From purikura (print club) to videkura (video club) to something else … sensekura, perhaps?
I’ve never quite enjoyed the whole video call idea, because to me, it felt more like a hinderance to my mobility and multifocal tendencies. However, Videkura is different in that the interaction initiative is an active one: you don’t go in and do videkura unless you want to; it’s an active form of playing.
and social.
why would you do it unless 1) you’re with friends and you want to play with them in this space and/or 2) share the outcome with other friends? Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe have done a study on the social uses of purikura, which has some interesting points (view their paper here). I believe that social playing is fundamentally crucial to humanity not only because it makes people happier by means of pleasure (which I think is the key importance of playing) but also because that’s where not “coercion” but “negotiation” of the familiar and foreign can occur, leading to mergings and emergings. A lot of us miss the point; sometimes we get it, but sometimes, many times, many of us don’t.
Along the way, I’ve learnt to prefer the idea of the for- movement as compared to the against- movement. Positive verbalisastion is something that’s advocated by religions and spiritual groups, but in my case, I approach it from the “play” perspective. For example, slogans like “against terrorism” and “against poverty” fundamentally assume some form of resistance and therefore establish the definitive positions of the winner and loser. In this case, the activity of playing becomes a rigid game in which the player must try to be the winner so as not to be the loser. So playing leads to the learning of taking and breakingrather than sharing and creating. Personally I think the latter sounds much more fun and constructive.
Now, Karaoke. A few years back Karaoke recording was hugely popular in Korea and no doubt in other Asian countries too - basically you go in and sing (dance, drink, talk, scream, make out, what not) and you get an audio CD or VCD of your performance. you could then share it with others (if you dare) or keep it as a sentimental souvenir. You can still do it at some karaokes but the whole recording hype’s pretty much gone flat. Then the second stage of that, at least in the case of Korea, was a variety show on TV that featured a segment in which general pubic would volunteer and perform in a karaoke box (if selected) as a performance battle against celebrities - like these girls:
This has been one of the most popular videos of all times on YouTube and subsequently been parodied by many keen youtubeans - from various cultures including US, Mexico, Switzerland … and the Sims:
So here, you do exactly what you would in a karaoke room but in a karaoke booth (like purikura booth) but with increased consciouness about the assumed audience, and in this case the performers are “selected” by the show’s producer, and the outcome is “broadcast” via television.
With videkura, U(sers) can choose to perform and communicate their “creative outcome” in a method/s of their choice. There are two types of videkura available in Japan at the moment:
Ututu’s MYSQ
MYSQ stands for “My style so qute” - I love quirky semi-make-sense english names like this. Their website has some info in English. I like their video; especially how they used a narrator with a Japanese accent :) To view the video, click on the “concept” button as shown below, and click on the video:
Basically you go into mysq, choose your songs etc, and go crazy while stepping on different seonsor tiles on the floor (which will generate video effects) and dance to the music (again, your sensor-enabled wrist bands will generate effects accordingly). Once you’re done, your video is compressed and sent to your mobile phone and a QR code will be displayed on the screen. Then you scan that QR code with your phone, which works as a link to your video, so you can send it to your friends - for different purposes: to make them admire you, fall in love with you, laugh at you, or even hate you ;) MYSQ is like an amalgam of purikura, DDR (dance dance revolution), and possibly in the future, karaoke, all coming together via mobile network. I like the playful combination of mobility and space. Smart.
Sega’s Love & Berry Digital Stage
Who could possibly resist the temptation of playing on something with a name like “Love and Berry Digital Stage”? This one’s closer to the idea of Purikura: you get to take photos, manipulate them by adding decorative graphics and effects etc. You also get to dance to the music but without the whole fancy sensor effect generators. Once it’s all done, you get your purikura print, which is basically a set of sticker photos but with a QR code at the bottom. Then you can scan the code with your phone to view your pictures and download your video. It sounds all good and fun but unfortunately, Love & Berry Digital Stage, unlike MYSQ, doesn’t allow you to share the outcome with other friends (come on!). Apparently you can only download it to your own phone :( Sega’s selling point appears to be in incorporating anime characters like Naruto.
view more info about Love & Berry Digital State here
I believe that convergence is an inevitable phenomenon in any facet of life; it is particularly conspicuous in today’s techno-driven society. If we are to find any value in developing new communication technologies, it will only be through convergence - ultimately it will be the convergence between the technology and human senses (some might want to call the latter “spirituality” - I fancy the Taoist idea of “all is one,” so to me, these are talking about the same thing just in different discursive frameworks).
