Mobile Cultures

Mobile Cultures
Author: Chris Berry
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2003-04-18
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780822330875

DIVA collection of essays on the uses of new media in the formation of East Asian and Pacific queer identities./div

Mobile Cultures

Mobile Cultures
Author: Chris Berry
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2003-04-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0822384388

Mobile Cultures provides much-needed, empirically grounded studies of the connections between new media technologies, the globalization of sexual cultures, and the rise of queer Asia. The availability and use of new media—fax machines, mobile phones, the Internet, electronic message boards, pagers, and global television—have grown exponentially in Asia over the past decade. This explosion of information technology has sparked a revolution, transforming lives and lifestyles, enabling the creation of communities and the expression of sexual identities in a region notorious for the regulation of both information and sexual conduct. Whether looking at the hanging of toy cartoon characters like “Hello Kitty” from mobile phones to signify queer identity in Japan or at the development of queer identities in Indonesia or Singapore, the essays collected here emphasize the enormous variance in the appeal and uses of new media from one locale to another. Scholars, artists, and activists from a range of countries, the contributors chronicle the different ways new media galvanize Asian queer communities in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and around the world. They consider phenomena such as the uses of the Internet among gay, lesbian, or queer individuals in Taiwan and South Korea; the international popularization of Japanese queer pop culture products such as Yaoi manga; and a Thai website’s reading of a scientific tract on gay genetics in light of Buddhist beliefs. Essays also explore the politically subversive possibilities opened up by the proliferation of media technologies, examining, for instance, the use of Cyberjaya—Malaysia’s government-backed online portal—to form online communities in the face of strict antigay laws. Contributors. Chris Berry, Tom Boellstorff, Larissa Hjorth, Katrien Jacobs, Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin, Mark McLelland, David Mullaly, Baden Offord, Sandip Roy, Veruska Sabucco, Audrey Yue

Mobile Phone Cultures

Mobile Phone Cultures
Author: Gerard Goggin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113518660X

What do we really know about mobile phone culture? This provocative and comprehensive collection explores the cultural and media dimensions of mobile phones around the world. An international team of contributors look at how mobiles have been imagined through advertising and social representations - tracing the scripting and shaping of the technology through gender, sexuality, religion, communication style - and explore the locations of mobile phone culture in modernity, urban settings and even transnational families. This book also provides a guide to convergent mobile phone culture, with fresh, innovative accounts of text messaging, Blackberry, camera phones, moblogging and mobile adventures in television. Mobile Phone Culture opens up important new perspectives on how we understand this intimate yet public cultural technology. Previously published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

Where are you Africa?

Where are you Africa?
Author: Castor M. Goliama
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2011
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9956578452

This is an original and innovative study of mobile phones in Africa from a theological perspective. The First and the Second Special Assemblies for Africa of the Synod of Bishops, held in Rome in 1994 and 2009 respectively, made an urgent appeal to the Church in Africa to employ various media forms of social communications for evangelization and the promotion of justice and peace. Evidently, electronic media are now increasingly used for evangelization across Africa. The proliferation of the mobile phone in Africa is a most welcome development to this end. On the basis of a thorough review of the growing literature on the mobile phone and the cultures it inspires, Goliama highlights the ambivalent nature of mobile cultures for the Roman Catholic Church's evangelization mission in Africa. He argues not only for the continued merits of face-to-face communication for the Church's pastoral approach in the African context. He points to how this could be enriched by a creative appropriation of the mobile phone as a tool for theological engagement, in its capacity to shape cultures in ways amenable to the construction of a Cell phone Ecclesiology. Such emergent mobile cultural values include the tendency of mobile users to transcend social divides, to promote social interconnectedness, and to privilege the question 'where are you?'. This informed and well articulated exploration of Cell phone Ecclesiology is thus envisaged to aid the Church in Africa to wrestle more effectively with challenges that diminish human life and promote instead qualities that are life-affirming to all categories of people in the Church and society.

Youth, Media and Culture in the Asia Pacific Region

Youth, Media and Culture in the Asia Pacific Region
Author: Usha M. Rodrigues
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2009-05-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443810398

Youth, Media and Culture in the Asia Pacific Region presents an analysis of youth media activities in a diverse, but geographically connected Asia Pacific region. The region, which is spatially connected by its colonial and imperial past, is becoming a significant player in the globalized world. In this context, youth situated in these economically, politically and socially structured communities are redefining their locales through their patterns of media use. The discourse of ‘youth’ in this disparate region is manifest in the media through their identity articulations and social activism. The book illustrates that these ‘youth subcultures’ in the Asia Pacific are part of the well marketed global consumerism culture, and yet at other times independent of the commodifying impetus of global capital. It draws on case studies to examine some of the media practices youth in the region are engaged in and elucidates the process of social change taking place in some Asia Pacific nations. 'This book contributes to the important and growing field of youth media studies. The regionalization of media research is necessarily recuperated here, bringing large populations of media users into a frame of reference that allows critical reflection on the new waves of use and sociality in the Asia Pacific region.' Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Professor of International Studies, UTS

Entangled Future Im/mobilities

Entangled Future Im/mobilities
Author: Daniela Atanasova
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2024-05-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839473802

How are im/mobilities articulated, imagined and practiced in relation to multiple futures? A critical examination of im/mobilities raises questions as to how power relations and crisis-driven futures enable, inhibit or prevent mobility, what meanings are culturally constructed around im/mobilities and how they are experienced. The contributors to this volume look at entangled future mobilities and immobilities using humanities and social science approaches in diverse examples: Afrofuturist poetry, de-extinction projects, dystopian novels, a Uruguayan planned relocation program, lives of rural Zambian women, climate adaptation in Morocco and Austrian financial literacy policy.

Personal, Portable, Pedestrian

Personal, Portable, Pedestrian
Author: Mizuko Itō
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2005
Genre: Computers
ISBN:

How mobile communications in Japan became a pervasively personal tool that connects families and friends, creating "always-on" social engagement.

Global Subjects

Global Subjects
Author: Jean-François Bayart
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2007
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Taking the plane or sending an e-mail: globalization has become part of the fabric of our daily lives. And yet it is often seen as an impersonal force that is threatening to destroy identities and undermine nation-states. In this major new book, Jean-Franois Bayart offers a radically new account of globalization which challenges the way it is interpreted both by neo-liberals and by the anti-globalization movement. Bayart argues that globalization is something that we ourselves have created, and the nation-state is actually a product, and not of a victim, of this process. Far from being synonymous with alienation and social disintegration, globalization establishes transnational solidarities and networks which overlap with nation-states without necessarily undermining them. Globalization has also refashioned sexual identities, transforming, through the representation of female and male bodies in the media, in advertising and in the Internet, the way individuals in different parts of the world have learnt to recognize themselves as sexual subjects. It has created new cultures of consumption which stimulate new desires, new techniques and technologies of the body and new forms of tension and conflict. Drawing on Foucaults notions of governmentality and subjectivation, Bayart develops a rich and illuminating account of how the social relations constitutive of globalization produce new forms of subjectivity, new lifestyles and new moral subjects, from the colonisers and colonised subjects of nineteenth-century India and Africa to the spread of new kinds of transnational and ethnicized subjectivities and lifestyles today. Spanning two centuries and drawing on his deep knowledge of Africa and the Middle East, Bayart shows that, if globalization is our handiwork, its development and thus our history will be decided on the contested terrains where new ways of life, new modes of consumption and new types of struggle are being invented.