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Screens on the move: media convergence and mobile culture in Korea

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Screens on the move: media convergence and mobile culture in Korea

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Content SCREENS ON THE MOVE: MEDIA CONVERGENCE AND MOBILE CULTURE IN KOREA by Hye Ryoung Ok A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES) August 2008 Copyright 2008 Hye Ryoung Ok ii Acknowl edgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of generous support and encouragement of my committee members and fellow colleagues at USC. Professor Marsha Kinder, whose enthusiastic belief in my work motivated me to pursue this adventurous topic, has always been there for me with acute inspirations and guidance. Doctor Mizuko Ito opened the door to a new world, a true interdisciplinary academic scholarship, and many more doors to professional research careers. Without her experty in mobile media culture, this dissertation would not have been conceivable. I am also indebted to Professors Tara McPherson and Akira Lippit for their intellectual guidance and warm support. Especially, I am deeply grateful to my dissertation writing group: Nam Lee, Jaime Nasser, and Dong Hoon Kim who have helped to sharpen my thinking and nourished me with genuine friendship through to this completion. I would like to share the pleasure of this accomplishment with my teachers, previous and present colleagues, and friends both in Korea and in the United States, who have stood by my side, sharing my frustrations and agonies in various ways and in different moments of my journey. To Professor David James at USC and Professor Oh Byoung-Nam at Seoul National University, I send my sincere respect. Their steady encouragement since my early academic iii career afforded me courage to move on. Most of all, I owe my deepest gratitude to my parents and sisters, who have looked forward to the completion of this dissertation more than anyone else and never stopped believing in me. iv Tabl e of Contents Acknowledgement ii List of Tables v List of Figures vi Abstract x Chapter I. Introduction: 1 1. Mobile Screen: Prodigy of Media Convergence 9 2. Contents: Moving Images in Digital Age 37 Chapter II. Screen Nation 50 1. Launching Mobile Screen in Digital Korea 53 2. Cinema and Glocalisation: Korean Blockbusters, 83 Shared Dream on a Big Screen Chapter III. Mobile Multimedia Content: The Aesthetics of Mobile 114 Spectacle 1. Defining Mobile Cinema 115 2. Mobile Cinema Yigong (Twenty Identities) 131 3. Mobile Drama Five Stars 168 Chapter IV. Mobile TV: TV-like Screens 190 1. Mobile TV at Present 194 2. Shaping Mobile TV: Content Programming Strategy of 204 Satellite DMB 3. Personal Television 224 Chapter V. Nomadic Viewer and Outdoor Screen Culture 239 1. Screens in Public Space: Click Click Ranger 243 2. Networked Urban Spectacle 262 3. Nomadic Viewer: A Dweller in the Screen-Wired Urban Space 288 Conclusion 298 Bibliography 305 v List of Tabl es Table 1.1 Telecommunication Companies’ Investment to 36 the Movie/Entertainment Content Industry Table 4.1 Comparison of S-DMB and T-DMB 198 Table 4.2 S-DMB Video Channels 207 Diagram 5.1 Circular Nexus of Screens in Click Click Ranger 246 vi List of Figures Figure 1.1: The (mobile phone) Screen in front of the (plat TV) Screen 9 Figure 2.1: Hanseong Telephone Office 14 Figure 2.2: A Telephone Operator in 1900s 64 Figure 3.1: Two Endings of Loafer and Egg, 2006 121 Figure.3.2: Shots from Twenty Movies in Yigong series 131 Figure 3.3: Titled Overhead Angle shots, At 2.0 am Convenient Store 140 Figure 3.4: Titled Overhead Angle shots, At 2.0 am Convenient Store 140 Figure 3.5: Surveillance Camera Shot, At 2.0 am Convenient Store 140 Figure 3.6: Establishment and Full shots, At 2.0 am Convenient Store 140 Figure 3.7: Close-Up Shots of Objects, At 2.0 am Convenient Store 141 Figure 3.8: Inserted Stills Cuts, At 2.0 am Convenient Store 141 Figure 3.9: Inserted Stills Cuts, At 2.0 am Convenient Store 141 Figure 3.10: Wiping with Split Screens, At 2.0 am Convenient Store 141 Figure 3.11-3.26: Compilation of Close-Up Shots from Yigong Movies 142 Figure 3.27: Runner’s High 146 Figure 3.28: It’s Different on Mobile Queen 146 Figure 3.29: To the 21 st 146 Figure 3.30: Sink & Rise 146 vii Figure 3.31: The Secrets and Lies 146 Figure 3.32: Sutda 146 Figure 3.33: Oh, My Baby 146 Figure 3.34: The Twenty’s Law 146 Figure 3.35: Tableau Shot of Korean Cards, Sutda 148 Figure 3.36: Tableau Shots from Three Camera Positions, Fucked up Shoes 148 Figure 3.37: Neighborhood 150 Figure 3.38: Looking for Sex 150 Figure 3.39: Intro shots, It’s Different on Mobile Queen 153 Figure 3.40: Mobile Phone Texting & Imaging, It’s Different on Mobile Queen 153 Figure 3.41: Advertisement of Mobile Phone at Shopping Mall, 154 It’s Different on Mobile Queen Figure 3.42: Thumbelinas’ Addiction to Mobile Phone, 154 It’s Different on Mobile Queen Figure 3.43: Happy Ending, It’s different on Mobile Queen 157 Figure 3.44-3.51: To the 21 st 159 Figure 3.52: Phone, 2002 162 Figure 3.53-3.54: Korean Version Movie Posters of One Missed Call series 162 Figure 3.55: Pass Me 164 Figure 3.56: Runner’s High 164 Figure 3.57: Screen frames within the Screen 164 Figure 3.58: Five Stars, Mobile Drama 168 viii Figure 3.59: That Bastard was Cool in various Media Formats 171 Figure 3.60: Auxiliary Marketing Space of Five Stars 177 Figure 4.1: DMB convergent platforms 203 Figure 4.2: TU media S-DMB ad. “Take out TV” 206 Figure 4.3: Yap, Romantic Fantasy Sitcom 210 Figure 4.4-4.5: Melo Cartoon 213 Figure 4.6: Ilssangdabansa 213 Figure 4.7: TU media S-DMB Television Commercial, “Real DMB” 216 Figure 4.8: Intro Shot of Slightly Dangerous Show: Do As You Say 220 Figure 4.9: Episode of “Washing Human Body in a Car Wash,” 220 Slightly Dangerous Show: Do As You Say Figure 4.10: Real Broadcasting City Hunter 221 Figure 4.11: Episode of “Hunting with a Borrowed Cellphone,” 221 Real Broadcasting City Hunter Figure 5.1: MCs of Click Click Range 243 Figure 5.2: Seoul City Hall during World Cup Soccer Match in 2002 243 Figure 5.3: Uporters Promotional Video 247 Figure 5.4: LED screens on Teheran Street, Seoul 267 Figure 5.5: LED screens Masan City 267 Figure 5.6: LED screens Coex Mall, Seoul 267 Figure 5.7: LED panel in Subway Station, Seoul 267 ix Figure 5.8: LED screens around Seoul City Hall 267 Figure 5.9: LED screens in Seoul Metro Subway Line 3 267 Figure 5.10: Luminarie Decorations in Seoul City Hall Plaza 283 Figure 5.11: Luminarie Decorations in Kwanghwa Gate 283 Figure 5.12: Luminarie Decorations in front of the DongA Daily Building 283 Figure 5.13: Luminarie Decorations in Cheongge Stream Plaza 283 x Abstract This dissertation examines the present of the mobile screen culture on the move in the legacy of screen media and its aesthetic and cultural significance within our contemporary and global mediascapes, focusing on commercial Mobile Phone Multimedia Content Service and Mobile TV developed in Korea since 2002. It defines mobile media (such as mobile phones, mobile TV and portable devices) as personal screen media and probes their position in the transition of our techno-culture heading toward media convergence. Through the reading of histories of media (particularly digital and mobile phone technologies), telecommunication policy, actual mobile multimedia content (mobile cinema), users’ practice, and institutional and social practice, it investigates how new mobile screen is defined, appropriated, and constituted in culturally specific ways in Korea, resonating with and contributing to the construction of global mobile screen culture in the digital age. Throughout this reading, this study consistently challenges techno-deterministic understanding of new media and rethinks conventional boundaries embedded in conventional media practices and discourses: the premise of independent medium specificity, myth of the new as opposed to old media, division of the private and public or the domestic and outdoor, the local and global, and so on. xi The multi-faceted meaning of the mobile screen as a networked personal screen medium lies in a historically, socially and culturally specific operation of media convergence in tandem with diverse dimensions of media practices: the mobile screen as a symbolic icon of nationalist economic development, the mobile screen as the latest digital venue in cinematic tradition, the mobile screen at the center of youth digital culture, the mobile screen as a personal television, and the mobile screen in urban spaces. The chapter topics—screen, infrastructure, aesthetics, industrial practice, and space —are meant to locate the mobile screen at the intersection between historical trajectories of screen media and the culturally specific appropriation of mobile technology, a juncture where the synchronic and diachronic development of mobile screen technology converge. Its zigzagged crossing eventually reaches the broader cultural phenomenon of the digital age, that is, the advent of the ‘networked public.’ 1 Chapter I Introduction In the autumn of 1998, when the after-shock of economic crisis that massively hit Korea and its adjacent neighbors a year earlier was still wavering, I moved to New York City, from Seoul. Then, I could still happily manage my everyday life without the mobile phone and high-speed broadband internet like many other Koreans. My life in New York, one of the busiest and most techno- savvy cities in the world, was not much different; although I eventually got my first Motorola analog mobile phone handset, I was still happy with my dial-up internet connection. Since then, however, our everyday techno-cultural hemisphere has changed, particularly for me, a Korean living abroad who found familiar lifestyles and cultural spheres that I left in Korea were rapidly transforming year-by-year. On my first visit back to Seoul in 2000, my friends did not give me a fixed time and place while coordinating our nightly get-togethers. They simply said, “If you stick around the Gangnam, I’ll phone you later.” Most of the time, text messages appeared on my rented mobile phone at the last minute, just as I was beginning to feel anxious about unfixed appointments. Our familiar routine of nights out no longer included a frequented Karaoke or a pool room after rounds of dinner and drinks. It was PC Bang (PC café) that 2 ubiquitously replaced old-fashioned game rooms on the street corners where my friends flocked, playing hot on-line games for hours, cheering and commenting on each other’s play. It was the time when young Korean professional gamers became celebrities by championing most global ‘Starcraft’ game leagues. A year later, the same friends talked about a new movie they saw the other night. My honest question - which theater was running the movie – was met with answers like “Of course, I downloaded them, No time for theater!” without hesitation. In the midst of cheerful nights out in summer 2002, a friend would pull out his phone and take pictures of faces flushed with alcohol and say “I’ll post it on my Cy (Cyworld: personal mini-homepage), go scrap it,” and in response to my perplexed silence, “Oh, you are not my Il-Chon (Cyworld specific internet idiom for blog neighbor) yet? Check one of our Cys, ask to be an Il-Chon, then you will surf to any of our mini-hompies.” Tiny MP3 Players, with various shapes and designs, were common accessories embellishing their necks. Their super slick mobile phones, annually updated, played music, showed the clips of movies, news, even semi-nude pictures of popular stars, and paid bills at restaurants. It was the time before MySpace hit the other Pacific shore and i-Pods became a must have gadget for techno-savvy global early adopters. In 2004, clever Korean teenagers stirred up society with their high-tech delinquency that hijacked mobile phone technology to cheat on a massive scale in the national college entrance exam. Later in 2005, my old friends were watching live television on 3 their mobile TV-convergent phones or through their car navigation systems, which gradually became available in other parts of the globe, such as Japan, Italy and England. Were my friends techno-savvy cool youngsters? Not particularly. They were ordinary college-educated middle class office workers and young professionals in their late twenties and early thirties, common urban dwellers of Seoul. I was obviously not part of their techno-futuristic world. What happened? Okay, I had been left behind. Physically stationed in New York and Los Angeles thereafter in the United States, supposedly world hegemonic centers of modern technologies, I had missed all these technological waves. Eventually, most of these new technological gadgets and ‘new’ lifestyles appeared on US shores along with imported Korean mobile phones and spread around the globe. In 2007, with i-Pods, various Portable Media Players, American version of 3G mobile phone service, and Japanese portable game devices disseminated into the common public domain, my feeble translation of what Koreans do with their portable devices did not sound futuristic any more to ordinary Americans. Meanwhile, I found myself welcome more than ever in academic conference circuits and IT professional gatherings with my work on Korean mobile screen culture. Suddenly, Korea was cool. It was also the time when Korean popular cultural products such as movies, pop songs, and television dramas hit the fans abroad under the adored name of Hallyu (Korean Wave). It was the time when the Korean-originated 3G mobile phone service, Helio, ambitiously migrated to 4 the American market. In March 2006, when EarthLink and SK Telecom, the largest wireless communication service carrier in Korea, launched Helio, it was one of the first high-end multimedia specialized mobile phone services in the United States. Helio ambitiously declared its mission “to deliver an unparalleled 3G wireless experience for consumers who crave the latest, innovative wireless applications,” and “to bring the culture of phone use in South Korea.” 1 It did not hide that the acclaimed excellence of the Korean mobile phone technology was Helio’s major selling point in the competitive niche mobile phone service market in the United States, as it promised to bring “SK’s advanced handsets” and “its innovative suite of applications and services and result of its annual R&D investment.” 2 In this array of euphoric accounts of new technology as “latest, advanced, and innovative,” what draws my attention is Helio’s ambition to import a ‘culture of (Korean) phone use.’ People ask me mostly the same questions: How did Korea achieve all these technological advances so suddenly? Do Koreans really watch and enjoy movies on small screen? Well, how and why has Korea become an IT-Power house all of a sudden and why do Koreans love new small screens? I did not and 1 John Borland, “Earth link Mobile Venture Renamed Helio,” CNET News.com, 25 October 2005, http://www.news.com/EarthLink-mobile-venture-renamed-Helio/2100-1039_3- 5914186.html?tag=item (accessed in 25 April 2008). 2 Helio Press Release, 26 October 2005, http://www.helio.com/page?p=press_release_detail&contentid=1146085900525 (accessed in 25 April 2008). 5 still do not have an answer to these questions as I believe there is nothing essentially Korean about all these phenomena nor miraculously new about our cultural embrace of these technological innovations. I rather see a shift or transition of our media environment and the paradigm of techno-culture on a global scale heading in the direction toward ‘personal screen culture’ and ‘media convergence.’ With disparate paces and configurations in diverse local contexts, this continual yet accelerated media transition has been challenging and reformulating the boundaries of traditional media forms and institutions, whether it is cinema, television, or print journalism. Within this paradigm, digital technology functions as a transformative mechanism that renders and delivers cinematic and televisual images as ‘digitized content’ to diverse ‘display channels,’ that is, multiplied and multifunctional screens. Mobile technology entered at the center of this personal screen culture in the digital age, with various portable devices such as the mobile phone, PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), PSP (Play station Portable), and PMP (Portable Media Player) that employ ‘mobility’ as the predominant mode of media experience and ‘convergence’ as their fundamental condition, whether their default function is telecommunication, gaming or computing. Not only did they expand the horizon of personal communication, but also introduced a new stage of ‘mobile screen’ experience based on its changed status as the “mutable 6 mobile,” 3 a new portal where information technologies converge and create new display formats for multimedia contents. The commercial branding of the ‘iPod’ series, ending with the iPhone, in this sense, aptly epitomizes the overall transition to personal media culture, the flow that Korea was emulating on the frontline through its cultivation of mobile screen technologies. My questions begin here. Instead of asking why and how Korea is transformed into an IT-Power house, therefore, I solicit how these changes in Korea specifically resonate with and take part in the comprehensive shift of our changing media environment. I begin by posing what culture of Korean mobile phone use Helio is attempting to export or import. Suffice to say that what Helio aims to transplant is the Korean model of mobile multimedia content service, my questions begin with the ways the Korean uptake of invention, adoption, and appropriation of mobile screen technologies contribute to and illuminate the construction of global mobile phone culture and further screen culture in the digital age. Most of all, the fundamental concern here is how to address the meaning and the significance of newly emergent mobile screens, that is, networked personal screen media, and screen experiences that continue and at the same time discontinue our old- fashioned media conventions and practices. With proper due, Korea provides a 3 Geoff Cooper, "The Mutable Mobile: Social Theory in the Wireless World," Wireless World: Social and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age, eds. B. Brown, N. Green, R. Harper (London: Springer, 2002), 19-31. 7 fascinating lead to unearth this issue, evoking our awareness about the integral role of culture in shaping technological use by presenting a complex case, manifesting how the local appropriation of technology prefigures the potential of technology and takes part in its heterogeneous constitution, not as a passive adopter of a globally standardized universal technology. Eventually, the disruption of power dynamics between the global center – historically western- and the local –marginalized others- is what explains the shock of Korea’s debut in world IT scenes and motivates this academic inquiry on the mobile screen culture in Korea. This study, therefore, neither aims to retrospectively unearth the hidden secret behind the success of Korean mobile screen technology nor to predict the future of screen culture yet to come. Rather, it is an assessment of the present of the mobile screen culture on the move in the long legacy of screen media history and the interpretation of emerging personal screen culture within our contemporary and global mediascapes.” In order to capture the vivid picture of the present of the mobile screen culture, this study reads histories of media (particularly digital and mobile phone technologies), telecommunication policy, actual mobile content, users’ practice, and institutional and social practice of appropriating the mobile screen technology and investigate how the mobile technology has been conceived and explored as a new screen medium for potentially new forms of moving images and culture in Korea. Throughout this 8 reading, this study consistently challenges conventional boundaries and binary concepts embedded in our understanding of media: the premise of independent medium specificity, myth of the new as opposed to old media, division of the private and public or the domestic and outdoor, the local and global, and so on. Indeed, ‘new’ forms of media content, users, and culture emerge as in the case of young people’s participatory mobile media use, but often tagged and adorned with ‘old’ vocabularies, customs and practices. Findings of my field research consisting of interviews, ethnographic surveys, and archiving primary materials (such as media texts, advertisements, periodical accounts, industrial imaginings and technological discourses) will show how the discourses of the new and old become deeply intertwined in establishing the new mobile screen experience. Given that the significance of mobile media as newly emerging forms of personal screens has not yet been fully discussed within any of the academic fields I draw on, this interdisciplinary study takes an untraveled road leading toward many possibilities. The chapter topics—screen, infrastructure, aesthetics, industrial practice, and space —are meant to locate the mobile screen at the intersection between historical trajectories of screen media and the culturally specific appropriation of mobile technology, a juncture where the synchronic and diachronic development of mobile screen technology converge. Concrete data, technological specificities, and business practices archived in this work are meant to be both obsolete and updated as the mobile screen continues to evolve. 9 However, as histories of all other precedent media technologies have proven to us, it is the critical perspective toward the constitutive role of culture, specifically operating in culturally and socially specific contexts, when the potential of new technology is debated, defined, and appropriated out of tensions and negotiations with our old conventions, that the study of this early history of the mobile screen brings into our everlasting investigation of new and newer technologies to come. 1. Mobil e Screen: Prodigy of Media Convergence Figure 1.1 The (mobile phone) Screen in front of the (plat TV) Screen. June service, SK Telecom, 2004. In November 2002, June, SK Telecom’s multimedia oriented 3G mobile content service (mobile data application), debuted in Korea. 4 With the newest 4 For matters of convenience, the industry term ‘3G mobile phone’ refers to the ‘Third 10 mobile phone technology (CDMA2000 1x system) 5 that allows large-size data transmission, the mobile phone in Korea, which is commonly called a handphone or hyudaephone (portable phone), was reborn into the mobile screen medium. Following SK Telecom, another major wireless service provider, KTF (Korea Telecom-Freechal), launched Fimm (First in Mobile Multimedia) in March 2003, 6 changing the perception of the mobile phone ever since. Like NTT DoCoMo’s I-mode in Japan that redefined the mode of wireless communications into an internet-based communication (mainly, texting) beyond telephony, June signaled the big shift toward content-oriented mobile phone business, which has led to the subsequent development of the mobile TV and other mobile media services. Already networked as wireless telecommunication system, the mobile phone acquired a new layer of network, that is, a wireless internet and began to Generation’ of mobile phones. Each generation of mobile phone technology is upgraded in terms of its capacity and speed of information delivery along with the development of new mobile phone technologies. 1G mobile phone operates on analog, 2G is digital, 3G adopts IMT-2000 and most recently 3.5G is based on HSPPA system. Since CDMA 2000 1x technology was commercialized in Korea for the first time in the world in 2000, Korean 3G mobile content service actually has operated on 2.5 G technology of CDMA2000 1x EV-DO (Evolution-Data Only) until real 3G technology of IMT-2000 became commercially available in early 2007. That is, mobile phones that enabled multimedia content service were called 3G while it actually stood in for 2.5 G status. 5 More specifically, it is CDMA 2000 1x EV-Do, a special protocol for the data packet based on CDMA2000 1x that provides 16 times faster (2.4 Mbps) and 5 times larger size of data delivery than earlier version of CDMA 2000 1x. Korean mobile service carriers continuously updated the content delivery technology formats in advance of other countries as they move ahead with evolving mobile content service. For example, SK telecom commercialized new generations of streaming video compression technology - H.264(Video compression) and MPEG4 HE AAC(Audio compression) - in February 2004 for the first time in the world. 6 In fact, KTF’s Fimm was invented 5 month earlier than SK Telecom’s June. However, due to the insufficient service system, it had to be relaunched in 2003. 11 be connected to the broader cultural field beyond the telecommunication sector. Content, the extra cash-cow for network providers, suddenly mattered. Technically, mobile content service refers to the value-added information (data) provided through mobile phone internet, which consists of three categories: 1) communication centric, 2) transaction-centric, and 3) content-centric. 7 The former two categories of content services, largely text-based, had already been available on 2G mobile phone before June came into the market. Since SK telecom launched June in 2002, the sales of content-centric mobile data application services have dramatically increased every year. As of January 2005, mobile content services occupied about 30% of the company’s entire cellular services sales revenues. 8 Among various contents, moving image content under the category of movie/ TV occupied 17 % of the entire content service revenue. However, how was it feasible to introduce the unfamiliar experience of ‘mobile content’ to users who already have preconceived ideas about the mobile phone as a telecommunication device? 7 Choi Yang-Soo, “The Production and Distribution of Mobile Contents” (paper presented at the Mobile Communication: Mobile Communication and Social Change conference, Seoul, Korea, October 18-9, 2004), 42; It should be noted that in Korea, the term ‘Contents’ in a plural form is generally used to refer to the content as a unit of marketable media product (both analog and digital), regardless of its grammatical inaccuracy. For instance, the mobile multimedia content service is called the ‘mobile multimedia contents service.’ Contents, in fact, has rapidly become a hot word along with the development of digital media and the new convergent media business utilizing digital networks. Whether intended or not, this flawed terminology seems to parallel the changing ontological position of the media product, from uncountable ‘work’ bounded in a specific medium (with the content as subject in opposition to the form) to the countable bit-sized data packet. 8 SK Telecom, Press release, 26 January 2005, www.Sktelecom.com. 12 June, as a premium multimedia service, functions under the mobile environment with many devices such as multimedia-enabled cellular phones, PDAs and Drive for Vehicles, while offering the full functionality of TV, MP3, camcorders, DVD, and game devices. June [promises to deliver] a premium personal multimedia channel with something for everyone; from a teenage music video lover to a business taking part in a video conference while on the road. 9 The above press release of SK Telecom provides a glimpse into how the industry defines the mobile content service. Here, the statement highlights two significant factors of a new mobile phone service: First, the mobile phone is a convergent device equipped with diverse functions. Second, June, in itself, is a multimedia service. Apparently, the ‘multimedia’ aspect of the mobile phone is emphasized. Various forms of entertainment products including music, movie, television programs, and games are uniformly provided as ‘downloadable’ bit– sized data files. Compiling these various forms of content, respectively produced as contingent on the technological and institutional parameters of their original media, delivering them through the mobile telecommunication networks, June refurbishes the mobile phone into a new media ‘conduit’ as the central vantage point of media convergence. A step further, Mobile TV renders any digital devices – whether portable or not- into a convergent screen medium as long as 9 SK Telecom, Press release, 25 November 2002, www.SKtelecom.com; The promise to provide video conference – video calls- is fulfilled in 2007 when the real 3G mobile phone service became available in its full capacity. Yet SK telecom has not been as much successful in 3G phone market as it had been with previous service, overpowered by its competitor KTF’s successful operation of “Show” – sub-brand specializing in video calls. 13 networks are provided. In other words, mobile multimedia content service is not materially bounded to the physical condition of screen and associated institutional requirements but is itself ‘moving’ across as a data package, expanding the screen experience across the boundaries beyond indoors and outdoors and private and public. In this sense, it is the power of the network, not the material presence of the screen platform, which attributes the redefined status of screen to the mobile phone and further fulfills the premise of ‘mobility’ of the mobile screen. Hence, depending on whether it is equipped with constantly-on wireless networks or not, the mobile screen is categorized into two types: networked mobile screen- mobile phone, mobile TV, and portable devices with wireless internet- and un-networked mobile screen- PMP, PSP, and portable DVD player. The un- networked mobile screen technically demands individual users to customize - sourcing, downloading and storing- their own content garnered from various sources, mostly digitized online content, and thus allows a comparative degree of freedom from the centralized and institutionalized network. Compared to this, the networked mobile screen is a fundamentally institutionalized and commercialized practice as it requires the infrastructure and the operation of the central network that transmits streaming service – live–downloading in case of 3G mobile phone service- to individual users. Korean 3G mobile phone content service and mobile TV operate on the networked mobile screen although their 14 network remained a “closed and controlled system” 10 until its full technological capacity was commercialized with the latest 3G mobile phone equipped with ‘open and full-browsing internet’ or Wibro, a mobile broadband internet technology, in 2007. Although both types of the mobile screen provide similar personal screen experience, the networked mobile screen presents more complex issues regarding the aesthetic and cultural implications of mobile multimedia content due to its ambivalent position as a personal screen medium governed by public networks, and thereby complicates media studies attempt to map it within the topography of conventional media established based on medium-specificity. In this sense, the mobile phone’s transformation to a networked mobile screen is not solely attributed to the technological innovations of a convergent device. What makes this repositioning of the mobile phone into a convergent medium is the cultural and social practice of imagining and appropriating the technology in particular way, which overall corresponds to the paradigm of what Henry Jenkins defines as “convergence culture.” 11 10 Harmeet Sawhney, “Mobile Communication: New Technologies and Old Archetypes” (paper presented at the Mobile Communication and Social Change Conference, Seoul, Korea, October 18-9, 2004), 10-17. 11 Henry Jenkins, Convergent Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, (New York: NYU Press, 2007). 15 Theoretical Refl ections on Convergence Encompassing all dimensions of media production, delivery and consumption, Jenkins argues that convergence is the operative principle of the contemporary mediascape, which characterizes the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experience they want. 12 His comprehensive grasp of convergence surmises what media studies have endeavored to articulate with regard to overall issue of ‘digitization’ and its impact on media culture. On the one hand, the digitality, the medium specificity of the computer technology itself has been discussed through such concepts as ‘hybridity,’ “digitextuality,” 13 ‘hypertext,’ and ‘interactivity.’ On the other hand, however, the most significant shift with digitization is the emergence of the democratized means of media production and the central role of computer networking as a new delivery system for communication and media culture. The rapid expansion of digital 12 Ibid.; The notion of convergence is defined in many different ways from diverse disciplinary perspectives. For example, from the technological perspective, convergence means “the union of audio, video, and data communications into a single source received on a single device, delivered by a single connection” - John Belton, “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution,” Film Theory and Criticism (Sixth Edition), eds. Leo Baudry and Marshall Cohen ( New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 904. From the communication studies perspective, it is paraphrased as the “tendencies to blur the boundaries between very distinct information/communication.” - Paschal Preston and Aphra Kerr, “Digital Media, Nation-States and Local Cultures: The case of Multimedia Content Production,” Media, Culture & Society, no. 23 (2001), 109. 13 Anna Everett, Introduction to New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, eds. Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2003). 16 distribution entails the dissolution of medium-specificity, that is, what Fredrich Kittler postulates as the thesis of “no-media,” 14 or “post-medium condition” in Rosalind Krauss’ definition. 15 By delivering the images across the boundaries of each medium, digital technology erases the differences of media. However, it is important to consider that digital technology is not a deterministic factor of the post-medium condition. Rather, it is a necessary but not sufficient factor of the operations of convergence, which are more contingent on the specificities of cultural contexts. For instance, Thomas Elsaesser and John T. Caldwell argue that the aesthetics and the ontological implication of digital media should be discussed in the wider context of its institutional modes. That is, the generic history of digital media should be found out of the “congruent historical shifts of media” 16 or “conjunctual history of the technical media,” 17 rather than in its radical transformative effect on the formal aspect of media contents. Basically, both scholars foreground the importance of industrial logic behind the adaptation of digital technology such as global capitalism. Especially, they argue that the convergence of media, which 14 Fredrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems, (Netherlands: G+B Arts, 1997), 31-32. 15 Rosaline Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of Post-Medium Condition, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999). 16 John Caldwell, “The Second Aesthetics,” New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, eds. Anna Everett and John Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2003), 140. 17 Thomas Elsaesser, Introduction to Cinema futures: Cain, Abel or Cable; The Screen Arts in the Digital age, eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Key Hoffman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 10. 17 is often credited to the conditions of digital aesthetics, is not a direct result or intrinsic to the nature of digital technology but an inevitable phenomenon of the up-to-date global media industries’ practices that aim to expand their market boundaries. In the television broadcasting sector, digitization represents, as Caldwell argues, “second shift” aesthetics in the development of long-standing industry practices; from broadcasting to multi-channel narrowcasting; from mass economies of scale to niche economies of scope; and from serial flows to tangential and cyclical flows. 18 According to him, with the changed practices of media, ‘textual dispersal’ and ‘user navigations’ that involve the ‘migration’ of users across brands and conglomerate boundaries become essential parts of production and marketing consideration. Therefore, the digital stands for these second shift aesthetics that employ the traditional and modified programming strategies in the design of everything from interface and software design to merchandizing and branding campaigns. In the cinematic sphere, according to Elsaesser, the digital is more of cultural metaphor of the contemporary media practices, that is to say, a ‘delivery system’ through which diverse but established media regenerate their own aesthetics in close relation to other media. Hence, he interprets digitization as a mere factor of media convergence rather than an essential change to the aesthetics of media. Expanded to the other media practices, digitization reflects the overall economic context behind the forces of 18 John Caldwell, Ibid., 136. 18 convergence and ‘synergy’, which is represented by “multi-national company policy and the quest for global audiences,” 19 a signifier of the ‘cultural shift’ governed by what Martha Kinder defines as a “supersystem of entertainment.” 20 In this way, convergent culture materializes “transmedia intertextuality” whose multiple possibilities are configured in myriad forms and modes in a specific medium, 21 with or regardless of digitization, contingent on constitutive configurations of textual and contextual dimensions. In defining a particular new convergent device or convergent media practice, hence, the most urgent question is to solicit out these ‘specificities’ of configurations that produces ‘new’ out of the relationship with ‘old.’ These specificities are what make convergent cultural practices multilayered not monolithic and thus divulge the limitation of the technologically deterministic understanding of media convergence. Convergent Mobil e Screen Devices June, hence, came to define the mobile phone, not simply a phone any more but a mobile screen, as a multimedia platform that embodies the transmedia intertextuality, which inevitably disrupts traditionally partitioned 19 Thomas Elsaesser, Ibid. 20 Martha Kinder points out the multiple possibilities of “Transmedia Intertextuality,” representing a “supersystem of entertainment” that has come to be a dominant force in the global entertainment business.- Martha Kinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games, (Berkeley: University of California press, 1991). 21 Marsha Kinder, Ibid. 19 disciplines of technology and media. In this context, it is notable that the mobile screen is often positioned as a “geographical extension” of conventional media reception. 22 Is the mobile screen a merely extended venue for conventional media reception? Or is there a new artistic or formal possibility that defines the specificity of the mobile screen? If so, how does it provide a different screen media experience? From the technological perspective, the mobile phone is literally a convergent device that combines telecommunication, mobile internet, and the screen. Mobile TV, officially DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) in Korea, expands the capacity of the mobile screen by adding broadcasting. First if all, its significance as a personal medium fundamentally originates from its technological condition of being a wireless service that enables the user to overcome the temporal and spatial restraints of the conventional internet environment by providing mobility, ubiquity, accessibility, convenience, personalization, location-based and portability. 23 Since its introduction in late 1980s, the mobile phone has evoked numerous studies about its impact on social behavior and cultural space in terms of these characteristics. The majority of early studies on mobile phone technology 22 Choi Yang-Soo, Ibid. 23 Initially, these characteristics of mobile phone service were saliently coined and defined by industrial discourses (notably, consulting reports) which attempted to analyze the potential business models of the mobile phone. For example, Durlacher Research, “Mobile Commerce Report,” http://www.durlacher.com/downloads/mcomreport.pdf ( accessed in 8 August 2002), Ovum, “Defining the Future: Can New Generation devices and MMS Revitalize the Mobile industry?” (July 2002), www.ovum.com (accessed in 15 August 2002). 20 have mainly focused on the relations between mobile phone technology and social changes particularly in terms of the transformation of interpersonal communication, from a communication studies perspective. 24 While these early studies present the diverse uptake patterns of mobile technology in various local contexts and examine the implication of changes involved with personal communication and social behaviors such as the rise of “virtual walled communities,” 25 “telecocoons,” 26 and “networked individualism,” 27 some of these positions often employed the techno-deterministic assumption of the transparency of technology, that is, the premise of a ‘single’ technology and its ‘global’ dissemination to different contexts, most notably represented by the James E, Katz’s thesis of “apparatgeist of perpetual contact” that “tends to standardize infrastructure and gravitates towards consistent tastes and universal features.” 28 24 Notably, J. E. Katz and Mark Aakhus eds. Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private talk, and Public Performance, (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2002); J. E. Katz ed. Machines That Becomes Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology, (New Brunswick: Transation Publishers, 2003); John Agar, Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone, (Cambridge: Icon Books 2003); Rich Ling, The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society, (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2004). 25 Rich Ling, Ibid. 26 Ichiyo Habuchi, “Accelerating Reflexivity,” Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile phones in Japanese life, eds. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Mia Matsuda (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 165-182. 27 B.Wellman, ed. Networks in the Global Village, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). 28 J. E. Katz and Mark Aakhus, “Conclusion: Making Meaning of Mobile - A Theory of Apparatgeist,” Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private talk and Public Performance, eds. J. E. 21 In fact, social sciences of technology or cultural studies approaches to technology have emphasized the particular historical, social, discursive and cultural processes of the development and deployment of technology in specific contexts. 29 These attempts to articulate “techno-social situations” in which technologies are constructed and deployed in order to follow the multiple effects and subordinations that are produced, disseminated, and reproduced in various contexts 30 provides the fundamental perspective to open up the discussion of the mobile phone, not as a universal technology, but rather as a “cultural technology,” 31 whose implementation takes on culturally and socially specific forms. 32 Specifically, as the mobile phone has evolved into convergent device Katz and Mark Aakhus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 310. 29 My perspective of looking into the social and cultural construction of technology is situated in the tradition of cultural studies of media and social science studies of technology represented in the following works: See, Raymond Williams, Television: Technology as Cultural Form, (New York: Schocken Books, 1974) ; Caroline Marvin, When Old Technologies were New, ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940,(London, England: University of California Press, 1992); P. Du Gay et al, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, (London: Sage Publications, 1997) ; W. Bijker, T. Hughes, and T. Pinch eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems, (Cambridge : MIT Press. 1987) ; W. Bijker and J. Law eds. Shaping Technology/Building Society, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography, (Sage Publication, 2003); D. MacKenzie and J. Wajcman eds. The Social Shaping of Technology, (Philadelphia and Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985; Second Edition,1999) . 30 Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz, “On Cultural Studies, Science, and Technology,” Techno Science and Cyber Culture, eds. Stanley Aronowitz et al (New York & London: Routledge, 1996), 13. 31 Raymond Williams, Ibid. 32 Notably, Barry Brown, Nicola Green and Richard Harper eds. Wireless World: Social and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age, (London: Springer, 2002); Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda eds. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, (Cambridge: MIT 22 that constantly broadens and transforms its boundaries, gradually adding more functions from simple mechanical features as a calculator, a clock, and a voice recorder to more sophisticated functions like photos, camera, MP3 player, games, mobile internet, and multimedia contents service, it is not feasible any longer to define the mobile phone as a universal telecommunication medium. Accordingly, mobile phone research becomes diversified with focus on various uses of mobile phone from the implications of mobile phone camera uses, 33 electronic wallets 34 Press, 2006); Gerad Goggin, Cell phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday life, (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) ; Heather Horst and Daniel Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication, (New York: Berg Publishers, 2006). 33 The mobile phone camera use is one of the most studied topics that have generated prolific researches. For a few notable studies, see, T. Kindberg, M. Spasojevic, R. Fleck, and A. Sellen, “How and Why people use Camera Phones,” 2004, http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-216.html (accessed in 25 April 2008); Ilpo Koskinen, Esko Kurvinen and Turo-Kimmi Lechtonen, Mobile Image, (Finland: Edita Publishing Inc. 2002); Rich Ling and Julsrud, T, “Grounded Genres in Multimedia Messaging,” A Sense of Place: The Global and the Local in Mobile Communication, ed. Kristof Nyiri (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2005), 329-338 ; Daisuke Okabe and Mizuko Ito, “Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use: Steps toward Technosocial Ethnographic Frameworks,” Mobile communication in Everyday life: Ethnographic views, Observations and Reflections, eds. J. Höflich & M. Hartmann (Berlin: Franks and Timme, 2006), 79-102; Barbara Schifo, “The Domestication of Camera-Phone and MMS Communication: The Early Experiences of Young Italians,” A Sense of Place: The Global and the Local in Mobile Communication ; C. Riviere, “Mobile Camera Phones: A New Form of "Being Together" in Daily Interpersonal communication” (paper presented at the Mobile Communication and Social Change, Seoul, Korea, October 18-19, 2004); Van House, N. et al., “The Uses of Personal Networked Digital Imaging: An Empirical Study of Cameraphone Photos and Sharing” (paper presented at the CHI, Portland, Oregon, 2005); Van House, N. et al., “The Social Uses of Personal Photography: Methods for Projecting Future Imaging Applications, 2004, http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~vanhouse/pubs.htm (accessed in 3 December 2005); Virpi Oksman, “Mobile Video in Digital Image Culture” (paper presented at the Seeing, Understanding and Learning in the Mobile Age conference, Budapest, Hungary, April 24-27, 2005); Heidi Cooley, “It’s All About the Fit: The Hand, the Mobile Screenic Device and Tactile Vision.” Journal of Visual Culture 3, 2 (2004): 133-155. 34 L. Cooper, C. Baber, and C. Johnson, “A Run on Sterling--Personal Finance on the Move” (paper presented at the ISWC, San Francisco, 1999); S. Mainwaring, K. Anderson and M. Chang, “What's in Your Wallet: Implications for Global E-wallet Design” (paper presented at the CHI, Portland, OR, 23 to mobile gaming. 35 However, as the latest addition to mobile phone features, the screen aspect of the mobile phone with multimedia content services has received comparatively little attention partly due to its fast cross-over with other portable screen devices and slow dissemination to the majority of mobile phone users outside of specific locations such as Korea, Japan and some European countries including Italy and England. From the technological perspective, the significance of the mobile screen is more properly situated in the media studies’ discussion of the impact of computer technology on the changed status of screen in general rather than in communication sectors. In his study of the logic of computer, Lev Manovich cogently points out that the digital technology with the principle of “algorithmic manipulation of data” abruptly changes the status of screen from a window into an illusionary space to the interfaces through which “distinct modes of the world” are communicated. 36 Hence, for the subject facing the interfaces of the computer screen, in theory, this projected world on the screen are not illusory images to contemplate but to navigate and explore with the possibility of controlling their spatial-temporal framing of the image by manipulating computer input and 2005). 35 C. Licoppe and Y. Inada, “Emergent Uses of a Multiplayer Location-Aware Game: The Interactional Consequences of Mediated Encounters,” Mobilities Journal 1.1 (2006): 36-61; J. McGonigal, “The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real-world, Mission-based Gaming,” Second Person, eds. P. Harrigan and N. Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). 36 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 10; 65. 24 output. This changed status of screen as an interface resonates with Anne Friedberg’s redefinition of the screen in digital age as a “display and delivery” format, which is “variable in versions of screens.” 37 Similar to Manovich, Friedberg argues that the traditional spectator, whose fixed relation to the screen world generates the “immobilized and identified spectatorship” now turns to the “users with an interface in his/her control.” 38 In this sense, as digitally generated interfaces for data communication equipped with the most intimate and personal interaction options for the user, mobile screen devices embody the screen in the digital age. However, it is important to note that these interfaces for new screens are constructed after or in mediation of conventional media forms, which affect the way in which the new screen is culturally experienced. For instance, Manovich articulates, due to the cultural adoption of cinematic traditions as the dominant principle of computer software or hardware, the technological specificity of the computer screen is compromised by both “providing a window into an illusionary space and working as a flat surface that carries text labels and graphical icons.” 39 That is, the computer screen is structurally mediated by ‘cinematic interfaces.’ Friedberg also points out the important role of televisual experience as a 37 Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” Film Theory and Criticism, 914. 38 Anne Friedberg, Ibid. 39 Lev Manovich, Ibid., 90. 25 historical mediator in the overall transition of screen toward interfaces for personal display formats. Television, with the combination of new technologies such as remote control and VCR, facilitated a new interactive viewing experience, paving the way to the more extensive level of the control for the computer user by allowing the user to control his or her “temporal and spatial condition of watching.” 40 Yet watching a movie on a mobile phone is not a revolutionary new idea originating from digital convergence if we consider the parallel genealogies of electronic media dating back to the invention of the telephone and motion picture. William Boddy provides a fascinating early history of telephone where he aptly quotes William Uricchio’s insight, “the introduction of the telephone in 1876 inspired a number of speculative inventions which linked the simultaneity of the telephone to the photographic image, “which implies the “pre-cinematic conception of a moving-picture medium.” 41 Boddy considers this to be a prehistory of television, but it is more suitable as a prehistory of mobile TV. That is, this early imagination of the possible movie-picture medium over spectrum is literally, and more true to its original idea, materialized into the mobile screen, 40 Anne Friedberg, Ibid., 922. 