ABSTRACT
In a highly media-saturated country such as Singapore, where broadband penetration and mobile phone ownership are high, the use of mobile media is intense – especially among youth. The country’s ubiquitous mobile media device is the mobile phone. Mobile phone subscription in Singapore has seen a phenomenal rise, from 200 per 1,000 residents in 1997 to 1,225 per 1,000 residents in 2007. As of April 2008, mobile phone subscriptions had risen to over 5.9 million (Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore 2008), exceeding the country’s population of 4.6 million (Statistics Singapore 2007). Beyond mobile phones, other popular mobile media devices include MP3 players, digital cameras, handheld games, personal digital assistants and laptop computers. To boost mobile Internet usage, the government has introduced the Wireless@SG scheme which provides free wireless broadband Internet access in public areas until 2010. With such infrastructure in place, the use of a variety of forms of mobile media is growing in Singapore, particularly by young people. This chapter examines the representations of mobile media in four leading
Singaporean teen magazines through analysis of both promotional and editorial content. It takes a discursive approach to understanding how mobile media are represented and marketed to young people and the symbolism of these representations. In so doing, it seeks to uncover the ‘youth script’ which undergirds these representations and the implications of this script. The term ‘youth script’ is inspired by the ‘gender script’ (Hubak 1996;
Rommes 2002; Van Oost 2003), which argues that conceptions of gender guide the design and marketing of technological products and devices. As with the gender script, the youth script is a socio-technical script (Akrich 1991, cited in Hubak 1996); that is, it refers to the conceptions that innovators have of the users of technological devices/services, and to the attitudes and values relating to them (Hubak 1996). Socio-technical scripts are to be distinguished from physical scripts which are the pre-determined physical affordances of devices. Media representations are part of the socio-technical script as they are based on innovators’ notions of users and future users of their products and services. Through analysing a variety of representations of
mobile media aimed at youth, I identify the dimensions of the youth script which I will define as ‘the conceptions of youth which guide the design and marketing of technological products and services’. The youth script determines how mobile media is represented to youths and how mobile media use by youths is represented. Concurrently, the youth script also serves to define what it means to be a youth growing up in a society where mobile media is increasingly important. By explicating the different dimensions of the youth script for mobile media, we can understand how mobile media is socially shaped for the youth audience.
