Futures of Learning

Lee, Dong-Hu, et al, Eds. (Paju, Korea: Hanul Academy, 2006)

The title is catchy, true to the point. It just grabs all the hot spots within current discussion of youth digital culture: mobile, girls, digital, and Asia, in a fashionable yet quite adequate form. As a cultural studies scholar who has been chasing newly emerging digital media culture in Asia, particularly, mobile screen culture in Korea, I am always hungry for this kind of scholarly works that deliver vivid pictures of everyday use of ICTs. In spite of recent academic and popular interest in the Asian innovation and uptake of ICTs, ethnography or cultural studies based research studies are still rare, though increasing, compared to the plethora of the in-depth analyses of technological innovation, macro policy and industry models of ICTs implemented in Asian techno-centers. Often, these attempts to unearth the secret of Asian success seem to consolidate its myth, the image of digitized Asia, leaving our urgent questions unanswered: what people actually do with these technologies? Meanwhile, the linguistic barrier delays the conversation between these sites and outside observers, limiting our access to local perspectives toward what is happening in their everyday lives. Personal, Portable, and Pedestrian (2005) is a nice exception that delivers rich textures of Japanese mobile culture captured by insiders’ eye to the global readers. Turning to Korea, I have to say unfortunately much of its stories still left veiled behind such renowned tags as ‘IT-powerhouse,’ ‘the most wired country,’ ‘online Gamers’ Heaven,’ and ‘digital Korea,’ though we recently see increasing numbers of English-written studies on Korean Social Network Sites (mostly, Cyworld), Game Industry (PC bang and online game), and mobile media.

Considering this situation, I am happy to introduce Mobile-Girls @ Digital.Asia, a timely and valuable work that well serves to fill the gap of knowledge. This anthology came out of the international symposium, “Mobile Practice: Girls’ Culture and Digital Mobile Media”(2005). Nine articles by fourteen Korean scholars from Women’s Association for Communication Studies (KWACS), the organizer of the symposium, and international scholars including Angel Lin, Larissa Hjorth, Abin Tong, and Laura Miller provide substantial ethnographical research findings of gendered mobile phone use (centered on SMS and MMS usage) in the Asia-Pacific region (Mostly Korea, but including Japan, Hong Kong and Australia). In terms of its theoretical orientation and methodology, this book resonates to what Personal, Portable, and Pedestrian achieved, the serious attention to locally specific yet globally resonant youth (particularly, girls) mobile phone practices. As the book is written in Korean and hence does not allow access to most non-Korean readers, the brief outline of contents might be useful to apprehend the range of works.

From the outset, the book acknowledges girls’ marginalized position in this region in terms of social/financial/political hierarchies and attempts to reassure that teenage girls’ mobile phone culture have played a significant role in diversifying and cultivating the mobile phone as a ‘personal medium.’ The book consists of three parts: Part 1: Korean Sonyeodeul (Korean word Sonyeo means girl), Gender, Culture and Digital Mobile Technology, Part 2: Digital Asia and Mobile Girls, and Part 3: Digital Sketchy of Girls’ Subculture: Networking and Dynamics. Three articles in the first part solicit out general theoretical issues of gender, technology and media use through the textual analysis of the commercial advertisement (Lee, Dong-Hu, “Gender Image in Mobile Phone Advertisement”), the assessment of the notion (and the discursive construction) of ‘Sonyeo’ as physical/social/cultural identity and its presence in the technological field (Kim, Ye-Ran, “ Sonyeoseong (Girl’s Identity) and Mediafication of Body: Mobile Communication Culture and Sonyeo Discourse”), and the empirical research of Korean women’s practice of mothering with the mobile phone (Kim Myeong-He, “The Reproduction of Mothering with the Mobile Phone”). While the first part attempts to map and address overarching theoretical issue of gendered mobile phone use in Korean context, the second part extends this discussion to the other Asia-Pacific experiences. In particular, Larissa Hjorth’s article is notable. In “Gendered Mobility: Customization and Gender in the Asia-Pacific Region,” she offers the comprehensive and detailed analysis of what she calls the “topography of personalization” drawn from her accumulated ethnographical researches of teenage girls’ practice of customization (from the decoration of mobile phone device to the use of favored features of the multimedia phone) in four different national contexts (Korea, Japan, HK and Australia).