41 Requoted from William Buddy, New Media and Popular Imagination : Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9 ; originally from William Uriccio, “Ways of Seeing: The New Vision of Early Nonfiction Film,” Uncharted Territory: Essays in Early Nonfiction Film, eds. Daan Hertogs and Nico De Klerk (Amsterdam: Netherlands Film Museum, 1997), 130. 26 which delivers moving images over the telephone. Boddy further points out that what caused the “the irreconcilable distinction in the historiographies of cinema and wireless technology that embodied in the publicness of cinema’s site of reception versus the domestic setting of wireless fabrication and reception,” 42 is the institutionalization of these two technologies, cinema as public technology and radio as domestic technology. These arguments suggest that cinematic and televisual media practices are two of the primary references to the formation of the digital screen’s current status and of the mobile screen as a personal screen medium. Then, to what extent and in what particular way do these legacies condition the institutionalization of the mobile screen as it is? In order to solicit the answer to this question, it is important to examine the concrete cultural practice of defining and constituting the medium specificity of the mobile screen in specific contexts, where the historical trajectory of mobile technology as a screen medium is fabricated. For instance, globally pervasive and contingent text message (SMS; Short Message Service) culture was prefigured as a prevalent mode of mobile phone communication in such local contexts as Japanese and Finnish youth mobile phone culture, which eventually redefined the mobile phone communication system. Given that most of modern media and communication technologies are of western-origin and the non-western countries’ experiences of 42 William Buddy, Ibid., 14. 27 these technologies have been categorized into subordinate case studies of a singular technology from the techno-deterministic perspective, 43 the local initiated constitution of mobile technology challenges the conventional power dynamics between the local and global. This “disruption of the status quo of US domination in early history of mobile technology combined with the diversity in implementation of mobile communications infrastructures,” as Mizuko Ito argues, characterizes the uniqueness of mobile phone technology in that it has been seen “from the start as located in specific social, cultural, and historical contexts rather than as a cross-culturally universal solution.” 44 Technologically and culturally proactive invention and appropriation of ‘screen’ dimensions of mobile technology in Korea thus not only exemplifies this “heterogeneous co- constitution of mobile phone technology across the transnational stage” 45 but also articulates the specific juncture where media transitions toward convergence on a global scale are executed and realized through particular cultural practices 43 This binary assumption on global technology and localized experience is widely persistent in more nuanced researches. For example, in her study of Korean youth mobile phone culture, Kyongwon Yoon argues that the continuity between the Korean youth’s use of mobile culture and traditional social relationships is interpreted as an example of periphery resistance against the globalizing effect of mobile technology. Not only does this argument fail to conceive the status of Korean mobile phone technology within the heterogeneous global technoscapes, but it also intensifies the ideologically charged power relationship between the hegemonic global and marginalized local - Kyongwon Yoon, “Retraditionalizing the Mobile: Young People’s Sociality and Mobile Phone use in Seoul, South Korea,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, no.6. 3 (2003): 327-43. 44 Mizuko Ito, Introduction to Personal, Portable and Pedestrian, 5. 45 Mizuko Ito, Ibid., 7. 28 in local contexts. In this sense, the analysis of Korean mobile service carriers’ concrete industrial practices will unearth this locally-initiated but globally- resonant, and historically- latent constitution of the mobile screen as a networked personal medium. Convergent Media Practice: SK Tel ecom’s Mobil e Multimedia Content Service The centrality of network in the mobile screen service inevitably leads to the advance of wireless telecommunication carriers as the core player in convergent media environments, where the conventional media system is dismantled and re-organized into a convoluted ‘big bang’ that requires a new order with appropriate social/cultural/technological institutions, laws and regulations for both hegemonic industry players and newly emergent media sectors, mostly rooted in information computer technology. When SK telecom launched June, mediascapes and technoscapes in Korea were undergoing this transition which was often referred to as “media big bang” or “contents war,” spurred by the surge of new alternative media forms and businesses based on internet or personal media in competition with the conventional public media. 46 For instance, the rapidly growing power of internet portal sites such as Media 46 In the case of broadcasting television, there are three major network channels. KBS, the largest and the most powerful, is a public network owned by government. MBC, second largest channel, is technically privatized but in fact, KBS owns the majority of its stocks and through this system, government wields the indirect control. Lastly, SBS is the only private channel. 29 Daum, Naver, and Empas upset and decentralized the dynamics of power structure of the media industry as they became the first-hand conduits or redistribution channels for all ranges of media content and information – including text-based and audio-visual content, search engine, email and blog service-. 47 In addition, this transition toward a media big bang is even more strongly supported by public discourse as a promising development that could contribute to enhancing “National competitive power” in the global market. 48 In fact, the crucial role of the nation-state in the global development of digital multimedia content business has been acknowledged by many scholars, notably Manuel Castells, 49 yet it is also the particular “industrial textual practices” 50 that 47 The central position of portal sites in online space is a unique phenomenon in Korea, where globally powerful search engine services such as Yahoo and Google do not compete with these domestically grown online media in the market. For instance, Naver is the most popular portal site known for its user-friendly information search and media content redistribution. 48 For example, it is common to come across such argument as “it is fortunate that Korea (n technology) leads the current change of media environment toward convergence… we should concentrate all policies to building up the national competitive power based on through understanding of the changing media environment.”- Kim Taek-Hwan and Lee Sang-Bok, Media Big Bang: Hanguki Byeonhanda (Media Big Bang: Korea Changes), (Seoul, Korea: Park Youngryul Chulpansa, 2005), xiii. 49 Manuel Castells ed. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, vol.1, (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), Manuel Castells et al eds. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). 50 John Caldwell, “Critical Industrial Practice: Branding, Repurposing, and the Migratory Patterns of Industrial Texts,” Television & New Media, vol. 7. no.2 (May 2006), 105. This voice resonates with the growing emphasis on the role of industry in information technology fields as such, “multimedia content developers can be seen as an emergent cultural industry which draws upon both traditional skills of representation and communication and new global technologies to 30 formulate new convergent media services out of the chaotic and complex big bang. To launch June, a ‘personal premium entertainment channel,’ on the mobile phone operating out of the traditional entertainment industry, SK telecom had to remodel or invent whole range of parameters of business practice from content production, acquisition, revenue share model, and content programming strategies to designing channel format and interfaces compatible with the mobile environment, in cooperation or competition with every party involved in the media industry. Later mobile TV also faced the same challenge. This concrete industrial practice is so crucial in generating the discourse by which the mobile screen and its cultural use is defined and positioned in relation to conventional screen practices. It is also the contested terrain wherein the rhetoric of ‘new’ medium or technology and ‘old’ convention compete and intersect with each other for determining the configuration of the mobile screen within the public imagination. From the perspective of the wireless service carriers, the mobile content service is a necessary step to creating new profit revenues in a fully saturated mobile telecommunication market. “We already have a network established, which is the most demanding and costly infrastructure,” said the representative of the content strategy team at SK Telecom, “we simply asked develop new cultural forms for diverse groups of end users” - Paschal Preston and Aphra Kerr, Ibid., 125. 31 ourselves why not try to maximize its capacity rather than letting it unused?” 51 SK Telecom chose June as a solution to maximize the network capacity, and in fact they already had been extremely proactive in developing highly segmented business models as well as technology deployment as Rachel Healy, a Spectrum Strategy Consultant, says, “the Korean model is probably the most advanced market segmentation from a mobile service provider I have been able to find anywhere in the world.” 52 Mobile multimedia content is a particular service added to meet and maximize the demands of young people. 53 Interestingly, in shaping the mobile multimedia content into a profitable service, service providers –SK Telecom and KTF- modeled their respective mobile content services after existed media conventions. In his comparative study of business practices of SK Telecom and KTF, Joo Wan-Geon argues that 51 From the Interview with SK Telecom, 10 January 2004. 52 Stephen McClleland, “South Korea: A CDMA Success Story,” Telecommunications International; vol. 38, no. 9, (September 2004), g S7; Under the main corporate brand of ‘SK Telecom’ for general wireless telecommunication service, SK Telecom runs several sub – service brands including family brands (Speed 011010, Nate, Moneta) and further segment brands targeting specific age groups (TTL- designed to suit the lifestyles of young people, Ting-for teenage markets, UTO – for young professionals aged between in their 25 and 35, CARA - membership services tailored to women, and leaders Club - a premium membership service for all ages). Each sub-brand offers a distinct service rate plan and the content service package customized to their target consumers. For example, Ting offers more generous and discounted text message package for teenage consumers who are known for their preference to the text messaging while Moneta provides the financial transaction centric content such as stock market information and internet banking for more adults consumers. 53 All three mobile operators in Korea have already put emphasis on the youth market sectors by offering specialized rate plans for college students (ages 18-23) and high school students (ages 13- 18. For the 18-23 age group, there are SK telecom’s TTL, KTF’s Na, and LG telecom’s Khai. For the 13-18 age group, SK telecom’s Ting, KTF’s Bigi, and LG Telecom’s Khai Holeman.- Manuel Castells, Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective, 140. 32 SK Telecom’s blueprint for its mobile multimedia content service was to build an “entertainment portal” (similar to the format of online portal sites) while KTF’s ambition was to establish a “broadcasting portal” (closer to traditional TV broadcasting). 54 He succinctly points out the difference between two major mobile content services that reflect their fundamentally different ideas and strategies to define the mobile screen as a new medium, which determines subsequent practical decisions about interface design, content delivery systems, programming strategy, marketing campaigns, and aesthetics of individual content. SK Telecom’s model of entertainment portal was built on the ‘pull’ mode of service that utilized the database directory system for VOD (Video-On- Demand) content service, supplied by content providers and stored as a database in the centralized service directory which is easily identified through a specific interface menu. As opposed to this, KTF adopted the ‘push’ mode of service that is based on the traditional broadcasting system which allows each content provider to broadcast their content according to its own schedule through an individually allotted service channel on KTF’s mobile content site. These two different modes of content delivery not only affect the contradictory business strategies of SK Telecom and KTF in content acquisition but also programming strategies. SK Telecom tends to have an exclusive control over content delivery, 54 Joo Wan-Geon, “Mobileeul Tonghan Yeonghwseobiseuus Heonhwangkwa Banjeonbangan (The Present of Movie Service on Mobile and Future Developmental Plan),” (MA thesis, Dongkook University, Korea, 2003), 30. 33 limiting content providers’ role to the production of content. 55 Based on their exclusive contract system, SK Telecom auctions contents from diverse content providers regardless of their established positions in traditional market structure. This strategy often leads to strong competition among new content providers and eventually cultivates the invigorating exploration for unique and innovative mobile content, distinguishable from conventional media content. In contrast, KTF operates as something similar to a broadcasting network in the sense that it presents diverse mobile content service channels allotted for content providers, which yield control over programming. As a result, KTF’s push mode inevitably relies on the power of established content providers, notably, television networks, for securing and managing content, which explains the predominance of repurposed television content and less original content in KTF’s Fimm service. In fact, in industrial discourse the shift of power relationships in the convergent media environment is often expressed through the emphasis on the “pull model of content business,” which results in the weakening of the traditional business model of broadcasters and shifts their power to new media operators such as mobile network operators. 56 In this regard, the difference 55 In general, Content providers supply either original or repurposed content to SK Telecom under the exclusive contracts whose conditions vary from a product-based to a yearly commitment-based. Once a content provider delivers its content to SK Telecom, their role is limited to taking profit share. 56 Per Anderson et al, “A Technoeconomic Study of Mobile TV,” The Stockholm University of Economics and Royal Institute of Technology, 13 July 2007. 34 between SK Telecom and KTF’s business strategies aptly explains their disparate prospectus in the Korean mobile multimedia content market, where SK Telecom not only advanced as a major player, overshadowing the long-held hegemony of KTF in domestic telecommunication market, but also entered into the entertainment industry as a new producer. To nurture this new market, SK telecom has not only heavily invested in creating original multimedia content for mobile phones but also actively promoted cultural events, particularly a series of events in alliance with the movie industry. Indeed, cinema is the primary reference point that SK Telecom uses in imagining ideal mobile content. For example, in cooperation with the movie industry, SK Telecom organized the first ‘Mobile Yeonghwa (moving images) Seminar’ as a part of the Pusan international film festival in 2002, one of the first academic events that addressed the potential of the mobile screen. Along with this academic event, SK telecom launched various cultural events and related data services to promote the public understanding of mobile content services: ‘Mobile PIFF’ (Mobile channel for Pusan International Film Festival – a ticketing service, Info, trailers of programs) (October 2003), ‘Monet N-Ticket’ (A paper-ticket-less service for CGI multiplex theater), ‘Mobile Yeongsang (Image) Competition’ (December 2002), ‘Flash Animation Competition’ (July 2003). Specifically, as exemplified by its heavy investment in such content competitions, SK Telecom was more proactive than other competitors in searching for ‘ideal’ mobile content, which has 35 progressively expanded into more direct involvement with content production. For example, in 2002 ‘Mobile Yeongsang Competition,’ it is reported that 420 scripts were submitted with 21:1 odds, and SK Telecom funded twenty winning scripts to be made into mobile video content including Lord of the King, Offspring of Mars, Loafer and Egg, Endless Target, and WHO, short digital videos with various genres, themes, and experimental forms that eventually became the first generation of mobile cinema. The ‘Flash Animation Competition’ in 2003, that showcased a serial animation with high-definition screen quality exclusively designed for mobile handsets, is another example of SK Telecom’s attempt to find ideal mobile-specific content from already proven genres, like flash animation, with huge popularity online. After the experiments with the mobile cinema Yigong series (2002) and the mobile drama Five Stars (2004), SK Telecom put a hold on its in-house production of mobile multimedia content but has more aggressively entered into the movie industry. 57 In February 2005, SK telecom announced that it became the second major stock holder of Sidus HQ (one of the major film production and entertainment agencies in Korea), which signaled SK telecom’s entrance into the entertainment content business. 58 Since then, SK 57 Compared to SK Telecom’s active production of original mobile content, KTF has not much involved with original mobile content production, which corresponds to their business model of being a ‘broadcasting portal.’ In general, KTF focuses on the auxiliary data services such as movie trailer, preview, and ring tone over the mobile video content service. 58 Kim Soo-Kyoung, “2005 Hanguk Yeonghwa Tujabekeup Heonhwang (Mapping the System of Korean Movie Investment and Distribution in 2005),” Cine 21, No. 493, 3 March 2005, 44. 36 Telecom has expanded its venture into the movie business in full force and in August 2007 officially launched its own movie distribution wing. 59 Telecom Investment or Alliance Investment Scale Details Sidus IHQ (Entertainment Agent) 34.05% stock holder & Management right Manage Chungeorham film’s produc./distri. SKT Chungeorahm film IHQ owns 30% stock Produc./distri. of The Host KT Sidus FNH (Movie Produc.) 51% stock holder Secure content & participation in movie biz Olive Nine ( TV Drama Produc.) 19.2 % stock holder Produc. of Jumong & secure TV content LGT MusicOn Alliance with Mnet Media On-Off line music file source service Hanaro T Cinema Service (Movie Produc./Distri.) 3.7% stock investment Secure content for Hana IP- TV Table 1.1 Telecommunication Companies’ Investment to Movie/Entertainment Content Industry. Seoul Economy News, 26 August 2007. In the convergent media environment, where the competition to acquire compelling content for diversified media venues has been intensified and the cross-investments across media industries have also increased, SK Telecom’s entrance into the movie industry with the expectation of securing quality content is not a unique phenomenon but rather indicative of a general transition toward a contents war in Korea. Along with SK Telecom, telecommunication companies have successively entered into the movie and entertainment business either directly or indirectly as <Table 1.1> illustrates, which leads to the restructuring of power dynamics in this sector, where venture capitals have been major 59 The first movie that SK Telecom will distribute is Once Upon a Time in Korea, for which SK Telecom funded 20 % of total budget. - Seoul Economy News, 26 October 26 2007. 37 investors since the later 1990s. This converging media practice inevitably generates a direct impact on the structure of movie industry and thus is often met with anxiety-driven responses from the movie industry about the collapse of boundaries between individual media sectors. It is reported that SK Telecom’s entrance will increase dwindling movie funding, but it is also considered a threat to “degrading movies to subsidiary content for telecommunication service.” 60 Their anxiety is maybe the expression of an implicit fear of witnessing and acknowledging the force of media transition, heading towards the convergence paradigm where movies, television programs, animation, and games are all equally rendered as ‘content’ -democratized data files with no more explicit association with their source media. 2. Contents: Moving Images in Digital Age So, we watch moving images on mobile screen devices. They come in a variety of genres and forms, and from diverse sources: the service directory of June lists all familiar categories including but not limited to TV news, sports shows, movies, TV drama, animation and other auxiliary entertainment 60 Seoul Economy News, Ibid. 38 excerpts. 61 Are these same movies and TV shows that we have watched in a theater, on television, or on a computer screen? From a technological and industrial perspective, they equally exist as ‘digital data files’ under the name of ‘content.’ On the one hand, as examined above, this shift corresponds to a technological level of media convergence where “digital imaging, delivery, and display effectively erase the messages implicit in the source media,” 62 and thus images acquire a new function as “image-instrument” or “image-interface.” 63 On the other hand, this rhetorical shift from talking about productions as ‘programs’ to talking about them as ‘content,’ as John Caldwell argues particularly in the context of television, underscores “the centrality of repurposing in industrial practice,” which “frees programs from a year-long series and network-hosted logic and suggests that programs are quantities to be drawn and quartered deliverable on cable, shippable internationally, and streamable on the Net.” 64 In this way, the term content represents moving images in the digital age, that is, ‘post-cinematic’ and ‘post-televisual’ imageries flowing across digitally enabled 61 During the inaugural service in 2002, the category of ‘Movie/Animation’ consisted of following sub-categories: 1.Cool & Hot, 2.Free trailer theater, 3.New movie theater, 4.VOD theater, 5.Mobile/TV shorts ( TV short movie theater/20:Yigong/June exclusive/Winner of mobile movie competition/ ⓜgallery/ExtremeX), 6.DVD/Cine 24, 7. Yupgi/comic animation, 8.Action/SF animation, 9.Drama/animation. 62 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, (Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 238. 63 Lev Manovich, Ibid., 10. 64 John Caldwell, “Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the Culture of Conglomeration,” Television after TV; Essays on a Medium in Transition, eds. Lynn Spiegel and Jan Olsson (Duke University Press, 2004, 49. 39 networks. Along with this rhetorical and industrial shift toward content as a basic entity of media experience, the original media works such as movies, television programs, and animation clips turn into “original sources,” both in material and rhetorical senses, as a source for repurposing and a reference for inspiration. Based on this ontological definition of content, I categorize moving image content employed for the mobile screen into two groups: Original Mobile Content and Migrated Mobile Content. Original mobile content refers to moving images produced specifically for mobile screen devices, and migrated mobile content indicates repurposed or repackaged content, primarily syndicated from conventional media. In spite of their different origins, original and migrated mobile content embody the same aesthetic and cultural paradigm of convergence, particularly in the dimension of delivery, as they are designed to be consumed across media, whether their flow begins from mobile media or conventional media. While the migrated mobile content tends to maintain its off-line identity in terms of formal aesthetics and the mode of consumption, in spite of certain degree of modification, original mobile content represents aesthetic effort to create new forms of visuality specific to the condition of the mobile screen, in terms of formal structure, mode of address, newer interactive protocols and end- user subject position. 40 In general, migrated mobile content occupies the majority of moving image content on the mobile screen service and enjoys more popularity in Korea. For example, the study on user’s preference for mobile multimedia content reveals that in 2004, the most popular mobile multimedia content on June was television content (30%). 65 Adult content (27.0%) followed the television content and music content ranked the third. This finding shows that in the early stage of mobile content service, familiar content still won public attention in spite of service provider’s aggressive effort to promote the newness of mobile media. In addition, the success of individual content tends to depend on its off-mobile popularity, which shows the close proximity between the conventional media and the mobile multimedia content service, and thus seemingly supports the argument about the mobile screen as the geographical extension of conventional media. If we look at the specific types of migrated mobile content, the overshadowing legacy of conventional media becomes more apparent. For instance, as of 2004, most migrated contents in the ‘movie’ directory on June were re-edited short promotional materials for feature movies running in off-mobile theaters, such as movie trailers, highlight clips, and making-of films. Some feature movies were re-run in their original length, but due to the technical 65 Ahn Hye-Jin, “Mobile Multimedia Contentse Dehan Sayongja Manjokdowa Gyeonjenguwi Jeonryak Yeongu (The Study on the User satisfaction of Mobile Multimedia Contents and the Strategy of Competitive Advantage)”(M.A. thesis, Sukmyoung Women’s University, Graduate School of Information and Telecommunication, e-business, 2004), 53. 41 restraints of mobile multimedia content service –downloading systems and high service charges due to large file size - 66 they did not succeed in attracting users unaccustomed to the new medium, and it was these short materials that were most accessed. However, June also served as the extended venue for conventional media in other ways by providing an alternative space for non- commercial movies. Digital shorts that seldom acquire exhibition venues within conventional media environments, and independent or foreign movies that had difficulty in securing exhibition venues found their space in June. For example, the Japanese movie Memory (Give it All, 1998) and anime Millennium Actress (2001) premiered through June after they struggled and failed to get theater distribution. 67 This heavy reliance on migrated mobile content in the early stage partly resulted from the unstable industrial structure of mobile screen media service, in 66 The service rate plans for multimedia content service have been constantly changed but in general, users pay extra fees for downloading data files in addition to their basic network subscription fees. According to the packet system that transmits and charges according to the data size (1 packet = 512 Byte), when the user watches a mobile cinema through June it costs 1.3 won per packet (1000 won= 1 dollar) as of 2004. For example, in order to watch one episode of Loafer and Egg, the user pays about 500 won, which totals approximately 5000 won for entire episodes. Sk Telecom provides various promotional plans such as a limited quantity plan or a limited time plan in order to loosen user’s hesitance against the expensive cost of mobile content service - Joo Wan-Geon, Ibid., 43. 67 This view to the mobile screen as an alternative venue for non-mainstream cinema/genres is widely shared. For example, Matt Crowley, senior marketing manager at Palm, said he “advised filmmakers to think of mobile devices as a potential home for short animated films that traditionally haven't reached large audiences outside of the festival community.” - Tom Krazit, “Short Films Eye the Really Small Screen,”CNET News.com, 13 March 2006, http://news.com.com/Short+films+eye+the+really+small+screen/2100-1026_3- 6049109.html?tag=st.rn (accessed in 11 July 2007). 42 which regulations and business models such as copyright fees and revenue share models were not clearly established to invite more active participation of content producers. The cooperation between the movie industry and wireless telecommunication industry was still fledging, as one content provider admits, the “movie industry remained still hesitant to accept the mobile phone as a potential auxiliary market and thus regarded it as another free venue for publicity.” 68 In this context, most original mobile content was directly or indirectly produced and sponsored by mobile screen service providers, notably SK Telecom for June, and this practice continued into mobile TV. SK Telecom particularly attempted to connect the mobile phone with the cultural habits of consuming conventional media, and thus produced original mobile content with close association to conventional media, notably cinema and television, which were named accordingly ‘mobile cinema’ and ‘mobile drama.’ Since the first generation of mobile cinema was introduced in 2002, SK Telecom moved forward with bigger scale mobile content project such as mobile cinema Yigong: Twenty Identity (2002) and mobile drama Five Stars (2004). This original mobile content vigorously explored mobile screen- specific aesthetic forms and thus represented the concrete aesthetic and cultural imagination of ideal moving images for the mobile screen. By the time Five Stars was produced, the industrial 68 From an interview with Park Hyo-Jung, Assistant Manager, Content Business Development Team, SK C&C, 15 December 2004. 43 practice of producing, marketing and consuming original mobile content established a set pattern, and the aesthetic characteristics of original mobile content become conventionalized into mobile visuality. Naming Mobil e Content: the Legacy of Cinema Technologically, original mobile content is a trope of digital video, digitally generated images that “loose photography’s indexical relation to reality,” 69 similar to ‘on-line streaming multimedia like Youtube videos,’ ‘web cinema,’ ‘little movies,’ and QuickTime movies that appeared in the 1990s. The technical constraints of the mobile screen pre-condition the forms of original mobile content at the preproduction, delivery and display stage. First of all, in the case of content for mobile phone, generally the content is shot in digital video or re-edited into a series of short episodes which run approximately between 1 min to 10 min (up to 30 min for mobile TV content); transferred to the MPEG 4 file format for wireless transmission for which movie frames are readjusted down to 12 to 20 frames as opposed to the standard 24 frame of a conventional feature movie; and screened on an LCD screen, which is the smallest screen among currently available screen formats, varying from 2x4cm to 4x7cm depending on the mobile devices. 69 W.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 44 Aesthetically, they are what Holly Willis defines “new form of digital media art,” situated “at the intersection of formerly separate realms of filmmaking, music video, animation, print design, live club events, video art” 70 in the post-medium condition, which was metaphorically eulogized with the thesis of “The End of Cinema,” 71 or “The Death of Video Art” 72 following the Arthur Danto’s famous thesis of “The End of Art.” 73 Coming at the ends of every medium - in the modernist sense-, original mobile content enjoy the liberty of “reworking the roles of images” 74 or “remediating” 75 the old and familiar media forms and our relations to them into new hybrid ones. However, the most predominant reference is cinema. The SK telecom’s coinage and application of ‘mobile cinema’ for various forms of original mobile content explicitly indicates how industrial textual practices identify new media content. After mobile cinema, to coin a genre name for original mobile content by combining ‘mobile’ and 70 Hollis Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image, (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 3. 71 Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema.” 72 Michael Rash, “Visions after Television: Technocultural Convergence, Hypermedia, and New Media Arts Field,” Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, eds. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 73 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 74 Hollis Willis, Ibid., 3. 75 John David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). 45 ‘(any) genre’ has become common throughout mobile TV, with categories such as mobile drama, mobile animation, mobile game show, and mobile sitcom. In particular, the specific examples of mobile cinema will reveal how they reformulate various cinematic conventions into mobile specific forms, demonstrating the way in which the cinema functions as the primary reference for this “cinematic imagery beyond the frame.” 76 In order words, relying on the legacy of the cinema as a ‘cultural interface,’ original mobile content attempts to provide a similar and illusionary experience of cinema on the mobile screen but at the same time inadvertently or self-reflexively betrays consciousness about the ontological condition of its own medium. This practice of new media relying on old media conventions or the persistent legacy of cinema is widely witnessed across the global uptake of the mobile screen. After the 3G mobile phone became widely available since 2002, various types of special events appeared to explore and promote the mobile screen experience, notably, the surge of international festivals to showcase mobile phone-generated or mobile phone-screened cinema. The early attempt of defining and institutionalizing new mobile content in tandem with cinematic tradition is vividly reflected in diverse festival names: Mobile Yeongsang 76 Peter Weible, Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, eds. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003). 46 Competition (Korea, 2002), World’s Smallest Film Festival (2003, US), 77 Zoie Cellular Cinema Festival (2004, USA), Senef Mobile & DMB festival (2005, Korea), 78 Mobile Film Festival (Taiwan, 2005), CellFlix Festival (US, 2006), 79 Pocket Film festival (France, 2005, 2006; Japan, 2007), 80 EDiT: Mobile Film Festival (Germany,2007), 81 Phone Film Festival (The Czech Republic, 2008), Bird Eye View Film Festival (UK, 2008), and World’s Tiniest Film Festival (Spain, 2008). 82 77 It defines “mobile films are digital films that are displayed on mobile devices.” http://www.internetvideomag.com/articles2003/BigDigit.htm (retrieved in 18 March 2008). 78 Opening in July 2005, it claims to be the world-first digital film festival for DMB (mobile TV) sponsored by Korean mobile TV and mobile phone service carriers including TU media Channel Blue, KTF Fimm – press release, June 2005. 79 For its “cellular film competition," the festival showcases films made on mobile phones. It particularly presents the awareness of emerging youth digital culture. “There is a fundamental difference between the kids creating these CellFlix videos and my generation or even kids three or five years older than them. This generation sees themselves not only as the consumers of media, but as the producers of media as well. These videos were not made for my audience; they were made for those creating the content," a festival organizer Dianne Lynch said. – Rebecca Lee, “Move Over, Sundance: Cell Phone Film Festival Takes Off,” ABC News, 2 May 2007, http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Story?id=3120077&page=1 (accessed in 18 March 2008). 80 It is a typical case where the industry is actively involved with a cultural attempt to mobilize filmmaking on mobile phone. Festival organizer, Paris' Forum des Images, distributed 3G mobile phones and a directive to 100 film-makers, writers, musicians, and other creative peoples. “[It is] Europe's first celebration of the cinematic potential of mobile phones. The festival director suggests an interesting analogy between mobile technology and cinema, in that “the constraints of making movies on a mobile phone were in some ways similar to producing film on the primitive "cinematographe" camera invented by the Lumières.” - Rory Mulholland, “Festival Celebrates Mobile Phone Movies,” BBC NEWS, 6 October 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4314894.stm October 6, 2005 (accessed in 18 March 2008). 81 This festival refers mobile content to ‘minisodes.’ 82 It was designed to promote ‘mobile phone video sharing,’ by a commercial sponsor who specializes in Video Ringtone (Vringo) during Mobile World Congress 2008. 47 Mostly sponsored by local mobile service carriers, these festivals resonate with Korean companies’ industrial textual practice of defining and cultivating the mobile screen experience, although with various agendas. The arbitrary use of ‘film,’ ‘movie,’ and ‘cinema’ in combination with technological references to mobile devices such as ‘pocket,’ ‘cellular,’ and ‘phone’ provides rich cases that show how new media technology is culturally mobilized into familiar media practices. It also represents the particular rhetorical strategies by which the newness of the mobile screen is addressed, with most focus on the potential changes of image production and delivery systems that mobile technology could generate: mostly, the mobilization of ‘personal’ production and exhibition as seen in their statements. However, their intended or neglected slip of identifying mobile contents as film –apparently a technically incongruous term with mobile digital content- is particularly interesting in the sense that it indicates the persistent effort of securing continuity between old and new. Specially, this linguistically diverse representation of the cultural understanding of mobile content becomes more complex in the Korean context, where a single Korean word ‘Yeonghwa’ (meaning, moving images) refers to English concepts of film, movie, and cinema simultaneously without marking differences between the three English words. For example, SK Telecom chose ‘Yeongsang,’ which signifies broader ranges of either static or moving images, in their first mobile cinema event 48 ‘Mobile Yeongsang Competition,’ and switched to ‘Mobile Yeonghwa’ for most of their subsequent original mobile content. In translating this culturally specific mobile screen practice for this study, I suggest the term of ‘Mobile Cinema’ for Korean ‘Mobile Yeonghwa’ as it corresponds to my theoretical consideration of mobile content and mobile screens in the broader context of and in relation to conventional mediascapes, as a new media practice that resonates with the changing media paradigm in terms of image production, delivery and consumption, not as an isolated case of digital video content. Considering that in film and media studies, according to rigid distinctions of terminology, ‘Film’ is used to refer to the technological and medium specific dimension of moving images, fundamentally based on the condition of celluloid film strip, ‘movies’ to the commercial and industrial entity, and ‘cinema’ to an institutional practice, such terms as ‘Mobile Film’ and ‘Mobile Movie’ are not only limited but insufficient to characterize the comprehensive aesthetic and cultural significance of mobile content and mobile screen practices. Cinema, in this sense, is not dead, although its celluloid origin may have become a memory, but rejuvenated more than ever, persistently operating as a cultural interface par excellence of original images that educates and guards the cultural experience of any new forms of moving images. What cinema might have lost is its institutional power as a public technology, that is, the ‘decline of cinema as public space.’ The media transition accompanying digital technology, 49 latent since the early days of media history throughout the development of television, and convergent industrial practices that head toward the ‘one-source- multi-use’ paradigm, dispersed the location of the cinematic experience into diverse venues outside of the ritualized social space of theater, and thus ‘privatized’ the cinema for the ‘de-centralized user/spectator.’ However, with the mobile screen this decentralized user is spatialized and materialized as opposed to what early digital theories predicted about immaterialized subjectivity in virtual space. The mobile screen keeps the controlling subject, who can immediately control the screen and whose subjectivity is always particularly spatialized (in diverse viewing locations across private and public space) and materialized, deeply situated within his/her distracting environment. The mobile screen, therefore, embodies the advent of the personal screen media through its nomadic display of cinematic imaginary, the aesthetic possibility (intersected) in the context of network, and the interactive relationship with users within ubiquitous digital screen culture, alluding to what early cinema has dreamt as its future, a cinema dependent on “the reflexivity of embodied spectatorship.” 83 83 Lauren Rabinovitz, “More than Movies: A History of Somatic Visual Culture through Hales’ Tours, IMAX and Motion Simulation Rides,” Memory Bites: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, eds. Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 100. 50 Chapter II Screen Nation Until the late 1990s, it was hard to imagine that one day Korea would become one of the most powerful players in the global race toward digital media technologies. Not only for Koreans but also for outsiders, the current prestige of Korea as an “IT power house” or “Global Digital Test Bed” seems to have arrived as a sudden revelation given that “fewer than 1 percent of South Korean residents used the internet in 1984 but by 2004 more than 71 percent of South Korean households subscribed to broadband net service.” 1 The usage rate of high-speed broadband internet has reached 77 percent along with 78 percent of mobile phone subscription in 2007, 2 accrediting Korea with a reputation of being the ‘most wired country.’ Since 2002, Korea has been ranked first in the ITU’s Digital Opportunity Index. 3 The former exporter of household electronic products is renowned for its high-technology and associated products: namely the mobile phone, semi-conduct chip and screen. 1 John Borland and Michael Kanelos, “South Korea Leads the way,” CNET News.com, 28 July 2004. 2 National Information Society Agency, Kukga Jeongbo Sahwoehwa Bekseo (National Informatization Whitepaper), Seoul, Korea, 2007. 3 International Telecommunication Union), World Information Society Report 2007, 58, http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/publications/worldinformationsociety/2007/ (accessed in 25 April 2008). 51 In the midst of Korea’s gradual refurbishment of advanced information technologies and transformation to the “digital Korea,” 4 mobile technology occupies the central position. Not only do the continuing technological innovations of mobile network and product developments such as 3G mobile phone, DMB (T-DMB) and Wibro carry out their intended mission to boost the national economy in the global market, but mobile media culture also deeply infiltrates everyday life as the catalyst for changes to the media environment heading toward digital, personal, convergent screen culture. For example, it is reported that 2,300,000 PMP (portable media player) were sold in 2007, surmounting the sales of TV sets at 2,100,000. Chung Seok-Won, Vice-President of Raincom, credits the dramatic increase of the sales of PMP to the “frenzy of downloaded video clip such as American TV shows and UCC since the beginning of 2006.” 5 Simply speaking, the networked mobile screen represents the current techno-cultural configuration of Korean society. However, it is not the aim of this chapter to celebrate the achievement of Korea. In order to articulate the cultural shaping of mobile technology as is, this chapter investigates the specific techno- social, cultural and discursive contexts of the development of mobile technology 4 Tomi Ahonen and Jim O'Reilly, Digital Korea: Convergence of Broadband Internet, 3G Cell Phones, Multiplayer Gaming, Digital TV, Virtual Reality, Electronic Cash, Telematics, Robotics, E-Government and the Intelligent Home, (London: Futuretext, 2007); John Borland and Michael Kanelos, Ibid. 5 Chosun Daily, 21 February 2007. 52 in Korea since its birth to the present. Most of all, the story of mobile phone technology in Korea will reveal that in fact the uptake of mobile technology and following successful innovations and appropriations were Korea’s effort to deal with the force of globalization, which has significantly affected every part of political and social spheres of the global scene since the early 1990s. In particular, the first section follows the historical and discursive trajectory of mobile phone technology that was systematically promoted as the flagship project of a national economic development plan along with other Information Technologies since the 1980s to the present while speculating on the economic significance of screen- related industries, more precisely, the screen-related exports industry within the paradigm of globalization The current configuration of Korean mobile phone culture was born out of the cultural paradigm of ‘globalization through localization’ that emerged in the early 1990s and intensified after the critical moment of economic crisis in 1997, often referred to ‘IMT-crisis.’ However, the impact of the discourse of globalization through localization was not contained in the technological sector but rather wide-spread, reflecting the anxiety and ambivalent cultural discourse in Korea faced with the force of globalization. Entertainment and media industries were no exception to this flow, and the changes of industrial system around and after 1997 directly echo this cultural discourse. In the sphere of the screen, for instance, the strategy of Korean blockbuster movies appears to be a kind of the cinematic translation of this 53 cultural paradigm of globalization through localization, paralleling the advance of Korea as an IT-power house and the emergence of Hallyu (Korean Wave). In this regard, the second section of this chapter discusses the parallel development of Korean film cinema, which has moved toward the convergent media environment where it eventually meets with the mobile phone industry in 2000s. These particular cultural practices of thinking and reacting to the issue of globalization from local perspectives in technological and cultural domains embody tensions and controversy regarding the process of globalization, corresponding to what Roland Robertson introduces as the practice of “glocalisation,” 6 which culminates on the mobile screen as a material yet symbolically contested terrain. 1. Launching Mobil e Screen in Digital Korea No other example better opens the story of the mobile screen in Korea than Helio’s transnational adventure that crystallizes the global flow of mobile technology. Simply speaking, Helio is a dream project of IT-powerhouse Korea epitomizing the cherished discourse of ‘globalization through localization’. What 6 Roland Robertson, " Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” Global Modernities, eds. M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (London: Sage, 1995), 25-44. 54 Helio imports to the United States are what Korea desires to export: mobile phone hand-sets, advanced mobile technologies and mobile phone culture. Considering that Korea and the United States have a long-standing international trading relationship, the story of Helio might not seem unique at first glance. It is with the consideration of the challenged power dynamics between the local and the global in terms of the dissemination of new media technology that renders the case of Helio memorable, in that it is the mobile phone technology – one of the newest and most sophisticated new media technologies- that Korea is able to export and not import. Particularly, it is Korea’s unique strategy of developing mobile technology into screen media through the exploration of networked mobile screens such as 3G mobile phone multimedia content service and mobile TV that put Korea on the map of global mobile phone culture. However, the rhetoric of globalization through localization is not something new but familiar that has underlined the long history of the development of the information and telecommunication technologies in Korea since the 1980s. Throughout various moments of the history of mobile phone technology in Korea, it has oscillated between the two opposing values of ‘nationalism’ and ‘globalization.’ Sometimes, these two values have been understood to compete with each other, yet other times they are employed coercively in order to achieve the mutual goal of ‘national economic development.’ Mobile technology has become a contested terrain in which these 55 opposing discourses are practically combined and moreover reinforce each other. In unveiling this dynamic between the actual historical development of mobile technology and the impact of the discourse, it is particularly important to scrutinize the role of nation-state government, which has functioned not only as a driving force for the development of mobile technology but also as a disseminator of ideological discourse into the public. That is, the public discourse of mobile technology in Korea, mediated through the conventional media, has played a significant role in overdetermining a particular technology as a national project and inviting an individual citizen to formulate a national identity through the uptake of the mobile phone technology. For instance, at the discursive level, buying a new mobile phone hand-set and subscribing to an up-to-date mobile phone service were not merely valorized as the extension of the personal freedom to employ a new technology but as the public act of supporting national economy and thus thereby strengthening national pride. It is not unusual to come across such headlines as “Korea invented [such] technologies, hand-sets, for the first time in the world” or “the most up-to-date technologies so far” in the popular media in Korea, which allude to the pervasive self-consciousness about the cultural significance of mobile technology. This rhetoric of pride towards technological development most explicitly appeared in the 1980s, when Korea began to transform itself into an information society. In the global history of media, it is not surprising to witness occasions where emerging new technology 56 becomes entangled with the nationalist discourse. Many studies on the cultural history of technology have provided rich examples of the constructed cultural discourse to celebrate the invention of new technology in service of reinforcing the superiority of a given society. For example, in his study of early days of Radio, William Boddy reveals, “the recurring triumphantist allegory of technologically enabled racial and geopolitical ascendancy was offered as early as 1858.” 7 This rhetoric continued to affect the dissemination of subsequent new media technologies until it re-surfaced the topography of the information society across the global as Manuel Castells eloquently addresses in Network Society. 8 Castells characterizes the historical period of globalization since 1980s in terms of the establishment of informational society, where the new society is both “capitalist and informational, while presenting considerable historical variation in different countries, according to their history, culture, institutions, and to their specific relationship to global capitalism and information technology.” 9 Technology plays the fundamental role in this process as technology (or the lack 7 A typical example of this tendency works like this: “H. L. Wayland, in the New England, “the new telegraph gives the preponderance of power to the nations representing the highest elements of humanity… It is the civilized and Christian nations, who, through weak comparatively in numbers, are by these means of communication made more than a match for the hordes of barbarism.”; Originally quoted in Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to Marconi, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 10; re-quoted in William Boddy, New Media and Public Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 17. 