i was able to attend the first day of the ATOM conference and even had a chat with mizuko ito over coffee last saturday (much indebted to you, john!). had been waiting excitedly and expectantly for the moment i finally get to see her, so it almost didn’t feel adequately real to me as i was watching her in front of the audience in z 411, qut gardens point on a summery brisbane saturday. there have been numerous surreal moments recently. perhaps dienna was right; huge changes that i can’t even conceptualise may already be happening right now. fun surreal times.

// mizuko ito @ atom 2006

mizuko ito was the very first keynote speaker at the conference. her talk was basically a condensed version of her past-present works, ranging from the social life of the mobile and children’s media mix, through to the most recent study of purikura. her background is in anthropology, and her technosocial approach views the youth as fluent natives of digital world. i guess this is why so called “post-structuralist” research is most appropriate in studying the youth of today. the individualised, fluid shift in the “power geometries” of today is more organic to youth - living in nagara (while-doing-something-else)-hood.

her emphasis on viewing youth social practices “not incomplete or immature but fully competent as the fluent natives of digital world” reminded me instantly of the film “hana to arisu (hana & alice),” which i think captures beautifully the seemingly (in adults’ eyes at least) loose sense of temporality, or the temporal language of youth. this, to me, sounds clearly like “play.” this fascinates me - and this is one of the main areas that i’m hoping to find out more about through my phd. the idea of play manifested/experienced/created for and by youth through mobile media. to achieve this, i thought i could take a similar approach to that of mizuko’s. to capture the everyday use, these methods were taken:

1. Close “direct’ observations of people’s activity in divers locations rather than reported usage.
2. Interpreting user experience by analysing subjectve reports 9interviews) in relation to observational data

i would love to do interviews (rather than survey and focus group, taking the advice from randy kluver and barbara atkins) and also observations of mobile interactions in the space young people occupy voluntarily (hang-outs) and for pragmatic reasons (subway). but the problem is, i may be a partial speaker of the language of youth, but i don’t speak any chinese and my japanese is laughable - yes, this whole language barrier thing may be breakable but not when you have extremely limited resources finantially and time-wise. i need to speak to someone… hopefully, well, definitely before my confirmation.

anyway, meeting mizuko ito was one of the highlights of this year for me, and i thoroughly enjoyed it. i’m very thankful of john who kindly took me there, and of mizuko who, despite her crazy schedule, generously spared enough time to talk with us over coffee. i also had an embarrassing moment with her as well - i was walking out of the campus and ran into her who was walking into the campus for the conference after our coffee session, and she asked “are you leaving?” to which i replied “yes, i need to get some apples…” i’m sure i had a great impression on her as a serious and dedicated scholar. hahaha! well, if this helps, i usually don’t eat apples and the only apples i eat are from this particular stall at the west end markets, only on saturday mornings (but the apple guy wasn’t even there that day… :( ). ah- excuses.

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