Performing an Imagined image of the mobile media in different cultures

“A cross-cultural approach to mobile media”, a summer-semester class for research students of the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, had the first-half presentation session on June 24. This class was designed to seek an alternative framework to grasp the cultural aspects of the mobile media by introducing a cross-cultural approach.
In the first-half of the course, students were required to conduct a group-assignment: to investigate the mobile phone situation of foreign cities such as Seoul, Melbourne, Shanghai and Barcelona. A guiding framework was given to students as an assumption, that is, four dimensions to construct the mobile phone phenomena in a society: policy, technology, industry, and culture. In the presentation session on June 24, each group made a presentation on what they found about the city in general, plus played a short skit in relation to the mobile phone in the public place of that city. This process has been schemed in order to induce learning by performing the imagined images of the mobile phone in different cultures.
In the latter-half of the course, students will explore the same scheme in a different context: to compare the past and the present of mobile media in Tokyo.
(This class is being supervised by Mizukoshi Shin, the leading member of MoDe)