“Acting a typical mobile landscape of Seoul” on May 22, 2009

The workshop of “Acting a typical mobile landscape of Seoul” has been conducted as a cross-cultural approach of performance ethnography on the mobile media, positioning itself as a further tryout of “Acting a typical scene of mobile phone” in Tokyo and Helsinki in 2004.
The workshop was held in May 22 in Seoul, with 6 university students (1 male, 5 female). Participants were divided into 2 groups and each groups was given 10 minutes to plan and rehearse a short skit that shows a typical mobile landscape of Seoul. Finally, we have 4 short skits performed, each of which plotted out into scenes of idling during lectures, calling to ex-girl friend, a long-distance birthday party, and one typical day of a university student.
Those performances reveal that Korean youngsters get used to command and manage their intimate relationships, using mobile phones in mundane communication. For future work, we would like to add a cross-cultural analysis in comparison with the results of workshops in other regions, expecting to elaborate the notion of “cultural distance” or “intimacy” as the cultural aspects of mobile media in modern society.
(Workshop conducted and analyzed by Yonnie Kim, a member of MoDe)