<nettime-ann> M/C Journal 'mobile' Issue Now Available

["Axel Bruns" <mc@media-culture.org.au>]

.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 19 March 2007

                          M/C - Media and Culture
              is proud to present issue one in volume ten of

                                M/C Journal
                   http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

            'mobile' - Edited by Larissa Hjorth and Olivia Khoo

Convergence has become part of burgeoning mobile media. The mobile phone
has come of age. As an integral component of visual media cultures, camera
phone practices are arguably both extending and creating emerging ways of
seeing and representing. In media footage of late, camera phones have been
heralded as providing everyday users with the possibility of self-
expression and voice in the once unidirectional model of mass media. In
addition, the "exchange" and gift-giving economy underpinning mobile phone
practices is further enunciated by the camera phone's ability to "share"
moments between intimates (and strangers) through various contextual
frameworks and archives from MMS, blogs, virtual community sites to actual
face-to-face digital storytelling.

This is particularly the case in the Asia-Pacific region, where mobile
practices in locations such as Tokyo and Seoul have brought about new forms
of media use; for example, mobile phones are increasing being deployed to
connect to, among other things, Web 2.0's burgeoning landscape of social
software. In much of the rhetoric of current media criticism, users are
being interpellated as prosumers (producers plus consumers), but what is
the reality behind this so-called agency? Do users really feel empowered by
the structures of immediacy connected to user-generated content (UGC)? Are
they 'liberated' by the multi-media functions of the mobile phone or is the
increasing convergence of mobile media causing more complications than
pleasures?

This issue of M/C Journal explores the role of convergent mobile
technologies in the Asia-Pacific region. The issue explores the socio-
cultural particularities of various adaptations of mobile media, from case
studies on mobile communication in the Asia Pacific, to cross-cultural
analyses of the transborder flows of mobile media production,
representation and consumption.

  Feature Article
"Approaching the Mobile Culture of East Asia"
  - Jaz Hee-jeong Choi

Jaz Choi's paper provides a wonderful introduction to the culture of mobile
technologies in East Asia, focusing largely on South Korea, China and
Japan. She problematises the rhetoric surrounding technological fetishism
and techno-orientalism in definitions of 'mobile' and 'digital' East Asia
and raises important questions regarding the transformation and future of
East Asia's mobile cultures.

  Articles
"Mobile Intimacy: Theories on the Economics of Emotion with Examples from
Asia"
  - Gerard C. Raiti

"The Technological Gaze: Event Construction and the Mobile Body"
  - Yasmin Ibrahim

"Media Reporting, Mobility and Trauma"
  - Collette Snowden and Kerry Green

"Texting Love: An Exploration of Text Messaging as a Medium for Romance in
the Philippines"
  - Randy Jay C. Solis

"Modernity and the Mobile Phone: Exploring Tensions about Dating and Sex in
Indonesia"
  - Lee Humphreys and Thomas Barker

"Superstition or Modernity?: On the Invented Tradition of Lucky Mobile
Phone Numbers in China"
  - Li Li

"Understanding the Design of Mobile Social Networking: The Example of
EzMoBo in Taiwan"
  - Chih-Hui Lai

"Going Live: Converging Mobile Technology and the Sociability of the
iGeneration"
  - Mariann Hardey

"Mobility and Displacement: Refugees' Mobile Media Practices in Immigration
Detention"
  - Linda Leung

"Staying Safe and Guilty Pleasures: Tourists and CB Radio in the Australian
Outback"
  - Peter B. White and Naomi White

  Photo Essay
"Zeitgeist"
  - Andrew Johnson

===========================================================================

Further M/C Journal issues scheduled for 2007:

'adapt':   article deadline  9 March 2007,   release date  2 May 2007
'complex': article deadline  4 May 2007,     release date 27 June 2007
'home':    article deadline 29 June 2007,    release date 22 August 2007
'error':   article deadline 24 August 2007,  release date 17 October 2007
'vote':    article deadline 19 October 2007, release date 12 December 2007

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M/C Journal 10.1 is now online: <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/>.
Previous issues of M/C Journal on various topics are also still available.
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Visit all four M/C publications at <http://www.media-culture.org.au/>.
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All contributors are available for media contacts: mc@media-culture.org.au.
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end


-- 
Dr Axel Bruns, General Editor                 editor@media-culture.org.au
M/C - Media and Culture                  http://www.media-culture.org.au/

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