Mobile Media And Social Intimacies In Asia

This edited volume brings together cutting-edge studies from emerging scholars of East/Southeast Asia who explore the role of mobile media in the contemporary transformation of the region’s social intimacies, from the romantic to the familial to the communal. By providing a regional and transnational overview of such studies, it affords new insights into how these mobile technologies have contributed to the rise of ‘glocal intimacies’. This pertains to the normalisation and intensification of how people’s relationships of closeness are entangled in the ever-shifting and constantly negotiated flows between global modernity and local everyday life. In providing case studies of mobile media and glocal intimacies, the chapters in the volume attend to a broad range of countries that include China, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Taiwan. This illustrates the differing ways in which mobile media might be embedded in the region’s divergent articulations of social intimacies, which reflect the ongoing tensions between Western and Asian imaginaries of modernity. The chapters also discuss a wide array of mobile media that people use, from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, to messaging apps like KakaoTalk and WhatsApp, to dating apps like Tinder and Blued. This allows for a mapping out of the different levels of impact that mobile media might have on social intimacies in a region that contains some of the most technologically advanced as well as the most technologically behind societies in the world. In summary, this book allows readers to take a comparative approach to understanding the complexity of the glocal intimacies that are emerging from the ways people in Asia use mobile media to reconfigure their local ties and to enact global relationships. This volume will benefit students, academics, and researchers who are keen in media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and Asian studies. “This exciting and much-needed book will greatly advance our efforts to decolonise media and communications research. The chapters offer empirically rich and nuanced accounts that challenge the dominant paradigms about mediated intimacy.” Mirca Madianou, Goldsmiths, University of London “This collection develops the original concept of ‘glocal intimacies’ to describe how mobile media have become a crucial site where new social intimacies are enacted, reinforced and transformed in Asia. It introduces fresh empirical research from emerging scholars to furnish deep theoretical insights into these imaginaries and practices.” Audrey Yue, National University of Singapore

Locating intimacies of place and gender (Seoul) -- Spectres of mobile intimacy : mobile media in crisis management of 3.11 (Tokyo) -- The place of intimate visualities : Ba ling hou, LBS and camera phones (Shanghai) -- Intimate distance : sociality and identity in the face of diaspora (Manila) -- Generations, mobile intimacy and political affect (Singapore) -- The place of the domestic : smartphones, women and labour (Melbourne) -- Intimate publics, communities and networks in an age of mobile social media -- Topographies of the intimate : mobile publics in the Asia-Pacific -- Emplaced presences : visual cultures of embodied intimacies -- Conclusion : intimacies of the social, mobile and local.

This book is an upper-level student source book for contemporary approaches to media studies in Asia, which will appeal across a wide range of social sciences and humanities subjects including media and communication studies, Asian studies, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and Asian studies, it provides an empirically rich and stimulating tour of key areas of study. The book combines theoretical perspectives with grounded case studies in one up-to-date and accessible volume, going beyond the standard Euro-American view of the evolving and complex dynamics of the media today.

International Review of Social Sciences Research (IRSSR) is an open access refereed journal focused on the various domains of social sciences. The diverse fields of knowledge under the umbrella of social sciences offer interesting areas suited for different methods of research. This allows researchers to apply multiple designs to describe, analyze and evaluate historical, current and futuristic situations or events. Moreover, there are multitude of areas such as social issues, current events, environment, humanities, history, and education, among others. This journal celebrates the broad spectrum of social sciences by providing a platform for the dissemination of the research outputs. It encourages intellectual discussions of topics that contribute to the various fields of knowledge.

This book examines the influence of the mobile media technology in the lives of young people in East and North Asia, South East Asia and Australia, addressing important questions of social identity, well-being, participation and exclusion.

This volume fills a major gap in publications on migration and digital media worlds by bringing information and communication technology (ICT) to the fore of our understanding of migrants’ experiences in, and practices of, connectivity and mobility. During recent decades, migration within and from East Asia has become paradigmatic of the changing substance and patterns of global mobility. Focusing on migration within and beyond East Asia, a region defined by its global migration and its leading role in ICT use and development, this volume explores the pervasive use of smartphones as an everyday reality for East Asian migrants, advocating the necessity of understanding how they live their lives both online and offline. In this respect, the originality of this volume lies in its interdisciplinary analysis of migrants’ activities at the crossroads between physical and digital spaces. Our theoretical innovation and empirical findings will open an avenue to investigate the novel shape and scales of contemporary connectivity and mobility.

While a decade ago much of the discussion of new media in Asia was couched in Occidental notions of Asia as a "default setting" for technology in the future, today we are seeing a much more complex picture of contesting new media practices and production. As "new media" becomes increasingly an everyday reality for young and old across Asia through smartphones and associated devices, boundaries between art, new media, and the everyday are transformed. This Handbook addresses the historical, social, cultural, political, philosophical, artistic and economic dimensions of the region’s new media. Through an interdisciplinary revision of both "new media" and "Asia" the contributors provide new insights into the complex and contesting terrains of both notions. The Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia will be the definitive publication for readers interested in comprehending all the various aspects of new media in Asia. It provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, conceptually cutting-edge guide to the important aspects of new media in the region — as the first point of consultation for researchers, advanced level undergraduate and postgraduate students in fields of new media and Asian studies.

Love and Technology: An Ethnography of Dating App Users in Berlin explores how dating apps fit into Berlin’s unique dating culture and brand of intimacy, and form a tangible nucleus around which users navigate dating rituals, romantic biographies, and digitally mediated intimacies within city space. Drawing on the field of digital anthropology, this book takes the form of an immersive ethnography, resulting from 13 months of fieldwork with young dating app users, across Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid, in Berlin. It argues that dating apps offer, or impose, depending on their context of use, a series of affordances. These affordances, and the technological devices they rely upon, exist through the relation between users and their environment, both in terms of physical spaces and cultural frameworks. The book posits that dating apps are woven into spatial practices and self-narrativization, constituting imagined communities for their users, as well as a canvas, alongside the city of Berlin, against which to characterise romantic experiences. Scholars interested in digital anthropology, ethnography, dating, and regional Berlin will find that Love and Technology offers a vibrant springboard for thinking through both theoretical and methodological concerns.