I guess the first technological convergence in the milieu of the mobile phone was between the phone and the user’s computer - transferring contact info and similar activities. Now it’s obviously between the phone and a big network of computers - the Internet. And I find it fascinating how things converge and emerge so quickly in such diverse domains of life in different techno-social contexts.
watching porns online or blocking porn sites on a national level?
The Ministry of Information and Communication said it will join forces with law enforcement authorities and portal site operators to set up an online surveillance system.
Specifically, the ministry will block links to foreign pornographic sites regarded as sources for obscene materials circulating on the nation’s major portal sites. It will block around 180 such foreign sites by the end of May, while beefing up surveillance of cyberspace to keep such hazardous content from minors.
The Korea Times reports that 1 in 10 minors are addicted to mobile phones in korea.
The state-backed Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion found early last year that roughly one third of Korean students send more than 100 phone messages every day.
Up to 35.4 percent of 704 surveyed students aged between 14 and 24 in Seoul and its vicinity said they are members of the 100-messages-per-day club.
i was once slapped (not literally) for sending too many txts. that was shortly after my return from korea and i didn’t even realise that i was sending a few too many. well, i don’t think i was, number-wise. i did send a few a day to that particular person (the slapper) but the problem, i think, was the content of the messages, not the number. i was sending short perhaps “meaningless” messages like “damn, my car battery’s gone flat while i was away” or “it’s so hot. i’m melting” etc, a practice i had got used to during my stay in korea. seemed everyone was doing it, and i was quickly absorbed into the whole practice of sending multimple meaningless messages (MMMs!). ok, 100 messages a day sounds pretty excessive. my fingers and wrist wouldn’t be fit (or young?) enough for that kind of wild exercise.
what i found amusing - but not in such a positive way - in the Korea Times article was this part:
“The number of young mobile addicts would be much greater than merely 10 percent,” said Sung Yun-sook, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Youth Development.
“In particular, young students tend to use handset messages too much. We learned this often prompts them to lose concentration on their studies,” Sung said.
whatever young people do to “play,” the issue of it being a “negative influence on their studies” always becomes one of the main problems and a main part of some political and social propagandas. i do understand that it’s part of the korean culture in general - confucian influences are still widely evident in many corners of korea - and that it’s a small country with not so great social welfare system, so you need to start early to work hard to give yourself greater competitive edge. what i don’t really appreciate is the enormous perceived value of “studying, the korean way” - which is focused exclusively on scoring high in the university entrance exam. this value system really kills people, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
graduating from a good university gives you a golden (and probably empty) promise that you will get a good job, and your spouse would be equally great (if not better) in various ways: attractive, educated, well-off, and from a good family. let’s not forget that the general practice of getting married in korea involves the groom(’s parents) getting a place for the couple to live in and the bride(’s parents) filling up the house with everything from toothbrushes to a tv. so the general belief is - regardless of how realistic it is - that you graduate from a top university, you’re set for life (although this once solid belief is eroding). no wonder education is such a significant part of korean life. its adult literacy rate is around 98% (as of 2004) and that of youth is appx 100%, according to the human development report.
enthusiasm in education is a good thing. but over enthusiam in a rigid learning process for unwise purposes really defies the meaning of education. having a girl/boyfriend is not ok for students and thus prohibited by their parents and greatly discouraged by adults in general, because it’s a major disruption to their studies. students don’t get to acquire pragmatic knowledge about sex and sexuality at school or anywhere, really. Result?
according to the 2001 UNICEF report, korea had the lowest teenage birth-rate at 2.9 percent. So I assume that the number of teenage abortions must be quite high, if counting illegal operations. enjo-kousai is a growing practice amongst young korean girls - although enjo-kousai mainly stems from the material/consumerist culture, another reason why girls get into this is because there is nowhere for them to go apart from suffocating schools (there’s a good book in korean on enjo-kousai amongst korean youth written by yunju kim-go). and this is one of the main reasons why korean youths constantly look for ways to hang out with other youngsters and entertain themselves in the virtual realm, especially the Internet and computer games.
