Mobiling & Designing : Socio-Media Studies on Designing Mobile Media Culture and Literacy

“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)

This research analyzes the affective use of the mobile phone in Tokyo focusing on family, friends and couples’ relationships. The mobile phone is seen as an instrument and media that not only mediates, but also crafts people’s relationships and represents an opened door to their affective worlds. The methodological approach in order to conduct this research is the virtual ethnography. The researcher will interview families, friends and couples, will spend time with them (shadowing), and collect their mobile phone messages. Also, videos will be taken in order to examine the ways our body is affected by the mobile phone, and expressions and body language will be examined.
After introducing the main theories on feelings, these will be mingled with media theory to reflect on how our feelings are being mediated by the mobile phone. Tokyo will be examined, as it is the urban setting that represents the context of this research and the place where affective communication happens. Finally, the fieldwork data will be analyzed in detail to explain the mobile phone mediated affective worlds of families, friends and couples in Tokyo.
(This research is being conducted by Minerva Terrades, a member of MoDe)

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)

MoDeは、3月21日に開催されたMELL EXPO 2009にて「禁じられた遊び」というディスカッション・セッションを開きました。水越伸、岡田朋之、金ヨニ、などMoDeプロジェクトのメンバーらが登壇し、子どもに対するケータイ禁止の動きを含め、日本のモバイル社会に関わる諸課題について討論を行いました。
The MoDe held a discussion session titled “Forbidden games” in the MELL EXPO 2009 in March 21, 2009. Mizukoshi Shin, Okada Tomoyuki and Yonnie Kim, members of the MoDe, were on the panel and led a discussion mentioning the current discourse concerning mobile phone and teenagers in Japan.
詳細については、ディスカッション・セッションの記録を参照してください！
View the transcript for more information.
200903禁止された遊び.pdf(日本語、Japanese)
(報告者：金ヨニ)

The MoDe participates a collaborative research project in cooperation with KDDI Research institute. The research project has launched aiming exploring the socio-cultural possibility of mobile media in the future. A couple of other labs in the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies also participate as a research partners of the project.
The Mode will design research schemes from a pespective of socio-media studies, focusing upon mobile media practices and literacy. Its aim is to position mobile media culture as the bourgeoning research area of media studies, as well as to reflect on its underlying frameworks in terms of the media literacy.

In March 2007, we will make a study trip to Denmark and England in conjunction with “media exprimo.”
On March 12-13, we will make a presentation and have an interactive discussion at the Department of Media Cognition and Communication, the University of Copenhagen. On March 15-16, we will also have an opportunity for the same kind of presentation and discussion at the Department of Civil Engineering, Aalborg University.
For more details, please click here.

(Feb. 26th, 2007)