8 Manuel Castell, ed. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Vol.1) (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996). 9 Manuel Castell, Ibid., 13. 57 of it) embodies the “capacity of societies to transform themselves” and inevitably focuses on role of the state that intervenes in deciding on the use of technology. 10 The history of Korean mobile phone technology is situated in this context of the global transformation into information society, as referred to by Castells. Since the 1980s up to the present, Korean society, by state intervention, has embarked on an accelerated process of ‘technological modernization’ and ‘informationalization,’ which has been expected to change the fate of the economy, national military power, and social well-being in the face of global flows. Considering that technological development is the essential part of modernization project, the valorization of the ‘technological modernization’ is not limited to Korea. Technology, as David Morley argues, has always been the “central potency of [its] modernity,” in that when the modernization project proceeds, the perspective toward the history tends to be based on the degree of the development of technology. 11 However, it is the collapse of discourses of ‘modernization’ and ‘informationalization’ (or ‘globalization’) that characterizes the cultural specificity of Korean uptake of mobile phone technology. Simply speaking, mobile technology was taken up as an iconic driving force for Korea’s race toward information society, fulfilling the belated modernization project. 10 Manuel Castell, Ibid., 7. 11 David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism: Japan-Panic,” Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries, (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), 173. 58 Due to its geopolitical and historical background, being geographically located outside of the West and historically marginalized from the modernist project of the early industrialization as a result of Japanese colonialism since the turn of the twentieth century, the urgency of technological development has always been strongly advocated in contemporary Korea. Ever since Korea acquired its independence from Japan in 1945, self-consciousness about its belated modernization has haunted Korean society. As in the cases of many so-called ‘third world’ countries which were newly liberated from colonial power after WW II, ‘catching up’ in the technological development was not only a survival tactic for sustaining Korea’s export driven economy but also a way of consolidating its national identity as a modern nation state. Hence, Korea’s development of an informational society in fact overlaps with the ‘belated modernization project’ for which technology will perform the central role. The popular slogan of “Let’s catch up the informationalization while belated in the industrialization” in 1990s adequately portrays the central characteristics of the Korean project of informationalization in the age of globalization, which ironically reinforces the borders and the power of the nation-state as opposed to the popular premise of globalization as the cause for the dissolution of national borders. 59 As such, in Korean society, technological development is understood to be a “collective goal” as Rey Chow argues. 12 In her study of the use of Walkman in China, Chow cogently points out that this is a general tendency in East Asian cultures, as part of the non-Western world that survived from the backwash of Imperialism and had no choice but to adopt the western-model of modernization along with already developed technologies. Hence, for these former colonies or neo-independent countries, catching up in the technological development that mostly originates from the West in order to modernize their country in fact means to westernize. Telecommunication, the prehistory of mobile phone technology, is one of the numerous modern technologies that required the process of modernization or westernization for these countries as well as for Korea before it rode into the information society. Although it is beyond the scope of this study to dwell on a historical overview of telecommunications development in Korea, I will focus on two significant historical moments in the development of telecommunication and mobile phone technology that shed light on Korea’s big leap from an underdeveloped and decolonized country to the birthplace of the most sophisticated mobile screen. 12 Rey Chow, “Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized: A Different Type of Question about Revolution,” Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, eds. Du Gay, P. et al (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 138. 60 The first historical moment of ‘Era of Globalization’ comes in the period of the ‘revolution of telecommunication technology,’ which roughly spans the 1980s to the economic crisis of 1997. The dominant discourse of the first moment is the ideology of self-reliance in response to globalization, primarily based on the premise of techno-determinism, which presupposes dynamics between the presence of the universal and autonomous global technology and local adaptations. Mobile phone technology was introduced during this period, in early 1984, with the cellular car phone system but until 1991 Korea lagged behind other Asian nations, not to mention industry leading Western countries, in terms of developing commercial mobile telephone service. However, the second half of the 1990s witnessed the rapid development of the mobile phone industry, and this dramatic change was largely attributed to the overall revolution of telecommunication technology and the unique industrial and governmental practices implemented during this first historical moment. Then, with the changed social conditions after economic crisis in 1997 and the phenomenal success of the mobile phone industry, came the second historical ‘Era of techno- nationalism,’ which continues into today. During this second moment, the discourse of techno-nationalism that developed out of the experience of the first historical moment has ascended into the central strategy of Korea coping with the continuing flow of globalization, but with a changed attitude from defensive resolution to aggressive policy. 61 Among many factors credited for the remarkable achievement in information technology during these periods, it is widely agreed that the government‘s strong leadership played a crucial role in leading collective effort. The strong role of government was prominent enough to the extent that the Korean model of government-led development of information technology and even the contribution of the elite bureaucrats in Korea became the subject of the study. 13 However, most studies also point out that it is the aligned force of the government and big private corporations, called ‘chaebul’, which have executed the developmental plan. This government-led developmental model and particularly the symbiotic relationship between the government and chaebul continue to operate until today, with pros and cons as seen in the case of SK Telecom’s and Korea Telecom’s mobile screen business. 14 13 For instance, ITU World Information Society Report 2007 allots the section for the Korean model of broadband internet dissemination, which focuses on the role of government in establishing the infrastructure and promoting the dissemination through effective policies. – ITU. Ibid., 58; The study on the leadership of Oh Myoung, a former Head of the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications represents the interest to the operation of government and policies during this period. - Kim Jeong-Su, Hanguk Tongsinui Hyeokmyeong: Oh Myoungui Leadership Yeongu (Korean Telecommunication Revolution: Study on Leadership of Oh Myoung), (Korea: Nanam Publisher, 2000). 14 The close alliance between the government and chaebul has been one of predominant characteristics of Korean model of economic development ever since Korea began its industrialization project, which has continuously generated a controversy about its pro and cons. For instance, one of the most heated debates centers on the issue of the favoritism for specific chabuls, which have intimate relationships with the government in many forms, to allow the licensing of promising business. 62 Dawn of Gl obalization: The revolution of Korean Tel ecommunications before 1997 and the discourse of Self-Reliance In the few English-language studies on the history of telecommunications in Korea, the changes of the 1980s are often described in terms of ‘miracle,’ ‘revolution,’ and ‘reform,’ which all emphasize Korea’s dramatic leap forward from the stage of underdevelopment in the 1970s. The miraculous reformation mainly aimed to modernize telecommunication systems, and most of all, as James Larson adequately pinpoints, to achieve economic and technological “self-reliance.” 15 On the one hand, the modernization of telecommunication systems was an inevitable, practical solution to achieve self- reliance in global economic systems where Korea, with a heavily export- orientated economic structure, had to cope with such challenges as increasing wages at home and greater competition from other nations. Hence, the continuing development of advanced telecommunications technology was called for in response to the general need for the nation’s economy to move into higher value-added services and products, which Korea could eventually export. On the other hand, the issue of self-reliance has always been central in any discourse of technological development in Korea since its birth as a modern nation. 15 James Larson, The Telecommunications Revolution in Korea, (Oxford University Press, 1995), 294. 63 From the beginning, modern communication technologies were either introduced by foreigners or served foreign interests in the declining Chosun dynasty, which was undergoing drastic transition and turmoil from old kingdom to modern nation after shattering its long-held ‘national seclusion’ policy and was thus facing threats from various imperial forces that desired to occupy Korea for commercial and political purposes in the late nineteenth century. For example, in August 20 1885, the first telegraph line between Gyeongseong (then, Seoul) and Incheon and The Hansung Telegraphy Ministry, the first Telecom authority in Korea, were officially established, a decade before Korea was colonized by Japan. However, The Hanseong Telegraphy Ministry was installed and operated by Ching Dynasty (then, China)'s finances and technology in accordance with its political ambition to expand its power over the Korean peninsula. It was two years after in 1887 that finally the Chosun Telegraph Ministry was established and the ensuing laws and regulations of telecommunication were issued under Chosun dynasty’s jurisdiction as an independent communication institution. Following the establishment of the telegraph system, Chosun government launched the initial form of telephone service beginning with the first public telephone service between Hanseong (another name for Seoul) and Incheon in 1902. However, only three years after its service, the communications control right was taken away by the contract signed under coercion by the Korea-Japan Communications Corporation on April 1, 1905. Since then until Korea was finally 64 liberated from Japan in 1945, the modern telephone system was placed under Japanese control. Figure 2.1 Hanseong Telephone Office, 1902. left. Figure 2.2 A Telephone Operator in 1900s. right. As the case of the early Telegraph system illustrates, the overall development of telecommunication technology in modern Korea history is no doubt politically charged. In his study of the telecommunication system in colonial Korea, Daqing Yang scrutinizes the strong political nature of the implementation of telecommunication systems, which has led to following developments in a similar direction. 16 When the information infrastructure was built in colonial Korea, Yang argues, it was not primarily for civilian business activities. Rather, the telecommunications networks, especially long-distance 16 Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Imperialism, 1930-1945, (Cambridge and London: The Harvard University Asia Center, 2003): “Colonial Korea in Japan’s Imperial Telecommunications Network, “Colonial Modernity in Korea, eds. Shin Gi-Wook and Michael Robinson (Cambridge and London: The Harvard university Asia Center, 1999). 65 telephones, were developed mainly “to meet Imperial Japan’s urgent political and military desire to consolidate control over the Korean population” 17 as in the case of the first international telephone service, which was built between Gyeongseong and Osaka by the Japanese colonial government in 1933 as a part of the Japan-Korea-Manchuria cable network in order to connect the colonies of Imperial Japan. In the same year, Gyeongseong Broadcasting Station, Korea's first broadcasting station, opened, providing both Korean and Japanese language broadcasts to about 1,440 radio subscribers. Hence, compared to the American case when the telephone was introduced as a private communication media, 18 the telephone entered into a Korean society as the part of ‘public’ technology for social governance, and it was much later in the Japanese colonial period when ordinary Koreans were given access to telephone technology as a modern personal medium. Even in post-colonial Korea, telephone technology did not smoothly return to the hand of Korean state but rather remained under the control of others as Korea was rapidly involved in a new cold war world order because of the Korean War. Remains of Japan’s imperial telecommunications network served to consolidate cold war politics over the Korean peninsula. Without any 17 Daqing Yang, “Colonial Korea in Japan’s Imperial Telecommunications Network, “ 135. 18 For the detailed accounts of the history of telecommunications in the United States, see Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). 66 resources and technologies to maintain it up-to-date, the post-colonial Korean government, immediately after the liberation, could not fully refurbish or expand the telephone network for the use of Korean people. As the demand for international communications increased during Trusteeship led by the United States in Southern part of Korea, the U. S. military command assigned a U.S. telecommunications company, RCA, to be in charge of the international communications business in Korean territory. Accordingly, RCA established an office in Seoul and began international communications operations. Hence, just as the first international call was between colonial capital Gyeongseong and Osaka, the first “direct” international call was made between Seoul and Washington. It was simply a transfer of control and power from Japan to the United States; it was also “American engineers, during the Korea War, who repaired Japanese cables (Mukden cable) and stations in order to maximize the cable’s use as a trunk line for troops in Korea and as a vital link between General MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo and U.S. forces in the peninsula.” 19 This early history of Korean telecommunication system is particularly significant in the sense that on the one hand this legacy of the centralized control system of telecommunication technology has continued until very recently when the telecommunications system was eventually privatized in 2002, shaping the politically charged nature of technology in Korea. Regardless of systematic 19 Daqing Yang, Ibid., 187. 67 transitions along with political and social changes, the tendency of ‘publicizing’ communication media has continuously affected the cultural use and the lived experience of media technologies to a certain degree. On the other hand, it shows how the rhetoric of self-reliance or the independence of technology was so deeply sewn to the historical development of telecommunication systems, although it has been reformulated into different forms of discourses. Since the Korean government eventually took over its control after Korean War was over, the telecommunication system has remained under central government control either directly or indirectly in pursuit of the collective goal of achieving self- reliance. More specifically, Korea Telecom (KT), the government-owned telecommunication service provider established in 1981 under the name of Korea Telecom Authority (KTA), basically monopolized the telecommunication sector, taking exclusive charge of building and managing the telecommunication infrastructure and service in the domestic market until it began to be privatized in 1991 as a response to pressure from global economic systems (such as WTO telecom accord in 1998) to open the market. Until it was entirely privatized in 2002, Korea Telecom was responsible for the overall establishment of telecommunication systems encompassing local telephone, high-speed internet, and wireless telecommunication. 20 20 Korea Telecommunications market privatization began in 1991 as 20% of KT stock was sold to private sectors and progressed slowly during the 1990s until it was 100% privatized in 2002. – for 68 During the 1980s, Korea continued to put a strong emphasis on “localization of technologies with an eye toward strengthening its own telecommunications industries and increasing their success in export markets.” 21 It was also the period when the repressive military government tried to compensate for its lack of political legitimacy with economic development. 22 Hence, the technological development once again was closely tied to or served the larger goal of leading economic growth of the nation. During this period, the Korean model of technological development, named the “Complex Product System” 23 or the “National Innovative System,” was firmly established and has remain effective ever since. The TDX (Time Division Exchange) telephone switching system and the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) wireless system are two representative achievements in Information Technology run by the government as national flagship projects during the first historical moments detailed history of telecommunications privatization in Korea, see J.P.Singh, “Privatization and Market Liberalization in Asia,” Telecommunications Reform in India, ed. Rafig Dossani (Westport: Quorum Books, 2002). 21 James Larson, Ibid., 296. 22 Singh argues it is important to view the dramatic reformation of telecom system during this period in light of the political need of the government of the time. For example, in the 1980s, the Korea state government “became more conscious of providing services to its growing ranks of middle-income services” so implemented many policies including “the elimination of [phone] waiting lists by 1987, which exceeded 5million in 1982,” because of the necessity of compensating for its lack of political legitimacy. - Singh, Ibid., 103. 23 Cheong Jae-Yong and Whang Hye-Ran, “Developing the Complex System in Korea: The Case study of TDX and CDMA Telecom System,” International Journal of Technological Learning, Innovation and Development, Vol. 1, No.2 2007: 204– 25. 69 of modernization. Studies of Korean telecommunication history unanimously focus on the effective operation of the Korean model of technological development that integrates such agents as government, manufactures, and users where the government takes initiative in formulating long-term plans of development, R&D investments (through a public research institute - most notably, ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute- ) and policies while the private sector invests and commercializes the technology. Most of all, it is obvious yet significant to note that this Korean model of technological development embodies the cultural hegemony of the nationalist paradigm within which the goal of achieving technological autonomy and economic growth are deeply intertwined. For example, Korea Telecom’s official acknowledgement of its achievement of the domestically developed TDX self- reflexively divulges this nationalistic economic logic behind the technological development, as it says, “not only TDX led to improved telephone services, [but also] it led to decreased foreign currency spending and increased foreign currency earnings because foreign-made switching systems no longer had to be imported and the TDX-1 could be exported.” 24 While nationalistic discourse dominated the development of the telecommunications system since the colonial period up to the 1980s, what 24 Korea Telecom, “KT 120 year of history,” http://event.kt.com/new_kt/eng/about_kt/history/main.html (accessed in 19 February 2007). 70 facilitated the lagged development of mobile technology in Korea in the early 1990s was ironically the force of globalization imposed from outside. In response to the United States’ pressure to open Korea’s value-added network markets as part of the GATT free trade policy signed in 1991, which eventually led to opening market access to foreigners in all sectors by 1998 under the WTO telecom accord, as well as domestic demand to privatize the telecom market, the Korean government restructured the governmental organization and information technology industry in the direction of privatization. By this point, Korea Telecom established its goal of localizing telecommunication systems with, as it claims, “state-of-art strength of the basic nationwide telephone network,” 25 which eventually became the foundation for nation-wide high-speed broadband internet. While allowing more freedom for the private sector of the telecom industry, the Korean government developed extensive policies and investment plans to boost up these weak links - value added networks (which means data communication) and mobile networks that were directly exposed to the flood of foreign technologies in an open market system. As a result, Korea Telecom and its auxiliary company Dacom 26 started to build up a broadband network utilizing its nation-wide landline telephone infrastructure and launched HiTEL, 25 James Larson, Ibid., 71. 26 Dacom was created in 1982 under the condition that 30% of its stock was owned by KTA until 1991. In order to promote competitive market structure, Korean government privatized Dacom 100 % in 1994 and since then Dacom started competing with KT in long distance telephone service. 71 Korea's first PC communications service, in 1991, which laid the foundation for the so-called myth of the high-speed broadband infrastructure of current Korea. The most significant result of this changed environment was the Korean government’s decision to embark on the mobile phone project centered on 2G CDMA technology. That is, in order to defend technological independence and resist the pressing force of globalization, the Korean government chose mobile telecommunications as a key strategic industry for “systematic internal capacity- building,” which would in turn contribute to the country’s future exports and its competitiveness in the global IT market. 27 Following the successful precedents, the mobile phone project proceeded strategically through the collaboration of private corporations and government as part of the national economic development plan. Since 1991, coordinated by ETRI, four of Korea’s leading telecommunications and electronics companies including SK Telecom and Samsung Electronics engaged in a technology transfer program with the U.S. company Qualcomm. ETRI and the consortium of corporations acquired licenses for manufacturing and selling mobile phones and CDMA infrastructure equipment in the global market and finally launched the commercial CDMA mobile phone service for the first time in the world in 1996. At that time, GSM (Groupe Spécial Mobile) mobile phone system, originating in Europe, was 27 Manuel Castells et al, Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 18. 72 successfully dominating the global mobile phone market, and CDMA technology was left unexplored. Considering this context, it was an adventurous decision to adopt neglected CDMA cell phone technology, but it turned out to be effective for Korea’s long-term plan to secure the U.S. market for possible exports of mobile phone equipment as well as to pre-empt their favorable position with new technology in the fledging global mobile phone industry. Once the CDMA mobile phone technology was successfully deployed, Korean corporations aggressively cultivated domestic markets backed by supportive government policies. In particular, SK Telecom, which is responsible for the following innovations of mobile phone service and satellite DMB service, entered into the telecommunication business after it acquired a license for the primary cellular phone business by taking over 23 % of management right of Korean wireless telecommunication Inc. (KWT) in 1994; competing with KTF and LG Telecom, SK Telecom has kept its dominant status in the domestic mobile communications until today. 28 After privatizing KWT in 1995, SK Telecom launched the test version of CDMA digital mobile phone service in Incheon and Bucheon and eventually expanded it throughout the nation. 28 However, charges of nepotism for awarding telecommunications licenses (especially in cellular) to influential chaebul such as SK by the Noh Tae Woo administrations came under intense public and judicial scrutiny later, as the owners of SK became in-laws with previous president Noh Tae-Woo through the marriage of their children. 73 The role of government was not limited to leading technological development but extended to encouraging the consumption of this new technology through a series of special policies, ranging from handset subsidies to preferential regulations implemented as a part of the long-term economic development plan. 29 It is a widely observed practice for government to employ long-term technological development plans across the globe but the efficiency of the Korean model of government-industry cooperation, Larson contends, lies in “its actual influence and immediate realization of the commercialized form of technology that is oriented toward the export,” satisfying both parties. 30 However, after 1997, although the state still remains a strong force behind the success of the Information Technology sector in Korea, the private corporation has emerged as a primary force in advancing sophisticated mobile phone service and expanding IT infrastructure. 31 29 For the detailed accounts of this debate, see Suh Yi-Jong “Mobile phone Baljeonui Sahwoemunhwajeok Yeoggeonkwa Geu Yeonghyang ( Socio-cultural Condition of the Development of Mobile Phone and Its Socio-cultural Effect),” Jeongbo Tongsinkwa Hanguksahwoeui Byeonhwa (Information and Telecommunication and the Change of Korean Society), eds. Lee Bong Ho and Kim Dong-Ju, (Korea: Communication Books, 2005); Lee Young-Yong, Park Yong-Tae and Oh Hyun-Sik, “The Impact of Competition on the Efficiency of Public Enterprise: The Case of Korea Telecom,” Asia Pacific Journal of Management, vol. 17, 2000: 423-442. ; Kim Dong-Yeob, “The Politics of Market Liberalization: A Comparative Study of the South Korea and Philippine Telecommunications Service Industries,” Contemporary Southeast Asia, vol. 24, no. 2, 2002: 337- 370 ; Kim Han-Joo, Byun Sang-Kyu and Park Myeong-Chul, “Mobile Handset Subsidy Policy in Korea: Historical Analysis and Evaluation,” Telecommunications Policy, vol. 28, 2004: 23-42. 30 James Larson, Ibid., 72. 31 Choi Sun-Gyu, “ITwa Hanguk Gyeongjeui Hyoyulkwa Bunbe (IT and the Efficiency and Equity of Korean Economy),” Jeongbo Tongsinkwa Hanguksahwoeui Byeonhwa (Information and Telecommunication and the Change of Korean Society), eds. Lee Bong Ho & Kim Dong Ju ((Korea: 74 This shift of power dynamics is partially connected to the changed political climate - the democratization of Korean society along with the inauguration of the civilian government in 1992 after almost thirty years of military dictatorship- and the increased power of the Korean economy. Thereafter, the meaning of globalization has also undergone transformation. While globalization was conceived as a threatening force that might shatter the national economy and thus induced the strong nationalistic response against it during the first historical moment, it gradually became accepted as an unavoidable and even necessary condition for extending national power based on the exports of IT products in the second historical moment. However, in spite of the growing acceptance of globalization, the strong tendency of techno- nationalism has continued to impact the discourse of technology in Korea and even become intensified after the economic crisis in 1997. Techno-Nationalism and the Myth of the Mobil e Phone in Post -IMF era The second historical moment came in the late 1990s, particularly after 1997 when the pan-Asian economic crisis hit the Korean economy hard and brought about significant changes in diverse dimensions of Korean society. For most Koreans, the economic crisis in 1997, commonly identified as ‘IMF Communication Books, 2005), 36. 75 (International Monetary Fund) crisis,’ was one of the revealing moments when the domestic economy was forced to encounter the global economy. The economic crisis after the collapse of the stock market in 1997 suddenly damaged the myth of economic achievement, which has been Korea’s ultimate goal for the past fifty years of its modernization effort. The Korean economy plummeted from eleventh to last place among forty-six advanced and emerging market economies, and it fell from sixth to thirty-fifth place in terms of global competitiveness ranking in 1998. 32 Unemployment rates soared beyond 8 percent at the peak of the crisis and the GNP dropped sharply from $10,543 in 1996 to $6,750 in 1998. Many people lost their jobs, crime and suicide rates rose higher than ever before, and the lives of many middle class families were radically undermined by economic problems. The so called ‘reformation of economic structure’ required by the IMF to pull Korea out of its economic crisis and remodel it according to standards of the world economic system, has effected the everyday lives of Koreans. With the loss of economic independence by the intervention of the IMF, the collective sense of loss and failure created a new mode of cultural sensitivity. As the national economy faced an unprecedented crisis, the fear of the uncertainty of the future prosperity and 32 Kim Bu-Young, “Globalizationei dehan Baneung: Hanguk Yeonghwa Saneopeul Jungsimeuro (The Reaction against Globalization; The case of Korean Film Industry)“ (MA thesis, Seoul National University, 2000), 20; requoted in Kim Sung- Kyung, “Renaissance of Korean National Cinema’ as a Terrain of Negotiation and Contention between the Global and the Local: Analyzing Two Korean Blockbusters, Shiri (1999) and JSA (2000),” 5, http://www.essex.ac.uk/Sociology/postgraduates/kim.pdf (accessed in 25 April 2008). 76 moreover the anxiety over foreign forces involved with the crisis, in this case, global financial institutions represented by IMF, turned into the resurgent nationalist sentiment across all spheres of Korean society. To defend the national economy became a priority more than ever and the discourse of Neo-nationalism dominated the public sentiment in the cultural sphere of Korea. By the time of the economic crisis, Korea was on the stage as one of the largest and important exporters of mobile phone handsets and was known for its innovative invention of Information Technologies and business models. Hence, as it was for Japan in the 1990s, mobile phone technology has suddenly become mobilized as a hope for future economic recovery, a competitive technology that was expected to defend national identity. The subsequent success of implementing multimedia centered mobile phone service and mobile screen media in early 2000 fueled this sentiment to the point that mobile phone technology has become the symbol of national pride and economic strength. It is not coincident that two of the top profitable export products of Korea were a mobile phone hand-set and an LCD screen. Along with the semiconductor chip, these three IT products occupied seventy-one percent of Korea’s trading profit in year 2002. 33 Considering the economic importance of these technologies in Korea, it is not farfetched to argue that the mobile screen emerged as a kind of 33 National Information Society Agency, Ibid., 250. 77 synthesizing technology that could potentially maximize the synergy of these hot technologies. In this atmosphere, ‘globalization’ appeared to be an urgent agenda for Korea to confront, but it was met only with ambivalence. On the one hand, globalizing Korea was touted as the only practical solution to survive and keep up with other first world metropolises. On the other hand, the increased self- awareness of Korea’s inferior status as a minority within the dominant first- world economic system stirred up shared resentment against globalization. In the Information Technology sector, the paradigm of globalization was met with more aggressive strategy beyond the rhetoric of self-reliance that governed the previous historic moment. In other words, the strategy of ‘globalization through localization’ replaced the monolithic discourse of globalization as one-way top- down model that forced Korea to catch up to the advanced, universal and western technology and thereby appeared to be the more proactive ideology, positioning Korea to be the active creator of the flow, not a passive follower. In a sense, the valorization of the localization of technology seems to be simply the transformation or extension of the discourse of self-reliance; but in the post-IMF era, the localization did not stop at improving the national economy but rather aimed to advance it in the global market, responding to the repressed desire to be just like industry leading western countries. Simply speaking, the rhetoric of localization is based on the strong economic logic that proclaims the necessity of 78 winning in the global competition with domestically cultivated technology. Such common claims of the invention or commercialization of the ‘world first’ or ‘world best’ technology in popular media reveal this obsession with the ‘invincible domestic technology.’ However, the ambiguous rhetoric of ‘globalization through localization’ disguises the fundamentally intermingled or inseparable relationship between these two notions by bestowing localization a (temporary) priority as a separate process from ‘globalization.’ In particular, this economically over-determined status of the local and the national culture in relation to the globalizing force has been a central issue within postcolonial discussion; Homi K. Bhabha cogently argues, “the ‘locality’ of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself, nor must it be seen simply as ‘other’ in relation to what is outside or beyond it.” 34 Korean society in the Post-IMF era most explicitly recalled this ‘international dimension’ of one nation-space. Without question, the very idea of localization, the recent attention to the local in binary relation to the global, is the other side of the phenomenon of globalization. From the beginning, Korean mobile phone history has embodied the symbiotic constitution of the local and global as mobile phone technology itself was originally imported through global trade and appropriated into a new form of technological product locally rather than domestically invented, which in return Korea exports to the global market. 34 Homi K Bhabha, Introduction, in Nation and Narration, (London: Routledge, 1990), 4. 79 Therefore, the story of Korean mobile technology is not likely to begin without the consideration of the condition of globalization, as does the story of global mobile phone culture. What this story tells in particular is the improbability of the premise of globally universal technology and the importance of addressing the complex and heterogeneous formulation of a cultural and social technology in a specific local context, whose meaning of ‘locality,’ however, is created out of its constant negotiation with the global. Going back to the beginning of the myth of Korean mobile phone, it is feasible to argue that Korea’s application and realization of the technology put U.S.-originated CDMA mobile technology on the map of the global mobile phone business. Specifically, the innovation of 3G mobile content service played a key role in attracting attention to the Korean uptake of mobile phone technology beyond its previous position as an exporter of mobile phone hand-sets. The severe competition among domestic telecommunication operators, especially between SK telecom and KTF, paved the road to rapid innovations, and their industrial practices play a key role in constituting the cultural uptake of the mobile screen. In 1998, SK Telecom acquired more than 5 mil. subscribers and annexed Shinsegi Telecom, which was founded by a consortium of 246 domestic and foreign companies in 2002. In competition with SK telecom’s expansion, Korea Telecom, a hegemonic domestic telecommunications provider, changed its name into ‘KT’ and refurbished its mobile phone business through the reborn 80 KTF, a merged corporation of KT Freetel and KT M.com, in May 2001. Out of this competitive environment that quickly saturated the mobile phone service market based on telephony, Korea moved ahead in exploring the next generation of mobile phone service. As a result, around 2002 when most of other countries were still in the middle of establishing 2G voice-phony mobile phone networks, various new mobile content service appeared with the claim of being the ‘world first.’ The advent and successful implementation of mobile content services is particularly significant in that on the one hand it demonstrates the Korean information technology industry is maturing in the ‘software’ business with the capability of producing and exporting creative content, including online games and mobile multimedia/business content, which are now known as specialties of IT-Korea beyond the manufacturing of hardware. On the other hand, mobile content services accompany the overall transition of media industries heading toward a new way of producing, consuming and exporting entertainment content known as the paradigm of media convergence. The various mobile phone content services that SK Telecom and KTF have developed since 2002 were eventually exported to other national mobile services including notably ‘Mobile Cyworld’ in Japan and China, mobile games throughout Asia and most representatively Helio in the United States. In other words, the development of mobile phone technology after 1997 demonstrates the big leap of Korea from an 81 importer of western technology toward an exporter of sophisticated domestic technology and cultural products. Along with the global success of Korean technology and products, the rhetoric of self-reliance or independence has been overshadowed by the more aggressive attempt to surmount other competitors in the global market. For example, when the commercial mobile TV service was launched for the first time in the world in 2005, it was touted as the extension of what the 3G mobile phone has achieved and carried over the nationalistic discourse that circumscribed the success of mobile phone technology. As terrestrial DMB technology invented in Korea was eventually selected as an EU technological standard for Mobile TV service in 2006, it became a next hope for the nation’s future technological prosperity in spite of its slow uptake in the domestic market. How much cultural and financial capital is being poured into cultivating the mobile screen business is immeasurable, but the following statement by Ministry of Information and Communication adequately sums up the closely knit political and economic logics of state-run development plan and betrays a self-reflexive awareness of the significance of mobile technology in Korea that this chapter has examined so far. This statement advocates the government’s new long-term ‘U-Korea IT 839’ plan, which aims to foster 8 services, 3 infrastructures and 9 new growth engines including the development of infrastructure, software engines and commercial application services in service of ‘ubiquitous computing.’ 82 The development of serious of innovative technologies from TDX in the 80s to CDMA, broadband internet since 1990s has established Korea as global IT power house… however we cannot afford to be complacent with past achievements since today’s winner-takes-all environment allows only a company or a nation with best technologies to survive the fierce competition across the international border…. To cope with the challenge and to make a leap toward a global leader in IT field, Korea should take an untraveled road that no other competitor has stepped. 35 In spite of the typical official euphoric tone, this statement nicely summarizes the fundamental strategy of the Korean model of technological developmental of the past twenty years, and reflects the ideology of techno- nationalism in the age of globalization. The desire to step on ‘the untraveled road’ may mean a road to the blue ocean, the newest market for private corporations, and to the prevalence of Korea as an independent nation without interference of the outside forces of the Korean government. In this context, it is notable that this untraveled road has been paved in search of the newest forms of screens. We could ask why and how the screen has become the most contested terrain of the newest information technologies in Korea, to the extent that naming Korea the ‘Screen-Nation’ is not an exaggeration. So far, this section traced the discursive trajectory of the development of mobile phone technology 35 Ministry of Information and Communication, press release, “U-Korea IT 839,” http://www.mic.go.kr (accessed in 20 April 2006). 83 in Korea. In order to describe the picture of Korea as a screen-nation, more pieces of the puzzle need to be gathered from various spheres of Korean society. 2. Cinema and Glocalisation: Korean Bl ockbusters, Shared Dream on a Big Screen In 1998, the only country where the movie Titanic (James Cameron, US) sunk in the box office battle was Korea. A domestically produced high-budget action film, Shiri (Kang Je-Gyu), ranked top in the box office against this globally successful Hollywood blockbuster by marking the biggest box office record (over 5 million) in Korean film history. The success of Shiri is often compared to the battle of David and Goliath in popular discourse. Following Shiri, a series of so called ‘Korean blockbuster’ films such as Phantom: The Submarine (Min Byeong- Cheon, 1999), Joint Security Area (Park Chan-Uk, 2000), Friends (Gwak Gyeong- Taek, 2001), 2009 Lost Memories (Yi Si-Myeong, 2002), Brotherhood (Taegukki, Kang Je-Gyu, 2003), Silmido (Kang Woo-Suk,2003), Typhoon (Gwak Gyeong-Taek, 2005), and The Host (Gwoemul, Bong Jun-Ho, 2006), have successively renewed domestic box office records while updating the industrial indexes of production and marketing costs. Intended to be ‘big’ in every aspect of film production, these 84 self-defined ‘blockbusters’ not only led the phenomenal success of Korean films in the domestic market against Hollywood imports, but also facilitated the production of blockbusters as a new trend in the Korean film industry. 36 It is not an overstatement when many Korean film critics claim that Korean blockbusters mark a new phase of Korean cinema, a so called, ‘renaissance of Korean national cinema.’ The advent of Korean blockbusters also coincided with the emergence of Hallryu (Korean Wave), which designates the popularity of Korean popular culture including cinema, K-Pop, and Television dramas that have taken Asia by storm. The success story of Hallryu in many ways parallels the myth of the Korean mobile phone in not only their contemporaneous occurrences but also in their role of mediating and further promulgating the ideological and discursive paradigm of the specific historical moment haunted by the force of globalization. In particular, the reformulation of the structure of the entertainment media industry during this period has shaped a favorable environment for newly emerging digital entertainment content business. That is, the domestic media industry’s capability of producing and commercializing competitive multimedia content in recognition of the potential global market played a significant role in 36 The Korean film industry has recorded over 40 % of the national market share at the box office since 1999. In 2001, Korean films made up 49.1 % of the domestic box office and they have increased beyond 55 % in 2003 and 2004 - Korean Film Council, Hanguk Yeonghwa Saneop Yeongam (Annual Book of the Korean Film Industry), (Seoul, Korea: Gipmundang, 1998- 2004). 85 cultivating vigorous experiments with new screen technology. In this context, forming part of the Hallryu, Korean blockbusters present the particular case of shifted cultural paradigm on the side of a big screen as they have remapped the discourse about Korean national cinema in constant negotiation with globalization, responding to the changed social and cultural conditions of Korea since the 1980s to the “Post IMF era.” 37 Korean blockbusters came to the scene less than a decade after the “Korean New Wave,” the spate of new films and growth of film culture from the early 1980s to 1990s, had opened up the discussion about the ideal national cinema and advocated the rhetoric of ‘self-reliance’ in the cinematic domain. The most apparent shift within the ideal of national cinema is found in its newly defined relation to Hollywood, the dominant global system to which Korean national cinema has been positioned as ‘marginalized other.’ The single word that might effectively describe the transition that the Korean blockbuster brings up is the ‘Hollywoodfication’ of Korean cinema in terms of both film style and industrial practice. What happened between the Korean New Wave and the Korean Blockbuster? The answer lies in the redefined status of Korea in the 37 Recent studies of Korean blockbuster anonymously mention the importance of the ‘Post-IMF stage’ as a crucial socio-cultural context for its formation. See Kim So-Young eds., Ateullantis hokeun America: Hangukhyeong Beulrolbeosuter (Atlantis or America: Korean Blockbuster), (Seoul, Korea: Hyeonsilmunhwa Yeongu, 2001); Rob Wilson, “Killer Capitalism on the Pacific Rim: Theorizing Major and Minor Modes of the Korean Global,” Boundary 2, 34 (1) (2007): 115-133. 86 global market order that ensconces the cultural paradigm of ‘globalization through localization’ in Korea since 1997. Finding ‘Korean-ness’: Korean New Wave, a prelud e to Korean Bl ockbuster or Hallyru The characteristics and discourse of the Korean blockbuster become clearer when it is compared to another distinctive mode of national cinema, ‘Korean New Wave’ of the 1980s and the 1990s. In spite of its popular currency, the term Korean New Wave itself is problematic in the sense that its definition, characteristics and periodization are open to multiple interpretations in spite of its efficiency in delivering the general consensus that there was a ‘new tendency’ among films from the 1980s to the early 1990s. Questions such as when exactly it began and ended, and which films should be included or not, however, are contingent on the diverse historiographical perspectives. For example, around 1994, several terms were coined to explain this new tendency such as “New Seoul,” 38 “New Realism,” “New Korean Cinema,” and “Korean New Wave.” 39 38 The multicultural literary scholar Rob Wilson, who stayed in Korea since 1984, noticed the change in Korea society and movies and since then, published several articles about “New Seoul” movies – Rob Wilson, "Filming 'New Seoul': Melodramatic Constructions of the Subject in Spinning Wheel and First Son," East-West Film Journal 5, no.1 (January 1991): 107-17. 39 Chuck Stephen suggests that the period of Korean New Wave ranges from 1983 to 94 while Yi Hyo-In proposes from 1980 to 1995. - Chuck Stephen, “Kingdom Comes,” Film Comment, (September 2000): 33-40; Yi Hyo-In and Lee Jung-Ha eds. Korean New Wave: Retrospective from 87 Since this new tendency was officially introduced as a distinct trend of films from 1980 to 1995 under the label of “Korean New Wave” at the Pusan International Film Festival in 1996, the term ‘Korean New Wave’ acquired currency at least for Korean film critics, who themselves were active participants in this trend and later became central players in Korean film culture in the 1990s. Recently, in Remasculization of Korean Cinema, Kim Kyoung Hyun uses the term “New Korean Cinema” for the films from late 1980s to early 1990s, whose central motif, according to his perspective, is the representation of “traumatized modern male subjectivity.” 40 In spite of no direct association being made between the technological– information telecommunications- and the cultural sectors during this period, these two social manifestations share amazingly similar agendas of achieving ‘self-reliance’ against an outside force, whether it is Hollywood or global technology. In fact, the central agencies of these two social phenomena are 1980s to 1995, (Pusan: 1st International Film Festival, 1996). 40 Kim Kyoung Hyun, The Remasculization of Korean Cinema, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 20; His definition of New Korean cinema focused on male subjectivity is unique in the sense that he does not agree with most of scholars who find the strong connection between Korean New Wave and Minjung movement but rather postulates that New Korean Cinema features the male characters who stand in antithetic to all sorts of collective power. He argues, [male subjectivity] represents “contestation waged not only against the official historiography of South Korea that consistently involved nationalist agencies but also against the new Minjung history that claimed to be the “collective will of the people” while countering the government’s version.” It is true that male characters in Korean New Wave who search for independent freedom and self-respect are one of the significant tropes. However, considering that their trauma, frustration and the struggle mostly result from their exterior conditions, that is, oppressive historical, social and cultural realities of modern Korea, I argue Korean New Wave films are deeply concerned about Korea’s status as marginalized other and the traumatized male subjectivity is a symptomatic representation of this national identity. 88 almost antagonistic in the sense that the telecommunication sectors were led by state intervention while Korean New Wave was mobilized by non-mainstream players, predominantly the anti-government cultural movement in 1980, in alliance with the Minjung movement. 41 Considering this difference, their unexpected yet aligned response to the issue of national identity can be read as symptomatic of cultural sentiment in the post-IMF Korea. If the birth of the mobile phone in Korea is indebted to the necessity of finding a practical solution to achieving technological independence for the national economy, Korean New Wave is driven by the goal of materializing ‘Korean-ness’ through the cinematic form and content that are specific to Korea against the sweeping influence of Hollywood. In particular, the rhetoric of self-reliance is most evident in the Korean New Wave’s stark social and political consciousnesses about representing social reality, as opposed to mainstream commercial cinema, and its search for the 41 ‘Minjung’ means ‘mass of the people’ in Korea. However, it implies new connotation in the context of resistant movement as such; “minjung are those who are oppressed politically, exploited economically, alienated sociologically, and kept under-educated in culture and intellectual matters.”- Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia (C.C.A) ed., Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History, (London: Zed Press, 1981); requoted in Isolde Standish, “Korean Cinema and New Realism,” Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema, ed. Wimal Dissanayake (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 86 ; According to David James, from the political aspect, minjung movement is, “national popular campaign for democracy that broke the military dictatorship and collimated in the 1992 presidential elections.” – David James and Kyung-Hyun Kim, Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 12 ; but its impact was not limited to the political terrain but expanded to the cultural, religious and art movements including filmmaking. Since 1980, in alliance of minjung movement, several film collectives were founded and participants of this movement have continued their filmmaking and film criticism practices up to the present, forming a major influential voice in current film industry. 