a lot of my friends in korea say that they want to live in another country, expressing concerns for their, and their (some yet-to-be-born) children’s future in this small, complicated country. i’m an australian resident myself, and i understand their desire to leave korea. in fact, korea is losing thier top brainpowers to other countries precisely for the tough lifestyle it offers - i’ve seen stats but i don’t have them here now). what can be done? well, there is no quick fix. the infamous korean PARIPARI (hurry-hurry) mentality is just NEVER going to work in this situation. one most crucial area to look at is definitely education, and providing “space” where young people can feel free to express themselves, and more importantly, encourage them to be there and play. the number of daily text messages may not drop, but at least there’s a hope that their learning will continue and will lead them to make the korean society a better one.
i recently met up with two friends of mine in seoul.
we had drinks - koreans are heavy drinkers; you simply must come and experience it yourself to truly understand what i mean.
An investigation showed on Sept. 13 that South Koreans consumedan average of 4.5 liters of distilled liquor such as whisky and the nation’s most popular alcoholic beverage “Soju” in 2002, ranking fourth after Russia, Latvia and Romania.
– full article from the Seoul Times here
this time, though, my friends and i only moved once, which means we only did “2-cha.” cha is a counting suffix for the number of drinking places (be it a pub or a restaurant where you drink) you go in one night - or day, why not. it’s sort of like “rounds” - e.g. “oori uhje 5-cha gasseo” literally means “we went 5-cha yesterday (last night),” which means “we went to five different places to drink last night.” we koreans drink, drink, and drink… then consider moving to a different place for a change of scenery, and type of edible consumables, i suppose, and continue on. drinking is one of the biggest and most important cultures in korea.
anyway, we only did 2-cha and parted because first, it was getting late, and second, i was still hungover from the night before when i lost track of the number of cha’s, and third, we couldn’t afford to miss the last train. and most naturally i gave each of them a hug at the train station. what i got was, of course, eventually a hug in return, but what i got first was an utterance from my shocked friend k:
“what, you’re a westerner now?”
maybe she was just jealous that she wasn’t the first one to get my hug. haha. no, seriouly… compared to australia, i feel that korean culture involves much closer physical proximities in general. friends walk around holding hands, or arm-in-arm (not so much between men though) etc. such physical intimacy is quite evident in the food culture of korea, where almost all dishes are shared amongst the people on the table. you don’t get your own little portions in your own plates apart from your bowl of rice, and sometimes soup - though stews are shared. so basically, an unvited guest at dinner time is not a problem as all you need to provide them with are:
a spoon
a pair of chopsticks
a bowl of rice
and a bowl of soup, if having a soup, not a stew for that particular meal
yes, you dig in and double-, triple-, and howmanyevertimesyouwant-dip your spoon and chopsticks into various dishes on the table. of course there were gender-based traditions before - for example, women were not allowed to eat with the men in the family - but unless you’re from a really traditional family, you probaby don’t eat separately like that anymore.
now, back to the “hugging” part, i wonder what it is that makes “hugging” a surprisingly foreign practice in korea, especially when physical contacts in other ways and social ties are a lot more intimate and stronger in general. something to think about…
i’ve heard some very good reviews - by critiques and everyday film appreciators alike - about swing girls. i really hope there are still tickets left. would love to see it.
i’ve been interested in japanese culture for a while now.
when i was growing up, i didn’t hear much good stuff about japan. traces of the war still remain in many facets of life in korea. older generations simply do not approve of anything japanese. this is also one of the main boosters of the korean wave in countries like china and taiwan. “japanese culture? no. korean culture? oh well, ok.” sort of mentality.
my initial contact with japanese culture was through anime. i didn’t know that they were japan-made; i was just watching what was on tv. some of my favourites were marco (母をたずねて三千里), anne of green gables (akage no anne), and the future boy conan (未来少年コナン).
