His question was whether we could have systematic approach to ‘play’ – in other words, could we provoke an occurrence of play in a systematic manner? I responded with the acknowledgement that it is actually impossible for us to grasp the notion of play with our existing conceptual framework so ’systematizing’ play or rather bringing play into play may not be a productive thing – it’s simply impossible. And our attempt at that process should be considered as a ‘game’ not play in its entirety. In that respect, my answer was no, it’s not play (it’s a part of it – conceptually subordinate to play). What I didn’t mention was Caillois’s notion of the ludus and paidia continuum; a game, as a form of play that involves operative rules (governing system) it’s a ludic form of play and yes, in that respect, we can in fact systematise the process of play. Furthermore, in order to nurture creativity, and particularly innovation, the interplay of ludic and paidic play is crucial. As I argued, the space where we play is in the seam of fantasy and reality: the folding of re/deterritorialization. And that’s exactly where the space for creativity can be found. On a pragmatic level – designing such a system or control mechanism – what’s accentuated here is the need for an idling space (as Yeun Bae Kim - at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology - mentioned as the most crucial element to provoke ‘fun’ in HCI during my interview with him; and also seen in the case of play activities such as parkour, which can be perceived as a userled spatial reproduction).

Humans, by default - for ontological security as I argued in the paper - look for ways to create an idling space, a playground where creativity flourish. Such a place is built, sustained, and destoryed then rebuilt with creativity itself. To better support this human aspect we must avoid a monopolic configuration, which is something hard to achieve today, so on a more practical level, we should avoid an oligopolic system when it comes to creative industries. In this respect, I support what can be called a micronodal system - a dynamic network economy of micronodes (such as SMEs and individuals). And I’ve been long excited by microeconomic developments and a firm believer in the notion of ‘patient capital’ (see Jacqueline Novogratz’s article here).

Network technologies speed things up. No doubt about that. However, making a transformation, not a trend or a quick wave, takes patience as it involves an en masse of individual conceptual and action inputs. The majority rule still prevails today for a collective change but the size of the majority gets bigger in a network society as people have means to continue debating and even hindering the transactional channels of the action node/s for the change. And of course, we see a greater potential in creating positive transformations for the world. Therefore we need access to more creative minds and share ideas to move forward together. I believe in Bataille’s notion of economy that on a macro-level we as humanity have an inherent ‘excess’ and therefore must share/obliterate it for a peaceful continuation of humanity.

So then what can we do to create not an impossible smooth utopia but a stimulating playground for us? Here I suggest a term playpolis to loosely refer to an ideal form of urban environment: a seductive, sustainable, and creative city of integrative techno-social networks. A systematic approach - politics most importantly in this context - should ensure that small nodes can actively connected in the bigger network and that there is an idling space in the place of interaction (localised contexutalisation and entrepreneurality of informal economy for example) while very importantly, ensuring the environmental sustainability. We know that environment vs economy is a stupid comparison. Writing this on a beach of Lesvos, I can’t feel more strongly about this.

And thanks for asking the question Jason :)

The activity of play, according to Huizinga, ‘proceeds with its own boundaries of time and space’ (ibid p.13). This creates what is commonly known as the magic circle, which, as with any combination of time and space, takes account of other such combinations, or realities, germane to the player’s current context. With the rapid advancement of media and communication technologies in contemporary society, such layering of realities transpires more quickly, evidently, and variously than ever before. Today, the notion of playground appears to resonate closely with mediaspace, ‘a dialectical concept encompassing both the kinds of spaces created by media and the effects that existing spatial arrangements have on media forms as they materialise in everyday life’ (Couldry & McCarthy, 2004, p.2). Therefore, any play activity needs to be perceived as a multifarious phenomenon, and thus requires considerations to techno-social contexts of the player and of the time and space in which the activity takes place. Here, new media technologies function as toys with and through which the inter-relations between micro- and macro-realities are constantly (re)constructed.

This paper presents a unique case of Seoul: one of the most connected, densely populated, and quickly transforming metropolises in the world. More specifically, the paper looks at the realisation of and desire for play of Seoul residents who are neither children nor adults, but are socially placed in between these two realms, and the role new media technologies play as a coordinator in this process: everyday play culture of trans-youths in Seoul and new media technologies as toys.

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international toy research association world congress: toys and culture
wed 25 - fri 27 july 2008
university of the peloponnes
nafplion, greece
http://toyresearch.org/conference_call_for_papers_2008.php
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This paper investigates intersections of play, technology, and ontological security within the contemporary East Asian city, based on reflections and observations of play from my fieldwork in 2007– 8 with ‘trans-youth’ in Seoul. Trans-youth are those who are neither children nor adults; In the Korean context, they are those between the ages of 18 and 24, situated on the delicate border zone between digital natives and immigrants in Prensky’s (2000) term. Taking the ontological position, it would seem that given the opportunity, most people would choose to live a pleasurable life over one lacking it. Although ‘pleasure’ is non-universal — for instance, this necessitates certain fundamental material requirements — desiring pleasure has been common across geographical and cultural boundaries throughout human history. Similarly, most people would prefer the next moment to be a more pleasurable one than the contrary. Pleasure in this sense is inherently interrelated with possibility and pressure, together which create a phenomenon of play, a fertile soil for creativity that could bring about transformations necessary for the development of human history. Therefore, change and pleasure are ontological necessity for each other. In this respect, Bataille’s (1986) argument – though essentially confined to the domain of eroticism, which, nevertheless, he perceives as a fundamental element of humanity – that ultimate joy ensues the (unsustainable and thus illusory) overcoming of discontinuity has some validity.

How does this notion translate in the present era of capitalism, rapid urbanisation and networks? One way of answering this question would be to examine the rules of the current ‘economy of desire’ (Petrescu, 2005, p. 46), which encompasses not only financial but also emotional and socio-cultural domains. How then do we conceive the intersections of play, technology, and ontological security in this context? My research suggests that the embeddedness of change in ontological security has increasingly become more manifest with the embeddedness of mobile technologies in everyday life. Here, network technology provides a flexible means for reterritorialisation in the techno-social ecology.

Huizinga (1955) sees play as a pleasure provoking phenomenon and the primordial soil for human civilisation, rather than ‘the other’ of the ’serious’ human life. This paper shares his view and reflects on the concept of ‘urban play’ (or play in the everyday urban context), with particular considerations to ubiquitous technology, an increasing fixture of contemporary cities. Taking Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of the smooth/striated space, it is argued that as an essential fabric of everyday life, urban play allows users of the city to (re)create smooth spaces in conceptually striated urban space. This thus accentuates a need for interdisciplinary approach that combines macro- and microscopic perspectives to understand the value context of the city, which can inform the design and development of desirable and sustainable urban communities.

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creating value: between commerce and commons
wed 25 - fri 27 june 2008
brisbane convention & exhibition centre, south bank
brisbane, australia
http://www.cci.edu.au/events/creating-value-between-commerce-and-commons
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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.

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 ;)

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.