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.

4 day long AoIR’s finally over (well, ok, it ended last friday… but then again, i’m living with “sunday vision”). it was a great conference. really enjoyed it. here are some of the highlights:

1st day: doctoral colloquium (qut kg)

we had randy kluver and barbara atkins as our chairs. people who are passionate about what they do are very sexy. yes, sometimes people like that may turn out to be a bit of psycho, but hey, what’s sexy without psychotic?

i had four main issues i really wanted people to help me with:

1. play - lack of direction in literature
2. contacts - for fieldwork in japan, korea, and china
3. mobile contents/applications - for case studies
4. actor network theory - where to from here? how can i cleverly overcome the temporal drawback of this and expand this for my research?

i got some interesting and helpful feedback from both the chairs and other students. it seems that the second phase of my methodology could be improved to make it more efficient and viable. this was my initial plan:

1. literature review
2. questionnaire and focus group (or interview)
3. case studies

after the presentation + feedback, plus a private chat with randy, it became clear to me that i may need to scrap the idea of quetionnaire (the main reason suggested was the difficulties that i will no doubt face, especially in china. randy’s got a lot of experience in research in china, and he warned me in a nice way about the hardship of conducting “structured” research in china) and replace it with interviews only. randy commented that he thought my project was extremely exciting and fascinating, but my methodology may present a lot of hinderances. i’ve thought about it for a while, and decided to go with the interview method. barbara and randy were so helpful, i feel really indebted.

i personally find deleuze’s ideas facsinating - though i only have an extremely limited amount of understanding - so polly mcgee’s presentation interested me. we’ve emailed each other since, so hopefully we can keep in touch. enjoyed listening to other people’s ideas too. apart from the fact that we had no sweets for morning/afternoon tea and very limited consideration for vegetarians in terms of food prepartion, and consequent physical and emotional pain, it was an enjoyable day, at least cognitively.

2nd - 4th day (hilton)

unlike most of us who pay to talk, keynote speakers are paid to talk. obviously there are reasons for that, and i enjoyed the keynotes (john hartley and guo liang). there was one session that i particularly enjoyed - incidentally full of qut people, not just qut people but qut people i like :) - jean burgess, sal humphreys, christina spurgen, and melissa gregg (uq). jean’s idea of new media literacy in relation to usability and hackability was very interesting (smart woman!); jean mentioned that people’s desire to improve their photographic skills is one of the main motives behind their continued flickr participation. this made sense to me as well, as i believe that “social productivity” is main reason behind the continued participation in cyworld in korea. i would like to contemplate further on the similarities and differences between flickr and cyworld from the productivity perspective. sal talked about regulations in multiuser online games, which was fascinating as well. i quickly - despite jean’s official “no more comment/quetions” - mentioned two animations before i left the room for another presentation: serial experiments lain and .hack. serial experiments lain was what brought me into the world of digital communications research. i watched the series (thanks to gt) in my 2nd year of undergrad, and i was blown away. unfortunately someone mentioned some website or something right after my comment, so i had so many people coming up to me during the break asking about the “websites”… haha. oh well.

other sessions i found exciting:

• nancy baym: The Internet in advice columns: Constructing relational consequences
  - i love her energy; it was really fun to listen to her talk
• marta celletti: The Internet as a Time of Regression: a hypothesis
  - big, interesting ideas. lots to think about.
• marika luders: Converging forms of communication?
  - i liked her simple yet effective interaction-participation-social integration approach. met her at the doctoral colloquium. she’s fun. tres cool.

i met a lot of great people at the conference, which was the best thing about the conference for me. it was a very enjoyable experience. it was a long one as well, so accepting the end of it felt pretty weird, as i said in my group email the other day:

the aoir conference has been such a major, though temporary, shift in my daily routine, it felt so surreal to walk out of the Hilton last Friday (had drinks to chill out, but it became even more surreal especially with nick cave’s little message on the toilet wall, rainbow, and the boys in their underpants parading victoriously around new farm after the game).
obviously i didn’t stay for the wrap-up; went to anise in new farm with oksana. had a wonderful time. surreal. definitely. and fantastic.