marco opening
then i was reading lots of japanese manga, and moved to music, then to literature, film, food, arts etc. one of the things i always do when i go over to korea is to sit at kyobo book store and read books by japanese writers. there are places to sit, and on special days you even get offered little bits of snacks and things (so that you don’t get hungry while reading books for free…?) so i satisfy two different types of hunger at once there. i’d love to read more of japanese books here, but it’s just really hard to find contemporary japanese literature here other than murakami haruki and maybe yoshimoto banana. they’re two of my favourite japanese writers, yes, but it’d be great if we had some more variety going on here. i absolutely love ekuni kaori, murakami ryu, and yamada amy, too.
one of my friends in japan has told me how she can see that murakami haruki’s works could be very easily translated into english without losing much meaning. she said they are “written that way.” my japanese is still shockingly limited, so i’m not quite sure exactly what she means, but i can sort of see how impossibly difficult it would be to translate ekuni kaori’s work, for example. she usually writes in very simple, short sentences. mostly her sentences are not complex or compound types - simple, sometimes fragmented, yet beautifully written.
i bought a book in tokyo on my way back to australia earlier this year. i actually had read a review of it on my way to korea from australia, but failed to locate a copy in any of the cities that i went to - from osaka to asahikawa - so i was delighted when i saw it hidden under some very boring looking novel at a little bookshop in the tokyo international airport. it’s called “inside and other short fiction: japanese women by japanese women.” it’s a collection of eight short stories about contemporary japanese women, written by contemporary japanese female writers. it’s an excellent book.anyway, i’ve started reading “dance dance dance” by murakami haruki. i’m reading at a very slow pace, as i don’t want to lose myself in reading it and forget about all the work that needs to be done. here’s a little excerpt from the book (page 3):
A mysterious hotel.
What it reminded me of was a biological dead end. A genetic retrogression. A freak accient of nature that stranded some organism up the wrong path without a way back. Eveolutionary vector eliminated, orphaned life-form left cowering behind the curtain of history in The Land That Time Forgot. And through no fault of anyone. No one to blame, no one to save it.
The hotel should never have been built where it was. That was the the first mistake, and everything got worse from there. Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another fine - not to say elegant - mess. No detail seemed right. Look at anything in the place and you’d find yourself tilting your head a few degrees. Not enough to cause you any real harm, nor enough to seem particularly odd. Who knows? You might ge tused to this slant on things (but if you did, you’d never be able to view the world again without holding your head out of true).
That was the Dolphon Hotel. Normalness, it lacked.Confusion piled on confusion until the saturation point was reached, destined in the not-too-distant future to be swallowed in teh vortex of time. Anyone could recognize that at a glance. A pathetic place, woebegone as a three-legged black dog drenched in December rain. Sad hotels existed everywhere, to be sure, but the Dolphin was in a class of its own. The Dolphon Hotel was conceptually sorry. The Dolphin Hotel was tragic.
can’t wait to get further into the book. a fun japanese time ahead.
a while ago, i read some articles about google’s emerging relationship with korea. i didn’t archive them anwhere - even on my del.icio.us, which would’ve been so easy and a smart thing to do - so i will need to dig them up again, but here’s one of the articles i read then:
Google recently announced that it would invest at least $10 million on an R&D center in Seoul, Korea, reports the Korea Herald, and hire 130-150 researchers. Alan Eustace, Google senior VP for engineering, told the Korea Times that they want to recruit local computer scientists to “further develop innovative search technologies for Korean users and users around the world.”
– Google, Youtube, and Korean Connections @ GigaOm here
google’s share in the competitive search engine market in korea is only 5%. that’s pretty embarrasing for a company that’s managed to turn its name into a verb. you could never replace google in this sentence “just google it or something” with a different search engine name. all the other search engines fall into the second part of the sentence: “or something”
koreanclick reports that unique search referrals in korea are mostly by naver (appx 80%), followed by daum (48%) and yahoo!korea (32%). google’s only at 10.8%. a recent report also shows that to the question “what’s the site that first comes to your mind when you hear the term ’search engine (검색사이트 gumsek saitu)’?,” 59.4% said naver, 10.5% daum, and 7.3% yahoo. In terms of shopping sites, auction was found to be no 1 at 26.3%, followed by gmarket (18.6%), interpark (4.7%), and d&shop (4.2%). you can read the original article here (in korean). ebay bought auction in 2001, but they didn’t change the name; “ebay” is not mentioned anywhere but right on the bottom, where people wouldn’t really scroll down to see. but when i typed in “www.ebay.co.kr” i was taken to auction.
