ABSTRACT
Since the 1997 financial crisis in the Asia-Pacific, countries in the region have sought to rebuild their economies by transforming their manufacturing industries into information societies. The mobile phone is not just symbolic of this shift towards new forms of economic, social and technological mobility; it also represents a set of material practices that helps to embed new technologies into existing social and cultural rituals. From the development of its hardware to its uptake in everyday life, the production and consumption of mobile media have reconstituted the relationships surrounding technology, youth, gender, intimacy and labour. Nowhere is this more evident than in the use of mobile phones by young female consumers in the region. A key example of this phenomenon can be found in Japan, as evidenced by
the rise of kogals, a new young female identity (Miller 2005). Kogals are a hybrid type of young female performativity born through keitai (abbreviated from denwa keitai, or mobile phone) technocultures. In particular, kogals have been instrumental in the shift from the pager and PHS (Personal Handyphone System, a hybrid of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and mobile phone) to the keitai (Fujimoto 2005; Hjorth 2003a, 2003b, 2005; Matsuda 2005; Okada 2005). As the keitai phenomenon became increasingly pervasive from 2000, it became apparent that the symbolic and literal meanings associated with the keitai were concurrent with a steady rise in the visibility of young women and with new forms of creative and affective labour evidenced by new creative industries such as mobile novels (keitai sho-setsu). Behind these images of keitai success and the specific role of ‘personalization’ within Japanese technologies lies a parallel story – the rise of the active and subversive female user. The rise of the keitai from business tool to social accessory parallels the
demise of the national symbol, the oyaji (salaryman), and the growing power of young female users – epitomized by the female high-school (gyaru) user. Consumers, particularly young women, have played an integral role in both the growth and adaptation of keitai cultures; so much so that the emergence of new tropes for empowered female consumers is indivisible from the keitai
phenomenon which, in turn, has been integral to emerging forms of Japanese national identity. Thus, through the lens of the keitai phenomenon, we not only can gain insight into new modes of young female perfomativity but can also reconsider the role of gendered technologies and notions of agency within the emerging technocultures as the region moves towards dominating narratives of twenty-first-century mobile media. Indeed, the symbiotic relationship between youth media expression, media
literacy and new forms of employment in the creative industry cannot be underestimated in the context of the Asia-Pacific. Just as paid female employment (predominantly in precarious new media sectors) has increased in the ten-year period since the financial crisis (International Labour Organization 2008), so too have the new forms of mobile media and social labour. This parallel and interrelated phenomenon has resulted in the reworking of concepts of gender, youth, labour and technology. Labour has taken on various immaterial and material guises, from social intimacy to creative user content. These new forms of labour and intimacies around mobile media practices express modes of mobility and immobility across socio-emotive, psychological, economic, political and geographic terrains. They produce localized ‘imaging communities’ characterized by the exchange of cameraphone images and vernacular text messages, as well as new commodities such as mobile novels. As the region embraces a new-found global power in what Dirlik (2007) has defined as the ‘Global South’ (that is, the twenty-firstcentury shift of the global power axis from the West to the East and specifically to China), we need to unpack some of the ways in which youth and new technology, especially in terms of young female consumers, has been discussed. This chapter draws from examples found in fieldwork conducted between
2000 and 2007 in Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong and Melbourne, in which I investigated the emerging narratives of expression and empowerment among young female mobile media consumers. Rather than framing the region in terms of ‘imagined communities’ of nation-states formed through the rise of print media, as Anderson (1983) has argued, this study aims to focus upon the digital micro-narratives of user-created content (UCC) created for mobile media by youth. These micro-narratives, what I call ‘imaging communities’, can provide a window onto some of the complex ways in which gender, youth and mobile media are being inscribed and challenged. Drawing from case studies conducted with young female users between 18 and 28 years old, I explore the tensions between the rhetoric surrounding the rise of the empowered user as ‘produser’ (to use Bruns’ (2006) terminology) and the reality of what this agency conundrum means in the light of the increasingly public performativity of intimacy. How do we conceptualize these new forms of social, creative and affective labour, practiced by predominantly female youth, and their relationship to market labour and the creative industries? What do these imaging communities reflect about the region’s formation of gender around youth media?