anyway, another conference weekend - going to ATOM conference. crazy busy. but i don’t mind it at all. especially since 4pm yesterday ;)

went to michael curtin’s seminar organised by iCi this morning.

one of my supervisors, michael keane, often mentioned about curtin’s works especially his idea of “media capital,” but i never really got around to finding more about them, so i printed out a few chapters and articles last night, and started reading them. so far, i’ve been really enjoying reading his works, especially on the ideas about media capital and neo-networks. he claims that media capital is a relational concept within the realm of globalisation (here he defines globalisation as a “process that operates at a number of levels: local, national, regional, and worldwide, as opposed to a process that emphasises the latter”) - in his own words, a media capital is an intersection, or a site of mediation, of complex patterns of economic, social, and cultural flows. so curtin’s definition of “media capital” is twofold: a capital as a centre of activity, and as a concentration of resources, reputation, and talent. hollywood and hong kong are two obvious examples. and he suggests and attempts to identify changes in the cultural industries in the era of neo-network, or the era beyond the limited/controlled channels of distribution.

i asked him about his views on the roles that digital communication and user-led media innovation play in this new era of cultural shifts, coming from the perspective of the korean wave. he was quite enthusiatic about the korean wave, and talked briefly about what an interesting case this phenomenon is especially in relation to the cultural/technological policy. the massive broadband rollout in korea was one of the few positive things that the Kim Dae Jung government did. without the technological infrastructure, i don’t believe that the korean wave would’ve been possible.

after the talk, i went and spoke to him in person. when i mentioned how thought-provoking and interesting the session had been, he responded with such modesty, apologising how he had to jump to and from subjects, and then go back to the original subject etc. i honestly didn’t mind it at all. in fact, i’d be very suspicious of anyone who tries to advocate the linearity of knowledge, creativity, epistemology, or actually, anything in that matter. oh, in fact, it was probably a perfect way of explaining his main ideas evolving around “relational” processes :)

thanks again, professor curtin.

went to Corey Doctorow’s session at the Ideas Festival.

thoroughly enjoyed his interesting, stimulating talk.

it’s pretty scary how people, including myself, don’t seem to pay enough attention to issues that will, undoubtedly affect, or are already affecting, us all on a global level.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) or Digital “Restrictions” Management is already shaping our techno-social environments. what’s obvious to us now - things like the dvd region code telling the rightful owner off, and sony’s ridiculous attempt to covertly install spyware on their own customers’ (yes, those honest people who would buy copies of celine dion’s latest cd, for example -_-;) computers - are actually a tip of the iceberg. soon enough, we will have to face and reluctantly accept various definitions and technological restrictions enforced by giant corporations like Sony and BBC, which will in turn alter multiple facets of our daily life. one of the examples given by Doctorow was how a particular media content can be licensed to a single “family unit.” now, the problem is rather obvious here. how would you define a family unit? what if your child goes away for education? what if you get divorced, in which cases may involve children frequently moving between the parents’ residences? and what if you’re in a same-sex relationship in a country where the same-sex marriage has not yet been legalised (or will it ever in every country)? regardless of our wishes, those companies will make those definitions - political, economic, social, technological, and cultural.

we’re living in a wired world. we cannot escape it.
like in the animation “Serial Experiements Lain,” everyone’s connected.

if we remain unaware of what’s going on with DRM, technology will no longer be some gadgety tools working for our convenience; it will be the most powerful tool that will conveniently serve the needs of the oppressors who will at every opportunity instantly snatch away our rights not only as technology consumers, but as human beings. we need to make sure that we understand the significance of DRM, and actively participate in developing fair and practical ways to protect the freedom and creativity of humanity from being - so publically yet disturbingly privately - legally molestered.

for more information and/or inspirations, check:

electronic frontier foundation: http://www.eff.org/
electronic frontiers australia: http://www.efa.org.au/
creative commons: http://creativecommons.org/