as with the global UCC boom, korean portals are pretty much in the same trend, but i’ve noticed that the korean ones have been doing that for quite a while now. and one of the most interesting things i’ve noticed about naver is that it gained popularity through its “naver knowledge search (네이버 지식검색 naver jisik gumsek).” this is a really interesting service, much like a combination of search engine + wikipedia. kind of like google (but naver had started way before google did) but much neater. korean search engines are quite different - i mentioned this after rachel’s presentation at the AoIR7.0’s doctoral colloquium as well, but if you compare how search results are displayed in yahoo (us or australia) and yahoo korea, you can clearly see the differences. yahoo!korea displays things in this categorical order:
knowledge (users answer to other users’ questions and gain ponts, too)
blogs and message boards
yahoo category
web results
news
hub (tag-based search)
music
videos
images
shopping
yahoo!korea basically ripped off naver’s knowledge service. well, it is in fact a really useful thing to have, and it’s helped me quite a bit every time i was preparing my trip to japan (but some people simply want to know things like “which instant noodle is hotter?”). of course i also used message boards in my daum cafes (clubs), and daum portal has recenly incorporated cafe message board search as well, which has boosted their lagging popularity. people seem to care about what other “normal people” or “netizens” have to say about thier subjects of curiousity.
anyway, back to google, as the first mentioned article says, korea’s not all that attractive in terms of market size. it’s a small country. but there are a lot of r&d centres over there, it’s pretty ridiculous - there seem to be a lot of magazine and journal articles on this topic anyway, so you can “(please insert your favourite search engine’s name here)” it, if you like - there’s ibm, microsoft, sun, hp, siemens, and google, just to name a few.
the korean government’s agenda to turn korea into the R&D Hub of North East Asia seems to have worked. why korea for r&d? here are some reasons:
strategic location
(between two largest economies of the world, china and japan)
cultural proximity
(to other asian countries: traditional and contemporary. the korean wave phenomenon has hit the whole region and beyond, from japan to uzbekistan)
brains, or qualifications
(oecd’s report, education at a glance 2005, reports that tertiary education attainment rate of koreans between 25-34 is 47%, and the country is one of the highest performing in student performance in problem solving)
supportive environment
(the government wants you there and will offer you subsidies and tax benefits)
nice infrastructure
(transport-wise and more importantly, the broadband. if you want to see the future of broadband, or the future broadband lifestyle, go to korea)
sustainability
(labour’s still cheapter than first-world countries, and cities are becoming more livable for creative class - foreign and local alike)
it all sounds lovely and beneficial for everyone. but i’m also hearing (or reading, more like) a lot of concerned voices coming from korea. they’re saying that those r&d centres are not contributing much to developing korean r&d sector. some main reasons behind this opinion include:
most centres function independently to the existing r&d sources in korea; in other words, there’s not much interaction between the KOREAN education and r&d sectors and the foreign-owned.
most workers at those centres are actually koreans; it’s just the same r&d power repackaged, rather than dynamic interactions amongst different multi-national sources.
and lastly, it appears as though korea is used as a testbed (for its techno-social and geographical advantages) and “development,” rather than “research” centre. after all, r&d includes two aspects: research and development. in the cyclical process of r&d, the egg comes first; from there chicks are “developed” into hens who can lay more super eggs later.
so i’m not quite sure what google wants from korea, other than looking at what’s going with contents and users in this exotic world built upon broadband. i hope that korea continues to shine technologically and culturally, and people - rich and poor - get to benefit from all that’s happening and is going to happen. korea will have to be careful so that they don’t get sucked into “the system” and spat out before they realise that they’ve lost most, if not all, of their eggs. my humble suggestion is that korea should watch out for their “palipali” tendencies - getting things done in a rushed/hurried manner. this charactersitic is seen in every facet of korean society, and has contributed to some amazing phenomena and developments; but after all, you can’t break the egg and pull the chick (or chicken, even) out, or sell off your farm for a quick gain before the eggs hatch (well, you can, but it’ll be a shame). can i just point out that i really hate using metaphors… well, i did it anyway just for a change.
