5, 6), because the multifarious mobility of a new Chinese generation is important in its own right (Chapter 4), because the regulation of social media in Seoul is important in its own right (Chapter 2), because the trend towards ‘power-blogging’ and the alternative it poses to party-political blogging is important in its own right (Chapter 11), and because the personal responses to the Fukushima disaster are important in their own right (Chapter 3). Of course, in all of this, everyday life is as political as it is personal, private, subjective and intersubjective. There is no purity here; grand politics is built on the everyday, and the everyday is grand politics, and where these and many other hybrids proliferate, we need nuanced studies of places where the ‘interior is the new exterior’ (Sukhder Sandhi cited in Margaroni and Yiannopoulou 2005: 222), studies of public-intimacy, present-absences, personal-politics and all manner of other ‘monsters’ (Law 1991). In order to understand the complex, political, social, cultural, technical and above all dynamic nature of mobile social media in the Asia-Pacific, we suggest two key concepts: mobile intimacy and intimate (and social) publics.

Mobile intimacy

One way to understand the tensions around salient and transitory modes of intimacy is in terms of ‘mobile intimacy’. By ‘mobile’, we are not only referring to technologies that move with us and enable us to move, but also the various ways in which non-geographic mobilities play out through mobile media practices. In considering the forms mobility takes beyond mobility in geographic space we might first do well to remember that as a notion, mobility qua ‘being moved’ has long been attached to emotion (Lasén 2004), particularly labile or volatile emotion, but also its more sanguine forms. Second, mobility is also closely connected to the properties of fluidity, and we argue that fluidity (and its close cousin, i...