Jason C. Romero's Website

Digital Youth in East Asia

Just a few things that caught my interest at the Digital Youth in East Asia conference.

Joo-Young Jung said that in Tokyo 88% use mobile internet and 26% have a computer, and Wan-Ying Lin said, “Time spent on the Internet has no direct/linear relationship with civic engagement.”

Sophia T. Wu started off her presentation by saying that her daughter goes to sleep with her mobile and has said that she would die without it. She also noted that young people use the camera phone transgressively (taking pictures of teachers) and to capture transgressive moments, argued that the “photo archive becomes experience archive,” and claimed that the cell phone allows these young people to “leave without escaping.”

In other words, they can surpass spatial boundaries while still staying within their confines, much like the Internet — though the same could possibly be said for older technologies, such as the book or the letter. Note: I’m thinking this now, not then. Though, one thought that I did have then was, “How is a cell phone different from a soccer ball,” in the sense that each allows for particular games to be played and various forms of play to emerge.

Cathy N. Davidson had a great point I hadn’t thought of or heard, though it seemed obvious afterwards, about how the play that people engage in on social network sites such as Facebook are actually a form of labor, because they generate revenue for the host site. As she said, DIY (do it yourself) quickly becomes DIFT (do it for them).

At the end I remarked that something seemed to be getting lost in discovering that this form of play was actually labor, because what seems crucial is that these individuals are experiencing this labor as non-alienated labor. David Slater said, “Alienated labor? I don’t even know how you would measure that.” But others defended my critique and said there was a need to consider what I would call the users’ experience of pleasure, though they might use different terms.

This was all followed up by some wonderful pecha kucha presentations, but the only one that I am going to mention is Minerva Terrades’s on technoaffectivity and users’ experiences with their cell phones.

Minutiae

• I had to switch to being a day-timer for the conference.
• As I also tweeted, “I lost my map of Tokyo and feel like a complete failure.”
• At the geikaiwa dinner a friend talked about being ignored as a gaijin even though he speaks fluent Japanese.
• I got my first twinge of power differential anxiety in Ni-chome when I met a gay guy who was a furita.