Digital Youth East Asia: Shin Mizukoshi

Over the next few days, I will be providing snapshots of the Digital Youth East Asia workshop that took place in Tokyo June 21-22, 2008. It was hosted by Temple University Japan (under the leadership of Kyle Cleveland) and co-organized by Anne Allison of Duke University, Shin Mizukoshi of Tokyo University and David Slater of Sophia University. Participants came from Japan, Australia, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere. It was a great event and so chock full of content I don?t even know where to begin . . .

So I?ll begin with beauty. The gorgeous new Tadao Ando building at ToDai (Tokyo University) that houses the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies. I?ve included some photographs from Flickr of this new building. And since Ando is my favorite architect, I?ll digress here by mentioning that, although Ando himself has no academic degrees, he was made a professor at Japan?s most prestigious university, ToDai, and taught there until his retirement. This is Ando?s only building at ToDai.

The program that Shin Mizukoshi is part of is as close to a Japanese version of HASTAC as any program I?ve encountered. There were times, during his talk, where I felt like I was listening to myself or David talking about the HASTAC triptych of innovative design, critical thinking, and participatory learning. He calls it ?MELL?: Media, Expression, Learning, Literacy. (For more of Shin Mizukoshi?s work, see http://web.mac.com/shinmizukoshi/Site/home.html).  His talk moved effortlessly between technology interfaces and new media design, social networking experiments that were "happenings" as well as information-gathering events, theory, and learning experiences that extend from the university to the community and back again.  Very, very HASTAC.  And totally original.  It was thrilling to see, informative to hear, and enlightening on every level.   

Prof Mizukoshi summoned up his method with the German word Verfremdung, basically defamiliarization.  It is important to be curious about the ordinary, that which is so common it is almost invisible to society (which makes it dangerous or useless).  He emphasize the important co-emergence of a medialogical imagination and a new media literacy. (I particularly admired this part of Mizukoshi-san's talk, not least of which because Verfremdung is a key concept for me as well.  In this new book I am writing on how we know the world, I?m using the English word ?awe? to translate the notion of Verfremdung: examining that which you are used to in order to understand its mystery, what you have taken for granted, what has eluded you. In Brechtian drama, he purposely creates a distance between the audience and the events to force speculative curiosity, surprise, estrangement from the familiar: Verfremdung.)

Mizukoshi-san noted that the keitai, the mobile phone, is the most common technological object in Japanese culture now, which is exactly why we need to take it as new, consider its social and technological meaning and impact.  Yet this common technology has many meanings, on every level from the social and interconnective to its lock-box code which has major social implications.

His talk was partly based on the demography of mobile phone use in Japan.  In the first talk at Digital Youth East Asia, we heard the results of an excellent quantitative study conducted by Wang-Ying Lin and Joo-Young Jung ?New Media Connections of the Digital Generation: Digital Divides in Five Cities: Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong, Tokyo.? They noted that only 26% of Tokyo youth have home computers as compated to 60% in Hong Kong. Yet 98% of Tokyo teens, as with 98% of Hong Kong, use the internet. The difference is partly accounted for by the amazing keitai, which is used for information, email, social life, games, data bases, calendaring, bank loans, purchasing and store credits, security, child monitoring, directions, travel guides, and just about everything else. It even includes a pedometer so you can track your daily exercise.

The keitai is almost ubiquitous across age and social class, and has surpassed the PC as an information source, a networking tool, a fetish object, and a communication source. Everyone in Japan, it seems, has one, and they work brilliantly (even where wireless seems to elude my laptop). Yet, as Mizukoshi notes, the keitai is a closed technology. You can decorate it. You can customize with it. But you can?t really get in there and rework the open source code. That is significant. And it is one of those areas that needs the combined efforts of engineers, computational scientists, designers, social scientists, artists, and humanists in order to enact ?critical media practice.? That factor will become even more important as Japan debates the regulation of cell phones and their role as a tool of social management and surveillance.

As Mizukoshi (and HASTAC too) insists, we, as members of our society, should have a right to create the next generation of technology. But, to do that, we need to work together to understand both digitality and society and the interfaces and relays among, across, between, above and below.

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[Special thanks to "Motoe" and "Bo Peter" on Flickr for these beautiful images of the new Ando building at ToDai. Pls click on the image to take you to the Flickr photostreams and for full documentation.]