The third part is particularly interesting as it delves into the micro-level details of everyday life of Korean ‘Thumbelinas.’ Authors argue that Handphone (a Korean word for mobile phone) is an “affective digital technology” that allows high school girls to create and micro-coordinate their intimate personal networks in and outside of the surveillance of elders’ eyes as well as functions as a ‘personal memory box,’ the object of emotional affection (Kim-Go Yeon-Joo & Lee Ji-Eun, “Handphone as Emotional Media: Focusing on the Teenage Girl’s Daily Use of Handphone”), a creative and expressive tool for girls play culture in their use of ‘emotext’ (emotion + Text)(Lim Sook-Hyun et al, “Sonyeo’s Handphone Play”), and the central space for ‘chatting’ among their peers that increases the sense of intimacy and belonging to their community (Kim Eun-Jin et al, “Mobile Sonyeo’s Suda (Chatting)”).

Overall, each article makes numbers of interesting points. One of overarching themes I find notable is the position of youth mobile culture in a broader cultural context, which is often constituted and represented in terms of ‘conflict’ or ‘difference’ in the public imagination. Especially, Part 1 nicely raises questions on the ambiguous status of Korean youth who are called ‘Digital Generation,’ ‘Cyber Sinillyu (new human species: new generation),’ ‘Thumb tribe,’ and ‘Netizen (Net + Citizen).’ Korean youth, as far as digital technologies concerned, remains a contested terrain where the tensions provoked by the digital divide, mainly according to generational gaps, is intermingled with the celebratory expectation of its prosperity. I agree with this point that ambivalent representation of Korean youth in public and even academic discourse, both elevated to the future hope in techno-nationalistic Korea and at the same time condemned as a threatening force to the existing social norms (accused for their cyber delinquencies and different lifestyles), let the real picture of young peoples’ lived experience slip through.

Yet as much as I agree it is vital to account for the contextual specificities in interpreting the actual practices, I sense the potential drawback of context-determinism, as in the case when the socially constructed girls’ role is taken for granted as a given condition without further consideration of other variables. This could lead to another quanundrum that I find from this volume: the implied assumption of biological determinism. I would not see it problematic to argue girls’ mobile phone culture significantly contributed to constructing mobile technology as it is, as a personal medium that consolidates the intimate relationship. However, the simplistic assumption that girls want to continue, or in other words, favor to build their intimate relationship with whatever available technologies somehow seems to easily collapse the gender identity with the specific form of social relationship building (in the same vein, selection of research themes such as ‘mothering’ and ‘chatting’ may be questionable as it tends to preset the boundary of practices.) Even though these are in fact prominent practices of girls/women that have been widely observed and definitely deserve serious attention, we could also learn more from self-reflexive questioning, before hastily moving into this direction.

Finally, just as this book draws on the geopolitical boundary of Asia-Pacific, it is an ongoing challenge to define the ‘regional’ characteristics of mobile phone use, if any. To begin with, generalizing Asia as one entity is certainly problematic considering the unequal dissemination of digital/mobile technologies across the region. It is truly a few technological centers such as Japan, Korea and maybe HK that have spurred this hype of Digital(and Mobile) Asia. More importantly, what implications can we draw from thinking about specific ‘regionality’ in relation to the global and local mobile phone culture? This book does not explicitly answer to these questions. Larissa Hjorth’s article may be a suggestive example that presents the value of cross-cultural research in finding answers, as she provides a comparative frame against which locally specific girls’ practices acquire additional meanings. In the end, this is one of those questions that keep haunting/stimulating our international literature review team along the way.