89 unique aesthetics of Korean national cinema. On the one hand, the military dictatorship of Chun Do Hwan, which was replaced by civil government in 1992, circumscribed the development of Korean New Wave both in discursive and practical ways. Previous to the 1980s, President Park’s military regime repressed film culture with such measures as the “motion picture law” 42 that employed a ‘quota system’ as well as restricted the freedom of expression. With this restriction, all films should be commercial by design as “sympathy to communism, government criticism, artfulness and sexual obscenity were all reasons for censorship and confiscation causing creativity to disappear. Melodramas, sleazy comedy, and action films were the most popular genres of this time.” 43 Rapid industrialization and modernization that corresponded with westernization created large-scale disturbances upon the existing social order, agrarian ways of life and traditional values in Korea as well as upon modes of aesthetic representation. However, the 1980s saw slight relaxation of government control, which was purportedly designed not only to emolliate military rule over civilian life 42 The laws actually limited the number of production companies to 16 and established a quota system for the production and import of films. Each company had to produce a minimum of fifteen films a year. In order to secure finance, each film production company licensed under the new law was given a special quota for the importation of foreign films. Due to this quota system that allows to import lucrative foreign films at a one to three ration to the domestic film production, many cheap second-rate domestic films known as ‘quota quickies’ were produced in the latter half of the 1960s and the early 1970s. 43 John Marshall, “A Brief History of Korean Film,”www.Pusanweb.com, http://pusanweb.com/Exit/Oct97/briefhist.htm (accessed in 25 April 2008). 90 through such measures as the abolishment of the national-wide curfew and the lift of the prohibition of leisure/entertainment business but also to promote a democratic image of Chun’s military administration before Seoul Olympic games in 1988. This hint of democratization in Korean society parallels the privatization of the telecommunication sector as examined in previous section. In particular, the screen and screen entertainment met unprecedented levels of freedom encouraged by the government’s policy intended to disperse the critique on oppressive political system to the other attractions, the so-called notorious ‘3S (Sex, Sport and Screen) cultural policy’ in the 1980s. Several amendments of Motion Picture Law followed this mood and generated a more favorable environment for the production of diverse and progressive movies. 44 Under this climate with loosened regulations, on the one hand, a film was increasingly considered as an art form to express individual creativity while mainstream films, on the other hand, took a chance to freely exploit more graphic scenes in semi- porno erotic genres. Along with this political situation, the increased dominance of Hollywood films in the domestic market played a crucial role in formulating New Korean Cinema’s antagonistic attitude toward Hollywood. Since 44 In July 1985, the revised article 4 changed the laws concerning the establishment of film companies from a license system to a registration system. In addition, the new constitution of February 1988 included Article 22, which clearly states ‘the right to artistic freedom,’ a right incorporated into the revised Motion Picture Law of May 1988. 91 throughout 1980s and early 90s, Hollywood’s transnational film industry pushed the Korean government to open the highly-protected domestic market in the name of free trade in tandem with the WTO’s push of the Korean market into the telecommunications service sector. As a result, such major transnational corporations as UPI, Sony, and Columbia succeeded in penetrating the Korean film industry through their local branches for direct distribution. In this context, not only did Hollywood represent the dominant film language of capitalism against which Korean New Wave tried to define itself, but it emerged as a threatening force dismantling the security of national cinema as an independent industry. Before the success of Shiri in 1997, Hollywood movies occupied up to 60% of the Korean film market, where the comparatively small scaled, technically unsophisticated domestic movies could not stand a chance. 45 Under these circumstances, the lack of legitimacy of the military government of the time – its inauguration by military coup, the massacres in Kwangju in 1980 and the stronger political tie with the United States- inevitably spurred resistant political and social criticism, which gave birth to the minjung movement as part of the broader student-led political and cultural movement. The minjung film movement came out of this milieu, advocating alternative cinematic form and content that could fight against the Korean mainstream – 45 Lee Moon-Haeng, “Emerging Korean Film Industry: A study on Strong Presence of Korean Film in the Domestic Market” (paper presented at the 6th World Media Economics Conference, Canada, Montréal, May 12-15, 2004). 92 Hollywood-stylized commercial films- and Hollywood itself. Its impact on the development of the Korean New Wave is widely acknowledged, as David James points out, “[minjung film movement was] an affiliated, illegal, underground, agitational cinema that nourished participatory social engagement and also fostered a generation of cineastes who, in the period of liberalization that followed it in the early 1990s, created the vibrant New Korean Cinema.” 46 Most of Korean New Wave filmmakers, who were in their late twenties at that time, had been involved with the minjung film movement to some degree. By aligning themselves with the ‘minjung’ whom they regarded as true representatives of Korea untainted by corruption and foreign interferences, the activists of the minjung film movement generated a discourse that valorized self-reliance as the nationalist ideal. This ideological and political orientation of the minjung film movement and Korean New Wave films’ search for the ‘identity of Korean cinema’ are explored in cinematic form in two significant ways. On the one hand, in response to the strong political consciousness of the minjung film movement, ‘realism’ was cherished as an ideal film style for national cinema. This style characterizes the representative works of Park Kwang-Soo and Jang Sun-Woo during this period. Each of their films adopts realism in diverse forms: in the level of social criticism (A Single Spark, Park, Kwang-Soo, 1995), or of personal sexual politics (From Me To You, Jang, Sun-Woo, 46 David James, Ibid, 13. 93 1994), or of political criticism on past Korean history (The Petal, Jang Sun-Woo, 1996). Film criticism of the time continuously emphasized realism as an effective strategy to achieve a distinctive national cinema aesthetic and characterized the realism of Korean New Wave in terms of new content (stories of working class and radical student activist), new settings (factory and slum houses) and new issues (the north/south division, urbanization, industrial unrest, and family breakdown). 47 In the late 1980s, this call for realism was met with more vigorous militant film making, leading to diverse film collectives in the form of a socially concerned documentary film movement. On the other hand, there were ongoing calls for cultivating national cinema aesthetics, which may be found in traditional culture or arts forms as in the case of Im Kwon Taek’s films. 48 For example, a film Critic Yi Hyo-In emphasizes “Koreanization/localization of movie culture” as the most important task of national cinema. He argues, 47 However, those film critics, unlike the widely accepted Bazinian definition of Realism, put the emphasis on the interconnection between film and ideology. As Jung Sung-Il defines, realism is demanded to be ‘critical’ or ‘scientific’ in that it addresses the mechanism of the reproduction of reality. He further argues, “[a realism] movie constructs and reorganizes the conditions of real life, which is circumscribed by ideology.” Thus, according to critics of Korean New Wave, the ideal Korean movie should not only reflect the reality of Korean people’s life but also reveal the hidden structure of ideology. - Jung Sung-Il, “Korean Cinema/Ideology/Film Criticism,” Yeonghwa Eeoneo (Film Languag: from Spring 1989 to Spring 1995), ed. Film Language Editorial. (Seoul, Korea: Sigakgwa Eoneo, 1997), 20. 48 Im Kwon-Taek answered to this call in a unique way. Im Kwon-Taek’s position within New Korean Cinema is significantly different from other directors in the sense that Im Kwon-Taek took an independent path toward finding ‘Korean- ness,’ without direct involvement with the collective movement. Im Kwon-Taek’s strategy of “investigating key periods in Korean history and motifs in traditional culture” that could also increase the appeal to the international film circuits, positions him in the paradigm of national art cinema. Regardless of the fact that Im Kwon-Taek reached to this goal through his own journey, the emphasis on finding aesthetics of national cinema resonates with the shared agenda of the period. - David James, Ibid., 13. 94 “national cinema should aim to realize and establish ‘regional culture’ and furthermore to contribute to creating ‘alternative international movies’ in opposition to the commercial movies represented by Hollywood by introducing new worldview about symbiotic relationship of human, nature and cosmos.” 49 This archetypical discourse of national cinema as a cinematic vehicle of representing ‘Korean-ness’ as opposed to the global aesthetics of Hollywood takes part in the prevailing endeavor of pursuing ‘localization’ of the period. According to this paradigm, Im Kwon Taek’s Sopyonje (1993), a domestically successful and critically acclaimed art film, was touted as an ideal example of national cinema that marked the turning point of Korean film history before Shiri. Yi’s comment on Sopyonje succinctly surmises the nationalistic implication of the achievement of the Korean New Wave, in that “it more or less corresponds to the change of consciousness that I demand as the premise of national cinema. The strongest virtue of this film lies in its evocation of self-awareness and self-esteem about the fact that Korean movie can be popular even if it tells Korean story in Korean way just as Na Un-Gyu’s Arirang (1926) did for Korean audience in the Japanese colonial period.” 50 49 Yi Hyo-In, “National Cinemaui Seroun Ihe (New Approach to National Cinema),” Hangukyeonghwaui Mongsanggwa Ohe (Daydream and Prejudice of Korean Cinema), (Seoul, Korea: Mingeul, 1994), 41-2. 50 Yi Hyo-In, “Sopyonje,” The Hankyoreh, 28 February 28 1996. 95 However, after the success of Shiri, the relationship between Hollywood and Korean national cinema and the discourse between globalization and localization significantly changed as the ‘Korean Wave’ was expanding its power beyond the boundaries of the nation, across Asia, and as Korea was becoming a more active player in the global market. Korean Bl ockbusters: Saving a Nation in Post -IMF Korea Dramatic changes across all cultural, political, and industrial spheres in the post-IMF Korea produced patriotic addresses from political leaders and the social elite, which in turn reinforced strong patriotic or nationalistic sentiment among the majority of Koreans. Various campaigns were promoted to emphasize unity, community, and the values of Korean culture. However, the ambivalent response to globalization – the call for resistance against the threatening outside forces collapsed with the desire to prevail in the global market- that affected the technological sector also severely influenced the film industry. In the midst of this turmoil, the ‘Boycott Hollywood film’ campaign was one of the most notable phenomena. Many NGOs initiated and took part in the ‘Boycott Hollywood film’ campaign that was triggered by negotiations between Korea and the United States for the Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT), which continued into the recent 96 turmoil around the sustenance of the screen quota system and Korea-US FTA (Free Trade Agreement) in 2007. Since 1987, against the dominance of Hollywood films, Korean movies produced by small productions with low budgets, limited scale, and less technical sophistication could not stand a chance. In addition, as the United States government continuously pushed the Korean government to reduce the number of days of screen quota reserved for screening domestic films or to even abolish it in exchange for the relaxation of restrictions on the U.S. automobile and mobile communication market, the fate of the Korean film industry suddenly turned into a question of the independence of national culture. Being encountered and penetrated by the hegemony of the first world, the boundary of national culture seemed to be shattered and left to be redefined, although it was the very assumption of national culture as an intrinsically unitary and self- deterministic entity that was challenged. The awareness of the permissive boundary of national culture, however, was redirected to reassure and reconfirm the ‘validity of local culture’ as a popular catchphrase of the time stated, “To be essentially Korean is to be global,” the colloquial version of the ideology of glocalisation. In this context, the discourse of ‘localization’ quickly acquired currency as a possible alternative solution to cope with force of globalization, which however turns out problematic considering that localization itself is the inseparable, not oppositional, dimension of globalization. 97 The Korean blockbuster was born out of this social atmosphere, embodying the Janus-faced ‘liminal identity’ as it internalized the dilemma of being ‘inside/outside’ the global system. Unexpectedly, the transformation of the industrial system after the economic crisis turned the conditions more favorably towards the film industry at stake. As venture capital – which lost proper investment targets after the collapse of the Korean stock market– surged into the entertainment industry, the Korean film industry acquired unexpected affluence in terms of production funds. Meanwhile, big Korean conglomerate corporations actively launched their entertainment-specialized sub-companies and started to fund film production directly. Shiri – financed by Samsung entertainment– was the first successful product of this changed economic system. Backed by the surge of financial capital, the Korean film industry reshaped itself into a more competitive corporate system allowing big production and distribution companies such as Cinema Service and CJ to launch. What is particularly interesting about this change is that while these big production houses proclaimed opposition to Hollywood, they also aggressively followed the Hollywood model to establish themselves as transnational corporations with the desire to expand their global business across the Asian region and hopefully to the American market. To produce the ‘big blockbuster’ was one way of maximizing speculative capital for bigger profits. In these circumstances, the overseas market emerged as a necessary condition for the success of blockbusters, 98 the industrial logic that has been even more reassured with the trend of Hallryu. From this industrial perspective, the ‘internal globalization’ of Korean cinema was paradoxically an inevitable development. In 2005, it was telecommunication companies such as SK telecom and KT that replaced venture capitals to be new major investors in the film industry. As chapter I introduced, the convergent business practice between telecommunications and film industries eventually paved the way for telecommunications sector toward the easy acquisition of digital content and for film industries toward the expanded venues. Sharing the same agenda of globalization and furthering the aspiration to be global media conglomerates with the cooperation of the Korean IT industry, however, Korean blockbusters chose ‘localization’ as a practical strategy. In particular, Korean blockbusters responded to the newly resurrected discourse of national culture and self-consciousness about national identity through Korea- specific stories such as the division of nation (Shiri, Joint Security Area), the male friendship of local gangsters (Friends), an imagined history between Korea and Japan (2009 Lost Memories). As in the case of the phenomenal success of two obviously nationalistic films, Shiri and Joint Security Area, these localized stories fit into and even boosted nationalistic sentiment against the external force of Hollywood. Most Korean scholars agree that the Korean blockbuster is a symptomatic response to Hollywood dominance and an attempt to translate 99 universality into particularity in a spectral dimension. For example, Korean Scholar Kim So Young surmises the advent of Korean blockbuster as follows, Obviously, the South Korean blockbuster is a compromise between foreign forms and local materials, a compromise itself often staged on a grand scale. This blockbuster offers both a voluntary mimicry of, as well as imagined resistance to, large Hollywood productions, playing off various logics of both identity and difference in the global culture industry. Backed by the Korean nation-state and its national culture, the South Korean blockbuster presents itself as the cultural difference opposing the homogenizing tendencies of Hollywood. 51 (Italics mine) This quotation represents typical academic discourse that applies the issue of global and local to the interpretation of the Korean blockbuster as an attempt to diversify the ‘homogenizing tendency of Hollywood.’ I partly agree with this perspective in the sense that Korean blockbusters prove that Korea-specific stories could be made into competitive spectacle, which is eventually marketable elsewhere. However, in this effort, Korean blockbusters also represent the complicated and ambivalent operation of nationalism, which claims to expand beyond the goal of maintaining local resistance, aspiring to be another regional super power, that is, another ‘homogenizing’ agency in the Asian market. Seemingly, the political consciousness and the search for national cinema that once were the driving logic of Korean New Wave gave way to the economic logic, which foregrounded the commodity value of cinema as a marketable 51 Kim So-Young, ed. Ateullantis hokeun America: Hangukhyeong Beulrolbeosuter (Atlantis or America: Korean Blockbuster), (Seoul, Korea: Hyeonsilmunhwa Yeongu, 2001), 13, 15. 100 product in the global market. The increased sales of Korean movies overseas supported the ramifications of this economic logic. Local films have increasingly won critical acclaim and become favorites at international film festivals, as in the case of director Park Chan-Wook’s Old Boy that won Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival in 2004. South Korea's film exports jumped to $37 million in the first half of 2004, from $11.3 million in 2003 and $7 million in 2000. 52 The Korean War spectacle Brotherhood (Taegukki), starring pan-Asian heartthrob Jang Dong-Keon, alone “grabbed a solid $1.6 million for the first two days on June 26-27 on 286 screens, ranking second in Japan's box office behind Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." 53 Along with this economic success, Hollywood, that once was the antithesis to which Korean New Wave defined its aesthetics and political stance, turned into the ‘source’ of styles and a market competitor. While Korean New Wave tried to find Korean aesthetics and adopted realism as a possible political and aesthetic solution, Korean blockbusters imported, internalized Hollywood genre conventions such as horror, thriller, and blockbuster, and rendered them into competitive commodity forms. As the ‘Buy Korea’ slogan represents the sentiment of the post IMF period, the Korean blockbuster demonstrates its identity as a cultural product that could sell overseas. 52 Korean Film Council, Hanguk Yeonghwa Saneop Yeongam (Annual Report of the Korean Film Industry), (Seoul, Korea: Gipmundang, 2004). 53 Lee Jong-Heon, “Faces of Globalization: Filmmakers in Korea, “United Press International; reprinted in www.globalenvision.org, www.globalenvision.org/library/2/629, July 06 2004 (accessed 27 February 2008). 101 Korean blockbusters represent this discourse of ‘glocalisation’ through the central motif of national history with the tendency of the ‘recuperation of ideal male hero,’ as Kim Kyoung-Hyun argues. Most Korean blockbusters represent the ‘strong man with nationalist mission’ as ideal masculinity, whose main role is to protect, rebuild or reconstruct the nation-state. The prevalent use of genre in the Korean blockbuster, which requires actions and an adventure narrative, easily explains the request for main protagonists with strong masculinity. However, through this male hero, as Kim argues, the Korean blockbuster saves the frustrated Korean male subjectivity that was central trope of New Korean Cinema from the burden of history. 2009 Lost Memories is particularly an interesting example that shows the way in which Korean blockbusters contributed to the creation of ambivalent and engendered nationalism in the context of post-IMF Korea. By replacing the present experience of post IMF Korea with the colonial past of Korea, 2009 Lost Memories reinforces the allegorical function of the colonial history of Korea in Korean popular culture that has represented various historical crises caused by external threatening forces. In this post-colonial imagination, the representation of Japanese Empire creates an icon of ultimate enemy, which does not allow any room for negotiation and compromise and thus coerces the establishment of a homogenous, pure and unified nation as a resisting agent. 54 In Korean 54 With a record-breaking production cost of $8 million at the time - funded by both Korean and 102 blockbusters, the nation, once again, as a form of cultural elaboration, functions as “an agency of ambivalent narration that holds culture at its most productive position.” 55 This self-reflexive historiographical narration of the nation and the recuperation of the military man as ideal masculinity reveals the underlying ideology of the “hybrid process of self-determinism” of Korean blockbusters, which put into play the two contradictory terms of locality and universality. 56 On the one hand, the Korean blockbuster promotes itself as a guardian of the national film industry against global Hollywood corporations by localizing national culture through its newly founded content and national market. On the Japanese companies-, action packed spectacle scenes, and big stars from Korea and Japan, a science fiction drama 2009 Lost Memories represents characteristics of the Korean blockbuster. Narrative-wise, it narrates the ‘nation’ through a complex and twisted narrative structure. In the imagined future world of the film, Korea in 2009 is still a colony of Imperial Japan, whose national identity as once an independent country disappeared into historical oblivion. Simply speaking, the narrative of this film centers on the issue of history writing. However, the picture of Korea recovered from historical oblivion, The Great Korea – unified super power in Asian region- is not far different from The Great Empire of Japan. Thus when opposing narrators of Empire Japan and resistant Korea battle over the ‘right to narrate’ a legitimate history in the film, it is in fact the battle over the power to dream a desired history for their own sake. Therefore, when a male hero gets through the spectacular and tragic battle scenes to recover lost memories, what he actually recuperates is the Korean version of desired histories rather than its lost memories. However, considering this film is a transnational project that is co-produced by Japanese and Korean companies and targets regional audience in Asia, its nationalistic approach to the subject matter of Korean national identity - particularly, in tandem with its colonial past – seems quite unsettling. This collision between the film’s contextual identity and its ideological orientation raises an interesting question about the ambiguous meaning of the local (and national) culture in tandem with the regional and global culture. 55 Homi K. Bhabha, Introduction: Narrating the Nation, Nation and Narration. (London & New York: Routledge, 1990), 3. 56 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Introduction to The Postcolonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), 9. 103 other hand, it also serves not only to universalize the cinematic conventions of Hollywood but more significantly to supersede Hollywood through this ‘intended mimicry,’ thereby extending its power across East Asia. In this attempt, Korean blockbusters provide a new mode of national cinema that materializes the premise of the ‘globalization through localization.’ This changed attitude toward Hollywood has evoked controversy regarding its politics and significance in relation to globalization. For those who are concerned with national identity and culture, this practice certainly undermines the legacy, if any, of national cinema, and thus it is viewed as a form of surrender to the hegemony of Hollywood. Is it a mode of resistance to protect national culture or self- subordination? In order words, does it serve to create multi-culturalism by de- homogenizing global culture 57 or does it reify the thesis of “homogenization of globalization” 58 or even “cultural imperialism” 59 ? Alternately, does this present a cultural project of “de-westernization” 60 ? 57 Arjun Appadurai, Modernism at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 58 George Ritzer, Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit card Society, (Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1995); The McDonaldization of Society, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993). 59 Notably, H. Schiller, Mass Communication and the American Empire, (New York: Free Press, 1969). 60 James Curran and M Park, eds. De-Westernizing Media Studies, (London: Routledge, 2000). 104 Ambiguous Dream of the Gl ocalisation Project Overall, Korean blockbusters present a particular example of the strategy of “glocalisation,” supporting the premise that local cultures and global cultures powerfully interact, articulate and overlap with one another through diverse means of communication. 61 As Robert Robertson argues, the Korean blockbuster, in particular, exemplifies how the principle of glocalisation, “two interpenetrating processes: the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism,” operates in the cultural dimension. 62 In this sense, the Korea blockbuster rather shows the advent of a new mode of national cinema that is constructed through an intricate relationship with others, beyond the binary distinction between the authentic local and the universalizing global. To some extent, the Korean blockbuster is an expression of the increased confidence of Korea as a once marginalized other who now has achieved cultural power to produce and circulate ‘big’ movies, which had formerly been regarded as the exclusive domain of Hollywood. In this sense, there is a possibility for resistance through the appropriation of hegemonic convention and its transformation into commodity, especially for non-western national cinema. 61 Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, (London: Sage Publication, 1992). 62 Roland Robertson, Ibid., 69. 105 In this context, this desire for establishing a competitive national film is not significantly different from that of the Korean New Wave in spite of their internal differences regarding what kind of film should do this job. Eventually, the strategy of the Korean blockbusters, the cinematic and industrial experiment to translate the cultural paradigm of ‘globalization through localization,’ coincides with the advent of Korea as an IT-power house in the global market. The rhetoric of achieving ‘Hollywood-compatible technology’ for generating spectacle scenes with sophisticated special effects appeared as one of the marketing strategies that Korean blockbusters have vigorously employed. Although the special effects itself define the attraction of the blockbuster as a spectacle, the self-conscious emphasis on the level of technological achievement betrays both Korean cinema’s repressed complex of being inferior to the Hollywood standard as well as its regained confidence in producing equally spectacular films. Here, we found another instance that the discourse of techno- nationalism, the predominant discourse of post-IMF period that governed the development of new media technologies in Korea, operates as underlying ideology in the cultural domain. However, what is important in the end is to scrutinize the specific modes, instances and the effects that this dynamic of glocalisation plays out against the thesis of globalization in a given society. For example, the premise that globalization as the effective operation of transnational corporations necessarily results in the “de-territorialization of the nation state” 106 proves to be questionable in the case of Korean blockbusters and mobile screen. 63 For example, Masao Miyoshi argues that “in the age of transnational corporatism, national culture is increasingly irrelevant: multiculturalism holds the day now as a tradable commodity.” 64 When it comes to the transnational aspects of the Korean blockbuster, the force of globalization in return ends up reconfirming the boundary of nation-state and nationality more than ever. National culture indeed becomes increasingly relevant but its position in the era of globalization oscillates between the tendency of foregrounding unification and embodying hybridity. As shown in 2009 Lost Memories, the effort to globalize turns out to be another desperate attempt to leave the boundaries of national identity intact. The recent controversy around the screen quota system illustrates these tensions and ambiguity inherent to the glocalisation project in the cultural sector. The screen quota system is the most controversial issue that has been under hot debate among Koreans and specifically between Korea and the United States in regard to globalization. Since it was introduced in 1967, the screen quota has survived throughout the changes of regimes with the publicly acclaimed mission of protecting local movie production and promoting cultural diversity, although its specific regulations have undergone several revisions as a result of political 63 Arjun Appradurai, Modernism at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 91. 64 Masao Miyoshi, “Sites of Resistance in the global Economy,” Boundary 2, 22 (1) (Spring 1995), 69. 107 negotiations between multiple parties – including the United States free trade advocates – in various historic moments. In general, it is widely acknowledged that the screen quota played a key role in the recent success of local films. However, due to the very effect of protecting the Korean domestic film industry, the screen quota has been constantly placed under threat and criticism whenever Korea faces the issue of international trade. The typical claims against the screen quota argue that it goes against the principles of globalization and free trade. In fact, this controversy about the screen quota is not limited to the Korean case. 65 For example, when Korea wanted to sign a bilateral investment treaty (BIT) with the United States to attract more foreign direct investments in 2004 the screen quota stood in the way of closing the treaty for many years. Specifically, the Motion Picture Association of America has pushed Korea to abolish or reduce the quota, saying the motion pictures industry is a business and the quota system works against the free trade principle, which represents the perspective toward film as an industrial product. The same rhetoric is represented by a senior official at the Federation of Korean Industries, “the quota system prevents open and fair competition and hurts globalization characterized by deregulation in every sector of society. Now is the time for us to positively consider removing 65 Since its inception in the United Kingdom in 1927, the screen quota system has been constantly under debate linked to the issue of fair international trade between mostly the United Sates which wants to open other nations’ doors for Hollywood imports and the independent countries that struggle to defend the domestic film industry against global Hollywood. Currently, numbers of countries enforce some sort of the screen quota including France, Italy, South America, South Korea, Brazil, Pakistan and Italy. 108 the protective formula in this era of globalization." 66 This logic echoes the shared sentiment among economists who are concerned about the Korea’s progress in globalization, "Korea is a member of the OECD and has signed on to the WTO. The screen quota system violates the principles and commitments of tree trade," the United Press International reports. Eventually, the screen quota survived the BIT deal in 2004 but in June 2006, at the dawn of the FTA negotiations between Korea and the United States, the quota that had reserved screens 146 days a year for domestically produced films was reduced to half -73 days a year. In fact, it is reported that “before the official FTA negotiations began in 2006, the U.S. had originally demanded Seoul scraps entirely its screen quota system, and as a compromise for beginning the free-trade talks with the U.S. in June, Korea voluntarily halved the screen quota.” 67 This decision to reduce the screen quota met serious resistance from pro-screen quota lobby groups in the film industry, which is also responsible for the previous ‘Hollywood boycott campaign in the early 1990s backed by international NGO movements as advocates for cultural diversity. The rhetoric of pro-screen quota valorizes local films as national culture, not as economic products. However, this view often exhibits the mixed perspectives toward film as culture but at the same time as national industry, which complicates both the 66 Lee Jong-Heon, Ibid. 67 The Hankyoreh, 24 October 2006. 109 premise of globalization and that of cultural diversity. For example, insiders in the local film industry still consider the power of Hollywood and globalization threatening to the domestic film industry; as actor Ahn Sung-Ki, a head of a pro- quota lobby group, says in a press interview, "the environment that Hollywood movies are threatening the world market has not changed, despite our growing market share," and he continues, "scrapping the quota would deal a heavy blow to the local film industry.” 68 Shim Jae-Myong, a chair of Myung Film and a movie producer, reinforces the contribution of the screen quota to guaranteeing the quality of South Korean movies, as she argues "it has been only three to four years since homegrown films became competitive in the market. So it's premature to talk about removing the protective measure because the local film industry is just in its infancy." Her remark is particularly interesting in that it pinpoints how Korean filmmakers see the recent development of the Korean film industry, whose success in the domestic market coincides with the growth of Korean blockbuster. And the pro-quota voices reflect the fear of coping with globalization, "I understand the importance of globalization and investment accords with the United States," movie-buff Cha Hyun-Kyung says, "but I hope homegrown movies will be protected from U.S. film giants for two or three more 68 Lee Jong-Heon, Ibid. 110 years. I am concerned that unconditional pursuit of globalization may undermine the fragile South Korean film industry." 69 The screen quota issue in fact is an overarching beyond the border of Korea as it represents the severe conflict between the effort to preserve cultural diversity and to promote (economic) globalization. 70 The Convention on Cultural Diversity, an international union under UNESCO that proclaims cultural products as exceptions to the international and bilateral trade treaty, is a direct response to the concern about the homogenizing effect of intensified globalization. Once the FTA deal became a hot issue and the pro-quota lobby group raised criticism around its conflict with the Convention on Cultural Diversity that Korea signed, there have been several public hearings with involved parties but no consensus has been reached. The Korean government’s intentional delay in ratifying the Convention is interpreted as an attempt to prioritize the economic impact on other industries, notably mobile communication technologies, which could prevail in global markets. 71 69 Lee Jong-Heon, Ibid. 70 The rhetoric of pro-quota lobby group is based on the ‘Convention on the Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions’ (aka, Convention) that UNESCO passed as international law and began effective in March 18 2007. - Press release, “The UNESCO Convention Enters Into Force: First Conference of Parties Set For June 18-20,” Coalition Currents, (Canada; 23 March 2007); reprinted in Coalition for Cultural Diversity in Moving Images, http://www.screenquota.com (accessed in 27 February 2008). 71 Korean government voted for the PDCC in October 2005 (against the United States and Israeli) but did not follow the successive procedures to ratification. In October 18, 2007, Korean government announced that it reserved the ratification of article 20 that defines the Convention’s 111 This battle to preserve the best possible chances for economic prosperity, whether it is achieved through the preservation of domestic industry or the active acquisition of shares in the global market, is well reflected in the final agreement of FTA that has a direct impact on digital content business. In its new proposal, the United States has initially declared that it would refrain from pushing for a further reduction in the number of days of the screen quota, but films delivered via digital copy will be excluded from the terms of the quota, which expects to nullify the effect of the screen quota in the future when the digital distribution of the film will be the dominant mode in a digital era. Eventually after 10 months of negotiations, the Ministry of Culture announced that the final FTA deal was agreed on April 2, 2007 and the screen quotas in Korea will not be subject to change from the current 73 days. 72 In particular, along with this result, it is notable that the Korean government pushed hard to get a favorable condition for ‘digital audio-visual service,’ in that the Korean government will reserve the rights for control over on-line audio-visual content when it is necessary. This means that the Korean government will be able to exercise administrative control in order to protect domestically produced digital subjective relation with other Conventions and article 25 that regulates the international disputes over the application of Convention under the jurisdiction of the president without the approval of the National Assembly. It was interpreted as the Korean government’s attempt to put WTO treaty over the Convention. 72 Ministry of Culture, Press release, “Korea-US FTA deal and the Complementary actions,” 2 April 2007, http://www.kofic.or.kr. (retrieved in February 27, 2008). 112 content with such measures as quotas on imported digital content on line. The governmental strategy to guard online digital content is a carefully choreographed preemptive move based on the vision that domestically produced digital content could be competitive in the global market, following the successful model of Korean digital and Information technologies. Interestingly, in the press release, the Ministry of Culture attached the detailed analysis of the online digital content service market in the United States, which ironically and exactly illuminates what globalization truly means in an economic term; that is, infiltrating each others’ markets for maximum profit. In the end, this collided vision between the case of the screen quota and the concern over the digital content service adequately embodies the ambivalence of the strategy of glocalisation, which aims not only to defend self- sufficient national economy but also to expand it in the global market. Hence, the Korean blockbuster becomes an alternative form of globalization only in the sense that it provides diversity against the dominance of Hollywood. As it foregrounds economic logic of mobilizing national-identity in the global market where differences rather than homogeneity can be a powerful selling point, however, it resonates with the discourse of techno-nationalism that has driven and will drive the development of mobile technology in Korea. Therefore, what is at stake is an elaboration of the complex mechanism of glocalisation: what specific values and practices –whether it is social discourse, industrial systems, or 113 cinematic practices– constitute and intervene in the representation of national identity. In the end, the success story of the Korean mobile phone is not very different from the dream of the Korean blockbuster in that they stand in the same line materializing this ambiguity of globalization on screens in technological and cinematic form. The mobile screen and Korean blockbuster came into being in Korea as a result of the historically specific institutional practices by which Korea has risen to the state of global center, something closer to a “global city” in Saskia Sassen’s sense or a “media capital” in Michael Curtin’s definition, illuminating how a particular process of globalization is constructed at the intersection of local, national, regional, and global levels. 73 73 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Michael Curtin, “Media Capitals: Cultural Geographies of Global TV,” Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, eds. Jan Olsson and Lynn Spigel (Duke University Press, 2004), 270-302. 114 Chapter III Mobil e Multimedia Content: The Aesthetics of Mobil e Spectacl e In November 20, 2002, a two minute short video with the funky name of Loafer and Egg (Lee Hee-Cheul) was introduced to the Korean audience - not on the familiar screen of the movie theater but on the small screen of the mobile phone. Paired with two other videos exclusively created for mobile phone screens, Project X (Han Sang-Hee) and My Good Partner (Lee Sang-Ui), it marked the beginning of what became known later as a trope of “mobile cinema.” Commissioned by SK telecom whose mobile multimedia content service June just launched, these first generation of original mobile video content not only successfully drew public attention to the newly invented mobile screen but also represented the specific discursive and industrial practices behind the production of mobile video content. Furthermore, their key aesthetic features in terms of narrative structure and mise-en-scene, and diverse experiments with mobile screen-specific forms, have introduced visual languages that subsequent mobile video content continue to rely on. This chapter analyses how the formal characteristics of early examples of original mobile content (notably, mobile cinema Yigong series and mobile drama 115 Five Stars) have continuously been cultivated to the present, focusing on content production and programming strategies of SK Telecom’s June as well as changes of media environment in which the participatory digital culture, notably digital youth culture centered on internet and mobile media, plays a significant role. The detailed textual analysis based on the consideration of the particular cultural context of Korea will illuminate the specific formulation of convergent aesthetics of mobile video content, which re-appropriates existing media conventions and transforms them into new narrative structures, visual style, modes of address and interactive protocols. 1. Defining Mobil e Cinema: First Generation of Original Mobil e Content Facing with the new mobile screen, the most urgent and challenging task for mobile video content producers was to define what mobile cinema is or should be, and more significantly to find its medium specific aesthetics. This key question was met with many different answers and speculations, which eventually reached the preliminary consensus that the mobile screen provides a 116 ‘new’ screen experience due to its technological specificity, which provides a ‘personal’ viewing experience on a ‘small’ screen. Hence, new executive voices from wireless carriers and content providers behind this new expedition envision mobile cinema to be a “totally new field, a completely new genre of moving images embracing the pleasure of cinema and the mobile specificity yet unachievable by conventional cinema on screen (Lee Jung-Hwa, Producer at SKT),” or modestly “cinema only workable on mobile phone (Jung Uk, Producer of Project X and My Good Partner, Keowon Media).” 1 These remarks equivocally attribute the ‘newness’ of the mobile cinema to the medium specificity of the mobile screen. For instance, SK Telecom’s official definition of mobile cinema represents this rhetoric, laying out all the technological characteristics of the mobile screen. Mobile cinema is mobile phone exclusive cinema that is accessible through mobile communication (PDA/mobile phone) and an interactive cinema based on one-to-one communication by which [the user] can download moving image content and enjoy whenever and wherever without the spatial and temporal restraints. As it has to be downloaded, its form resembles a short movie with less than 2 min 30 length. In consideration of [technological] attributes of mobile phone, it is produced as a serial that consists of around ten episodes and each 1 Maeil Daily; requoted in Hwang Hae-Seop, “Chogi Mobail Yeonghwaeui Teukseonge Gwanhan Yeongu – Geondalkwa Dalgyaleul Jungsimeuro (A Study on Special Features of Mobile Film at Early Stage: The Case Study of Loafer and Egg)” (MA thesis, Department of Film and Television Studies, Graduate School of Mass Communication, Seogang University, Korea, 2003), 6: It is noted that he translates ‘Mobile Yeonghwa’ into ‘Mobile Film.’ 117 self-sustained episode in about 2 min duration is connected with overarching theme. 2 This industrial definition attempts to position mobile cinema as a completely new genre of moving images, a novelty that is inherently ‘distinguishable’ from existing media forms, which more or less reflects the underlying desire of the mobile industry to secure a suitable position for mobile cinema within conventional media environments. Apparently, this techno- deterministic position of industrial discourse collapses the issue of technological specificity of the mobile screen (downloading delivery system and small screen size) into the issue of mobile cinema aesthetics, using them as primary parameters that will automatically ‘determine’ the formal characteristics (short episodic structure) rather than speculate on the continuity or interrelation of mobile cinema aesthetics with other existing media conventions. At the heart of this discourse of mobile-specificity lies an emphasis on the uniqueness of mobile communication as a delivery channel that allows two-way communications with the user as well as the ‘mobility’ in service of ubiquitous viewing environments. However, how these aspects transpire in mobile cinema as opposed to conventional cinema is not clearly addressed in the above statement. The position of the mobile screen in a broader context of screen culture is more 2 Sk Telecom, press release, “What is Mobile Cinema”; requoted in Hwang Hae-Seop, Ibid., 7. 118 consciously addressed by the film industry through Chang Yun-Hyun, a renowned filmmaker and a consultant for SK telecom’s June: While attempting to combine the merits of cinema with those of mobile [into new form], mobile cinema is still under development. Mobile cinema essentially presupposes a different relationship between the producer and the consumer of the cinema beyond the level [of technical differences such as] small screen size that requires a unique cinematography. While [traditional] cinema that communicates with the public in a limited space does not so much acknowledge the subjectivity of the viewer, mobile cinema is originally a subjective (personal) media and requires an individual participation. In addition, in case of mobile cinema, the users interact with it in diverse ways, and their physical spatial and temporal environments become more connected with mobile cinema as they form the integral part of the backdrop of movie. 3 Rather than declaring the ‘exclusivity’ of mobile cinema to the mobile phone, Chang touches on the possible continuity and discontinuity between conventional cinema and mobile cinema. Drawing on the technical characteristics of mobile communication, he foregrounds changes of screen experiences that the mobile screen is expected to bring in, that is, the advent of ‘personal,’ ‘interactive’ and ‘ubiquitous’ screen culture, outside of the conventionally confined space for spectatorship and beyond the limitations of one-way delivery systems. Byun Gi- Soo, a producer of Loafer and Egg, reiterates Chang’s point as he states, “(mobile screen is) an exclusively personal media. Thus making mobile cinema is to catch 3 Yun Hye-Jung, “Everything about Mobile Yeonghwa,” Film 2.0, 28 December 2002. 119 the viewer in two minutes, overcoming the limitations of (small) LCD screen.” 4 These industrial discourses represent the axiomatic understanding of the mobile screen as a ‘networked, personal, small screen’ medium. Mobile cinema, in their definitions, is likely to be something grounded in this fundamental premise of the mobile screen. The question then arises, what kinds of aesthetic strategy should be employed to create the ideal mobile cinema? Is it form or subject matter that better materializes this concept of mobile cinema? The first generation of mobile cinema answered this question with different strategies: If Loafer and Egg represents the attempt to find the ideal aesthetics of mobile cinema in formal experiments with mobile screen specificity, Project X foregrounds the effective subject matter that might attract the user’s attention to the mobile cinema. Altogether, the first generation of mobile cinema presents five outstanding tendencies of ‘imaging’ cinema for the mobile screen: most notably, tension between narrative integration and the exhibitionist aesthetics, the serial narrative structure, interactive form, intermedial /convergent genres, and the re- appropriation of familiar content. Subsequent mobile cinemas that Yigong series represents repeat and develop variations of what the first-generation mobile cinema explored. 4 Maeil Daily, Ibid. 120 Mobil e Spectacl e: The Aesthetics of Mobil e Cinema Produced with the budget of $ 100,000 funded by SKT, Loafer and Egg, the first successful mobile cinema, tells a love story of a loafer who is a hopeless street fighter and a mute girl selling eggs on the street over twelve 2-min episodes. The first formal characteristic of mobile cinema that Loafer and Egg embodies is the conflicting but intersecting tension between the ‘desire to achieve narrative integration’ and ‘exhibitionist cinematic technique.’ Seemingly, its narrative, genre, and cinematography look familiar, not much different from the conventions of commercial cinema, specifically, based on classical Hollywood conventions. Yet it presents significant formal twists carefully constructed in consideration of the medium specificity of the mobile screen, which eventually creates the tension between the idea of cinema and the mobile. First, narrative- wise, it delivers a melodramatic love story chronologically in decisive 3 arc moments that progress through following the protagonist (a loafer)’s actions, based on the principle of cause and effect. Accordingly, Loafer and Egg mostly employs the basic convention of classical Hollywood cinematography such as continuity editing, shot-reverse shot, the 180 degree rule, and a scene composition moving progressively from establishing shot to medium/close-up shot. 121 However, this legacy of cinematic convention is deeply undermined by conscious experiments with mobile specific visuality. First of all, in two significant ways, the narrative structure deviates from the classical convention. As the entire narrative is divided intro 12 episodes wherein each 2 min- length episode contains the cliff-hanger and progressively continues to the next episode, its structure fundamentally is closer to the serial. 5 More significantly, Loafer and Egg adopts the multiple ending structures whose closure is left to the viewer’s decision promulgated by interactive options. It provides three different versions of ending – realistic, rational, and emotional- for the viewer, who is asked to make a decision through SMS messaging (Fig. 3.1). Figure 3.1 Two Endings of Loafer and Egg: Left, the Rational ending, with a caption of “Please Take Care of This Woman,” Right, the Emotional ending, they flee from her husband after fighting. From a music video Haru (by NRG) that compiled images from Loafer and Egg, www. pandoraTV.com, 2006. 