A sphere of polyphonic chats, loosely knitted by members of Shin's seminar.

On May 21, Mr. Tadahisa Hamada did his presentation at the panel: Internet, Activism, and Human Rights in Asia in the Fifth Asian Conference on Cultural Studies 2015.

The title of the paper was “Surveillance and sense of ‘privacy’ in the Internet embedded Japanese NGOs: through cross cultural survey.” The following is his proposal.

This paper examines awareness of issues in the information society and behaviors of people in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Japan compared with other countries. NGOs are crucially important for building civil society, and their activities are increasingly dependent on information and communication technologies (ICTs). In these two decades, legislation for information control and surveillance – such as the wiretapping law (1999), the resident registry network law (1999), the common number law (2013) and the state secrets protection law (2013) – have advanced but counter-movements were lackluster. For these reasons, it is important to raise awareness of issues in information society – such as digital divide, intellectual property rights, privacy – as well as to improve computer literacy among people in NGOs.

We interviewed people in NGOs in Japan and other countries. We found the low level of awareness on privacy issues of Japanese NGOs. Most respondents consider that privacy is important, but they rarely read privacy policies. They said they vaguely feel it is risky to disclose their private lives in SNS, but it is impossible to avoid surveillance. Some of them said information issues are not in their specialities. If they do not think that privacy is essential for our lives, democracy will not stay in Japan. To examine this topic deeply, we need to conduct online survey. We examine the characteristics of the respondents (age, gender, experience of the Internet, activity area and role in the organization).

We analyze the result in contrast with legal systems and cultures among countries. We suppose the concept of “watakushi private sphere” Tamura (2004) proposed may be suggestive to explain the result. The findings will be situated within the broader social and cultural context of Japan.

(Tentative report by Shin Mizukoshi, Professor of III, UTokyo)

This time in Biotope Salon, Minjoo Lee shared her ongoing research on counter-hegemonic discourse on new poor in Japan since 1990s.
Here she introduced two small-scale, independent magazines on young new poor in Japan: the one is “Freeter’s free,” and the other is “Lost gene.” Both have been published during late 2000s and edited by young activists, young intellectuals and young workers, all who have engaged with social movement on young poor in Japan.

Mine (Center, with Red Sweater and Mac) and members of Biotope Salon

In these two indie magazines, as Minjoo argued, the young new poor attempted to problematize public discourses on them and to produce counter-hegemonic discourse by unfolding and re-appropriating their own experience. Moreover, these magazines provided counter-(alternative) publics where the young new poor could reach to self-acceptance escaping from self-denial and collectively search for alternative ways of life without being captured by neo-liberal capitalism. In this process, the young new poor – not only readers but also contributors and editors – re-identify their subjectivities as laborers, political subjects, and young generation who are situated in the very middle of the social contradictions produced by late capitalism.

For further research, she also aims to explore their alternative ways of publishing as a media movement that created and managed their publishing groups as a collective social enterprise. This will be delved into mainly by interviewing editors, contributors and other related people in independent publishing companies in order to reexamine their struggles to cross boundaries between discursive and real practices. Biotope Salon members suggested insightful and practical advice and information for her further research, especially on interviewing and independent publishing in Japan. Based on those invaluable discussions at the meeting, we hope her to develop her research as more vivid and elaborate one.

(Minjoo Lee, PhD student of the GSII, UTokyo)

For Biotope Salon on February 5, 2015, Jiyoon Kim shared the background, outline, and very preliminary findings of one of the case studies from her on-going PhD project, the study trip to the “Eastern Bloc” by South Korean university students from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. “Eastern Bloc” hereby indicates transforming socialist societies such as the Soviet Union, Eastern European countries, and China.

This organized group tour has once gained a great popularity among South Korean university students. It was a product of the era in transition. By tracing their trajectory, we can see how the international relations of post-cold war period and domestic political issues are intertwined in the individuals’ performance and their itineraries.

Although the program was planned to provide students the experience of the “real face” of socialist societies by using the binary cold-war ideological frame, ironically, the phenomenon and the individual encounters to their visiting societies reveal the transforming South Korean society at the moment, arguably a “dual face” of post-cold war globalism. One of the evidences can be the way that significant others appeared and are described.

(Jiyoon Kim, PhD student of the GSII, UTokyo)

Insta.nalysis: Combining social media photography applications with blended arts-based research methodologies

During our media biotope salon in April, Laurel Hart, a visiting SSHRC scholar from Montreal, Canada gave a presentation entitled “Insta.nalysis: Combining social media photography applications with blended arts-based research methodologies.”

In this presentation, Hart shared her research of mobile photography as alternative media source, and the role of social media practices in the creation and sharing of local knowledge, as well as means of informal community education. The term mobile photography is used to describe social-media based photography practices that take place on smartphones through the use of sharing and editing applications, such as Instagram. In her presentation, Hart demonstrated how mobile photography can be viewed as an alternative, grass-roots media practice that enables individual and collective identity construction. She also explained how researchers could implement mobile photography as a key feature of a research methodology that combines arts-based research methods with the qualitative method of grounded theory (for more information see Hart, 2013).

Hart provided a brief overview of her 2011 #mymontreal research project, which was designed as a self-study to identify how mobile photography could facilitate artistic, open-ended and inductive research. Key characteristics of her method include: 1) an ongoing, daily photographic practice within a determined context, 2) the use of tags to assist with interpretation of images, as well as initial categorization of like groups (the tags function as instantaneous, participant generated codes), and 3) the use of photo-elicited memories triggered by review of the images and the grouping of images based on reoccurring themes.

This “mobile photography methodology” incorporates a multitude of unique characteristics present within the technology and daily practice of mobile photography. The resulting research goes beyond the written word to create a visual and poetic, intimate and affective presentation of participant’s first-hand experiences surrounding a given topic (Hart, 2013).   By utilizing a modified version of constant comparison to group the photos, key themes can be developed inductively, and layered meanings are presented through the exhibition of groups of images that are presented together with poetry or prose developed from photographic captions, tags and participant’s associated memories (Hart).

Hart, L. (2013). Instant Analysis: Mobile Photography as a Research Method. Canadian Art Teacher. 12(1), 24-27.

Yuko Tsuchiya, a visiting scholar, and alumna of iii, UTokyo, and associate professor of media studies, Hiroshima University of Economics showed her media practices with photo karuta: photo card game of Japanese alphabet in several local communities.

Detailed report will be put up soon.