Visual Communication and Co-Presence

Visual Communication and Co-Presence: Camera Phones in Japanese Life; Speakers: Mimi Ito & Daisuke Okabe; Time: Wednesday, February 1, 2006, 6-8pm; Location: USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Camera phones now represent 3/4 of all mobile phones in use in Japan today. As these devices have merged with existing practices of visual archiving, sharing, and communication, new kinds of technosocial practices have become part of everyday life in urban Japan. We will discuss the current state of camera phone use in Japan based on our ethnographic research, and outline some of the emerging trends for how related technologies and practices seem to be evolving.

Daisuke Okabe, a cognitive psychologist, lecturer at Keio’s Keitai Lab and at Yokohama University, has conducted extensive fieldwork on mobile phone and Wi-Fi use. Mizuko Ito is a cultural anthropologist who is interested in how digital media are changing relationships, identities, and communities; she researches new media and mobile phone use at Keio University and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication. Both teamed up with Misa Matsuda to edit Personal, Portable, Pedestrian, the first English-language book dedicated to mobile communication use in Japan that was published by MIT Press last summer. [blogged by Scott Fisher on Interactive Media Division Weblog]