5 The serial format is one of predominant characteristics of global mobile content. For example, Fox’s mobile video content named ‘mobisodes’ on Sprint in the United States also present the serial format. In his study on mobisodes, Scott Ruston presents 4 basic types of mobisodes structure: the serial, the episodic series, the short video, and the broadcast program excerpt, which is applicable to Korean and other mobile video content. – Scott Ruston, “Dial M for Mobisode” (paper presented at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Chicago, March 8-11, 2007). 122 Most of all, it is the use of SMS messaging as a way to communicate with the user that has been attributed to Loafer and Egg as a definitive feature of ‘mobile’ cinema. For example, after the realistic ending version where the loafer and the mute girl, already married to the villain, say tear-soaked good-byes to each other, the user receives a SMS message directly from characters in the movie: either “Wish you a happiness” from the mute girl or “ I miss you. Forever be with you” from the loafer. Along with this unique narrative structure, Loafer and Egg deploys various presentational formal strategies to increase the viewer’s attention to the story on small screen. Overall, scenes are composed with tight shots that focus on characters’ emotions rather than full shots to depict the actions or backgrounds. Especially, the predominant use of extreme close-up shots with minimized dialogue, which obviously intends to counter the limitation of the small size of screen, becomes the persistent tenant of the mobile cinema. In most cases, the static close-up shot of the face of the character dominates the screen, overshadowing the interactions between characters. In addition, there are inserted still-cuts of the character that stop the narrative progression in critical moments of the story in order to accentuate the impact of the character’s emotion on the viewer. For instance, in one scene where the loafer is hit by the villain, the 123 extreme close-up shot catches his smashed face in a still-cut for a while. While the camera angles and shot composition foregrounds the ‘stillness’ of the image to hold the viewer’s attention, the camera work and pace of editing take an opposite direction to intensify the effect of ‘dramatic movement.’ For example, most of scenes are shot with hand-held camera so the shaky camera movement is present on the screen. When a character’s action is dramatic, as with scenes of chasing and fighting, the shaky movement of camera is even more mobilized to the extent that the character’s motion turns blurry. At the same time, combined with fast-paced editing that connects “238 shots in 20 min running time,” it provides a much faster progress of scenes than the usual feature movie, resembling more closely the formal characteristics of commercial music videos 6 While extreme close-up shots, though much more prevalent than in typical feature movies, purportedly facilitate the viewer’s absorption into the narrative, such formal features as shaky camera movement and still-cut tend to technically interrupt the spatial and temporal continuity of the narrative progression and redirect the viewer’s attention to the apparatus of the medium. In other words, the narrative structure and formal characteristics of Loafer and Egg presents the hybrid of classical cinematic convention and the exhibitionist aesthetics that originates from the tradition of “cinema of attraction” in early 6 Hwang Jae- Seop, Ibid., 49. 124 cinema. 7 The exhibitionist aesthetics that foreground the “theatrical display” as opposed to the realistic representation not only form a fundamental base for the legacy of the spectacle that continues in specific genres such as musical, experimental cinema, animation and more prominently in contemporary commercial music video, but also recalls the intrinsic nature of the cinema as a medium of modern spectacle. Whether it is cinematic, televisual, artistic or commercial, the exhibitionist aesthetics in moving images is considered antithetical to the principle of narrative integration as they momentarily disrupt the flow of narrative progression. Interestingly, the mobile cinema producers consider the use of exhibitionist aesthetics as a practical strategy to complement narrative integration. For instance, Byun Gi-Soo, a producer of Loafer and Egg, revealed that he employed both still-cut and exaggerated and ‘visible’ camerawork as devices to manipulate temporality in order to fixate the viewer’s attention on the small mobile screen. 8 However, still-cuts generate the ‘tableau effect’ as they artificially stall the continuous narrative flow, while constantly moving and occasionally accelerated camerawork foregrounds the ‘effect of dramatic movement,’ which ironically reveals the difficulty or improbability of 7 Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo Baudry and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 831. 8 Hwang Jae-Seup, Ibid., 49. 125 representing ‘real’ dramatic movement within the small frame of the mobile screen otherwise. Moreover, the fact that such notable formal traits of mobile cinema as “tracking shots, long-view establishing shots, fancy pans, unusual point-of-view camera angles and extreme close-ups,” 9 are also common aesthetics of anime (Japanese animation) as opposed to the tradition of the western realistic representation is indicative of the current position of mobile cinema as an intermedial project that borrows visual languages from diverse media. Particularly, it is interesting to see these aesthetics of anime also result from the restraint of the medium, similar to the situation of the mobile cinema. As Luca Rafaelli’s argues, such formal traits as the “extreme shots fixed through several poses” that focus on the situation and emotion of central characters are an aesthetic solution “to cover up the missing intermediate movements” caused by the culturally specific production context and technological condition of anime. 10 Although mobile cinemas are shot on digital cameras that contain different technological conditions from Japanese animation, they share the similar 9 S.T. Napier, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing contemporary Japanese Animation, (New York: Palgrane, 2001), 19. 10 He argues that since animation was first introduced in Japan in 1920s, the economic constraints led to the technical and hence, aesthetic uniqueness of anime. According to him, compared to Disney and Warner Brothers Animations, the traditional cell anime was made with “less frame - twelve frames a second- that falls short for Disney standard for fluid realistic movement” – Luca Raffaelli, “Disney, Warner Bros, and Japanese Animation: Three World Views,” A Reader in Animation Studies, ed. Jayne Pilling (Sydney: John Libbey & Company Pty Ltd, 1997), 128. 126 obstacles of ‘limited spatio-temporal space” to deliver fully realistic representations of stories. Hence, this condition of ‘compressibility’ and ‘brevity’ of mobile cinema vouches for the effectiveness of presentational aesthetics explored by anime, also inflected by other genres such as the music video, a genre that mostly preserved the plethora of aesthetics of a cinema of attraction. Therefore, these presentational formal strategies in the first generation of mobile cinema represent self-reflexive attempt of mobile cinema producers who try to complement the illusion of continuity and illusion of realism within the spatio- temporally limited downloaded and digitized visual data content while they inadvertently reveal mobile cinema’s aesthetic position as mobile spectacle. Integral to the self-reflexive consideration of the medium, the second aesthetic trait of mobile cinema that Loafer and Egg represents is the incorporated ‘interactivity’ option for the viewer to participate in the construction of the content. In fact, interactivity could entail many different levels of interactions between producer, text and the consumer, and it does not require digital technology as a necessary condition. However, narrowed down to the cinematic sphere, it is acknowledged that digital technology enables more direct and comprehensive technological possibilities for the user’s participation. For instance, Jeffrey Shaw defines digital interactivity as “new, immediate dimension 127 of user control and involvement in the creative proceedings.” 11 Technologically, he continues, such digital specific mechanisms as “input-output technologies and algorithmic production techniques” transform “the traditional cinema’s compulsive spectator-spectacle relationship.” 12 In this regard, the use of SMS messaging in Loafer and Egg specifically utilizes this technological potential of the mobile screen as a personal digital medium. Thirdly, in exploring the mobile specific narrative structure, Loafer and Egg presents ‘seriality’ as a central aesthetic. Narrowing down to the individual episode, each segment of the twelve episodes of Loafer and Egg technically operate like a quick-time movie which could endlessly ‘loop’ as an independent visual data file, which characterizes ‘modularity’ as its formal characteristic. This seriality and modularity is widely associated with the modern television format while its tradition goes back as early as the ‘one-reel’ serials in the silent cinema era. 13 Specifically, appropriating melodramatic conventions, Loafer and Egg presents the digitized miniature version of the television soap-opera (though 11 Jeffrey Shaw, Introduction to Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, eds. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 19. 12 Jeffrey Shaw, Ibid., 19. 13 Notably, Pathé and Universal Pictures ‘one-reel serials,’ in form of melodrama and female adventure, established the convention as the predominant genre during the early period of silent cinema: For examples, see, from Pathé, Who Pays? (1915), Who’s Guilty?(1916), and The Grip of Evil (1916) and Universal serials including Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery (1914), The Broken Coin (1915), Perils of Pauline (1916) etc. – Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Context, (New York; Columbia University Press, 2001), 217. 128 incomparable to its huge volume of episodes and dialogues) or one–reel serials (accentuated with non-to-minimal use of dialogue). 14 In this way, the narrative structure of Loafer and Egg reflects influences from cinematic, television, and digital aesthetics, suggesting that the formal experiment with ‘intermedial or convergent genres’ becomes another central characteristic of mobile cinema. Project X, another major example of the first generation of mobile cinema, adopts the ‘intermedial and convergent genres ’as its primary formal principle and shows a different strategy of imagining the ideal mobile cinema. Promoted as the most expensive and large scale mobile cinema among the first generation, Project X reportedly consumed a $ 300,000 budget for its 32 episodes with big stars and spectacular scenes shot mostly in Prague. Although categorized as mobile cinema, its format is closer to the omnibus music video: each 2 min, structurally self-sustained episode is paired with a main song, with an overarching story of love affairs and the life of three killers(assassins) spanning from 1960s to the present and constructed within the action and melodrama genres. As it was originally conceived as OMD (Original Music DVD), the music that several popular Korean musicians (notably, Shin Hae-Cheol, Cy, and Nam Gung-Hyun) composed for this project was the central attraction of Project X. 14 Lee He-Cheol, the director of Loafer and Egg, reveals that the minimal use of dialogue was conscious strategy to tackle the condition of the mobile screen. He says, “foregrounding character’s emotions over action, I used ‘short and broken lines’ rather than ‘cinematic dialogue,’ catching lines that you often see in the commercial ad clips.” – Film 2.0, Ibid. 129 Regarding its music-centered form where dialogue is replaced by the lyrics of songs by famous singers, the director Han explains that “Project X, which I call ‘Eeumak- Yeonghwa( music- cinema),’ is born with the idea of creating a cultural content which could potentially be consumed across diverse venues including DVD and theater not limited to the mobile screen.” 15 Unlike other producers’ attempt to explore the mobile specificity, Han approaches the quest of defining ideal mobile cinema from subject matter. He expresses suspicion about the efficiency of the mobile specific form, “it may be appropriate for mobile cinema to shoot character-centered drama with extreme close-up angles but what eventually matters is the message. Shall we make a psychological mono-drama only because the stationary aesthetics suits better to the mobile screen? “ 16 While music is certainly a central attraction of Project X, unlike the typical music video where the images are subjective to the music (as backgrounds), it subjugates background music to the narrative function for a melodramatic story portrayed in spectacular scenes – but in different ways from the conventional musical where the dialogue or songs are sung by actors as integral parts of diegetic world. His strategy was not to be bounded by the technical condition of the mobile screen yet paradoxically resonates with that of more form-conscious Loafer and 15 Although the term of ‘music-cinema’ is an awkward and somewhat oxymoronic coinage, I translate it directly true to the director’s intention. For the clarification of meaning, I suggest it is equitable to the “Musical Drama,” which reappears in variations on Satellite DMB. –Film 2.0, Ibid. 16 Film 2.0, Ibid. 130 Egg in his emphasis on the spectacle as a primary mode to deliver narrative and to attract the users’ attention. If Loafer and Egg and Project X present opposite yet agreeable strategies to create the ideal aesthetics of mobile cinema, My Good Partner develops another compromising strategy to tackle this issue. Apparently, the narrative structure of My Good Partner is similar to others, a serial consisting of 18 episodes that tells the story of the work and romance of two idiosyncratic cops ( played by famous ‘Korean Wave’ stars like Kwon Sang-Woo and Choi Yoon- Young) in a mixed genre form drawn from action, comedy and melodrama. In combining different generic conventions, My Good Partner shares the tendency of ‘intermedial genre’ with Project X, yet instead of coming up with a new hybrid genre form like a music cinema, it rather choose to ‘re-appropriate familiar content’ from existing media by including the parody scenes of well-known television commercials and movies for comic effect targeting for young users. Instead of mobilizing the ‘newness’ of mobile cinema specific to mobile medium, My Good Partner, hence, relies on the ‘familiarity’ of conventional media content and reformulates them for the mobile screen in order to increase the user’s attention to the mobile cinema. In fact, this strategy of recycling familiar content remains predominant along with the attempt to find the ‘new’ mobile specific aesthetics, creating conflicting yet sometimes complementary tensions throughout subsequent 131 development of mobile video content in industrial and discursive practices. Re- defined, reformulated, and re-interpreted, these five outstanding formal tendencies of mobile cinema in early stage continue to characterize the aesthetics of original mobile content and evidence how existing media conventions and discourses are invited into or condition the creation of new media experience. 2. Mobil e Cinema Yigong (Twenty Identities) Figure.3.2 Shots from twenty movies in Yigong series. Yigong DVD, 2004. After the successful experiments of the first generation of mobile cinema, SK Telecom more vigorously expanded the production of original mobile content. Yigong: Twenty Identities is the first mobile cinema series that the movie industry 132 was actively involved in from its conceptual stage, envisioning the potential of the mobile phone as a new and alternative venue for movie display. The genesis of Yigong, according to the story behind its production, is somewhat accidental, though anticipated, rather than determined. According to SK Telecom, The Korean Film Academy, one of the prestigious professional film academies and a cradle for numerous important filmmakers in Korea, proposed SK Telecom to produce special omnibus movie series, which was to be a part of the celebration of the 20 th anniversary of The Korean Film Academy. Participating as a co- producer for this project, SK Telecom funded the entire project, allotting $20,000 for each movie on the condition that movies were to be premiered solely through June starting December 8, 2003. In commemoration of its twenty years of history, twenty alumni of the Korean Film Academy, including such rising and established popular filmmakers responsible for the recent renaissance of Korean cinema as Huh Jin-Ho, Bong Jun-Ho, and Min, Gyu-Dong, made twenty digital shorts with the shared theme of ‘twenty.’ Following the overarching thread of ‘twenty,’ twenty movies around 5 to 15 min length were shot for two weeks with HD cameras and edited for two weeks, and after the first run on June they were released in DVD. 17 The project name ‘Yigong’ succinctly represents the 17 Yigong series include: Under a Big Tree (Park Kyoung-Hee), Sutda (Kim Eui-Seok), A Runner’s High (Kim So-Young), Innocence (Oh Byoung-Chul), Fucked up Shoes! (Yoo Young-Sik), Twenty Millimeter Thick (Lee Hyun-Seong), The Twenty’s Law (Cho Min-Ho), Pass me (Kim Tae-Yong), It’s 133 multilayered meaning of this unique project in that the Korean word ‘Yigong’ is a homonym that could signify the ‘number twenty’(read phonemically), ‘alone but together’ and ‘a different space’ (written in different Chinese characters semantically) simultaneously. Considering this genesis, Yigong is an outcome of the cooperation between the movie industry and mobile industry in keeping pace with the changing media environment. Without June as a preconceived display channel, Yigong would not be much different from a common digital movie series as it was officially designed as ‘Digital Shorts Omnibus Project: Twenty identities.’ However, initially introduced as mobile cinema, it inevitably suggests a particular model of ‘micro cinema’ born and situated in the intersection where the conventional discourse of cinema and the discourse of new technology - digital and mobile - conjoined. “Why digital?: the world is huge and the audiences are out there!” declares the manifesto of Yigong. 18 With the clear ambition of “adopting the guerilla filmmaking with digital camera,” the Yigong project does not shy away from the digital as an alternative tool for new cinematic expressions and actively and explicitly attempts to explore the potential of digital to enhance or contribute different on Mobile Queen (Lee Young-Jae), Alone Together (Huh Jin-Ho), Twenty (Park Ki-Yong), Secrets and Lies (Min Kyu-Dong), Looking for Sex (Lee Yong-Bae), Race (Kwon Chil-In), Oh, My Baby (Jung Byung-Gak), Twenty Questions (Lee Soo-Yeon), To the 21 st ( Jang Hyun-Soo), Neighborhood (Hwang Qu-Dok), At 2.0 Am Convenient Store (Kim Tae-Kyun), Sink & Rise (Bong Joon-Ho). 18 Official press release, “Yigong Project,” October 2003; reprinted in DVD booklet. 134 to conventional filmmaking. Mostly, it is the extra-cinematic dimension of production and delivery systems where the Yigong project team anticipates the technological specificity of the digital to make a significant impact. According to its press release, the benefit of adopting the digital is attributed to “the efficient, fast and economic production with mobility,” which not only enables a “director’s movie with ‘freedom of production’ to be true to his vision” but also allows “the boundless options to meet audiences with the possible ’freedom of communication’ through diverse display channels including mobile, internet and theater.” 19 This ramification of the digital clearly reflects the awareness or the necessity of considering the changing media environment where the cinema can be produced, delivered, and experienced outside of the conventional institutions, and thus exists as ‘images on the move,’ that is, the ‘original multimedia data’ in constant flow (transmission) across diverse media. Each filmmaker’s comment on the digital reiterates this shared expectation of a new media technology as a vehicle to achieve more freedom in two dimensions. According to them, the digital is “freedom (Park Ki-Yong),” “economic, mobile… freedom (Lee Young-Jae),” “unprocessed materiality, strikingly clear and live proximity (Kim Tae-Kyun),” “cheap and flexible tool easy to handle, a new system unsubordinated to the capital (Hwang Qu-Dok),” 19 Official press release, Ibid. 135 and so on. 20 These positive expectations of the digital as a libratory technology both in production and distribution dimensions, in fact, have long been touted since digital technology was first introduced to cinema and dominated early academic and industrial discourses of digital cinema in the 1990s. Taking digital technology as its ontological precondition, mobile cinema succeeds in what early experiments of ‘web cinema’ explored. 21 In addition, it expand their dimension within a more radically changed media environment, where the boundaries that once demarcated media experience between on-line and off-line, analogue and digital, static and mobile, commercial and art, and the public and private have become more flexible and mutable. Born in this context, the Yigong project launched with a clear vision about the technological condition of the mobile screen as a convergent digital technology, which is explicitly reflected in the formal experiments of Yigong movies. However, it is the legacy of cinema – its discourses and conventions - that not only circumscribes the mode of production and consumption of these movies but also ‘re-mediates’ the creation of formal characteristic of moving images for the mobile screen. 20 From promotional booklet, Yigong DVD, 2004. 21 Early web cinema experiments in both commercial and artistic sectors advocated the potential of freer artistic expressions and more direct communications with audiences on the computer screen although they short-lived after the so-called doc-com crash. For further analysis, See, Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema : Reinventing the Moving Image, (London: Willflower Press, 2005). 136 Mobil e Cinema of Attraction: Cinematic Register Most of Yigong movies integrate this consideration of medium specific and technical conditions of the mobile screen into their disparate formal aesthetics. On the one hand, working with digital cameras and editing systems demands different formal strategies for those filmmakers who were accustomed to working with traditional film cameras and equipment. On the other hand, filmmakers were concerned about the new difficulty that technical conditions of the mobile screen - spatial and temporal limitations due to small screen size, limited transmittable data size, and distracting viewing condition attributed to the mobility of user - might impede the viewer’s concentration on the movie content and therefore complicate the conventional mechanism of spectatorship based on the spectator’s identification with the diegetic world. However, the degree to which each director actively develops unique formal strategies specific to the mobile screen and to the original mission of the project varies. For example, Lee Hyun-Seung, the director of Twenty Millimeter Thick who is also a co- executive producer of Yigong series, said that he originally planned to construct his movie with twenty shots pictured one shot per day, in an eerie and grotesque tone. However, due to his complicated schedule, he could not execute his original plan and justified his decision not to adhere to the guideline of the project, as he thought, “although it is organized by the Korean Movie Academy, I 137 think this ideal of this omnibus project is to quench an individual director’s desire for expressing themselves and for enjoying the filmmaking freed from the burden of commercial success in the industry.” 22 Resonating with the official manifesto of Yigong project, his remark elucidates the multilayered meaning of ‘different space’ in the broader context of the media environment, where the embrace of the mobile screen itself broadens the space for experimental and non- commercial movies as an alternative display venue. As a result, his movie about the fragmented moment of misunderstanding in love relationship does not employ significantly unusual formal strategies yet it is interesting to note that it adopts such formal techniques as ‘frequent use of panning and zooming,’ ‘hand- held camera,’ ‘extreme close-up shot,’ traits of ‘mobile of attraction’ that the first generation of mobile cinema implemented. As Twenty Millimeter Thick exemplifies, whether intentional or accidental, movies of Yigong series materialize the concern about the challenge to attract the viewer’s attention to the small screen with various formal strategies. In general, movies of Yigong series tend to strategically mobilize ‘visual spectacle’ as the mode of address over the conventional narrative. Some rely on proven cinematic tactics to appropriate the presentational genres such as action. In fact, all three 22 Han Seong-Hee and Kim Young, “<Yigong> projecteu Lee Hyun-Seong Gamdok: Naneun Chungmuro Boankwan (Director Lee Hyun-Seong in Yigong Project: Am I a Chungmuro Sheriff) ?, Film 2.0, 18 November 2003, 85. 138 first generations of mobile cinema already incorporated the action genre to different degrees for the same purpose: action sequences involving main protagonists who are a loafer, assassins, and cops respectively. Jung Hyun-Seong, an art director in The Twenty’s Law, explicitly advocates this strategy, “Melodrama in 5 min? It should be an action movie in order to grasp viewer’s attention.” 23 However, The Twenty’s Law is one of few Yigong movies produced with immediate consideration of specific generic conventions, and most of Yigong movies remain non-descriptive in terms of genre while attempting to tackle the given obstacles through diverse experiments of cinematic and non- cinematic languages. To begin with, most of the narratives in Yigong movies represent a trope of ‘fragmented reality’ carved out of realistic yet limited temporal and spatial backgrounds rather than in the artificially constructed fictional spaces. While several movies imagine fictional spaces (near future world in The Twenty’s Law, abstract non-space of Looking for Sex), it is mostly natural settings without elaborate embellishment of artificial sets where the stories unfold. Given that the length of the story is technically limited to no longer than 10 min, their narratives tend to be ‘episodic’ or ‘situational.’ The spatial backgrounds are mostly indoors, whether it is a convenience store or a nondescript closed room (Alone Together, 23 Jeong Hye-Seong, “20: Yigong Series the 2 nd, ”Cinebus , 169, 25 November 2003, 40. 139 Sutda, At 2.0 Convenient Store, and Fucked Up Shoes!), while a few of movies found a way to bring the outdoors into the small screen (Runner’s High, It’s Different on Mobile Queen, The Twenty’s Law, and Sink & Rise). This spatio-temporally condensed and compressed narrative, the ‘sense of fragmented moment,’ is partly attributed to the technical conditions of the digital video camera that enables filmmakers with swift, handy and easy mobility. Intended to be digital short videos on the small screen, movies of Yigong, with ‘small stories in a real world,’ embody the cinematic narrative in documentary style and thus generate the increased sense of ‘intimacy’ for the viewer, pertinent to the personal and private nature of the mobile screen. However, interestingly, rather than delivering the naturalistic representation of ‘fleeting moment,’ they employ various convergent formal strategies that highlight the visual display, tendencies of ‘mobile spectacle’ introduced by the first generation of mobile cinema, and thus produce what I call ‘mobile cinema of attraction.’ The Twenty’s Law (Cho Min-Ho), It’s different on Mobile Queen (Lee Young-Jae), and At 2.0 am Convenient Store (Kim Tae-Gyun) prominently demonstrate formal traits of the ‘mobile of attraction,’ particular strategies of incorporating exhibitionist aesthetics, in respective ways. First of all, At 2.0 am Convenient Store presents an archetypical example of experimenting with image-centered narrative construction in consideration of 140 the technical conditions of the mobile screen. At first glance, At 2.0 am Convenient Store, a short story about a boy and a girl’s nonchalant encounter at a convenience store and their emotional exchange, looks like a pretty music video due to its heavy use of background music, appealing images enhanced by a soft- focus filter and the high-key lighting, none to minimal dialogue, and foregrounded mood over action. Shot in the real location of a convenience store, the story unfolds with melodramatic tension in a closed indoor space, and due to this spatial limitation, camera angles are limited. Figure 3.3- 3.4 Titled Overhead Angle shots (left & center). Figure 3.5 Surveillance Camera Shot (right). Figure 3.6 Establishment and Full shots. 141 Figure 3.7 Close-Up Shots of Objects. Figure 3.8-3.9 Inserted Stills Cuts (left & right). Figure 3.10 Wiping with Split screens (center). (All in At 2.0 am Convenient Store, 2002) At 2.0 am Convenient Store attempts to overcome these physical limitations with various camera angles – tilted, high and low- and montages of full shot and multiple close-up shots (Fig.3.3-3.10) whose alteration creates a rhythm, breaking the otherwise monotonous and stationary mise-en-scene in a confined space and frame. At the climatic moment, the movie utilizes still-cuts of two main protagonists’ faces for dramatic effect. As seen in <Figure 3.8> and <Figure 3.9>, two close-up shots seen from characters’ points-of-view suddenly turn into monochrome from color with a zooming out effect, fixating their gaze on each 142 other as well focusing the viewer’s attention on the rare revealing moment of the characters’ psychology. Eventually the visual closure of the narrative suggests their possible romantic connection by converging two split screens with images of their faces into one wiping shot (Fig.3.10). In fact, the salient use of (extreme) close-up shots in tight angles is one of the most predominant formal traits of Yigong movies and literally the most popular cinematic register mobilized in mobile cinema in general (Fig.3.11-3.26). Figure 3.11-3.26 Compilation of Close-Up Shots from Yigong Movies. 143 As in At 2.0 am Convenient Store, close-up shots not only serve to fixate the viewer’s (and characters’) gaze on the character and significant objects for smooth narrative progression within the limited space of the small screen (other examples, To the 21 st ( Fig.3.17), Alone Together (Fig.3.12), Sutda (Fig.3.24; 3.26), and It’s different on Mobile Queen (Fig.3.15; 3.23)), but they also deliver the emotional states of characters to the viewer, which is a hard effect to achieve within the limited spatio-temporal frames of mobile cinema (To the 21 st (Fig.3.11), Runner’s High (Fig.3.13), Neighbors (Fig.3.21). At the same time, however, along with this more conventional use of a close-up shot in the service of providing a narrative clue or the object of emotional identification, a close-up shot also functions to render images into (often, inanimate) objects of spectacle on its own (At 2.0 am Convenient Store (Fig.3.7), generating ‘tableau effect’ that is also produced by inserted still-cuts and stationary fixed camera. In her discussion of the Quick Time Movie, Vivian Sobchack argues that the ‘tableau effect’ is an ontological characteristic of the ‘little movie,’ as its ‘miniature size’ inevitably affects our sense of space and time. Referring to Susan Stewart’s discussion of the miniature, she explains that as “temporal compression and condensation conflict with forward movement and ‘life-like’ animation,” 24 as a result “the miniature always tends toward tableau rather than 24 Vivian Sobchack, “Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime,” 144 toward narrative, toward silence and spatial boundaries rather than towards expository closure.” 25 While in general, this phenomenological understanding of the miniature as tableau is relevant to understanding the material presence of the mobile screen as a ‘miniature screen,’ I also would like to point out that examples of mobile cinemas, miniature (miniature images) on top of another miniature (miniature screen), reveal the tension between the desire to achieve narrative with expository closure and resorting to cinematic techniques that self-reflexively appropriate the tableau effect. Although fragmented and situational, most of mobile cinema attempts to construct the narrative within condensed and compressed space with the support of various cinematic techniques. Most of all, this centrality of (stationary) images in constructing narratives is intensified by the empowered presence of background music or sound effects over the dialogue. On the one hand, heavy presence of the music in the foreground – rather than the background- whether it functions as the main attraction (Project X) or as an affective tool to create mood (At 2.0 Convenient Store), illuminates the ‘intermedial’ aspect of these movies situated at the intersection of conventional cinema and music video. In most of Yigong movies, on the other hand, dialogue exists at a minimal level (At 2.0 Convenient Store, Pass Millennium Film Journal, no. 34 (Fall 1999), http://www.mfj- online.org/journalPages/MFJ34/VivianSobchack.html (accessed in 29 April 2008). 25 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 66. 145 Me, and Twenty Questions), or not at all (Twenty, Alone Together, Neighborhood, and Looking for Sex), giving room to voice-over narration (Sutda, Runner’s High and My Baby). As dialogue does not perform its usual function as a central drive of narrative progression, more attention is drawn to the presentation of the visual images, whose effects of exhibitionist display are intentionally coordinated. As demonstrated in the analysis of camera angles in At 2.0 am Convenient Store, the tension between narrative integration and exhibitionist aesthetics governs most of Yigong movies. It is particularly interesting that Yigong movies show two distinct tendencies to tackle this conundrum in regards to camera movement. On the one hand, ‘hand-held moving camera’ is ubiquitously employed especially when any sorts of bodily actions are portrayed, while there is also a tendency to foreground the tableau effect with the use of fixed camera, on the other hand. Although hand-held camera movement itself is not specific to mobile cinema or even to digital cinema, movies in Yigong repeats what Loafer and Egg experimented for the same purpose of effectively increasing the ‘illusion of movement,’ an exaggerated yet hard effect to achieve on the small mobile screen. On the technological side, the handy, compact and mobile aspect of digital video that directors applaud partly transpires in the fluid and blurry camera movement. 146 Figure 3.27 Runner’s High. Figure 3.28 It’s Different on Mobile Queen; Figure 3.29 To the 21 st ; Figure 3.30 Sink & Rise ; Figure 3.31 The Secrets and Lies; Figure 3.32 Sutda; Figure 3.33 Oh, My Baby; Figure 3.34 The Twenty’s Law ( from left to right, top to bottom). For instance, Runner’s High follows the runner’s quite monotonous trajectory with shaky hand-held camera, which captures heightened emotional and physical state of the character during her run (Fig.3.27). In the same way, from a character’s simple running (Fig.3.28; Fig.3.30) or riding a vehicle (Fig.3.31) to the moment of violent physical struggles in the incident of rape (Fig.3.29) or the sword battle (Fig.3.34), the camera moves with characters, increasing a sense of movement. In other times, the moving camera is deployed as an efficient way to break the sense of confinement in physically narrow spaces. Figure 3.32 and 147 Figure 3.33 show examples of the circulating camera in a crowded card play room (though not conspicuous in the still picture) and in a subway. As in these two shots, the moving camera often develops into panning that replaces cuts as an alternative editing technique, which works efficiently for the smooth shot transitions in the compressed temporality of mobile movies. On the other opposite side of hand-held camera movement, there is an equally significant use of stationary camera, shot with a single-vantage point fixed cameras, which foregrounds the theatrical display, another cinematic technique to generate the tableau effect. A trope of mobile cinema, notably, Sutda, Fucked Up Shoes, and Neighborhood, foreground this tableau effect as their central structure. In Sutda, a comedy in a confined game room, the camera either circulates around the card table with various angles or zooms in to close-ups to portray pairs of the traditional Korean cards in an one-dimensional frame, turning the cards as displayed as almost still-life objects of visual attraction in a momentarily non-forwarding moment (Fig.3.35). Pass Me, more directly, transforms the movement of real life into still-life that live characters turn into immovable objects, an artificially produced theatrical stage where a central protagonist navigates, by stopping the temporal flow of the narrative for a moment (Fig.3.55). 148 Figure 3.35 Tableau shot of Korean Cards, Sutda. Figure 3.36 Tableau Shots from Three Camera Positions, Fucked up Shoes. While Sutda presents a hint of the tableau effect, Fucked up Shoes explicitly employs it as a central formal strategy as Fucked up Shoes constructs the entire narrative with a succession of events captured in three fixed and confrontational camera positions (Fig.3.36). The camera does not move but displays theatrical skits happening around mixed up shoes at the threshold of a restaurant from stationary and observational positions, yet alternating between fast and slow motions and thus adding a visual rhythm to the motionless shots. Through these spatially fixated yet temporally variable tableau shots, Fucked Up Shoes records 149 people’s behaviors, gestures of taking off shoes, and the arrangement of colorful shoes in front of a doormat/shoe shelf, and thereafter presents characters’ bodily movements and the shoe arrangements as its main subject. Fucked Up Shoes’ strategy of relying on the theatrical mode of presentational display without elaborate cinematic manipulations is one example of tackling the technical specificity of the mobile screen, the small screen size that hinders the immersive experience. Neighborhood pushes this tableau effect to the extreme through its intermedial and experimental style, revealing the flexible definition of mobile cinema. Officially it claims to be a “video dance,”as director Hwang Qu-Dok defines, a “reinterpretation of the most primitive of human languages – body movement (dance) through visual art.” 26 Without dialogue nor conventional narrative and cinematography, once introducing main characters through a series of extreme close up shots, Neighborhood presents a long sequence of protagonists dancing in front of a fixed and stationary camera, whose choreography alludes to a romantic triangular relationship between three characters (Fig.3.37). Accordingly, the dancing sequence flows just like the dance performance on a stage as their movement is presented within the layered image frame of a birdcage. In particular, the double exposure of images - two faces in a 26 Hwang Qu-Dok, Yigong DVD booklet. 150 close-up shot and the dance performance and birdcage - could be interpreted as an interesting visual motif that reflects the aspect of ‘compressibility’ of the spaces in mobile cinema– whether it intends to or not- in parallel with the use of split screen in At 2.0 am Convenient Store. Figure 3.37 Neighborhood. Figure 3.38 Looking for Sex. In fact, the ‘intermedial /convergent genre form,’ the mixture of generic conventions drawn from diverse media, is one of the significant features of mobile cinema explored in the first generation. Yet movies of Yigong do not explicitly pursue this aspect except for Neighborhood and Looking for Sex, which is literally a cell animation. Looking for Sex tells a story about a male protagonist caught up in a fantasy where everything he encounters is converted into erotic modes. In one noticeable scene, a mobile phone hung around woman’s chest 151 morphs into a phallic object that the woman licks in his fantasy (Fig.3.38). The fetishization of the mobile phone in relation to female sexuality is actually one of the recurring themes in Yigong series, which interestingly reflects the ‘gendered nature of mobile phone culture’ in the public imagination. Mobil e Phone, Mobility, and Screens on the Mobil e Screen: Thematic Register Considering the amount of freedom given to directors, it is natural that there is no single overarching theme that encompasses the twenty movies in Yigong series, except the basic guideline of the concepts ‘Twenty’ and ‘Yigong’ (alone but together and different space). However, in spite of the diversities, there are three significant thematic registers that provocatively reflect the self- reflexive concern about the medium specificity of the mobile screen. Previously, Loafer and Egg showed how awareness of medium specificity is integrated into the formal structure through its use of interactive options via SMS messaging. While movies in Yigong do not incorporate such direct technical features of the mobile screen, the representation of the mobile phone, mobile phone culture, and the ramifications of the mobile screen in relation to the adjacent media environment appear as central tropes and themes. First of all, mobile cinema represents the mobile phone. Such technical features of the mobile phone as SMS and MMS messaging commonly function as 152 plot devices (To the 21 st ), or the mobile phone culture itself becomes the subject of the movie (It’s different On Mobile Queen). It’s different On Mobile Queen is the most self-reflexive movie of all and succinctly reproduces the cultural topography of mobile phone culture in present Korea, with a focus on youth mobile culture: particularly gendered (girls) mobile culture, the ubiquitous SMS messaging for ‘Thumb Tribe,’ and the issue of the sexuality in relation to technological use. Director Lee Young-Jae, introduces the theme of his movie, “’Mobile… beyond a tool of communication, a 21 st century-style ego. The contemporary young generation, twenty-years-old something, is unfathomable without the mobile phones. [This movie is] A slice of their culture (a culture of so-called ‘Thumbelinas’). “ 27 In fact, the advent of the ‘Thumb Tribe’ is considered a globally ubiquitous phenomenon of youth text messaging culture and represents traits of the play culture of what Howard Rheingold defines as the “M generation (mobile generation).” 28 This notion of Thumb Tribe is popularly adopted in Asia across China, Korea and Japan, where the original Japanese coinage of Oyayubisoku is believed to have traveled, with the same ideographic Chinese alphabet phonetically translated into Eomjijok in Korean. From this anthropological perspective, the movie follows a short adventure of a 27 Lee Young-Jae, Yigong DVD booklet. 28 Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, (Basic Books, 2002), 4-8. 153 “Thumbelinas,” as the director says, ”whose life is unimaginable without the mobile phone for which she could sacrifice anything, even her body for sexual service in exchange for a new mobile phone handset.” 29 By focusing on ‘Thumbelinas,’ a feminine figure instead of the more general, commonly used, and sexually neutral term of ‘Thumb Tribe,’ It’s different On Mobile Queen represents the gendered nature or construction of youth mobile culture in the public imagination, where a girl is mostly depicted as a morally vulnerable consumer who is easily allured by the attraction of new media technology. Figure 3.39 Intro shots: Dancing kids in title Sequence. Figure 3.40 Mobile Phone Texting & Imaging. 29 Lee Young-Jae, Yigong DVD booklet. 154 Figure 3.41 Advertisement of Mobile Phone at Shopping Mall. Figure 3.42 Thumbelinas’ Addiction to Mobile Phone. (all in It’s different on Mobile Queen) Beginning with an iris shot of an MMS message sent to the protagonist at the center of the frame, It’s different On Mobile Queen introduces the mobile phone as the main character of the movie (Fig.3.39). As the above Figures illustrate, It’s different On Mobile Queen extensively constructs a self-reflexive fable about the mobile phone through various self-reflexive formal strategies of mobile cinema such as close ups, no dialogue and hand-held camera. Following a title sequence that catches a group of young people dancing in a subway platform, fully equipped with their usual gear – earphones, MP 3 players and mobile phones-, our mobile queen enters into the center of the frame, coming out of the just- arrived train but keeping her attention solely on her mobile phone. Various 155 close-up shots constantly capture what she does with her mobile phone – mostly, texting (Fig.3.40) - and with her empty hands after her mobile phone is broken on the platform - still texting on the surface of anything and anywhere including the guard rail of the escalator or on the bare back of her sex partner in the middle of their intercourse (Fig.3.42). Her addiction to the mobile phone is represented at the level of obsession: she does not stop texting even when she is hiding in the closet as she and her sex partner are raided by an anonymous intruder, and she takes her self-portrait in most awkward moments, such as while she is awaiting for the sexual exchange or while the guy is caressing her body. Besides texting, the salient use of mobile phone camera - mobile phone imaging, sharing and MMS messaging- has defined the culture of Eomjijok, specifically girls’ mobile phone culture in Korea. It’s Different on Mobile Queen tackles this culture in a somewhat problematic representation of female sexuality. It is interesting to note that the implicitly hidden desire of ‘displaying her body’ or ‘capturing her image for display’ and its potential for exchange – most significantly, for the sexual gaze or even sexual service- is allegorically represented by an image of a mobile phone advertisement in the shopping mall (Fig.3.41), which provokes our mobile queen’s desire to get a new handset and leads to her attempt to steal it. On the one hand, the advertisement itself displays the sexy female body with mobile phone in her hand as ‘desirable objects,’ 156 reflecting the underlying ideological operation that juxtaposes or collapses the female body into consumable objects for the male gaze. This ideological underpinning in fact turns into reality as the mobile queen decides to sell her body in exchange for a new mobile phone to a guy who caught her stealing. Pairing with this problematic representation of mobile queen, two male characters in the movie assume roles of sexual predators who explicitly exercise their power of ‘voyeuristic gaze.’ One guy buys sexual service from a mobile queen and the other boy stalks her from the subway station. The latter’s presence is not known until the climax of the movie when he breaks into the office where a mobile queen is having an affair with the guy, but he exists as a ‘gaze,’ as a peeping tom, secretly taking pictures of her in the subway station or in the woman’s restroom (Fig.3.40; third from left). In this sense, neither of the guys nor the mobile queen represents a positive image of the mobile phone generation, and the movie’s ending is ambiguous in terms of its moral connotation. After a short chase and confrontation, our mobile queen finally catches the intruder, the boy who has stalked her. However, as soon as she finds out that he is also a ‘Thumb Tribe,’ who has to desperately type on the empty wall when he is devoid of his mobile phone even when pinched in a corner just like her, she suddenly forgives him, and they happily savor a moment of taking pictures together with their mobile phones (Fig.3.43). This seemingly happy ending celebrating 157 acknowledged comradery between Thumb Tribes is ambiguous and certainly problematic in terms of the representation of female sexuality in relation to the cultural use of new technology. Figure 3.43 Happy Ending, It’s different on Mobile Queen. In fact, studies of youth mobile phone culture have provided rich findings about mobile phone use (particularly, SMS and MMS messages) and implication for the changed social behavior of young people. 30 For example, SMS messaging is a ‘navigation tool’ for young people in Japan to maneuver between the cultural spaces of home, school and public spaces and to reconstruct their own spatio-temporal parameters. 31 While the mobile phone is an integral 30 For the detailed accounts of this topic, see, Eampere Kasesniemi. L., Mobile Messages: Young People and a New Communication Culture, (Tampere University Press, 2003); Mizuko Ito and Dasuke Okabe, Personal, Portable and Pedestrian, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); Kim Eun-Jin et al, “Mobile Sonyeodeului Sudaddulki (Mobile Girl’s Chatting),” Mobile- Girls @ Digital. Asia, eds. Lee Dong-Hu et al (Seoul, Korea: Hanul Academy, 2006); KimGo Yeon-Joo & Lee Ji-Eun, “Jeongseojeok Medieoroseoui Handphone: 10de Yeoseongdeului Ilsangjeok Handphone Sayongeul Jungsimeuro (Handphones as Emotional Media: Focusing on the Teenage Girl’s Daily Use of Handphone),” Mobile- Girls @ Digital.Asia. 31 Mizuko Ito and Dasuke Okabe, Personal, Portable and Pedestrian. 158 part of contemporary youth culture regardless of gender roles, it has been also noted that teenage girls’ gendered uses of mobile phones have played a significant role in diversifying and cultivating the mobile phone as a ‘personal medium,’ beyond its initial instrumental use as extended communication tool for business men, the first group of mobile phone users. The mobile phone is an “affective digital technology” that allows high school girls in Korea to create and maintain their intimate personal networks in and outside of the surveillance of elders’ eyes and functions as a ‘personal memory box,’ the object of emotional affection. 32 It is also a channel for ‘girl’s play with ‘emotext’ (emotion + Text) and ‘chat’ among their peers, which increases the sense of intimacy and belonging to their culture, 33 or a tool for displaying personal identity (as a fashion accessory). 34 While acknowledging the significant presence of girls’ mobile phone culture, this movie paradoxically and self-reflexively reproduces particular sets of cultural discourse surrounding youth mobile phone culture, which are centered on girl’s practice of consumption and the anxiety about her subversive delinquency against the dominant stereotype of female subjectivity 32 KimGo Yeon-Joo & Lee Ji-Eun, “Jeongseojeok Medieoroseoui Handphone: 10de Yeoseongdeului Ilsangjeok Handphone Sayongeul Jungsimeuro (Handphones as Emotional Media: Focusing on the Teenage Girl’s Daily Use of Handphone),” Mobile- Girls @ Digital.Asia. 33 Kim Eun-Jin et al, “Mobile Sonyeodeului Sudaddulki (Mobile Girl’s Chatting),” Mobile- Girls @ Digital.Asia. 34 James E Katz and Satomi Sugiyama, “Mobile Phones as Fashion Statements: Evidence from student surveys in the US and Japan,” New Media & Society, Vol. 8, No. 2, (2006); 321-337. 159 under hegemonic patriarchal social rule. The self-reflexive representation of the mobile phone and problematic conflation of the issues of gender, sexuality, and the mobile phone repeats in To the 21 st , another Yigong movie that builds a story exclusively around the mobile phone. Based on horror film conventions, To the 21 st delivers a story of serial murders executed by a young female ghost, seeking to avenge her own death caused by sexual crime, who entices her anonymous male victims through SMS messages. Figure 3.44-3.51 To the 21 st . Victimized from a rape, presumably dead at 20, a female ghost resides in her lost mobile phone (Fig.3.46; Fig.3.49; Fig.3.50) and entices twenty-one men who pick up the phone through MMS messages of ‘erotic pictures of female body’ (Fig. 3.45), and kills them with mysterious powers (Fig.3.51). Her mobile phone not only stores her tragic memory of sexual violence (Fig.3.49; Fig.3.50) but also 160 allows her (her ghost) to communicate her intentions for the victims through MMS messages (Fig.3.45; Fig. 3.46) and SMS messages (Fig.3.47). Interestingly, the display of erotic pictures of the female body in fact directly refers to another facet of the impact of mobile content service on the Korean mediascape, the huge popularity of ‘adult content’ on mobile phones which are presented separately from general mobile cinema/TV content service. Adult content, which encompasses commercially produced semi-nude pictures of known female star entertainers and erotic cartoons/novels, have proven to be the most profitable mobile video content until they were forced to back down by constant public scrutiny and fear of moral hazards. 