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.

I visited the Musashi Institute of Technology Yokohama Campus on a blistering hot summer day. The draw for the day was a panel discussion on “Akiba-kei Culture.” The panelists included Arisa, a popular maid at the renowned maid café, Mai:lish, the three members of an Akiba-kei idol group “Mug Cup,” and a group of three geek boys who are well-known on Twitter Japan and Hatena bookmarks. This event was part of an open campus day, designed to showcase the different university research groups to prospective students and other interested parties. The organizer who put together this event, an unusual one for a university campus, is Naoki Ueno at the Environmental Media Department. Mimi Ito and I attended the group dinner following the panel discussion, and interviewed Naoki over seared bits of Korean barbeque and kim-chee.

Naoki has made a career out of introducing situated learning theory and activity theory to Japanese scholars, and has conducted his own research on the design of educational and workplace environments. He was one of my mentors during graduate school, and was Mimi’s sponsoring researcher during her postdoctoral work in Japan, and is part of an international network of scholars who work at the intersection of technology studies, ethnomethodology, and sociocultural learning theory.

In 2007, he began a new project, funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Titled, “A Base for City-Making Using ICT.” The project aims to create an educational environment tied to urban design and ICTs. The goal of the work is not simply to develop technology or physical infrastructure. Instead, Naoki’s team conducts fieldwork on people’s everyday practice and the information and symbols that flow through certain urban areas, and design ICTs based on this research.  By taking this bottom-up approach to ICT design, Naoki is developing a form of information system design education that is tied to the specifics of social practice.

Naoki’s choice of field sites is also unique. One of his colleague, Ishu Rakusai, developed a browser-based system, NOTA, where NPOs and schools can easily upload records of their activity, such as text and images. They have piloted this system with in the Kohoku New Town area near the university. In addition to this work with the local community, Naoki’s lab has also been engaged with the support of subcultural communities. For example, another student, Tsuyoshi Furusawa, conducted research on graffiti culture in Shibuya. This project is a collaboration with the NPO, Konposition, which is working to reduce illegal graffiti by creating a legal graffiti wall. Konposition was looking for a way of representing their practice of erasing illegal graffiti or painting over it with legal graffiti. Tsuyoshi developed a system where the participants could upload images and locational information about graffiti via mobile phones.

Another example is the work of Koji Sawada, who is developing a web site where fans and minor musicians who are part of the live house scene can connect with one another. By integrating the system design with existing social practice, the goal is to develop a learning environment that exceeds the existing framework of activity.  Naoki explains that the development effort is directed at creating social institutions, resources, and occasions that support access to new practices. In Japan, as elsewhere, Naoki feels that most education about information system design focuses on technology, rather than looking at the concrete contexts in which these systems will be used. By contrast, his team engages directly with end users such as NPO groups and live house participants in order to understand their everyday practice. The students walk the city with these community members and conduct interviews that get at the underlying issues they are grappling with. By experiencing this kind of social research and technology development, the students can integrate both technical and social perspectives on design.

Naoki describes how his biggest challenge has been the coordination between various community groups, local government, university labs, and students. Drawing relationships between these diverse groups, whether they are from the local community or subcultures of geeks, musicians, or otaku, Naoki seems to relish the juxtaposition of different social groups and cultures. This is one the talents that has served him well as a scholarly emissary between Japan and Euro-American intellectual communities that engage in socicultural learning theory. Now he has brought these interests to bear on the education of a new generation of information designers who are building hybrids that cross the boundaries of social and technical systems.

With mobile phone usage now reaching almost fifty per cent of the world’s population, there continues to be an urgent need to understand the impact and influence of mobile communication practices across the globe. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective examines contemporary mobile communication and the transformations which the incorporation of mobile phones in society. Co-authored by Manuel Castells, Mireira Fernández-Ardèvol, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba Sey as a project by the Annenberg School Research Network, the book synthesizes a range of qualitative and quantitative research on mobile phones in an effort to “construct an empirically grounded argument on the social logic embedded in wireless communication, and on the shaping of this logic by users and uses in various cultural and institutional contexts” (4).  Framed within the rubric of Castells now famous notion of the “network society”, the authors divide the book into eight, topically oriented chapters. The book begins with a survey of the global mobile phone infrastructure and differences in the diffusion and adoption of wireless communication in Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania and the Americas. The authors then turn to the everyday, mundane changes in family and work life, time and new language practices in different national and regional contexts. They conclude by returning to broader questions about societal changes spurred and/or extended by mobile communication, such as the rapid uptake of mobile phones by youth, in the developing world, in social movements and in global development agendas.

While there is much in this collective volume that will be worthy of attention for readers in a range of academic disciplines, telecommunications companies as well as a variety of government and non-governmental organizations, one of the key contributions of Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey’s analysis revolves around their attention to infrastructure and the forces that shape an individual’s ability to participate in what the author’s term the “mobile network society”.  More than a simple matter of access, the co-authors identify and explore factors which they view as critical to understanding patterns of adoption and appropriation. For example, in their introductory chapters they focus upon the role of geography and population density in shaping the rapid uptake of mobile phones across a range of island nations, such as Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, and even less affluent countries like Jamaica and the Philippines.  They also draw connections between geography and population density and the relative prominence of mobile phones in urban areas. By contrast, larger countries such as the United States, China and South Africa which possess vast expanses of land and relatively disperse rural populations face a range of challenges which impact upon mobile phone penetration rates and, in turn, the ability to integrate the technological infrastructures underpinning basic adoption of mobile phones. This attempt to develop comparable concepts across national and regional boundaries is particularly useful given the scale and ambitions of the book.

