ABSTRACT
Contemporary South Korea (Korea, hereafter) is often described as the ‘fast’ nation as far as mobility is concerned, while young Koreans, equipped with mobile technologies, are called the ‘thumb-tribe’. In Korea, and in particular for Korea’s youth, it seems evident that the mobile phone has become virtually a part of the body, in that it is deeply embedded into everyday life. In 2007, 98.4 per cent of young people (aged 20-24) and 88.2 per cent of teenagers (aged 15-19) were using mobile phones (Korea National Statistical Office 2008b). As a consequence of this prevalence, 36.9 per cent of teenagers feel uneasy if they are not carrying their mobile phone (Choi et al. 2005). According to a recent survey of teenage mobile phone users in Korea, Japan, China, India and Mexico, Korean children tend to adopt mobile phones at an earlier age; in 2008, 87.7 per cent of 12-year-old Koreans owned mobile phones in comparison with 50 per cent of their Japanese counterparts and 27.7 per cent of their Chinese counterparts (GSM Association and NTT TOCOMO 2009). The rapid proliferation of mobile phones among young Koreans is parti-
cularly interesting because of the way in which the mobile phone as a new form of technology has been represented in the national process of technomodernization. The introduction and adoption of new technologies in any locale require both the technologies and their users to undergo a process of mutual repositioning: the local re-positioning of a technology and the re-positioning of locale by the technology. The new technology itself tends to reposition its local users in terms of new patterns of behaviour and the updated dynamics of networking, allowing them to rethink their identity as actors on a more global stage (Miller and Slater 2000: 18-21). Concurrently, the new technology is appropriated by its local users through a process of local filtering in that the technology is represented, imagined and appropriated differently when subject to different cultural and social filters. In this doubly articulated process, a new technology is localized by cultures and agents and also to some extent globalizes the locale; this chapter focuses on the local repositioning of mobile phones, rather than the repositioning of locale by mobile phones. By looking at the way in which young users have been positioned by and compared with other groups of users, this chapter
explores the mobile phone as a new and popular form of technology that has been positioned in the hegemonic formation of the techno-nation.