35 It has also been the most fingered target of heated public debate for its potential damage and threat to social custom, particularly for its presumed ‘bad’ influence on young people, whenever the mobile phone comes under fire. 36 The social phenomenon of consuming adult content on mobile phones certainly resonates with the 35 It is acknowledged that from the early days of mobile content service, mobile adult content has been condemned to be the most profitable yet shameful ‘gold mine’ for mobile phone service providers. – Choi Seul-Gi, “Mobile Adult Content Market: Woman Patron reaches to 30 %,” KMobile: Korean Mobile News, 25 February, 2005. 36 In early 2005, Public opinion board such as ‘The Commission on Youth Protection,” a governmental agency, expanded its precautionary monitoring on the ‘potentially harmful content’ to mobile content service and urged mobile service providers to install appropriate screening systems in order to forbid children’s access to adults content through such measure as ‘Special Mobile Service Contract for Youth Protection,’ immediately after it filed the legal sue case on mobile service providers for transmitting ‘illegal pornographic content’ in June 2006. Eventually, after legal struggles, SK Telecom declared to cancel all adult content that used to be serviced through Nate (upper service category of June) in July 2006. 161 commercial exploitation of the female body and the ‘objectification of female sexuality’ within broader consumer culture. However, while its negative implication is granted, it is also reported that in contrast to the general assumption that the primary consumer would be the men, female consumers are a significant part of this market, making up almost 30 % of entire sales in 2004, 37 which raises an interesting issue regarding the multifaceted complexity of gendered media consumption for which new media technology adds more friction and new nuances. Overall, To the 21 st twists the adult version urban legend – a lost phone with sexy female pictures- and constructs it into a horror narrative following the conventions of the horror genre, where it presents the exact mechanism through which adult content is consumed on the mobile phone. In fact, the motif of ‘haunted mobile phone,’ particularly condemned by traumatized female sexuality, has become a popular trope in recent Asian horror films including The Phone (Ahn Byoung-Gi, Korea, 2002,) and the One Missed Call series (Chajusin Ari, Miike Takesi, Japan, 2003). 38 37 In 2004, it is reportedly presumed that sales of adult content are divided into Star’s Nude Photo (44%), Erotic Novel (18%), and Erotic Cartoon (7%). In particular, narrowed down to the erotic cartoon genre, the percentage of female patron proves to be even with that of male, reaching to 50%. – Choi Seul-Gi, Ibid. 38 One Missed Call 2 (Tsukamoto Renpei, Japan, 2005), One Missed Call Final (Manabu Asou, Japan & Korea, 2006), One Missed Call ( Hollywood remake version; Eric Valette, USA, 2008). 162 Figure 3.52 Phone. 2002: A possessed girl with a haunted mobile phone in her hand (left). Figure 3.53-3.54 Korean Version Movie Posters of One Missed Call series. 2003 (center & right). Although further studies are required to examine the significance of these horror films within the genre, it is feasible to argue that these cultural representations of the mobile phone are gendered. In fact, from the beginning, the telecommunications technology, especially, the telephone has been closely associated with female subjectivity. For instance, in the study of early history of telecommunications in the United States, Claude S. Fisher provides rich examples of cultural discourses that were constantly mobilized to regulate the feminine – considered problematic against hegemonic social customs- use of telephone technology. 39 Parallel to the representation of problematic female sexuality in It’s different on Mobile Phone Queen, the gendered associations of the mobile phone in To the 21 st, reveals a certain tendency in the cultural imagination that conflates the irresistible charm and thus inevitable threat of the 39 Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992; Reprinted in 1994). 163 mobile phone with the female body, possibly reflecting male anxiety - literally, the male victim’s fear of death in To the 21 st - towards the proliferating and unyielding girls’ mobile phone culture. The second notable thematic register of Yigong series is the self-reflexive attention to the presence of the screen and screenic apparatus. From various forms of camera (mobile phone camera in It’s different on Mobile Queen (Fig.3.40; Fig.3.42), a regular camera in Pass Me (Fig.3.55)) to the display formats such as computer screen (Runner’s high (Fig.3.56)) and TV screen (Alone together, Twenty’s Law (Fig.3.57)), movies in Yigong integrate their interest in the technological apparatus of image production and consumption into the narrative. Often this attention is represented through the manipulation of the motif of ‘frames,’ the very basic ontological condition of the screen. If the use of the split screen presents the familiar cinematic reflection of the mechanism of the screen and multiple temporalities long explored by conventional cinema, television and experimental video arts (Secrets & Lies (Fig. 3.57)), pervasive use of still-cuts and entailing freeze frames, with diverse aesthetics purposes, allude to a prevalent recognition of this thematic tendency in a modest way. While they often serve a narrative function, as in At 2.0 Convenient Store, to highlight the emotionally climatic moment of two protagonists, in other times still-cuts and entailing freeze frames literally represent still pictures as in Pass Me (Fig.3.55, center) and 164 Runner’s High (Fig.3.56), which momentarily negates the operation of the screen as an illusory space for moving images and recalls our attention to its flat surface. Figure 3.55 Pass Me: Freezing the flow of time with camera. Figure 3.56 Runner’s High: Inserted photographs. Figure 3.57 Screen frames within the Screen: from Alone Together, Secrets &Lies, Twenty’s Law (left to right). Particularly, Runner’s High presents acute and self-reflexive consciousness about the condition of the screen as it shows a series of still pictures with or without the background of the computer window frame (Fig.3.56). When the still picture occupies the entire frame of the screen, it 165 functions just like a freeze frame, collapsing the frame of screen and that of the still picture and technically providing the illusion of crossing across these two different spaces - diegetic space and the one in the picture (Fig.3.56, left & right). In another shot, a still picture becomes part of compressed space with multi- layered frames (Fig.3.56, center), the frame of picture on top of the frame of the computer screen that delineates and recalls our attention to the invisible frame of the mobile screen. In this way, Runner’s High, cogently represents the exact mechanism that the “multiple window/multiple screen format becomes a daily lens,” as Anne Friedberg defines, “a vernacular system of visuality” in digital age. 40 In Pass Me, the protagonist constantly takes picture of passing landscapes out of the bus window (Fig.3.55). The lively scenes on the street, as soon as she takes the picture, freeze into still images to the point that one of them literally stops the temporal progression of the movie, turning the diegetic world into tableau scenery into which the protagonist walks in order to change the casual effect of the unfolding event (Fig.3.55, center). In this case, by displaying immobile visual data, still-cut inserts in Pass Me, on the one hand, self-reflexively redirect the viewer’s attention to the very ontological condition of the mobile screen, which is a vehicle for ‘moving images’ yet at the same time a flat display panel for any data just like the computer screen in Runner’s High. On the other hand, this 40 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 4. 166 attention to the frame and screen plays with the notion of ‘mobility’ on multiple levels – mobility of the character as mobile viewer in a mobile vehicle and the mobility of the images - suggesting another notable thematic register of mobile cinema : mobility. The analysis of cinematic registers of mobile cinema shows that the creation (illusion) of dramatic movement is one of the urgently shared concerns among Yigong movies. Whether the story itself involves dramatic physical movement or not, numbers of Yigong movies attempt to practically enhance the sense of movement in order to overcome the limitations of the mobile screen through diverse formal strategies as in Runner’s High, Neighborhood and Race. Yet this cinematic rendering of movement, in another sense, is an aesthetic response to the theoretical premise of ‘mobility’ of the mobile screen, an artistic negotiation to capture mobility of images on the potentially moving screen. Regarding to this issue, it is interesting to note that several movies embed the motif of ‘immobility’ into their characterization, paradoxically tackling the unconditionally affirmed condition of ‘mobility.’ For instance, My baby follows a group of social workers and children’s day camp to experience handicapped people’s daily life on the city street. The representation of their physical difficulty, though not impossibility, of navigating the public place on wheelchairs interestingly –and metaphorically- provokes scrutiny of the unchallenged and 167 presupposed ability of the viewer as an unconditionally mobile subject. Sutda furthermore confines the characters to a small gambling room where a wheel- chaired main character’s desire to achieve mobility as he gambles – both in a physical and social sense – does not go anywhere. In sum, the ranges of stylistic and thematic strategies that Yigong movies employ to tackle the mobile screen are diverse and sometimes contradictory in their effects. Specifically, it is notable that their search for the ideal aesthetics reaches out to diverse visual media for inspirations while sustaining an association with the cinema. The predominant tendency of exploring presentational formal strategies examined in Yigong, in particular, allude to the legacy of a cinema of attraction in contemporary media content in the nuanced way. Whether the effect of these presentational cinematic aesthetics is to serve realistic yet fragmented narratives or to intensify the tableau effect, they are the main operating principle to make mobile cinemas ‘spectacular’ visual objects. In the end, moving images within the small frame of the mobile phone are part of the spectacle that the mobile viewer carries and resides in. Constantly moving and watching, the female flanerie in Pass Me, hence, emblematically incarnates the idea of mobile cinema based on the epiphany of mobility -mobile spectacle, mobile viewer, and the mobile screen - in different spaces that Yigong dreamed. 168 3. Mobil e Drama Five Stars Figure 3.58 Five Stars, Mobile Drama. Sidus HQ, 2005. If Yigong represents commercial and artistic ventures to define mobile cinema, Five Stars claims to be the first ‘mobile drama,’ another coined genre of mobile multimedia content. If Yigong resulted from the mutual desire to explore the intersecting markets of the movie industry and wireless telecommunication industry, Five Stars was born a mobile-minded project from the beginning. Strategically and commercially designed for the growing mobile content service market by joint effort of SK Telecom with Sidus HQ, one of the major entertainment production houses in Korea, Five Stars presents an archetypical model of industrial practices to create and position mobile specific content without being bounded to pre-given parameters of conventional media. What defines Five Stars is its transmedia intertextuality, both on textual and contextual 169 levels, in that it freely and intentionally appropriates any available conventions from various media in order to maximize its commercial appeal. Premiering in October 2004, Five Stars set the record as the most popular original mobile drama produced in Korea as well as the 3 rd most popular drama among all mobile video content on SK Telecom’s network. It is reported that 75,000 users accessed its service for the first 15 days and more than 400,000 users have downloaded it through June. For the most part, the commercial success of Five Stars is attributed to heavy marketing efforts. Sidus HQ and SK Telecom promoted it as the first ‘mobile interactive drama’ and at the same time as a multimedia entertainment project which included other auxiliary media projects such as Idol Boys Singing group, digital photography picture book, OST, music videos, and even mobile games. For the Sidus HQ, Five Stars was also a part of the promotion campaign for its upcoming multi-talented Idol Boys group which shared the same name of ‘Five Stars.’ This intermedial aspect is explicitly reflected in the convergent formal structure of Five Stars, drawn from diverse digital media which is central in contemporary youth culture in Korea. In particular, Five Stars represents the entertainment business strategy to commercialize and appropriate girls subculture in terms of the digital media use into the mainstream media, whose prevalent presence and significance, however, 170 have met ambivalent public response as seen in the dubious representation of Thumbelinas in It’s different on Mobile Queen. Mobil e – Mind ed: Participatory Digital Youth Culture What distinguishes Five Stars from other original mobile content is its self-reflexive awareness and the active incorporation of the emerging youth subculture centered on digital media use – mostly internet and mobile phone- into its ‘interactive’ formal structure. To begin with, Five Stars adapts a popular ‘internet novel’ written by the most well-known and controversial internet novelist whose internet ID, ‘Gwiyoni’ (Meaning, Cute One; Lee Yun-Se), is her pen name. Gwiyoni published her first internet novel, That bastard was Cool (Geu Nomeun Meosisseosda, 2001), when she was a sixteen years old in high school. Since her first work garnered a phenomenal popularity in internet community, she has appeared as an icon of ‘youth internet culture’ (Fig.3.55). That bastard was Cool scored 8 mil. page views online, sold 500,000 copies when published as a print book later, and eventually was made into a movie in 2004. Its popularity even crossed the border to nearby Asian countries including Japan, China, Taiwan and Thailand where the popularity of the Korean Wave was surging to its peak. Gwiyoni herself joined the so-called the league of ‘Korean Wave Stars’ who enjoyed widespread fandom overseas. In China alone, it sold 600,000 copies, 171 creating a top bestseller for 5 months promoted by Gwiyoni’s fan meetings and book signing tour. Figure 3.59 That Bastard was Cool in Various Media Formats. Gwiyoni, 2001. Following up That bastard was Cool, Gwiyoni published five more internet novels until 2006 and even aside from Five Stars, her works have been constantly sought after by media producers. Most of her novels have been adapted to movies starring popular young actors, targeting the teenage girl market: Seduction of Wolf (Neukdaeui Yuhok; English movie title: Romance of Their Own) and That Bastard was Cool (English movie title: The Guy) in 2004, Doremipasolasido upcoming in 2008, and To You currently under production. Even before That Bastard was Cool hit the media market, the marketability of internet novel was already proven by the phenomenal success of My Sassy Girl (2002), which became one of the first successful Korean Wave films overseas. 172 Later recalled as ‘Gwiyoni Syndrome,’ the popularity of Gwiyoni’s non- traditional and idiosyncratic internet novels, more precisely, un-definable forms of writings departing from the traditional novel, not only shook the professional literature community but also signaled the emergence of ‘girls’ subculture’ on the surface of the public culture. It became a cultural phenomenon into which heated debates about its meaning, influence, and symptomatic implications have been poured from both popular and academic discourses. Most of all, her short, comic, lighthearted, episodic stories about everyday school life and romance of mostly teenage girls and boys were severely criticized and frowned upon by so-called adults with cultural authority due to their “violation of language structure,” 41 use of informal and colloquial languages such as internet idioms, slang, foul expression, and emoticons, “shallowness,” 42 and “negative impact on youth’s 41 It is acknowledged that the coinage and sharing of new linguistic codes within their intimate networks began with the dissemination of a beeper and early internet community (PC Tongsin in Korean) before WWW since early 1990s. While Gwiyoni’s informal use of language mostly consists of ‘Tongsin Eoneo’ (Internet Communication Idioms) and ‘Emoticon,’ there is also a popular trend of using more radical and broken form of language, which is called ‘Oegyeeo’ (Alien Words). The creation and sharing of Oegyeeo tends to be exclusive limited to the young people’s intimate networks (mostly, early teens) or special online communities such as ‘Teusumunja Manddang’ (Special Words Heaven; cafe.daum.net/NicknameWorld) that has more than 1 mil. members. The level of deconstruction for Oegyeeo, which not only dissects and fabricates a grammatical system but also mix-and-matches with foreign words, is so radical that ordinary Koreans cannot understand or decipher their meaning. However, there is also a parallel anti-Oegyeeo communities run by teenagers who are critical of this subculture - Yoo Hyeon-San, “We don’t Want to Play with You, “ Hankyoreh 21, 8 October 2003. 42 Ceon In-Seong and Kweon Hi, “‘That-Bastard’ Syndrome Urging Shallowness, ” Jungang Daily, 12 June 2007. 173 education.” 43 For those who uphold literature as a respectful high art or repository of standard cultural heritage, Gwiyoni’s novels ‘were not even a novel’ but a teenage girl’s gibberish that merely replicated a bad taste for low- brow genres of literature such as high teen romance pulp fiction, and thus became responsible for the ‘crisis of literature.’ 44 Somehow, these anxiety-ridden responses to Gwiyoni’s works paradoxically betray their acknowledgement of the potential impact that her works might yield on the existing cultural hegemony. In contrast, what most positive or at least objective discussions of Gwiyoni syndrome have focused on is the undeniable presence of new forms of internet culture supported by young people, who consider the internet as an integral part of their life, create new rules and activities to their own standards and life style, and play with them in virtual online spaces. 45 Gwiyoni’s violation of the linguistic code was not new but familiar to them as they themselves constantly create and share their own codes with their peers through SMS message and internet chats in everyday life, as numerous studies on youth mobile phone culture have witnessed. For its supporters, Gwiyoni’s success is 43 Lee Myeong-Ok, “Hangeol Pagoe Ireoke Makeumyeon Eoddeolkka? (Shall We Stop the Deconstruction of Korean Language),” Ohmynews, 18 October 2003. 44 For example, Park Deok-Gyu, “Gwiyoni Debate,” Seoul Daily, 22 July 2004. 45 However, it should be noted that Gwiyoni Syndrome is not unanimously supported by young people. There are as much anti-Gwiyoni sites as her fan sites, the diversity that shows the complex and multi-faceted configuration of digital youth culture. 174 largely based on its prompt reflection and transmission of young people’s already existing but hidden culture into the public online space, where more rigid conventional media remained relatively indifferent or unaware of fast changes in cultural sensibility. Faced with this cultural phenomenon, academic studies have examined and reassessed the significance of Gwiyoni’s works mostly in terms of its contemporaneity in the digital age. 46 For instance, in her study of digital literature, Choi Hye-Sil argues that the Gwiyoni syndrome exemplifies the broader changes of culture from “Print literature based” to “Electronic literature based,” or, more specifically, corresponds to the emergence of new communication systems centered on “digital storytelling that not only defies the boundary between oral and written languages, hierarchical one way communication between the reader and writer, and the self-sustained autonomy of the text but also converges with other forms of media.” 47 From this perspective, a “terrorist of Korean language/literature,” is recuperated as an “innovator of new literary forms specific to digital media.” 48 46 Among many, Kim Mi-Hyeon, “ Soseleul Senggakhanda – Hanguksoseului Hamjeong ( Thinking Novels- Pitfalls of Korean Novels),” Para 21, Spring 2004. 47 Choi Hye-Sil, Munja Munhakeseo Jeonja Munhakeuro (From Print Literature to Electronic Literature), (Seoul: Korea, Hangil Publisher, 2007). 48 Kim Eeun-Jung, “Ddeuneun Internet Soseul… Munhakeui Wiki (Rising Internet Novel… Crisis of Literature?),” JungAng Daily, 12 November 12 2007. 175 A recent prospectus of Gwiyoni’s works, regardless of their market success or critical values, is quite indicative of where convergence media practices are heading in Korea. Her recent novel, Syndrome (2006), coined the new genre of ‘Multimedia Novel,’ published/premiered on internet, which literally combined her writing, separately marketable OST music, and an accompanying internet movie, which in fact is remarkably similar to the overall scheme of the Five Star project. In addition, Africa (2007), her first poetry collection, which is a compilation of her short comments (to her fans writings) posted in her personal homepage in Cyworld, proclaims to create a new genre of a ‘Comment Poem.’ To ask whether it is a real poem or not obscures the point. What all of her works have achieved is to literally replicate the minute yet real ‘mode of engaging ‘with technological and cultural mechanisms of new digital media. Narrowed down, the linguistic characteristics of Gwiyoni’s works are identical siblings to those of SMS messaging shared among teenagers. Regardless of their artistic achievement as literature, fragmented, instantaneous, and colloquial – of ‘Net Generations’ or ‘Thumb tribes’- forms of Gwiyoni’s novels are noteworthy for their pioneering position as new forms of media content that not only ‘fit’ the convergent digital media environment but also reach out as closely as possible to the real sensibility of the young people – the central players/consumers in this changed media environment. In a broader context, 176 furthermore, what the Gwiyoni syndrome eventually brought up is the awareness of the emerging new forms of cultural activities based on ‘participatory media use’– exemplified by Gwiyoni’s career beginning as an average high school girl to an internet novelist– which is particularly contingent upon the creation of a “virtual subculture” in online space where young people create their unique identities in terms of knowledge, exclusivity and power.” 49 Born out of this cultural context, Five Stars aggressively rides on this trend and furthers it through its unique formal experiments suitable for the mobile phone, a key medium in youth digital culture. Previously, Loafer and Egg presented one way of incorporating interactivity options that allows the user to participate in narrative construction through SMS messaging. Five Stars expands the range of interactivity, in that users are invited not only to vote for casting an actor for a role of the final member of the team but also to decide the ending of the narrative through the most friendly ‘play spaces’ for them, that is, Five Stars’ Cyworld website - one of the world’s first social networking sites and the most popular personal homepage/blog service provider at the time- and its mobile phone site at June (Fig.3.60). Given that Five Stars is designed to be ‘mobile drama,’ the strategy of employing the cultural practices based on internet and 49 Andy Bennett and Keith Jahn-Harris, After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 347. 177 mobile phone is more than appropriate and in fact effective in defining and positioning this new genre of media content. Figure 3.60 Auxiliary Marketing Space of Five Stars: Cyworld Mini-hompy, Picture Catalogue with actors, Fan meeting, 2005. To begin with, neatly tied to Sidus HQ’s plan to launch and promote a new Idol group, the talent recruiting was wide open to the public with the anticipation of drawing public attention to its eventual commodity value. Interestingly, the recruiting process itself explicitly reflects the landscape of Korean popular culture, where internet based media have overpowered or at least rubbed shoulders with the conventional media. Sidus HQ asked applicants to post their digital pictures either on the Five Stars mini-hompy 50 in Cyworld or to send pictures to Five Stars’ Cyworld moblog through MMS messages. 51 50 Mini-hompy is a commercial name for the personal home page in Cyworld, an equivalent to personal web blog. 178 Indeed, the practices of taking, storing, and sharing (self-) portraits have emerged as one of the most pervasive cultural practices of engaging with such new media technologies like personal internet homepages and mobile phones. Therefore, the significance of Five Star’s formulation of interactivity options lies in its swift response to the broader cultural paradigm that Cyworld embodies. In fact, the Cyworld syndrome alone deserves a separate study considering its impact on cultural change in digital Korea. Most of all, it is acknowledged that Cyworld stands at the center of mobile convergent net practice in Korea, as Larissa Hjorth and Heewon Kim note in their study of gendered use of Cyworld in Seoul, where women – encompassing teenage girls and young women in their twenties and early thirties- participate as central players. 52 The gendered nature of this net practice is particularly pertinent to the discussion of Five Stars, which is explicitly built on and attempts to appeal to female users who are also major consumers of Idol groups. Studies have shown that there have been “major gender shifts through the usage of 3G mobile phone 51 In fact, Cyworld, the recent hot trend in Korea, is produced by TU Media and its moblog is run by SK Communications, which are SK telecom’s in-house companies. The fact that creative teams behind the remarkable success of Cyworld participated in the SK telecom’s recent ‘Digital Entertainment Forum’ demonstrates SK telecom’s consistent and systematic efforts in creating new entertainment business model centered on digital content. Tu media eventually launched mobile TV service (Satellite DMB) and moved into digital media market.- Kim Soo-Kyoung, “SK telecomi Yeonhwa Saeope Ddwieodeuneunga (Is SK telecom jumping into the Entertainment business?),” Cine 21, no.488, 25 January 2005, 30. 52 Larissa Hjorth and HeeWon Kim, “Being There and Being Here: Gendered Customizing of 3G Mobile Practices – Through a Case Study in Seoul,” Convergence :The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2005, 51. 179 practices that have seen stereotypes such as female users as ‘passive’ and male users as ‘active’ dismantled” 53 and women are “more active than men in their adaptability and willingness to adopt the multi-media functions of mobile phone” in Korea. 54 This increase of women’s presence in new media spaces is specifically reflected in the interface designs, geared toward the female sensibility. Notably, the successful operation of Cyworld with its famous cute designs proved that these options of cute interfaces designs, communicative tools, items and decoration accessories are not only practically effective in attracting or appealing to female users, but also pervasive as a predominant aesthetic principle in the net spaces. In a broader context, this cultural practice of ‘cuticization’ of new media technology aligns with the tendency of “techno-cute” that Brian McVeigh notes in his study of female customization of new technology in Tokyo. 55 Initially discussed as a regional specific tendency - prominently, originating from Japan’s ‘cute’ popular culture and disseminated across Asian Pacific region- this techno-cute appropriation of technology is becoming a global phenomenon as a “more comprehensive aesthetic form” in the sphere of techno- 53 Larissa Hjorth and Kim Hee-Won, Ibid., 51. 54 Lee Dong-Hee and Seun Hye-Sohn, “Is There a Gender Difference in Mobile Phone Usage?” (paper presented at the Mobile Communication and Social Change Conference, Seoul, Korea, October 18-9, 2004), 243. 55 Brian McVeigh, “How Hello Kitty Commodifies the Cute, Cool, and Camp: “Consumutopia” verse “Control” in Japan,” Journal of Material Culture, no. 5, 2002: 291-312. 180 culture. 56 Specially, it finds a specific place in the midst of Korean popular culture where Gwiyoni, Cyworld, 3G mobile phone, and Five Stars cordially meet. In particular, the genesis of Cyworld and its moblog, which is only accessible through SK Telecom’s 3G mobile multimedia service Nate as it was created and run by SK communications, clearly articulate the current configuration of mobile phone culture in Korea which is constituted institutionally and culturally in tandem with overall participatory digital culture. Incorporating this new media specific communication system into its pre-production stage, hence, Five Stars positions or desires to position itself something like a friendly ‘buddy’ that potential viewers could personally interact and communicate with in the virtual space of digital net practices. Interactivity: Narrative Structure of Mobil e Love Game Limited yet effective, this type of two-way communicational interactivity option is stretched into the narrative structure of Five Stars, which unfolds as a story about two high school girls and five boys, who also wish to be idol stars within the diegetic world of Five Stars. As its marketing phrase of ‘Five Stars as a love game’ illustrates, the narrative structure of Five Stars is intentionally built on 56 For the detailed accounts of the politics of cute in global context, see Iwabuchi Koichi, “How ‘Japanese’ Is Pokemon?” Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon, ed. Joseph Tobin (Durham and London: Duke Univ. Press, 2004). 181 the motif of a game with characters, challenge stages, and an open ending. First of all, true to its acclaimed genre of ‘mobile drama,’ Five Stars heavily relies on the conventions of Korean television, particularly the genre of ‘television drama,’ a Korean equivalent to American soap-opera or serials/series. Commonly referred to as ‘drama,’ Korean television dramas typically have a serial structure that runs with varying numbers of episodes, ranging from around 10 (mini- series) to more than 50 (weekend drama and daily-series). 57 Consisting of 7 episodes, Five Stars succeeds the ‘episodic and serial’ narrative structure that the first generation mobile cinemas have explored. Except for the introductory and final episodes, five main episodes are allotted to introduce each male character in the highly formulaic and stereotypical setting of a Korean high school. More specifically, Five Stars attempts to maximize the effect of user’s interactivity by embedding textual and contextual interactive options into the self-reflexive story and characterization. The story begins with an encounter between four high school boys, who already debuted as a rooky boy singers group, named ‘Blue Ocean,’ in Seoul, and an ordinary boy (Siul) living in the countryside; the four rebellious Seoul boys are transferred to the new school in the countryside due to their misbehavior, 57 Although customary named mini-series, in terms of formal structure, they are serials which have a central thread of narrative over the continuous episodes and definite narrative closure in the final episode. 182 which damaged their career as an Idol group. The country boy, who will eventually become a hidden jewel for their refurbished group, is the very one last member recruited by popular vote. As such, the contextual reality collapses into the diegetic world: Siul is the last member of the boys group within the diegetic world of Five Stars, and the actor playing Siul also becomes the last member of ‘Five Stars’ in real life. The narrative goal for these five male characters is to get the heart of Sejin, a pretty high school girl and the heroine of Five Stars. More accurately, the narrative revolves around who will be chosen by Sejin, but it is actually users who decide Sejin’s romantic partner through their popularity voting. Accordingly, each main episode functions as a challenge stage for five stereotypical suitors – tender boy, tough boy, cute boy and sexy boy etc- where they respectively boast their unique but highly predictable attractions, whether it is a warm heart, a musical talent or physical strength displayed through street- fighting action sequences, in order to attract Sejin as well as the viewer. Centered on a female protagonist with agency, Five Stars raises an interesting question about the gendered constitution of the presumed viewer. Regardless of their actual identity, viewers are supposed to identify with Sejin in order to exercise their decisive vote for five attractive boys. Not only does it resonate with the fact that the primary fans for the Idol Boys group are female-dominant and thus Five Stars project presumably targets teenage girls for its main consumer group, but it 183 also reveals how much girls’ media culture is deeply integrated into the formation of new media forms as an undeniable and powerful driving force. Therefore, winning Sejin’s heart narrative-wise – literally winning the viewer’s heart- collapses into the actual dreams of five actors who aspire to be idol stars in real life. Becoming a significant part of the formal characteristics of mobile video content, therefore, this kind of interactivity option, though limited, provides users with the chance to participate in the construction of media content through what Marsha Kinder calls, “performative interactivity.” In relation to the database narrative structure pertinent to digital media, Kinder defines the concept of performative interactivity: “by which performer of the narrative participates like an actor interpreting a role, contributing her own idiosyncratic inflections and absorbing the experience into her personal archive of memories.” 58 Although Five Stars and other fellow mobile cinemas do not provide completely open narrative structures under the viewer’s full navigability, they explore the possibility of interactive communication with the viewer, taking advantage of the medium specificity of the mobile screen as a more intimate, personal, and mostly ‘mutable’ medium. 58 Marsha Kinder, “Pat O’Neil with Rosemary Comella, Andreas Kratky, and the Labyrinth Project”, Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, eds. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 357. 184 If the episodic structure drawn from TV and an interactive game- structure characterize the convergent nature of the narrative structure of Five Stars, the intermedial generic origin of Five Stars more clearly reveals in its visual style with a tendency toward ‘mobile of attraction’ explored in mobile cinema. The fact that the director of Five Stars is Hyun Young-Seong, who established his career through commercial music video, help explain the presentational image- oriented style of Five Stars. In other words, the fact that he was chosen to direct this mobile drama itself reveals the underlying industrial consciousness about and expectation for the mobile screen medium: a small screen that requires a highly intensive visual style in order to constantly grasp the attention of potentially distracted users. As in the Yigong series, the dialogue of Five Stars is minimized to merely catchy lines for each character. What replaces the empty space of character emotional expression and communication is the slick ‘look’ and the exaggerated ‘action’ of characters. However, as opposed to the Yigong series and the earlier mobile cinema that foreground unique formal strategies, Five Stars does not employ explicitly experimental formal techniques but rather adopts the realistic style of representation based on classical Hollywood convention. Seeming realistic, however, the visual style of Five Stars exemplifies another way of presenting spectacle on the mobile screen. In tandem with such formulaic 185 conventions of Korean television (melo) drama and melodramatic music videos as high-key lighting, traditional shot compositions, artificially choreographed movements, and excess of sentimental mood, Five Stars presents the pretty boys and girls as the object of spectacle through softened, air-brushed, and exaggerated pretty looks. In terms of appropriating visual spectacle as the primary mode of address, Five Stars reiterates what previous mobile cinema suggested, although the specific strategies they employ are different. However, Five Stars’ more conventional and realistic strategy to create spectacle in fact is more or less not an individual case but rather pervasive among other original mobile content, undefined miscellaneous content without specific genre names. For instance, Extreme X, another original mobile content serviced though SK Telecom’s June along with Yigong and Five Stars in 2004, adopts similar strategies of relying on the spectacle to attract viewer’s attention yet it does not show any apparent signs of struggling with experimental cinematic techniques. Curiously not labeled by its producer with a specific genre name unlike its other siblings, it remarkably shares the visual styles of Five Stars yet it is spiced with bold and graphic representations of sexual themes. In a sense, it seems like an extreme version of Five Stars, geared toward probably more adult and presumably male users. With similar episodic narrative structure that moves toward a potential romantic 186 summation among characters, yet without the user’s interactivity option to participate in the narrative progression, Extreme X presents one female character and four of her suitors. In contrast to the image of innocent and adorable teen age girls in Five Stars, the female protagonist in Extreme X vividly represents a traditional sense of the female body as spectacle and an object of sexualized male gaze, enhanced by exposing costumes – bikini swim suits- and extreme camera angles that accentuate specific female body parts. At the same time, the four male characters who compete for the girl’s attention literally display their masculine and physical attractions through the spectacular sports scenes of waterskiing, inline skating, surfing, and kickboxing in each respective episode. In the sense that their bodies are also displayed as objects of visual pleasure, Extreme X is not shy to present both female and male bodies as central attractions for spectacular pleasure. In the end, it is also the intensity of attractions that affects the users’ decision about who will be the romantic partner for Sejin and thus a member of the promising Idol group, inside and outside the worlds of Five Stars. In sum, if Yigong series, deeply rooted in cinematic tradition, explores various presentational cinematic techniques to define mobile specific visuality, Five Stars succinctly shows the position of the mobile screen as ‘intermedial and mutable mobile’ within the convergent media environment and materializes this into its formal structure. While Yigong series fulfills the movie industry’s desire 187 to extend into new media, those twenty directors of Yigong saw the potential of the mobile screen as ‘another space’ open to them, freed from the pressure of the mainstream movie industry 59 and not entirely contained within the regulations and the paradigm of traditional movie industry. On the contrary, it is unexpected that a mobile-minded project, Five Stars, ends up with a highly formulaic narrative and the visual style of conventional media. Rather than the experimental formal innovations specific to mobile screen, Five Stars embraces convergent media practices, particularly, girls’ digital culture, into its formal structure. It cleverly galvanizes the most saliently adapted technological yet culturally shaped medium specificities of the mobile screen such as the interactivity option of SMS messaging, and therefore bends to the cultural sensibility of digital media practices among young people. The traits of ‘mobile interactivity’ that Five Stars has sophisticated is continuously reformulated and upgraded into new genres of mobile video content such as ‘mobile quiz shows’ on subsequent Mobile TV service. In this context, the familiar visual style of Five Stars functions as the access code, that is, the cultural interface that makes the travel of mobile video content across diverse media smooth. For the current formulation of this cultural interface of the mobile content, it is particularly important to point out the 59 Han Seung-Hee and Kim Young, Ibid. 84. 188 significant impact of television as much as that of cinema. Not only do majority of mobile video content, including the first generation of mobile cinema and Five Stars, declare the legacy of television – seriality and modularity - as integral to their convergent formal structure, but they also succeed the television’s centrality as a personalized and customized media practice, which has been enhanced with the development of remote controls and recent digital complementary technologies such as TiVo. Whatever their commercial name may be - mobile cinema or mobile drama- they expand the conventional one-way communication relationship between text and spectator/viewer/user into a new screen experience based on interactive flow. Although original mobile content responded to industry’s demand for the re-editable and re-packable “compact content,” 60 the unsatisfactory marketability of ‘newness’ inevitably let them be overshadowed by another strategy of finding ideal mobile content, that is, the increased reliance on migrated mobile content based on the practice of galvanizing preexisting media content. Whether with migrated or original mobile content, the visuality of the mobile screen is eventually constructed in the midst of the specific process of negotiation and appropriation of new and old conventions, out of the cordial 60 Lee Seun-Ho, “DMB contentseu Chabyeolhwa Jeonlyak: Teukbyeolhago Compacthan Contentsreul Chajaseo (The Differentiating Strategy of DMB content: Finding Specialized and Compact Content),”Media Today, 4 April 2005. 189 collision between artistic aspiration, commercial industrial practices and the user’s experience. Therefore, ambivalent tension between the discourse of new and old continues into the commercial Mobile TV service that immediately followed 3G mobile phone multimedia content service. The practices of Mobile TV will demonstrate how the legacy of mobile cinema and mobile drama bleed into a new terrain. 190 Chapter IV Mobile TV: TV-like Screens “Koreans will kill the TV,” said George Gillder, an author of Telecosm, at the 2004 Seoul digital forum. 1 In spite of the futuristic expectation to label Korea as a Digital Future land, 2 his remark shows some insight into the present digital media environment in Korea. With active usage of sophisticated mobile phones that he names “Teleputer,” he anticipates, Koreans will push away old-fashioned TV screens in ubiquitous computing environments. In fact, it is true that television viewership has constantly dropped in Korea, but this does not mean that people watch less television content. Rather, people watch more television than ever. They just watch television on ‘other screens,’ a transition that is blamed on the widely available high-speed broadband internet service and on the growing popularity of convergent mobile devices. However, it is important to note that what may be lost is the attraction of the television ‘screen’ and the old-fashioned one way delivery system of television technology rather than the 1 SBS Digital Forum, Je 3ui Digital Hyeokmyeong : Convergenceui Choe Jeonseon (The Third Revolution: On the Front of Convergence), (Korea; Mirae M & B, 2004), 105. 2 For the recent Korea fever in IT and Digital industry, see Tomi Ahonen and Jim O'Reilly, Digital Korea: Convergence of Broadband Internet, 3G Cell Phones, Multiplayer Gaming, Digital TV, Virtual Reality, Electronic Cash, Telematics, Robotics, E-Government and the Intelligent Home, (London: Futuretext, 2007). 191 television itself. ‘New’ screen media–brothers of Teleputers– do not simply replace ‘old’ media but rather they grow out of and tackle old media in a much more complicated way. Then, will these ‘TV-like screens” kill the TV in Korea? 3 This chapter examines the actual practices of mobile TV, one of the newest mobile screen ventures in media history, in the current mediascape of Korea. Following up the discussion on the intersecting relations between the condition of media convergence and the cultural formation of the mobile screen in previous chapters, I analyze the particular way in which mobile TV enters into contemporary screen culture as a networked personal screen media. If mobile cinema represents the cinematic interpretation of mobile video content or mobile appropriation of cinematic tradition on the mobile phone and thus embodies the changed status of cinema in digital age, mobile TV sheds light on the imminence of the changed significance of television in the paradigm of a convergent media environment. Defining, producing, and appropriating ‘ideal’ mobile multimedia content again appears to be the biggest challenge for mobile TV. It is not merely an aesthetic issue but cultural as well, where the industrial textual practices of content programming strategies of mobile TV operators and the user’s critical practice play constitutive roles. 3 Toby Miller, “Hullo Television Studies, Bye-Bye Television?,” Television & New Media, 1 (1) (2000), 5. 192 To begin with, mobile TV is an umbrella term that refers to the live streaming audio/video content service mostly on mobile/portable screen platforms, which encompasses other popular names such as ‘Pocket TV’ and ‘Portable TV.’ As the latest in mobile screen practices, mobile TV furthers the possibility of personal and portable screen media service that 3G mobile phone have explored at the center of transformations in communication and media, in the phase of ‘media convergence.’ From its inception, mobile TV embodies the characteristics of digital transmedia and operates in the principle of media convergence. Technologically, it is a new hybrid form of media service that literally combines telecommunication with traditional broadcasting and operates on convergent screen devices. Mobile phone content service works as VOD (video on demand), providing requested entertainment content to individual subscribers via the mobile phone wireless internet with its technical limitations of small data size and compromised quality. Yet mobile TV offers live streaming content in “unicast” fashion for all viewers at once, which is closer to traditional broadcasting. 4 As a broadcasting service, it also requires convergence at the level of cultural and institutional practices as a necessary condition, including the establishment of new social/cultural/technological institutions, laws and regulations in contrast to 3G mobile multimedia content service, which is largely 4 Marguerite Reardon, “AT&T taps MediaFlo for Mobile TV,” CNET News.com, 12 February 2007. 193 under the discretion of telecommunication. Along with this institutional level of convergence, the form of suitable content is reconfigured to meet the conditions of this new media service. User’s experience is accordingly readjusted for the changed media format and content, or vice versa. Overall, these multilayered dimensions of convergence are closely intertwined and reciprocally constitute mobile TV as digital transmedia. Hence, the aesthetics of mobile video content is not a self-sufficient issue but creates comprehensive meaning only when we consider the changing paradigm of medium specificity, the context of development, concrete industrial practice and usage patterns altogether. In previous chapters, I examined how mobile phone and mobile TV emerged as particular cultural technologies through the analysis of their developmental story in the history of media and particularly in the Korean context, where it was commercialized for the first time in the world. The actual industrial practice of commercializing mobile TV technology involves an invigorating discussion of its medium specificity, which is mostly represented through the interplay between the discourse of ‘newness’ and ‘oldness.’ In particular, the content programming strategy of Korean mobile TV services reflects this concern about how to position mobile TV as a new media service. Such questions as-what is the right content for the mobile screen, what do people actually watch on their mobile screen, what are they expected to watch and 194 moreover what and how do they want to watch- underline the mobile TV service operators’ content programming strategies and the actual construction of unique mobile content . 1. The Present of Mobil e TV In 2005, Korea began the world first commercial mobile TV service, using DMB technology, which refers to ‘digital multimedia broadcasting.’ Countries such as England, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan began the early stage of mobile TV service with different technological formats and business models. 5 In 5 As of January 2007, the global development of Mobile TV unfolds as follows: 1) England: As one of the vigorous members of Mobile TV ventures, England has witnessed a gradual development. Several companies such as NRJ group, SFR, ITV and Vodafone explored pilot Mobile TV services in streaming or downloading formats since the end of 2005. BT aligned with Virgin Mobile and together launched BT Movio while O2 cooperated with cable network NTL. A television network Arqiva put a temporary pilot Mobile TV service in Oxford. Vodafone began Mobile TV since December 2005 using its wireless portal Vodafone Live. Along with diverse business models, the various Mobile TV technological formats including Qulcomm’s MediaFlo, Korea’s DMB, domestic DVB-IP have been tested for their commercial potential as well as for standards. 2) Germany: Terrestrial DMB Mobile TV launched in May 2006 in eight major cities including Berlin, Munich around the World Cup Soccer 2006. 3) France: The pilot service of the Terrestrial DMB launched in December 2005 for making it the first European attempt. FrenchTelecom was constructing the research center for Terrestrial DMB while the major telecoms and television broadcasters formed an alliance such as Orange/Canal+, SFR/M6, Bouygue/TF1 and have been providing a limited live video content service using DVB-H. 5) United States: MobiTV leads the Mobile TV market by providing the video clips acquired through the partnership with big entertainment giants via wireless phone network. Verizon launched Vcast in March 2007, which transmits television content from major networks including CBS, Comedy central, ESPN, Fox, MTV, NBC 2, NBC etc. Sprint Nextel also provides video 195 the US, before commercial mobile TV service began in 2007 with the launch of Verizon Wireless’s ‘Vcast TV’ through Mediaflo, some wireless service carriers provided modified video content for their mobile phone networks including Sprint Nextel’s MobiTV and Verizon’s Vcast. In spite of the shared umbrella term of mobile TV, these global mobile screen ventures are not technically and institutionally homogenous. For example, most American versions of mobile TV are actually a 2.5G (2.5 Generation) mobile phone content service. Korean mobile TV or DMB is a separate mobile media service that requires the invention of independent new technology. In Korea, it is the DMB and not mobile TV that acquired currency as an official name both in industry practice as well as in popular discourse. In comparison, while DMB is a self-definitive term indicating its ‘technological’ nature and gamut, allowing all types of digitized multimedia content to be delivered to diverse mobile screen platforms, the term mobile TV circumscribes its identity as ‘media’ by specifying its association with conventional television. The fact that mobile TV acquired global currency as a definitive term in spite of locally and technologically diverse uptakes content through ‘Sprint TV’ and ‘MobiTV’ in a similar way of Vcast. 6) China: Weirung started the terrestrial DMB service in Beijing in May 2006 and other provinces such as Kwandung plans to launch terrestrial DMB service. 