Billing and pricing structures, telecommunications standards, competition and regulation also emerge as central to the adoption and appropriation of mobile phones worldwide. From calling cards and pre-paid phones to the sharing of phones, personal SIM cards, use of the more cost-efficient texting, or SMS, as well as systems of credits and remittances, creative micro-economies emerge in response to the cost and economic models of payment. While professionals and businesses continue to be at the forefront of mobile phone adoption, Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey suggest that many innovations in billing and cost emerge from the more marginalized sectors of society, such as migrants, who navigate considerable economic constraints and social challenges while working away from their homes and families. Drawing upon recent research by co-author Jack Qiu, the authors discuss the importance of mobile phones for rural-urban Chinese migrants. Although there remains a wide variation in the models and payment plans, they argue that migrants spend a large percentage of their budget on mobile phones and air time, which they attribute to the desire to maintain contact with family and others in their home towns as well as an emblem of status. In these instances, migrants often become one of the main drivers for cheap and flexible service innovations in the mobile telecommunications industry at the “bottom” of the market. Similarly, and perhaps more coherently than any other study with which I am familiar, Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey also provide compelling evidence that youth have become important drivers of the mobile phone industry.  Through an analysis of the development of the telecommunications industry and diffusion in different countries, they reveal how the industry began by marketing mobile phones to businesses but later discovered that youth (especially in Europe and Asia) rapidly appropriated the mobile phone. In response, the industry altered their established marketing strategies and began to cater to the demand of the global youth market. As they argue, this represents a significant shift away from previous models of technology adoption and innovation.

Like Castells’ network society thesis, Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey believe that “wireless communication technology does have powerful social effects” which reflects “the networking logic that defines the human experience of our time” (258). Yet, they also acknowledge that social practices and institutions play an important role in defining the textures and possibilities of mobile communication in society. For example, whereas many accounts attribute the widespread use of texting in the Philippines to frugality, research reveals that many of the most prolific users of SMS are in fact professionals in the their 30s for whom cost of a message does not represent their primary concern (140). Similarly, work among low-income households in Chile completed by Ureta suggests that mobility and economic necessity may not fully account for the fact that low-income families tend to treat their mobile phone like a shared, family land line rather than a device which may help each individual in the family maximize their earning potential. Such beliefs also influence the imaginative potential of the mobile phone in everyday life. In contrast to recent work in the United States where young people assert the importance of the mobile phone in terms of its salience as a symbol of independence, mobility and autonomy from the strictures of parents and the family., Yoon’s study of teens and family in Korea reveals that “the adoption of the mobile phone plays a major role in reinforcing traditional structures of family, school, and youth peer group under the cheong networks” (148). Similarly, and with respect to gender, the authors note that, “relative to Europe and America, the Asian Pacific exhibits a traditional patriarchal gendered pattern of diffusion…even in Japan and South Korea” (44) as well as in African countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, South Africa, Rwanda and Cameroon. Such factors, what the authors refer to as the sociotechnical context, possess clear implications for participation and engagement. It also reveals a diversity of practices which possess the potential to challenge our assumptions about the totalizing influence of technology, as well as provide insights into creative innovations not often considered in the more comfortable living spaces of industry and academic life.

Together, the authors’ efforts to synthesize, consolidate and recognize patterns in a range of practices is ambitious in scope and brings to the fore the importance of a broad notion of infrastructure that takes into account different local, regional and national contexts alongside meaningful variations in different sociotechnical contexts. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective is also a testament to collaborative work in that the author(s) various sets of regional and disciplinary expertise—Fernández-Ardèvol’s knowledge of Catalonia and the European literature, Qiu’s extensive work in China and Sey’s expertise in the African context and, of course, Castells’ ongoing contributions to conceptualizing broader changes in society – emerge as considerable assets to the book’s ability to analyze the mobile communication in a vast number of societies. Indeed, most books analyzing mobile phones and communication cross-nationally tend to compile chapters on different national contexts, which are tied together through introductory chapters. In its efforts to introduce and analyze material from Latin America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Africa alongside the more established literature on mobile communication practices in Northern Europe, East Asia (e.g. Japan and Korea) as well as North America, this book’s integrated analysis is distinctive. These cross-cultural (or perhaps more precisely, cross-national) differences underpin the need to think critically about our organizing categories when analyzing the adoption and appropriation on a global scale and illustrates the need for more empirical research during a period of rapid growth and change in the telecommunications arena, particularly in the space around new media and learning.  And while I am skeptical that the notion of the “mobile network society” is a particularly useful term for conceptualizing mobile phone practices in the “network society” (the “network society” also being a contested concept--see, for example, John Postill’s recent article in New Media and Society, 2008), as research on the global dimensions of global communication continues, Mobile Communication and Society will clearly hold an important place as a work that theorizes, compares and captures the contemporary mobile telecommunications landscape. 

Note: Please get in touch if you are carrying out research on mobile phones and mobile communication.

--Heather A. Horst