7) Japan: MBCo pilot tested Satellite DMB service for the first time in the world in early 2005 while the commercialization of Mobile TV has been slow. Recently NTT DoCoMo, KDDI Vodafone all support the OneSeg system centered on car navigation Mobile TV. 196 symptomatically raises a question about the role of culture in defining and appropriating a new technology. In fact, cultural studies of media have demonstrated that when a new technology is introduced into a given society, culturally specific discourse and appropriation eventually identify the technology, define its use, and thus realize its potential. 6 During this process, a new technology is often understood through or against an association with familiar and existing social and cultural conventions. The popular naming of mobile TV reiterates this tendency of mapping new technology within the existing cultural milieu. In particular, as the first model of commercialized mobile TV service, Korean DMB demonstrates the way in which the cultural practice has intervened, or more precisely, played a constitutive role in establishing this new technology as a current form of media service. The formal aesthetics of content on DMB and the content programming strategies of DMB service explicitly reflect how this intentional or inadvertent slippery use of terms – between mobile TV and DMB- reciprocally affects the formation of mobile visuality specific to mobile TV. I use the term DMB when I discuss Korean mobile TV service in order to distinguish the specific occasions and patterns of this cultural appropriation. 6 Notably, Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, (University of California Press; Reprint edition, 1994); Caroline Marvin, When Old Technologies were New, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); William Boddy, Mew Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States, ( New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004). 197 Mobil e TV in Korea: Satellite DMB and Terrestrial DMB Since DMB was first introduced in 2005, its subscriptions have dramatically increased, reaching 6.5 million in early 2007. There are two types of competing DMB services: Satellite DMB (S-DMB) and Terrestrial DMB (T-DMB). 7 For end users, S-DMB and T-DMB look quite similar except for their choice of content, yet these two mobile TV services operate on different principles. In terms of technology, S-DMB delivers content through a satellite to individual screen platform and like a traditional television broadcaster, it targets the whole country as a unified service area with a single broadcasting signal transmission. Individual users either receive a signal through their own DMB receivers directly or mediated through terrestrial gap fillers in a bad reception area. T-DMB adopts the same delivery system as television broadcasting, transmitting signals via current territorial broadcasting channels (VHK 8, 12) and gap fillers to individual receivers. Unlike S-DMB’s unfired service area, T-DMB provides its service in divided service areas such as Seoul (the capital city of Korea), and other parts of the country where its six service operators divide signal bands. <Table 4.1> illustrates the basic facts of two DMB services and shows their differences in several categories. 7 In early 2004, SK Telecom in Korea and MBCco in Japan launched a satellite together and have shared it for their respective Satellite DMB services. Terrestrial DMB technology invented in Korea was selected as an EU technological standard for Mobile TV service in 2006. 198 Category Satellite DMB(S-DMB) Terrestrial DMB(T-DMB) Operator TU Media(SK Telecom) Consortium (KBS/MBC/SBS/ YTN/U1Media/HankookDMB Subscription 800,000* 3 mil.* Channel 34 ch.(video 15/ audio 19) 27 ch.(video 7/ audio 13/ data 7) Service period 2005. 5.1- 2005.12.1 - Business model $13 monthly service fee Free service + ad. Sales Platform DMB phone (95%)/ car navigation (3.5%)/ PSP (1.5%) Diverse receivers: Car navigation (42%) / DMB phone (37.6%) / USB (12.1%)/ DMB only (9%)/ Laptop (2.2%) Content migrated mobile content + original mobile content Live TV content Coverage Nation-wide Limited (Seoul, Kyoungki) Regulation Commercial Public broadcasting service * As of February 2008: S-DMB 1.31 mil. vs. T-DMB : 9.69 mil. (by Korean Committee on Broadcasting and Telecommunication) Table 4.1 Comparison of S-DMB and T-DMB (as of January 2007). From the user’s perspective, mobile TV may seem to directly succeed mobile phone content service due to their similar display formats. However, DMB advances one step further in the path to convergence in that it is not only a technologically new hybrid form of broadcasting service which operates primarily on convergent devices but is also born out of the multilayered practices of convergence. In terms of technology, one of the unique qualities of Korean DMB is its active production of convergent screen devices. Although the 199 emergence of convergent screen devices is not limited to the Korean context, Korean hardware and software companies have been known for their innovative and successful invention of diverse convergent screen devices to which DMB added other new function in the form of DMB phone, DMB PDA, DMB car navigation, DMB digital camera and DMB PMP and so on (Fig.4.1). The invention of technology itself, however, is comparatively simple compared to the challenge of establishing new industrial and cultural practices of adopting it. As discussed in chapter II, the birth of Korean DMB is indebted to the Korean developmental model that deploys the strong initiative of the government and the close cooperation of private companies. In order to establish the nation’s leadership in information technology, the Korean government chose mobile telecommunications as a key strategic industry for systematic internal capacity-building, which would in turn contribute to the country’s future exports and its competitiveness in the global IT market. 8 As indicated in <Table 4.1>, the service operation of T-DMB is a direct result of this cooperation as it is run by a consortium among three major television networks (KBS, MBC and SBS) and three small media companies. Yet the industrial convergence between wireless 8 Manuel Castells et al., Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 18 ; James F. Larson, The Telecommunications Revolution in Korea, (Oxford University Press, 1995); Choi Sun-Gyu, “ITwa Hanguk Gyeongjeui Hyoyulkwa Bunbe (IT and the efficiency and Equity of Korean Economy),” Jeongbo Tongsinkwa Hanguksahwoeui Byeonhwa (Information and Telecommunication and the Change of Korean Society), eds. Lee Bong Ho & Kim Dong Ju ((Korea: Communication Books, 2005). 200 telecommunications and television broadcasting and the establishment of laws and regulations that govern this convergent media service have not been smooth. Considering that both wireless telecommunications and television broadcasting are equally big players in the media industry with distinct goals and territories, it is presumed to be difficult for them to negotiate and cooperate in order to create a new media service that could ideally benefit both parties. The government’s attempt to establish a “Commission for Broadcasting/Telecommunication Convergence” began in early 2006 but has since progressed slowly, failing to meet the urgency of the issue mostly due to the conflict between involved parties’ political and economic interests. As of October 30, 2006 when the bill was finally proposed, it was agreed that the commission would be put under the discretion of the Prime Minister and the reformation of Broadcasting/Telecommunication systems would be solely centered on the ‘content’ issue with the aim to create a ‘Unified Regulation Agency’ on content without any immediate measures for transforming institutional systems. The major obstacle that has held back progress comes from the unresolved debate whether to foreground the value of ‘economic development’ or ‘public interest’ in ‘Broadcast-Telecom merged services.’ 9 9 Containing these inherent conflicts, the Commission for Broadcasting/Telecommunication Convergence launched in March 2008 in full force along with the inauguration of a new government. 201 DMB also demands the production of new forms of content that could validate the attraction of medium as a convergent device. Since the first mobile phone multimedia service June was introduced in 2002, SK telecom has heavily invested in producing diverse multimedia content for mobile phones, explored the commercial potential of the mobile phone to be a new screen venue in various ways as discussed in Chapter III, and continued its commitment to DMB service through TU media, a SK telecom’s sub-company. The co-presence and dual play between the original and migrated mobile content also continues to govern the discussion of the ideal content for DMB. From the beginning of the mobile TV service, two DMBs adopted distinctive attitudes towards the issue of an ‘ideal mobile content’ and subsequently followed up with different content programming strategies. To begin with, the exploration of original mobile content searching for unique mobile visuality has fluctuated while migrated mobile content ended up becoming the majority of DMB content. More specifically, whereas S-DMB foregrounded the potential of the mobile screen that SKT has demonstrated their strength and determination through June, T-DMB envisioned a model for extended television broadcasting beyond its conventional venues. In practice, S-DMB has actively produced their own original mobile content in addition to repurposing content from conventional media while T-DMB has provided mostly live TV content. As a 202 matter of fact, this difference in content programming strategies is attributed to the distinctive institutional format of each service. S-DMB is a ‘commercial data broadcasting’ run by TU media and T-DMB is considered a ‘public service’ controlled by a consortium of television broadcasters. <Table 4.1> shows how this regulatory identification of DMBs with different values has significantly affected the way in which two seemingly similar DMB services are introduced differently in such practical dimensions as service plans and profit models. In parallel with these industrial and content levels of convergence, the user’s experience of mobile TV is also re-adjusted to negotiate between mobile TV and conventional media. Specifically, the diversity of convergent platforms increases the versatile and boundary negating effect of DMB service yet it also intensifies user’s confusion about the right position of mobile TV. In fact, initially S-DMB and T-DMB offered a different range of platforms that paralleled their disparate notions of DMB service. Technically, T-DMB is also more versatile because its receiver is easily attachable to other screen devices and it provides more variety of platforms, ranging from a $50 receiver to a $700 DMB phone. Users’ preference for a particular platform for each DMB significantly resonates with two DMBs industrial discourses behind their discrete content programming strategies. For example, the most popular S-DMB platform is a DMB convergent 203 mobile phone (95%) while the most widely adopted T-DMB device is DMB car navigation (42%). 10 S-DMB Platforms . T-DMB platforms Figure 4.1 DMB Convergent Platforms The issue of platforms affects significantly the expected or practiced mobile screen usage pattern. Interestingly, there exists a sharp age gap between major user groups for each service. It is reported that compared to the S-DMB 10 The importance of Mobile TV’s convergence with car navigation is already acknowledged by industry: TU media launched the new ‘TU ride on’ service through ‘HyOn-Duo,’ which enables watching both S-DMB and T-DMB with real time traffic information via satellite in March 12, 2007. It is a progressive move for TU media to close the gap between S-DMB users and T-DMB users that were previously divided by types of platform and by age group. 204 whose primary user group is young males in their 20s and 30s, T-DMB's dominant users are middle aged men in their 40s and 50s. 11 Although presumptuous, it is possible to question whether the popularity of the T-DMB car navigation platform and the easy application of T-DMB ‘receivers’ (which are modeled after small television antenna in its form and function) may explain the popularity of television content on T-DMB and the ‘unexpected’ presence of middle aged male users who are not usually expected to be early adaptors of new mobile technology. 12 2. Shaping Mobil e TV: Content Programming Strategy of Satellite DMB As discussed earlier in regard to the naming of mobile TV, the association with television plays a key role in defining the practices of mobile TV but as a result, it inevitably generates tensions and ambiguity in the process of establishing its specificity as a new screen medium. Nonetheless, it is important 11 TNS Korea, “New Media Sicheongja Pattern Josa (Report on New Media Viewership Pattern),” November 2006. 12 TNS Korea’s report shows that user’s preference to ‘TV news’ on T-DMB is closely related to the popularity of the car navigation convergent T-DMB platform. – TNS Korea, Ibid. 205 to point out that in spite of the achievement of original mobile content that experiments with mobile specific visuality, the delivery system of mobile TV is not remote from traditional ‘broadcasting’ in the sense that content is delivered through the technical structure of a unified central network and individual receivers. Therefore, it is not surprising that in its early stage of development, mobile TV was positioned as a ‘geographical extension’ of conventional media reception, particularly of television. 13 Yet the way in which mobile TV continues to tackle the legacy of traditional television is not simple. The analysis of Korean DMB services’ content programming strategies reveals how the conflicting discourses of ‘newness’ and ‘oldness’ persistently operate in the formation of mobile content and cultural appropriation of mobile TV technology. This conflict is mostly manifest in the industry’s effort to define the proximity or the distance of DMB from traditional television. Since its introduction, DMB service operators have constantly questioned the viability of the medium itself. The question is whether it is the mobile medium or the content that attracts the consumer, which recalls the contrasting marketing campaigns between SK Telecom and KTF upon the launch of 3G mobile phone content service. Faced with this question, S-DMB and T-DMB again showed a different understanding of the medium and thereby 13 Choi Yang-Soo, “The Production and Distribution of Mobile Contents” (Paper presented at the Mobile Communication: Mobile Communication and Social Change conference, Seoul, Korea, October 18-9, 2004). 206 developed distinctive content programming strategies. The case of S-DMB’s initial marketing slogan “Take out TV” illustrates more complex tensions and decision making processes in the search for ideal mobile content within the condition where major television broadcasters (who are also the operators of the competing T-DMB), refused to provide live television programs to S-DMB. First phase of S-DMB: ‘Take out TV’ Figure 4.2 TU media S-DMB ad. “Take out TV.” Courtesy of Jan Chipchase, Nokia Research Center, 2005. During the first phase of service from May 2005 to November 2005, S- DMB mostly appropriated the convention of television for its channel format and content programming strategy. In terms of channel format, S-DMB started with 12 video channels and 26 audio channels, which have subsequently gone under annual reformation. The video channels include two drama channels, three 207 movie channels and other specialized interest channels such as news, sports, games, animation and so on. As seen in <Table 4.2>, most of these channels repurpose syndicated television material from mainstream television networks, cable television and movie theaters except channel BLUE that exclusively presents original mobile content produced for S-DMB. Channel Description Source Ch5 EBSu Whenever, wherever, fill my knowledge EBSu (education) Ch6 SBS drama With fun and laughter SBS drama (drama/Ent.) Ch7 ch.BLUE Your privilege ch.BLUE (TU DMB only Ent.) Ch8 Entertainment Entertain me myMnet (CJ media Ent.) Ch10 TU Box My mobile theater TU Box (new premium movie ch.) Ch11 MBC drama Always fun with MBC drama (drama/sitcom/Ent.) Ch12 News 24 hour fast and accurate live news ch. YTN Ch13 Movie Multiplex theater in my hand! ch.CGV (movie news/new movie) Ch14 Sports Everything about sports! MBC ESPN, SBS sports (national team A-match/Pro baseball/Pro soccer/K-1) Ch16 Economy Diverse and useful Economy info. MBN (M-Stock/real estate) Ch17 Game Play with fun, Ongamenet (live pro-game league tournament) Ch19 Animation Fun Ani world, Tooniverse (animation ch. Or all ages) Table 4.2 S-DMB Video Channels (as of November 2005). The efficiency of setting up the familiar channel formats is commonly shared and even more asserted by other mobile TV providers across the globe. 208 Jason Kenagy, vice president of MediaFlo USA, says, “mobile TV must be very similar to home television to get consumers interested and people want to have a familiar way of changing channels or finding programs.” However, he also emphasizes, “at the same time the experience needs to work well within the confines of a 2-inch screen.” 14 This remark from different market context interestingly reiterates the wide spread ambivalence about mobile TV as a new medium. Most apparently, this shared ambivalence is reflected in S-DMB’s strategic emphasis and subsequent reforms of their exclusive channel, Ch. BLUE. Intense competition with T-DMB drove S-DMB to go with the limited sources of familiar migrated mobile content and as a result, S-DMB chose the strategy of foregrounding the newness of the medium itself and the production of original mobile content that maximizes the unique attributes of the mobile screen. Under this fundamental policy, TU media produced thirty original mobile content programs for S-DMB in its first stage of service. These original mobile content are not so different from those created for 3G mobile content service as they continue to explore the ideal visuality for mobile screen attempting to achieve a balance between the borrowed conventions of media genres and newly explored aesthetic forms based on the technical conditions of the mobile screen: limited screen size, the short duration 14 Tom Krazit , “Mobile-TV vendors Politely Jockey for Position,” CNET News.com, 24 May 2006. 209 of play, mobility of viewing conditions, and interactive options. Such formal characteristics of mobile cinema as ‘tension between narrative integration and presentational cinematic techniques,’ ‘interactivity options,’ ‘serial or episodic narrative structure,’ and ‘intermedial/convergent genres’ continue to replay with variations. In mixing and reshuffling all familiar generic conventions for a fresh convergent form, however, S-DMB’s original mobile content show more consciousness of television, as DMB’s live broadcasting program and display format resembles the television more than any other media. Specifically, as the technical condition of live broadcasting allows each piece of content to run without restraint of transmitting time and thus modestly relieves the limitation of short duration of content which is one of the biggest challenges of original mobile content for 3G mobile phone attributed to the delivery system of ‘downloading,’ S-DMB’s original mobile content have more room for complicated narratives. While migrated mobile content mostly preserve their original running time on network television after transferring to mobile TV, original mobile content, however, stick to a ‘segment’ format running between 15 and 30 minutes. Given that Korean public television networks do not allow intermission commercials during one program, and thus usually a single program continuously runs about one hour (depending on formats, between 30 minutes and longer than one hour), 15 minute lengths are still considered ‘short.’ 210 However, relatively elongated duration of content certainly enables the content producers to develop more conventional narratives as opposed to experimental narratives that mobile cinema/drama strategically adopt. Hence, when the world’s allegedly first ‘mobile sitcom,’ Yap, launched as a series with fifty-two 15-minute length episodes on Ch.Blue of S-DMB, it did not look much different from regular 30-minute sitcom series on network television. Figure 4.3 Yap, Romantic Fantasy Sitcom. TU media, Ch. BLUE, 2006. Yap reiterates that the common practice of borrowing the conventional genre name, as in the case of mobile cinema and mobile drama, to define new forms of original mobile content is still persistent in mobile TV. In spite of this association, what distinguishes Yap as mobile content from conventional television program is its subject matter. Due to less strictly imposed censorship on S-DMB, legally defined as a commercial data broadcasting, original mobile content on S-DMB tend to have comparatively more freedom to portray 211 restricted topics such as sex and violence, which, however, are still contained to a moderate degree suitable for its rerun on cable TV. For example, marketed as ‘romantic fantasy sitcom,’ Yap circles around the sexual lives of ordinary college girls and alien guys with supernatural powers from an anonymous planet. In an interview, Lee Yong-Hae, the director of the Yap, admits that he was clearly aware of the technical conditions of the mobile screen, which led him to experiment with unusual camera angles such as extreme close-up shots and tight frame composition in order to create an “intimate and close personal feel.” He continues, “in order to direct the attention to the small screen, I used ‘cartoonish action shots’ instead of common full shots and ‘brighter lighting’ than normal television because LCD screens on mobile TV are technically darker than television monitor.” 15 But mostly, he decided to take a chance by making a show more open to the restricted topic of sex and incorporated ‘light sexual jokes’ (which are incompatible to the censorship standard of network TV but relatively acceptable to cable TV standards), in order to appeal to the ideal target users of mobile TV, who are mostly young male early adopters. Interestingly, while acknowledging the necessity of considering the technological restrictions of the mobile screen, Lee simultaneously emphasizes the importance of positioning the mobile screen in the broader context of 15 From Interview with Lee Young-Hae, a director of Yap (Chorokbaem Media), 25 July 25 2006. 212 convergent media environments as he says, “I attempted to produce fun contents which could fit in the mobile life pattern rather than simply to make it purely mobile content.” 16 (Italics mine) His pessimistic view of the viability of the mobile media service resonates with the conventional media industry’s attempt to see mobile TV as an extension of existing media. Lee continues, “DMB could be a complementary to conventional media and effective for recycling content on the condition that T-DMB and S-DMB is unified as one commercial service.” His remark on the separation of S-DMB and T-DMB is a view largely shared by industry professionals who have tried to find the reasons for slower-than- expected uptake of DMB service in Korea at that time and who still continue to provoke controversy around the efficient operation of DMB service. Although initially created for mobile TV, due to its familiar television format, Yap was easily syndicated to cable TV and internet TV after its first run on S-DMB, thereby reversing the usual flow of content from existing media to new media, yet ironically it never crossed the border to T-DMB. If Yap represents the strong influence of television format on original mobile content for mobile TV, others still continue formal experiments with the mobile screen. Melo Cartoon (Sunjeong Manhwa) and Ilssangdabansa take quite a different path from Yap in the sense that they choose the intermedial genre mix 16 Interview with Lee, Young-Hae, Ibid. 213 as their fundamental strategy to attract the users to the mobile screen. Appropriating the flash cartoon genre into dramatic form as in what they call a ‘moving cartoon,’ they literally apply the episodic structure of the television drama to the cartoon drawings by a famous on-line cartoonist, Kang Pul. While they have slightly different narrative structures - Melo Cartoon adopts a serial structure showing a melodramatic romance story of young lovers dubbed with voice performance by famous stars in ten episodes while Ilssangdabansa presents an independent comic story in each episode -, they both represent dramatized cartoon aesthetics foregrounding the use of inserted text and the effect of flash animation. Figure 4.4-4.5 Melo Cartoon. Trailer, TU media, 2004 (left, center). Figure 4.6 Ilssangdabansa. Trailer, TU media, 2004 (right). As Five Stars resorts to the most up-to-date internet culture for inspiration, Melo Cartoon and Ilssangdabansa rely on the reputation of Kang Pul, 214 who is credited for his unique creation of the ‘internet cartoon aesthetics.’ Since his first work, Apartment (2004), a canonic piece of the first generation internet cartoon, debuted in the on-line cartoon community, the unique vertical layout of cartoon customized to the ‘scrolling’ reading specific to the technological condition of the computer screen has become the convention of visually created digital textuality. Just as Gwiyoni’s works have impenetrated the entertainment market, Kang Pul’s works have been one of the most sought-after digital sources, with four of his internet cartoons being adapted into movies by 2008. Pocket Drama presents a similar tactic of mixing genres, combining television drama with music video to create an extended story version of a music video where singers themselves appear and act as the main attractions. The fact that intermedial genre mix is the most predominant characteristic of original mobile content produced for mobile TV is quite reflexive of current position of the mobile screen that usurps convergent media practice into its ontological principle. Though their original vertical layout format is lost during the transition to the mobile screen, Melo Cartoon and Ilssangdabansa aptly indicate the vantage point where the mobile screen reaches out to embrace other forms of media into its own in an attempt to define its position in the current mediascape. In the end, S-DMB’s active production of original mobile content represents the industry’s effort to emphasize the necessity of ‘mobile- 215 customized’ content to whatever degrees of customization it may entail. In fact, it is true that Korean mobile TV service providers have more actively engaged with the production of original mobile content, but this call for mobile-customized content is not limited to Korea. For example, a Mobi TV representative in the US also acknowledges, “three of the five most popular channels on MobiTV's service were created especially for a mobile environment,” he continues, “people might want a familiar television experience on their mobile phones, but they actually watch much different types of content on those devices.” 17 At first glance, the popularity of short videos, so called ‘snack able’ content, seems to support the value embedded in medium specificity. However, what is interesting about his account is that it paradoxically reveals the ‘continued interest in the familiar television experience.’ As of 2006 when the interview was reported, MobiTV was mainly providing modified television content such as the mobile version of the show Lost and 24 along with highlight clips of sports shows. In other words, what Mobi TV attempted to provide was the modified experience of television or the mobile-transformed televisual experience rather than a completely new mobile content experience. Again, the conflicting tensions between the awareness of the attraction drawn from conditions of a new medium and the popularity of 17 Tom Krazit , Ibid. 216 familiar content play out in the global mobile TV phenomenon. Sharing this concern, S-DMB inevitably reconsidered the effectiveness of its initial strategy. Second phase of S-DMB: from ‘Take out TV’ to ‘Real DMB’ Figure 4.7 S-DMB Television Commercial, “Real DMB”: A woman is watching DMB in the subway with a shield around her. Overhead caption says, “Enjoy Everything, Alone!” (left). 2007. After a five month trial service in 2005, TU media shifted its programming strategy in November 2005 when their research findings showed that the attraction of new mobile screen was no greater than its functionality that increased users’ ‘access’ to conventional content on the move. 18 Going against their expectation and adding to their disappointment, it turned out that the most popular content during the first phase was ‘live TV’ and ‘Sports.’ 19 This result 18 TU media, “Annual Report on S-DMB,” November 2005. 19 The order of popularity runs as follows; 1) Live TV, 2) Online Game tournament & Sports channel, 3) Entertainment show & Drama, 4) Adult content (after-midnight pink movies) - 217 was partially credited to the popularity of big sports events such as the inaugural World Baseball League in 2005, where Korean national teams, having reached the semifinals, performed with unexpected excellence, but it is undeniable that syndicated television content was generally watched the most. The attraction of increased access to television content with mobility, possibly shown live, may well explain the rapidly increasing popularity of T-DMB. A year later, the most popular content for S-DMB was again ‘television drama’ (35%) and ‘news’ for T- DMB. From these findings, it is clear that the ‘liveness’ of broadcasting is probably the most defining legacy of television that benefited mobile TV and a sense of ‘collectiveness’ is still attractive, 20 if not intensified, for the users who desire to have extended connectivity on this presumably ‘personal’ media. The evaluation of the S-DMB’s service performance in the first phase addresses the dilemma of S-DMB’s initial marketing campaign of ‘Take out TV,’ which provided the user with easy assumption about mobile TV as being ‘mobile’ but still being television. It seems that the concept of “Takeout TV” was effective in that it smoothed users’ hesitance against adopting new technology by relying on a familiar association. Yet it paradoxically created the user’s Interview with Seo Kyoung-Seok, TU media, 10 July 2005. 20 The significant role of television ‘live broadcasting’ of historical events in constructing the sense of ‘collectivity’ is extensively acknowledged, challenging the premise on television as a personal medium. See, Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 218 expectation for mobile TV to be an extension of television, which led to subsequent disappointment due to the limited availability of television content on S-DMB. This unexpected response seems to provoke a sense of uncertainty or anxiety about the viability of DMB from the industry’s point of view. According to an interview with TU media, “In the end, it’s the quality of content that matters the most…we have been trying so hard to emphasize DMB as a unique new medium. Then if the public gets to know that conventional content are still prevailing, they might even question the very necessity of mobile media.” 21 This statement hints the sense of underlying doubt on DMB, or more precisely, the anxiety about the difficulty of identifying it as a new media service in a situation where the practical merging or cooperation between telecommunication and broadcasting sectors does not work as smoothly as is hoped. After an internal reinvestigation of the DMB’s prospectus, TU media immediately shifted its marketing campaign to “Real DMB” in the second phase of the S-DMB service, which continues until today. Overall, the marketing focus has shifted from ‘media’ to ‘content.’ Interestingly enough, while acknowledging the overshadowing power of conventional media content, TU media intentionally refused to reveal their findings regarding their suspicions about the medium and continued to promote medium specific experiences. This time, 21 Interview with Seo Kyoung-Seok, Ibid. 219 instead of appropriating the paradigm of television, TU media attempted to promote mobile TV as a ‘new life style,’ which positions ‘mobile viewing’ as a real and essential part of everyday life. According to this paradoxical strategy, on the one hand, TU media tried harder to get more diverse television programs from various sources including popular American television shows such as Desperate House Wives. In particular, in their November 2006 reform, three more specialized video channels such as OnStyle, National Geography and Green were added to its initial 12 channels while audio channels were decreased from 26 to 19. On the other hand, their original mobile content production has drastically declined. 22 As a matter of fact, only three out of thirty original mobile contents from the first phase of service survived in November of 2006. 23 It is notable that among all the types of original mobile content, those that foreground the ‘interactivity’ aspect of the mobile screen and deploy multi- platform formats particularly derived from the internet, have survived and are constantly reinforced throughout successive reforms. In other words, the real experience of “Real DMB” was redirected to mobile TV’s more intimate and personal aspects that allow users to interact with the production of content spontaneously out of their real life settings. For example, Slightly Dangerous Show: 22 TU media, “Annual Report on S-DMB,” September 2006. 23 These lucky ones are Yap, One Minute and Real Broadcasting City Hunter. 220 Do As You Say is one of the original mobile content programs that have enjoyed a long-run popularity since it was launched in 2005. What I define as ‘Reality Game Show,’ Slightly Dangerous Show incorporates viewers’ requests as the main challenge in each episode. Once the request is chosen, regardless of whether it is dangerous or ridiculous, the host of the show will perform the request in order to fulfill the viewer’s curiosity. The average number of mission requests totals approximately one hundred per week. Figure 4.8 Intro shot of Slightly Dangerous Show: Do as You Say: Caption says this program meets the safety guideline in consultation with specialists and pre-tests. TU media, 2005 (left). Figure 4.9 Episode of “Washing Human Body in a Car Wash,” Slightly Dangerous Show: Do as You Say. TU media, 2005 (right). In one episode, the request is to test what happens if a person would wash his body in a car wash center and the program records the show host’s attempt to wash himself in a self-car wash center (Fig.4.9). Outrageous requests such as washing one’s face with toothpaste or drinking Coke under water and the 221 realistic reportage of re-enactments inevitably generate an unexpected comic effect, fulfilling the user’s sadistic curiosity. Real Broadcasting City Hunter is another example of a reality show that maximizes the potential of ‘interactivity’ option in the same way as Slightly Dangerous Show. As a ‘Reality Date Show,’ according to my categorization, this show utilizes the hidden camera to follow the male participants’ attempt to hunt a girl on the street (Fig.4.11). Then, it adopts a ‘real time’ jury system which collects advice from one hundred designated jurors and from internet posts or SMS messages sent by anonymous viewers in order to help make a challenger‘s love proposal successful in each episode. Figure 4.10 Real Broadcasting City Hunter. Trailer, TU media, 2004 (left). Figure 4.11 Episode of “Hunting with a Borrowed Cellphone,” Real Broadcasting City Hunter. TU media, 2004 (right). As examined in the analysis of Yigong series and Five Stars, the self-reflexive employment of the mobile phone functions like an SMS message and active 222 adaptation of internet culture appears as a common strategy to mobilize a user’s interactivity into program format. In this sense, mobile TV is on the forefront of erasing the boundary between on-line and off-line media worlds, exemplifying the facilitated flow of digitized content through the network to various screen devices. A recently added hit original mobile content, Charles’ Breaking Morning, is a good example of this proactive move in that it constructs the show around UCC (User Created Content) clips and content scrapped from popular internet portal sites in pace with rapidly growing internet-based sharing and the consumption pattern of visual content, commonly associated with the UCC syndrome. In spite of the success of a few original mobile content programs, however, S-DMB’s successive annual programming reforms have proceeded towards adding more emphasis on repurposing popular television content. Among newly added television content in the November 2006 reform, the predominance of the ‘sports’ channel is symptomatic considering that in the following September 2007 reform, TU media eventually canceled their own channel, Ch.BLUE, and launched two new premium channels, ‘Tu Sports’ and ‘TU entertainment.’ Tu sports channel is to cover the most popular sports games such as England Premiere League soccer, American Major League Baseball, Japanese Pro-Baseball League (particularly games with famous Korean players), 223 K-1 and Pride. Tu entertainment channel is to be a hybrid channel that mostly reinforces the proven popularity of American television series such as Desperate House Wives, CSI and Smallville along with the most talked about domestic television entertainment shows while partially continuing to present S-DMB’s original mobile content. In fact, the symbiotic relation between sports and the adoption of new media is not something new. Big sports games have always served to boost demand for new screen technologies and media industries have aggressively taken sports events as marketing opportunities to promote attraction towards new media. Statistics have shown that various screen sales dramatically increased around World Cup Soccer 2006 in Korea while the sales of conventional media such as books, movies and art events significantly decreased. 24 DMB service was no exception during this phenomenon because in the same year, T-DMB subscription sharply increased to 1 million, recording 140 thousands sales during two weeks in June and surpassing early starter S-DMB in the market. Considering that it was also a big sports event that helped the sales of S-DMB during its inaugural service in 2005, S-DMB’s aggressive push of sports channels is nothing other than the reaffirmation of the role of sports for the expansion of new screen technologies. However, considering the prestigious 24 Korea Economic Daily, 19 June 2006. 224 status that ch. BLUE once had as S-DMB’s only original channel showcasing TU media’s substantial investment in original mobile content, the eventual removal of ch. BLUE is more than surprising as it reconfirms a pessimistic attitude toward the viability of original mobile content based on the medium specific aesthetics of mobile TV. 3. Personal Tel evision From 2005 to the present, S-DMB’s changing programming strategies demonstrate the ambivalent tension and constant negotiation that existed between ‘newness’ of media and the ‘old’ conventions that were employed to disseminate this emergent technology into society. In particular, user’s expectation to link mobile TV with traditional television proved to be a practical obstacle for the mobile TV service providers who wanted to distinguish their service from traditional television. In fact, numerous studies of global mobile TV services prove that the company’s mixed expectation is commonly shared among users and thus it eventually affects users’ understanding of the medium and their actual viewing pattern. One early study of a Korean mobile TV service presents interesting findings that reveal the anticipated position of mobile TV in relation 225 to other media. In her study of early adoption of S-DMB, Park Mi Young points out that before mobile TV was commercially launched, users expected that ‘mobile internet’ would be replaced by or compete with mobile TV when chosen from among various existing media such as television, newspaper, radio and the Internet. 25 In other words, mobile TV was initially understood to be an extension of a mobile data service (like mobile phone content service) rather than a broadcasting service, an assumption that was contradicted by later findings of actual mobile TV use patterns. Once mobile TV service became available, users more easily adopted the concept of mobile TV as an extension of television broadcasting rather than as mobile internet. A recent study of Swedish mobile TV reaches the same conclusion as does the research of the pilot mobile TV service in England 26 – users expect “content similar to traditional home-based TV.” 27 Turning to the user’s expectation and usage pattern, it is interesting to note the prevalence of the terms like ‘home’ and ‘familiarity’ in the industrial 25 Park Mi-Young, “Mobile Bangsong Suyonge Yeonghyangeul Michineun Jungyoyoine Dehan Yeongu: Wiseong DMBeul Jungsimeuro (The Study of the Effectual factors of the Adoption of Mobile Broadcasting Service: The case of Satellite DMB)” (M.A thesis, Internet business, Graduate School of information technology, Yonsei University, 2003). 26 Elizabeth Evans, “The Mobile Television Audience,” (Paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Chicago, March 8-11, 2007). 27 Per Anderson et al, “A Technoeconomic Study of Mobile TV,” The Stockholm University of Economics and Royal Institute of Technology, 13 July 2007, 7. 226 discourse which might be a reflection of the unexpressed anxiety toward blending private and public spaces in regard to media watching. As a personal medium, mobile TV in principle allows users to exercise their ‘private watching’ in public spaces, which has so far been limited to the boundaries of domestic space; television, in particular, has been the central medium in domestic space. Hence, on the one hand, the reliance on the familiar association with television and the emphasis on such terms may represent the desire to stretch the comfort of personal watching in private spaces into public space as a way of lessening the anxiety of adopting a new medium. On the other hand, the desire to explore the novelty of mobile TV as a personal screen medium that allows more freedom to the user and possibly more mobility, collides with the need for familiarity. In this way, the desire to negotiate within overlapping private and public space and the ensuing tension between the attraction of ‘newness’ and the comfort of ‘oldness’ circumscribe the user’s experience of mobile TV. In fact, studies on mobile TV use show that actual usage of mobile TV happens without being limited to certain locations across both private and public spaces defying the general assumption that mobile TV is an outdoor media. For example, a Nokia research study on early uptake of Korean mobile TV conducted in 2005 presents four major occasions where mobile TV is watched: home, commuting, micro/macro 227 break and secret use. 28 This finding about situations of mobile TV watching generally corresponds to other research findings on mobile screen use as well as mobile communications in general, and interestingly suggests that the ‘personal’ aspect of mobile TV, more than any other technological attractions like the acclaimed ‘mobility,’ is in fact influential in culturally defining the mobile screen. 29 My observational research on actual mobile screen use in Korea provides a way of addressing the relation between usage patterns and the forms of mobile content. Informal survey and interviews were conducted with twenty users whom I randomly selected in the subway and in a popular shopping mall in Seoul, Korea in the summer of 2006. 30 The goal of this informal survey was to find out what users actually watch on their mobile screens. Although this survey 28 Jan Chipchase et al, “Personal Television: A Qualitative Study of Mobile TV Users in South Korea,” Nokia Research Center: Japan, 2006. 29 “Portable Media Player Study,” one of the early studies on multimedia content use on the portable screen that I participated as a co-principal investigator also generates similar conclusion regarding the occasions for the use of a portable media player. A qualitative research with 40 college students shows that the portable screen is mostly utilized as a tool to carve out ‘personal’ space out of any environments whether they are traditionally defined private or public places. Even when the situation does not require ‘mobility’ as in the case of home watching, research subjects express their preference for watching with a portable media player in his/her room in order to partition their space from others – Entertainment Technology Center, “Portable Media Player Study” (Report presented at the Board Meeting, ETU, University of Southern California, 2005). 30 More specifically, in Subway line 2 and Koex shopping mall in Gangnam Ku. The locations of the interview were chosen with the expectation of finding samples more easily as these places are generally considered to be the primary places for mobile screen use. The survey was conducted over seven days in July 2006 and the selection of interviewee did not consider demographic distribution. 228 is limited in its scale and inclusive in terms of its attention to diverse mobile screen devices, it reaffirms what most of the research studies of Korean mobile TV use have found, and most importantly compliments the logic behind the changing programming strategy of S-DMB. Given the popularity of my selected locations among young people, the demographics of my subjects are anticipated but my observations first of all confirm that the dominant mobile screen user in these places are actually ‘young males in their 20s and early 30s’ (17 out of 20 subjects), who are generally considered to be the primary mobile media user group. Secondly, the predominant situation of mobile screen use in these locations falls under the categories of ‘commuting’ and ‘macro or micro break time’. Regarding the issue of content, the most relevant and interesting finding is that surprisingly no one was watching original mobile content at the time of the survey and most of the interviewees said that they barely watched original mobile content on their mobile screens. Regardless of the specifics of mobile screen devices that each user own or the diversity of their viewing situations, there were clearly divided preferences for content: either ‘familiar content’ or ‘personalized content.’ The most desired content is once again ‘live TV’ (sports or TV drama) and second favorite is various sorts of personally ‘downloaded content’ from other sources to their mobile screens (television drama, animation, 229 music video etc). Findings show that there are several factors that may well explain the popularity of familiar TV content such as ‘service charge’ demand for accessing available original mobile content services including 3G mobile phone or S-DMB, ‘individually diversified and customized usage’ of mobile screen devices for which broadcast content only fills the occasional break, and the ‘unsatisfactory quality of original mobile content.’ The most apparent tendency is the demand for ‘spatially and temporally unrestricted access to television’ as seen in the following quotations from interviewees. For the same reason, several interviewees expressed their preference for T-DMB over S-DMB. “I like T-DMB because it provides familiar content and it's free. Usually I watch news, sports, ‘must-see’ TV dramas on lap-top through T-DMB receiver especially when I go crazy during my overtime work at the office as there is no TV set there. I would be just satisfied as far as I overcome the lack of access when I want to watch something.”(male, 30s) “I bought T-DMB to watch World Cup Soccer tournament because it’s free and it’d be a hassle to adapt to different channel layouts of S-DMB.” (male, 30s) Along with the preference for familiar content, the disappointment with limited availability of compelling original mobile content and its unsatisfactory service quality is constantly addressed as possible reasons for the low popularity of original mobile content. 230 “It does not provide many interesting channels but only problems such as bad reception in the subway so I am considering canceling my S-DMB subscription.” (male, 23) If not favoring familiar content, it is the freedom ‘to customize’ that mobile screen users highly valorize. “I use my laptop because I want to watch what I want to watch or I’d just buy PSP to carry my downloaded stuff.”(male, 30s) “During my commute, I usually watch something, like downloaded movies or English lesson video clips on my PSP, as no other things to do in the subway. Sometimes watch at home for 1-2 hour because I don’t have my TV set.”(male, 20s) “I own a PMP and am considering buying a DMB receive too. As my commute time is quite long (50 min), I prefer to watch documentary, historic drama and epic that I downloaded because I don’t have much time to watch something at home." (male, 20s) Findings show that on the one hand ‘whenever and wherever’ factor provided by the ‘mobility’ of the mobile screen media seems to appeal to the users in urban space, outdoor environment, just as mobile TV service providers expected. Yet on the other hand, along with their preference to the ‘familiar television content’ on extended mobile venue, the users express strong desire for ‘personalized content,’ which is of particular significance for illuminating the way in which the mobile screen is culturally positioned as a personal screen media. 231 To begin with, the newly found ‘mobility’ and the ‘personal’ aspect of mobile TV seem to consolidate the image of the mobile TV no other than a ‘personal television.’ Interviewees enthusiastically welcome the mobile TV as an alternative television service when and where they don’t have an access to the television like in the situations of “no TV set at home” or “overtime work at the office.” Especially, this use of the mobile screen during the major/minor break time while sitting in the subway or taking a break between works reconfirms the televisual experience of the mobile TV, that is, mobile version of everyday experience of TV “as a technology that mediates the experience of the passage between distinct spheres of social life, most notably, work and leisure.” 31 This user’s practices clearly demonstrate that the legacy of traditional television is most important for the uptake of mobile TV. However, at the same time, paralleled with the convergent aesthetics of content, the newly emerging usage patterns of personalized consumption of mobile TV defy the existing conventions of television. Most of all, the predominance of televisual content across ‘TV-like screens’ requires us to question the definition and boundary of television rather than simply accept the ‘personal television’ as an extended television. As the newest invention of TV-like screens, mobile TV challenges the general 31 Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, (Duke University Press, 2001), 201. 232 assumption of television as a “relatively discrete object and a distinctive sphere of practice or as synonymous or interchangeable with other media” and expands the concept of “TV as a site and network.” 32 In other words, the traditional definition of television with a monolithic and unified flow needs to be adjusted to consider specific viewing situations. Television channels systemize the linearity of scheduled programs fixed within specific time slots and provide the same content to every viewer in different locations simultaneously. In this way, traditional television has played a key role in constructing a unified and collective sense of social life until diversified cable channels, digital video recorders, and more advanced TiVo gradually have disrupted this linearity by allowing the viewer to control the scheduled time slots of content to their own demands. Mobile TV tackles the flow of traditional television in an interesting way. On one hand, it extends the traditional way of watching television by alleviating the necessity of adjusting oneself to the scheduled programming in a spatio-temporally regulated environment. Especially when considering the popularity of live sports events or premium TV content, mobile TV serves to expand the site of television. On the other hand, the ‘personalized’ usage pattern 32 James Hay, “Locating Televisual,” Television New Media, Vol. 2, (2001):205-233. 233 of the mobile screen not only disrupts the linear flow of traditional television but also represents the emerging trend toward “DIY (do it yourself) visual culture.” 33 In contrast to the traditional one-way delivery system of media content from producers to consumers, DIY visual culture characterizes the advance of personalized and customized media production and consumption including the activities of re-appropriation and repurposing, mostly, through the internet network. Mobile screen and portable media devices play key roles in cultivating this trend, providing a personal storage and display venue. As convergent media devices, they are not only essential tools for everyday life – in case of mobile phone, combined with the traffic card, credit card, GPS service and coupons- but also tools to express and construct their self-identity, well exemplified through the practices of customizing phone decorations and photo sharing. 34 While music file sharing is the most well-known example of the personalized media consumption in present network culture, visual content downloading is equally important, particularly in relation to youth media culture. Primarily practiced in internet, ‘video downloading’ has emerged as a significant mode of media 33 Adrienne Russell, Mizuko Ito, Todd Richmond, and Mark Tuters, “Networked Public Culture,” Networked Public, ed. Kazys Varnelis (Cambridge: The MIT Press. Forthcoming). 34 Mizuko Ito et al name these portable objects “mobile kit” and examine its significance for the subject’s everyday navigation in the urban space. See, Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Ken Anderson, “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities:The Personalization of Urban Places,” The Mobile Communication Research Annual Volume 1: The Reconstruction of Space & Time through Mobile Communication Practices, eds. Rich Ling and Scott Campbell (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, forthcoming). 234 consumption for young people with technical competency to maneuver and manipulate the network, whose institutionalization with proper regulations over the copy right becomes the hot issue in the industry. The Mobile screen devices provides the attractive platforms for the young people who express the strong desire for customizing moving image content to their taste while the commercially available networked mobile screen services do not attract young users in spite of all the innovative experiments designed for them as my survey findings show. In general, whether it functions as the personal television or display screen for customized content, this personalized pattern of mobile screen use represents what I define the tendency of Nomadic Privatization, the predominant characteristic of mobile screen media use. That is, the user’s active appropriation of content customized on mobile screen media is a form of engagement with his or her everyday environment and this practice forms an integral part of what constitutes the ideal content for mobile screen as a personal screen medium. My term ‘Nomadic Privatization’ derives from Raymond Williams and Margaret Morse’s discussion on “Mobile Privatization.” 35 Although Williams initially focuses on the ‘home’ as a new center of privatized media consumption, mobile 35 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology as Cultural Form, (New York: Schocken Books, 1974); Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art and Cyberculture, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 235 TV extends the territory of private space for media consumption into the street. Along with this, I use the term ‘nomadic’ carefully in order not to celebrate the euphoric sense of individual freedom but to stress the extended ‘mobile’ factor of the individual whose tactics are however conditioned and negotiated in relation to the strategies of spaces. The emphasis should be on how individuals or social groups have access to and move to and from the place(s) where they engage mobile screen media in their everyday lives. Taking a home television as primary example, Williams’s definition of ‘Mobile Privatization’ involves “material repositioning” – a spatial redefinition- of viewer in the home, increasingly situated “at a distance, from other sites, from his earlier locations, from earlier concepts and material embodiments of the city” yet conjoined through broadcasting and other kinds of flows among places. 36 Morse further elaborates this condition of mobile privatization, focusing on the more psychological side as the “general features that promote the divided state of mind,” which are described as “the phantasmagoria of the interia.” 37 Most of all, it is her attempt to associate the television with other modes of transportation in terms of its effect to produce distraction that provides remarkably relevant insight into the discussion of the mobile TV. Building on Rudolf Arnheim’s 36 Raymond Williams, Ibid., 216. 37 Margaret Morse, Ibid., 100. 236 insight that “television turns out to be related to the motor car and the aeroplane as a means of transport for the mind,” 38 Morse expands this association to the shopping mall and freeway as sites for distraction. This distraction that television, freeway, and malls generate is “attenuated fiction effect, that is, a partial loss of touch with here-and-now,” which is in fact multilayered with “two or more different, even contradictory, metaphychological effects.” 39 This effect of distraction “based upon the representation of space within place, Morse continues, displaces space into a non-space.” 40 This phenomenological association of the television with the modes of transportation as an affective condition for distraction materializes, more than figuratively, in the mobile screen, a screen technology that presupposes the ‘mobility’ as its fundamental premise. Literally, the mobile TV collapses into the motor car or the aeroplane as numerous convergent mobile screen device come attached to these mobile vehicles and navigate the vast array of spaces. In this way, taking off from the tradition of television as a medium in private space, the mobile TV intrinsically embodies and reproduces the condition of distraction in the renewed tendency of nomadic privatization. 38 Margaret Morse, Ibid., 99. 39 Margaret Morse, Ibid., 101. 40 Margaret Morse, Ibid., 101. 237 The mobile TV screen exemplifies this tendency of nomad privatization as it extends the individual mobility and serves to construct the isolated private space by allowing the subject to carve out his/her own space in any physical location. With mobility provided by the mobile screen device, the user could ‘de- territorialize or re-territorialize’ the urban space against the strategies of place which is organized by the capitalist logic or the dominant ideology of society, and thereby navigates the urban space as a Nomadic Viewer. 41 However, the ‘nomadic’ movement of the viewer is not entirely free from social regulations or from strategies of place because their movement is empowered but at the same time conditioned by the logic of a dominant paradigm of society just as their mobile screen use fundamentally relies on the service operators’ networks. The analysis of mobile TV in this chapter demonstrates the multifaceted cultural significance of the mobile screen and the importance of elaborating the ‘specificities of the site of TV’ and the ‘transformation of Television.’ In the end, the meaning of individual mobile content and mobile screen itself depends on 41 Certainly, De Certeau’s discussion of spatial practices is inspiring for further analysis of mobile media use, especially insofar as phenomenological effects and spatial tactics are ways of approaching mapping as a mode of agency : See Michael de Certeau,’ The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Regarding to this issue of ‘privatizing’ tendency of the mobile screen use in urban space, Mizuko Ito el al present interesting findings about contemporary urbanites’ portable device uses. Their ethnographical research about the use of “mobile kit” presents specific patterns – cocooning, camping and footprinting- that subjects reshape and personalize urban space, “constructing their identity and activities and mediating relationship with people, places and institutions.” – Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Ken Anderson, Ibid. 238 the specific personal viewing experience in particular places, through interdependent technologies, and across social arrangements. The case study of Korean mobile TV demonstrates that user’s privatized mobile screen use is intermingled with the industrial textual practice of searching for the right mobile content, and therefore eventually constitutes a culturally specific pattern of appropriating new media technology. After all, television is in our hand, or in our car, or in our laptop. Basically, individual viewers own their own televisions, precisely TV-like screens, and move around with them. Therefore, the site of TV is not materially fixed but temporarily and spatially configured by the viewer. The viewer becomes the spatial denominator who moves across the public and private spheres and through media, no matter how remote the viewer is from those other spaces becoming conjoined through broadcasting. Mobile TV epitomizes this changed/changing view of television and the emergence of ‘networked personal screen medium’ that is not television nor cinema, as unavoidable part of the growing ubiquity of the screenic experience and the augmented reality of contemporary screen culture. When mobile screen situates in the broader context of outdoor screen culture, when nomadic viewer strolls on the street with the screen on hand, the privatization effect that mobile screen galvanizes, however, will meet its challenging counterpart. 239 Chapter V Nomadic Viewer and Outd oor Screen Culture Since before World War I Times Plaza in New York and Shinjuku crossroad in Tokyo later in the 1980s, have represented the futuristic image of the modern metropolis crowded by illuminating large screens with corporate signs of multi-national companies which preside over neon-baked night streets. At the present moment of the twenty-first century, passengers on the streets of Seoul, or in any equivalent global cities, will find soon themselves surrounded by various sorts of screens in daylight and in very nondescript parts of the city. Whereas big advertising billboards were once used to present graphic commercial signs, now large electronic screens (mostly, LED: Light Emitting Diodes screens) illuminate animated commercial signs and stream various lively short-circuit video programs. If the passenger is stuck in a car in the midst of the rush hour traffic around the Seoul City Hall Plaza (aka, Seoul Plaza), 1 he may luckily catch the latest news broadcast on any of the large electronic screens that surround the Plaza area. In the subway, his chance of glancing at any sort of screen greatly 1 Seoul City Hall Plaza has commonly designated the plaza in front of the Seoul City Hall Building (Seoul Metropolitan Government Building) at the center of downtown Seoul. In 2004, it was refurbished into the Seoul Plaza by strong initiative of a former mayor Lee Myeong-Bak, who eventually became a president of Korea in 2008. 240 increases. Along with all kinds of outdoor TVs installed in and around subway stations, from traditional TV sets to the newest PDP flat screens, his fellow passengers’ mobile TVs may provide him with a chance to glimpse a bit of popular television drama on air. Outdoor screens, the icon of the capitalist and commercial advertising that once populated the heavy commercial area, have been dispersed into mundane everyday life, extending the screen experience that traditional TV sets installed in various public places have provided for long time. However, while the old outdoor TV -whether it is an information display panel in the waiting rooms or a regular television set- blends itself into its architectural surroundings following the “institutional logic to adapt the TV screen and its image to the requirements of its site,” 2 these new breeds of outdoor screens do not or cannot disguise their conspicuous presence. Rather, presiding on roof-tops or covering the exterior wall of the buildings, the LED screen boasts its noticeable physical presence as a colorful part of the urban landscape. The mobile screen, one step further, amplifies the saturation of moving images as an integral part of urban reality, freed from the spatial restrictions imposed on fixated outdoor screens in physically and institutionally governed places. 2 Anna McCarthy, “The Rhythms of the Reception Area: Crisis, Capitalism, and the Waiting Room TV,” Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, eds. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 184. 241 This chapter situates the mobile screen as a cultural form in a broader socio-cultural condition of urban space, particularly one whose sensorial dimension is governed by ubiquitous presence of outdoor screens. In particular, I focus on the role of conventional screens, especially television, in mediating the experience of the mobile screen as the latest outdoor screen. While television has mostly been discussed as a modern entertainment technology that has consolidated the domestic space in opposition to public space, its presence in the public place has drawn comparatively less academic attention. The pervasive dissemination of outdoor screens in urban space not only expands the horizon of television but also requires us to reconsider the traditional binary division between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ spaces. The urban space saturated with pervasive screens no longer simply represents a traditional sense of the public space or remains the so-called “non-place” or “non-space,” where the concrete meaning of place disappears as a consequence of “spatial overabundance” along with the advance of the transgressive new media technologies. 3 Rather, its sensorial reality mediated by screens is material yet multilayered, augmented, 3 The concept of “non –place” is coined by Marc Augé in his discussion of the condition of supermodernity. He particularly points out the places for transit such as airports, shopping malls, supermarkets and highways. - Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Trans. John Howe (London-New York: Verso, 1995) ; For the discussion of this concept in media studies, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change, (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1989); Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyber culture, (Indiana University Press, 1998). 242 and contextual, depending on ‘where’ and ‘how’ its dweller creates the meaning of his/her momentary location. In December 2004, an entertainment program entitled Click Click Ranger broadcasted its first episode on channel MBC, one of three major television networks in Korea. Until it ended in 2005, the show exhibited the culturally specific practice of positioning the mobile screen within the conventional mediascape and ubiquitous screen environment. By incorporating the mobile screen into its unique program format that links multiple screens - the mobile screen, television screen, and outdoor screen - Click Click Ranger raises several theoretical issues on the relationship between new media technology, the existing media conventions, and culture. In Click Click Ranger, the mobile screen transpires in two significant ways: mobile phone imaging for moving image production and mobile TV for moving image circulation. Taking Click Click Ranger as a starting point, this chapter discusses how Korean television mediates the mobile screen as part of the larger outdoor screen culture and thus complicates the issue of ‘convergence of spaces.’ First, the unique display format of the Click Click Ranger that integrates mobile phone imaging into the circular nexus of three screens will illuminate the specific way in which the ‘public’ value of the mobile phone is constructed, challenging the general assumption of the mobile phone as purely personal media. Secondly, the practice of the mobile 243 screen in Click Click Ranger will provide an interesting case that complicates the issue of the public and the private spaces whose convergence can take myriad forms depending on the material and ideological conditions of the physical environment. The second section of this chapter furthers the assessment of the mobile screen as an outdoor screen medium in the broader context of outdoor screen culture, focusing on the way in which the outdoor screen succeeds and at the same time tackles the legacy of modern urban visual culture, and thereby contributes to the construction of the ‘screenic surface’ of contemporary urban visual culture. 1. Screens in Public Space: Click Click Ranger Figure 5.1 MCs of the Click Click Ranger: Two show hosts demonstrate how screens are linked on the rooftop of Seoul City Hall building. MBC, 2004. Figure 5.2 Seoul City Hall during World Cup Soccer Match in 2002. 244 Click Click Ranger is one of the three sections in the popular Sunday prime time entertainment show, titled !: Exclamation Mark, which was broadcast from November 2001 to November 2007, marking it as one of the longest running entertainment shows on channel MBC. Although it was short-lived, airing for about a year (from December 2004 to August 2005), Click Click Ranger set up a model for employing mobile phone technology with television and inspired other programs in competing networks. As a prototype, Click Click Ranger raises several interesting issues regarding the position of the mobile phone in Korea today. Click Click Ranger’s catchphrase of “Capture Korea’s today” literally and symbolically sums up the goal and the structure of the show: To report the present realities of Korea. Most of all, the uniqueness of the program lies in its thematic and formal use of three different screens: Mobile Phone Screen, Television Screen, and Outdoor Screen. In terms of content, Click Click Ranger presents several short video clips of anonymous do-gooders and misbehaviors on the street in a fashion similar to news reports. These clips are captured and sent by random citizens and Click Click Rangers that consist of one hundred young college students and citizen volunteers MBC recruited for the production of show. Technically, Click Click Rangers and anonymous participants capture videos on the street and send clips ‘in real time’ to the studio while the program is being pre-recorded. It is reported that ninety percent of participants use a 245 mobile phone camera and send clips through the wireless internet on their mobile phone. Most interestingly, Click Click Ranger adopts a multi-screen format of display that tackles the paradigm of media convergence by manipulating the ‘flow’ of content across media. The clips captured by mobile phone camera and selected for showing on regular television are simultaneously broadcast on a large LED screen installed over Seoul City Hall Plaza. In fact, the program itself is shot on the rooftop of the city hall building, where two MCs run the show as if they were news reporters (Fig.5.1). Hence, what is presented to the audiences on a regular television set in domestic space are shots alternating between the outdoor screen display, the MCs on the spot, and small video clips in Quick- Time movie format. Complicating the circulation of the images, the program is eventually aired on Mobile TV, specifically on the Ch.BLUE of Satellite DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) service on the following Monday. Following this path, the clips of Click Click Ranger finish their journey from the street to multiple screens encompassing all hot spots (‘hot screens’) in the current mediascape of Korea as <Diagram 5.1> illustrates. 246 Click Click Ranger’s experiment of incorporating the mobile phone into a television show directly corresponds to the recent development of Korea’s mobile phone industry and ensuing changes in the media environment discussed in previous chapters. While the mobile phone content service and mobile TV serve as extended venues for conventional media on the one hand, conventional media have also tried to incorporate mobile screen technologies into their formats in many different ways, as an attempt to emulate the paradigm of media convergence. Overall, the most heated concern for both parties is how to develop ‘new’ content that fits the condition of media convergence, which is often described with such easy catchwords as ‘media big bang’ or ‘content war’ in popular media. Click Click Ranger is an early attempt to answer this concern on the television network side. Following Click Click Ranger, other television Mobile Screen TV Screen Outdoor Screen Public exhibition, Seoul City Hall Imaging on the street/Mobile TV Click Click Ranger, MBC Diagram 5.1 Circular Nexus of Screens in Click Click Ranger. 247 networks and popular media organizations launched similar programs such as SBS’s ‘Uporter.’ It is a multimedia version of citizen journalism, which has become popular after the phenomenal success of Oh My News 4 and after the practice extended more into the entertainment sector through many UCC (User Created Content) sites. Figure 5.3 Uporter Promotional Video. http://Uporter.sbs.co.kr. Literally, ‘Uporter’ means ‘ubiquitous reporter’ and it mobilizes citizens to capture news on the street with their digital camera or mobile phone camera, which is then selectively shown through SBS’s regular TV News shows, radio ( in 4 It is one of the world first internet newspapers that primarily rely on voluntary citizen reports for news source. Its innovative format based on participatory digital culture has drawn wide academic attention both from inside and outside of Korea and Oh My News became the iconic example of citizen journalism in the digital age and the symbol of IT-Korea, that is, its pervasive internet culture enabled by strong broadband infrastructure. For more detailed and early academic account of its significance, see Eun-Gyoo Kim and James W. Hamilton. “Capitulation to Capital? OhmyNews as Alternative Media,” Media, Culture & Society, 7 (28), 2006: 541 – 560; Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, (Cambridge: Pereus, 2002). 248 the form of ‘Visible Radio’ on their website) and DMB channels. 5 <Figure 5.3> portrays anonymous citizens with their mobile phones on hand as potential Uporters, indicating the mobile phone is a central tool for them. Accordingly, SBS’s Uporter website reiterates the importance of employing the mobile phone, saying, “Uporter’s job is to provide the ‘live and flash’ news content using mobile phone. Any forms of information, be it a long news text, a short text message, a photo mail or video clips, will make Uporter news. Ubiquitous begins from mobile (Italics mine).” 6 From this statement, we see that the concept of ‘ubiquitous’ is taken up as a constitutive aspect of ‘mobile’ or vice versa. In fact, being ubiquitous or allowing ‘ubiquitous computing’ is certainly one of the central characteristics that the mobile screen provides as a new outdoor screen technology. Since the early experiments of Click Click Ranger and Uporter, this practice of incorporating mobile technology into public forums, not limited to the use of mobile phone imaging, has become quite common with the recent success of the ‘citizen opinion forum by SMS message’ in formal news programs such as MBC’s PD Journal and KBS’s News Time. It is reported that since PD Journal, one of most popular live reportage programs, included citizens’ live SMS opinions - at the 5 In August 2005, a month after its launch, it is reported that over one thousand Uporters were recruited. 6 SBS Uporter News website, http://ublog.sbs.co.kr/uporter_reg2.html (accessed in 5 January 2008). 249 end of each episode along with the compiled citizen opinions on the last episode sent to its internet website in the beginning of episode - the viewership rate has dramatically increased. 7 Since October 2007, on average day, around 500 SMS messages flood into the network while jumping up to around 1500 whenever hot issues are on the subject, such as the recent ‘Samsung Special Prosecution’ in March 2008. KBS’ News Time, a formal news program that targets a younger viewer group also experienced explosive responses from viewers since it incorporated citizens’ live SMS messages into a regular news broadcast in caption format beginning in November 2007. “The number of the participating citizen opinions through SMS message has dramatically increased to more than 20,000 per daily program from average 200-300 before since we changed the format into ‘live caption,’” said Chun Bok-Soo, a Manager of News Production Team in KBS. “We realized how much the viewer were eager to participate in the news with their opinions,” he continues, “SMS messages were certainly effective in attracting young viewers who normally are not enthusiastic about the production and the circulation of news.” 8 As a prototype, Click Click Ranger presets the model of exploring the ubiquitous aspect of mobile technology. 7 Kim Mi-Young, “Eomjijilgwa Sotonghagi Jeolbanui Seonggong: News Programui Munja message Silheom 5 gewol (Half Success to Communicate with ‘Thumb Tribe’: News Reportage Programs’ 5 month Experiment with SMS Messages),” The Hankyoreh, 16 March 2008. 8 Kim Mi-Young, Ibid. 250 Creating the Public: Private Imaging and Public Exhibition From the start, !: Exclamation Mark has built a reputation for being a ‘public value oriented entertainment’ program. Previous and current sub- sections of the show have employed the formats of ‘human documentary’ or ‘news report’ in which show hosts visit and follow various people, with the goal of promoting the ‘good civilian life and consciousness’ in the form of a public service campaign but with the pleasure of entertaining. So far, its campaigns have been successful in generating issues in public discourse and have had real consequences in social life in Korea. Some of its famous campaigns include: “Let’s read books,” “Let’s keep the traffic sign,” “Let’s eat Breakfast,” “Street Lessons,” “Open your Eyes” (Donation/Transference of cornea for the blind), “Asia Asia” (Illegal workers home visiting project), and so on. Partially, the show’s strategy to foreground public service within entertainment content reflects the unique hybrid characteristic of its network, MBC. MBC runs as a private company but at the same time it operates closer to a public broadcasting network since it is in fact indirectly owned by the government through KBS, the largest and most influential major public network owned by the government, much like BBS in England, and subordinated under the direct control of the Commission of Television Broadcasting. Hence, this dominant discourse of the 251 program not only circumscribes the content of the clips in Click Click Ranger but also affects its program format. Typical clips of Click Click Ranger would feature various incidents showing the violation of civil laws such as a parking violation, misdemeanors, or good samaritans who help weak and elderly people at the subway station and so on. In each episode, once the best citizen is chosen among the good samaritans, the show’s host calls up the ranger member on the spot and runs to the very location of the incident to give the samaritan a reward –a golden badge. Click Click Ranger’s appropriation of the mobile phone as a ‘ubiquitous eye,’ however, has a double-sided effect. On the one hand, it empowers the individuals as participants in creating public space, in the form of ‘mobile citizens’ whose vision publicize everyday realities in diverse places through their mobile phone camera lenses. Yet on the other hand, it evokes the suspicion of enforcing ‘ubiquitous surveillance,‘ whose threat has been increasingly acknowledged along with the penetration of ubiquitous computing and centralized wireless/wired networks. Their potential misuse might inadvertently facilitate wide distribution and manipulation of audio-visual information of individual citizens, breaching the privacy of victims. This controversy regarding the dubious nature of Click Click Ranger immediately appeared on the show’s bulletin board and also induced either anxiety-ridden or celebratory responses 252 from the press. For instance, a newspaper article on The Hankyoreh directly addresses this issue, “A new section Click Click Ranger in !: Exclamation Mark meets ambivalent responses mixed with high expectation and at the same time of anxiety…. Its use of ubiquitous mobile phone camera imaging for capturing good doers on the street, in spite of its good intention, reminds us of the dangerous look of ‘big brother.’” 9 On the other hand, most celebratory reviews of the show tend to emphasize the technological aspect of its format with little attention to the potential danger that The Hankyoreh cogently criticizes. The following quote from an online newspaper succinctly represents this celebratory position; “A newly added Click Click Ranger is technically the most advanced project that only Korea whose strength is known for the world’s best mobile phone technology can produce.” 10 The exaggerated appraisal of ‘world’s best and the most advanced Korean technology’ precisely reiterates the way in which mobile phone technology is assessed and validated in the dominant public discourse in Korea, resonating with the ideology of techno-nationalism as discussed in chapter II. Although hyperbolic, this celebratory rhetoric precisely points out the very fundamental premise of Click Click Ranger- its status as ‘technically the most advanced’ project. Then, what makes Click Click Ranger the 9 Sohn Won-Jae, The Hankyoreh, 3 December 2004. 10 Kim Yang-Hyun, MoneyToday/Starnews.com, 2 December 2004, http://star.moneytoday.co.kr/view/stview.php?no=2004120215510852989&type=1 (accessed in 5 January 2008). 253 most advanced project as claimed? As the aforementioned newspaper article concisely catches, it is the technical sophistication of ‘linking various forms of screens,’ a move Click Click Ranger foregrounds. Whether it is critical or celebratory, the controversy around Click Click Ranger’s use of mobile phone imaging directs attention to the multifaceted nature of the mobile phone. Most discussions of mobile phone imaging so far have emphasized its personal and autobiographical dimensions. 11 In general, the private use of mobile phone imaging is also more prevalent in Korea, manifested in the popular activity of archiving pictures on personal blogs such as Cyworld, an icon of internet digital culture in Korea. Notably, Multimedia Short Message (MSM), which allows users to attach pictures or short video clips to a mobile phone message, is generally discussed as a private communication tool or a vehicle to expand private space with the combined practice of blogging. Although the “social dimension of mobile phone imaging,” as Barbara Shifo argues, 12 has been equally observed, such as the formation of the ‘community’ through the sharing of mobile phone images - whether it is exclusive or relatively 11 For the detailed accounts of this topic, see footnote n.33 in Chapter I. Specifically for the autobiographical aspect, see Heidi Cooley, “Proliferating Streams of Thumbnails: Mobile- Imaging and the Biopolitics of Healthful Living” (paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Chicago, March 8-11, 2007) . 12 Barbara Shifo, “The Domestification of Camera Phone and MMS Communications: The Early Experience of Young Italians,” A Sense of Place: The Global and the Local in Mobile Communication, ed. In K. Nyiri (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2005), 365. 254 open to the general public, 13 the assumption that mobile phone imaging is the practice of ‘private imaging’ still prevails. While mobile phone imaging mostly corresponds to the cultural trend of ‘personalization,’ I argue that even this process of personalization is inherently social construction in the sense that the particular personalizing process is deeply cued and governed by the ideological paradigm of a given society. For instance, Larissa Hjorth points out that girls’ mobile phone imaging often reveals the internalized practice of “gender performativity,” 14 as they consciously appropriate the culturally constructed ideal image of women into their very personal self-portrait. 15 Compared to this model of private imaging, Click Click Ranger’s adoption of mobile phone imaging is closer to and continues the practice of citizen journalism only with changed technologies- from the (video) camera and to the mobile phone- for which individual Click Click Rangers perform the social 13 Notably, Mizuko Ito, “Mobile photo Sharing” (paper presented at the Mobile Monday Speaker Series, Los Angeles, October 16, 2006); Kunikazu Amagasa, “The Emergence of Keitai Family: Inner Constructions of Today’s Family from the Viewpoint of Keitai Use” (paper presented at the Seeing, Understanding and Learning in the Mobile Age conference, Budapest, Hungary, April 24- 27, 2005); C. Riviere, “Mobile Camera Phones: A New Form of "Being Together" in Daily Interpersonal communication” (paper presented at the Mobile Communication and Social Change, Seoul, Korea, October 18-19, 2004). 14 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (London: Routledge, 1999). 15 Larissa Hjorth, “Seongbyeulhwadoen Idongseong: Asia Tepyeongyang Jiyeokeseoui Jagimatchumhwawa Gender (Gendered Mobility: Customization and Gender in Asian Pacific Region),”Mobile-Girls@Digital.Asia, eds. Lee Dong-Hu et al, (Paju, Korea: Hanul Academy, 2006), 145. 255 and public dimension of mobile phone imaging, adjusting their camera eye to the dominant social norm and public discourse. Hence, while being true to the technological premise of the medium that provides ‘personal mobility,’ their mobile phone imaging resides in and further serves to reinstate the value of the public. Most of all, it is the particular use of the outdoor screen with the mobile screen that distinguishes Click Click Ranger from other home-video shows or citizen reports programs and enables it to construct a broader discourse of the ‘public space’ out of mobile screen usage in Korea. Circular Nexus of Screens in Click Click Ranger Going back to <Diagram 5.1>, which illustrates the circular nexus of screens employed for the show, what makes this nexus unique is the presence of the large LED screen as an integral part of the television show. Although the use of the mobile screen is also equally unconventional, the potential of mobile phones as screen media has been explored in diverse ways. Yet the large LED screen, in spite of its ubiquity in urban landscapes of the global metropolis, has received little attention in the conventional media industry other than in the outdoor advertising business. Probably, the first pivotal moment when large LED screens came into the public media awareness in Korea was the World Cup Soccer tournament co-hosted by Korea and Japan in 2002, when it served as a key 256 display venue for broadcasting the Korean national team’s matches in public places. The large LED screen that Click Click Ranger deploys is one of the several LED screens that drew large crowds around Seoul City Hall Plaza. It is this symbolic meaning of the ‘location’ of the large LED screen that underlines the dominant discourse of Click Click Ranger to create a public value-oriented entertainment show, mobilizing the most sophisticated screen technology, and at the same time affirms the significance of the large LED screen as a new outdoor screen medium. As cultural studies of technology have discussed, whenever new media technologies such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and computer enter into society, there have been ambivalent expectations, both utopian and dystopian, about its social function. Moreover, the changes in electronic media have served to “incarnate and condense wider social tensions” around the shifting definitions of social values such as that of public and private space and eventually “the construction of personal and national identity.” 16 As one of the first attempts to incorporate the large LED screen into a conventional media practice, Click Click Ranger exemplifies the culturally specific way the large LED outdoor screen enters into the public discourse of contemporary Korea and thereby is an integral part of the contemporary urban screen culture. 16 William Boddy, Mew Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4. 257 Simply put, in Click Click Ranger, the large LED Screen technically functions as an additional outdoor TV to broadcast its program. In spite of their ubiquitous presence – even before the ubiquitous media became a hot issue- outdoor TV has received comparatively little attention in media studies. In Ambient TV, one of the few scholarly works devoted to this issue, Anna McCarthy cogently addresses the disregarded subject of outdoor TV in public space and thus brings academic TV studies to the street. 17 Her discussion of the material and discursive formation of television and specifically its “site-specific” nature provides relevant points to discuss television’s relation to the issue of place and space. Early academic discussion of outdoor space has centered on the concept of non-space, the dissolute and meaningless public space created by the phenomenological experience of distraction induced by modern transportation and media technologies. Challenging this assumption, McCarthy argues that space is not non-space. Rather, she points out that the space contains the ideological and the discursive relationship with the subject, and the ideology of place (“strategies” of place, in Michael de Certeau’s term) is rendered or reproduced by the subject’s lived experience (“tactics” of subject) which 17 Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, (Duke University Press, 2001). 258 appropriates the meaning of space within the confinement of place. 18 In this sense, as an implemented part of the material condition of place, outdoor TV mediates this discursive relation between place and the subject, and thus serves to reconstruct the meaning of space. In Click Click Ranger, it is the symbolic meaning of ‘public space’ (its ideological connotation as the location of Seoul City Hall) that the commercial LED screen in City Hall Plaza embodies and that Click Click Ranger systematically appropriates and reproduces. In other words, the institutional logic that governs the flows of the large LED screen in City Hall Plaza is purportedly extended over the way in which mobile phone imaging is consumed and mobilized into particular sets of discourse in Click Click Ranger. Then, why is the location of Seoul City Hall Plaza crucial for linking up-to-date screen technologies? Physically located at the busy intersection of the political and economic center of the downtown Seoul, the Seoul City Hall Plaza has served as a central place for many important national events. By running the show on the rooftop of city hall building following the fashion of ‘live news report on spot,’ Click Click Ranger successfully appropriates the sense of ‘liveness’ and intentionally adds ‘moral weight – news-worthy-ness-’ to the clips. This simulated urgency and liveness that supports the show’s goal of being connected to everyday realities of 18 Michael de Certeau’, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 259 Korea is intensified on the symbolic level since for Koreans the Seoul City Hall Plaza is the emblematic center for national identity as manifested during the World Cup Soccer tournament in 2002. 19 <Figure 5.2> illustrates the scene of World Cup Soccer frenzy during which, with the unexpected achievement of the Korean national team going on to the semi-final, crowds gathering in front of the large electronic screens to cheer reached the point of becoming a nation-wide ritual. Not only did it mark the beginning of the new trend of media consumption - collective watching in front of large outdoor screens on the street-, the intensity and enthusiasm represented by the image of the ‘wave of Red Devils’ (the official name of Korean team supporters as well as the icon of 2002 World Cup) left an unforgettable impression on Korean popular imaginary. In fact, many Korean scholars agreed that World Cup Soccer frenzy in 2002 does not simply reflect interest in a national sports match but rather represents a demarcating historical moment in Korean society– a culminating point to celebrate regained national pride and strength after the collapse of the economy 19 This symbolic meaning of the Seoul City Hall Plaza is largely due to its significant presence in modern Korean history. Since it was first constructed in front of the Daehan Gate of Deuksu Palace by Emperor Kojong, the last king of Chosun dynasty, in 1897, its name changed from Daehan Gate Plaza to Seoul City Hall Plaza, and then to Seoul Plaza, along with the changes of its surrounding environments : Once the former Kyeongseong (the old name of Seoul) Bu Building, which Japanese colonial government built around the Plaza in 1926, was repurposed into a Seoul City Hall after Korea’s liberation in 1945, Seoul City Hall Plaza acquired a currency as a popular name until the Plaza was rebuilt into the Seoul Plaza in 2004. Located at the center of the capital city of Korea, Seoul City Hall Plaza has witnessed most of historical turmoil of Korea, becoming the popular location for mass demonstration whenever the important national issues were raised. 260 in 1997. More interestingly, the 2002 World Cup syndrome parallels the increasing self-awareness of Korea’s position as a world leading player in the global information technology industry. It is not a mere coincidence that the ‘mobile phone’ and the ‘screen’ were two of the primary export products of Korea at the time. Led by the semi-conductor chip, various sorts of screens (PDP, LCD screens, computer screens, and the traditional electronic screens) and mobile phones ranked among top three export products in 2005. 20 In its pilot episode, Click Click Ranger explicitly delivers this intertwined discourse of the screen and the nation, emphasizing the significance of City Hall Plaza by inserting clips of City Hall Plaza scenes during World Cup Soccer 2002 and charts with the statistics of mobile phone exports sales. In this way, the culturally accumulated strategies of the particular place of Seoul City Hall Plaza– a center of the civil and nationalistic ideology- enhance Click Click Ranger’s attempt to replicate the sense of ‘liveness’ of live broadcasting and foreground the ‘collective’ meaning of being networked. In this way, Click Click Ranger consciously appropriates, reinforces the large LED screen’s significance as a vehicle for creating public space, and furthermore delivers this constructed meaning of public space to the viewer at home. 20 Ministry of Information and Telecommunication, “Suchiro Bon IT 2005 ( IT 2005 by Statistics),” 29 December 2005. 261 In the end, Click Click Ranger’s complicated exhibition process does not simply aim to increase the pleasure of experiencing images, but to foreground the very technological competency of appropriating new technologies. The realization of the idea of ‘connecting’ these up-to-dated screen technologies symptomatically reveals the social discourse about the importance of ‘networked public in wired Korea’. Considering that mobile technology becomes a source of national pride, the cultural use of mobile technology in Korea, especially mediated through the conventional media practices, often invites the individual to the formation of national identity. In discursive level, the activity of buying a new hand-set or using an up-to-date mobile phone service does not merely extend the personal freedom of employing technology. Rather it takes part in supporting the national economy and thus, consolidating national pride. Thereby Click Click Ranger consolidates the institutional and the nationalistic discourse underlining its project and examplifies another instance of the television media “playing out a broader cultural ideology of space in particular places.” 21 In this context, mobile phone imaging meets television and the outdoor screen in City Hall Plaza and in this more or less blunt self-explanatory gesture, Click Click Ranger conjures up the mobile phone exactly at the center of the ‘current’ Korea. 21 Anna McCarthy, “The Rhythms of the Reception Area: Crisis, Capitalism, and the Waiting Room TV,” 188. ; The remaining questions are to ask in what way individual users’ direct experiences of outdoor screen on the street, not mediated through television at home, respond to the Click Click Ranger’s strategy. But this goes beyond the gamut of this paper asking for further empirical research on the user’s diverse tactics of viewing. 262 2. Networked Urban Spectacl e Through this metaphor of ubiquitous screen, the postmodern has come to equal surfaces, loss of depth, loss of differentiation, and the loss of historicity, where sounds, images, texts are remixed and recycled daily. - Paul Smethurst 22 Yes, screens are everywhere. They are ubiquitous in contemporary urban space. They come in various shapes, sizes and functions, sometimes alone and other times attached to other objects or connected to networks. Some of them move along with viewers while others decorate the surface of our daily architectural environments, whether indoor or outdoor, like the one on the refrigerator door or those on the rooftop of the building. Ubiquitous screen, however, is not simply a metaphor of post-modernity, the theoretical conception of our image-saturated culture. It is rather a material surface of our time, surface not as a replacement of depth but as a reality in itself. And large LED screens and mobile screens, which Click Click Ranger proudly presents in contemporary Korea, are the newest species to expand the horizon of the ubiquity of screens in outdoor environments. The Large LED screen not only succeeds the function of the commercial or public advertising that outdoor billboards once fulfilled but also continues the visual pleasure of the urban spectacle. If the visual graphics of billboards and 22 Paul Smethurst, The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction, (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 98. 263 electronic signs represent the visual surfaces of modern urban culture in at least the metropolis since the turn of the last century, illuminating LED screens define the visual landscapes of contemporary urban space - whether it be postmodern or not- in screen age. In fact, from the early days of modern media history, the screen practice (like actuality films of early cinema) and advertising signs (like famous Time Plaza billboards) conjoined in urban centers, governing the sensorial and imaginary experience of urban space in modern cities. 23 The “surface culture” that Janet Ward argues as the definitive characteristic of early modern visual culture finds its prime moment in the present when new media technologies have constantly updated the technological condition of the urban spectacle into what I call screenic surface. The LED screen is a fascinating technology that continues and at the same time transforms the tradition of outdoor advertising, electronic signs, and urban spectacle into new hybrid and convergent form of urban visuality, which of course is conditioned by specific social and cultural contexts of its placement. Therefore, there are two primary aspects that this section aims to scrutinize: first, the definitive traits of the outdoor screen in the legacy of (modern and/or postmodern) urban spectacle, and second, the position of the mobile screen in contemporary outdoor media 23 Eric Gordon provides fascinating intersected trajectories of cinema and outdoor advertising in modern cities at the turn of the last century. See Eric Gordon, “Cinema and Signs: Actuality Films and Times Plaza at the Turn of the 20th Century” (paper presented at the Association of American Geographers, New Orleans, LA, March 2003); The American Urban Spectator: New Media and the American City (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, forthcoming 2008). 264 environment. Mobile screen occupies an interesting position in a broader context of the outdoor screen in that it embodies the tension between the site-specific nature of outdoor screen - screen as a part of the street spectacle, as in the LED screen- and the situation-specific and decentralized experience of the outdoor screen by a nomad viewer. With the consideration of these two aspects, the use of the mobile screen and the large LED screen in Click Click Ranger will help us navigate the current topography of outdoor screen media culture and contemporary urban visuality in Korea, a culturally specific site of screen-wired global cities. Large El ectronic Screen: A LED Revolution The large electronic screen is made of various technologies: FDT (Fluorescent Discharge Tube), CRT (Cathode Ray Tube), and LED (Light- Emitting Diodes). Among them, the LED screen has emerged as the most cost- efficient and multi-adaptable technology and currently constitutes ninety percent of total large electronic screens in Korea. 24 . This self-illuminating image display system is made of special semi-conductor components that are capable of displaying images nearly 900 percent more clearly than its predecessors, 24 Kim Jae-Young, “Okwoe LED Jeonkwangpan Bangsongkwanggoui Hyoyongseongkwa Hwalseonghwa Banganui Tamsekjeok Yeongu (A Strategic Study on the Efficiency and the Revitalization of Outdoor LED Broadcasting and Advertisement),” Journal of Outdoor Advertising, 2 (1) (2005), 12. 265 resulting in a picture quality that is comparable to a high-definition television screen. 25 Generally subsumed under a commercial category of ‘outdoor advertising’ in many countries, the LED screen first of all succeeds the tradition of the ‘outdoor billboard’ along with various forms of its brother, LED electronic banners. Depending on the context where it is employed, although mostly for commercial advertising, the LED screen is called many different names: LED Video Panel, LED billboard, or LED display screen (specifically in Korean use). Since first introduced in 1995 in Japan, the large LED screen technology has rapidly upgraded urban landscapes in the global metropolis, as in the case of the fate of the famous and traditional neon signs in Time Plaza that have finally handed over their prestigious positions as “Time Plaza Spectaculars” to LED screens in early 2000s. 26 Yet with the introduction of the LED screen and most importantly the parallel development of other digital technologies, outdoor electronic screens appear to be another model of convergent screen media whose potential is vigorously explored in Click Click Ranger. Equipped with wired or wireless 25 Since the Japanese company developed blue LED module in 1995, the LED has become the primary technology to produce outdoor display panels. 26 Regarding the history of the LED screen in Time Plazas, Trevor Boyer points out “in 1996 Panasonic took over the spot from Sony's departing Jumbotron and installed a fluorescent sign. In 2000, Landmark Sign installed the current Panasonic Astrovision LED sign.” - Trevor Boyer, “Time Plaza Spectaculars: LEDs and Full-Motion Video in the Heart of New York,” 1 May 2004, http://digitalcontentproducer.com/mag/video_times_Plaza/ (accessed in 1 February 2008). 266 connectivity through internet, the LED screen transforms into a form of outdoor screen medium that is suited for high-quality full-color live broadcasting, beyond its primary function of advertising as an isolated display panel, replacing or joining already existing practices of outdoor TV. Technically, the enhanced network allows any types of programs to be displayed on the LED screen: a pre- recorded looping advertisement, a live feed from an on-site camera or a downloaded satellite broadcast. In general, the LED screen broadcasts tailored short-circuit programs whose content, duration and cycles are customized to specific needs and interests of their sponsors and the institutional logic behind each placement in a particular location. Currently, there are over one hundred full color large electronic screens installed in Korea and eighty percent of them are located in Seoul. 27 Yet the large electronic outdoor screen has a comparatively short and unlively history in Korea since the first rooftop electronic screen was installed in 1987, 28 compared to other screen technologies such as PDP, LCD and the mobile screen. In fact, Korea is behind other industry leading countries in producing and cultivating outdoor screen technology, which is the reason why Korean government recently selected outdoor screen technology – particularly the LED screen – as one of the 27 Korean Outdoor Advertising Association, “Outdoor Display Network Statistics,” http://www.koeba.com/info/network.php (accessed in 1 February 2007). 28 The first outdoor screen in Korea was a LED display panel installed on the rooftop of Hanheung building across Seoul City Hall in 1987. – Kim Jae-Yong, Ibid., 7. 267 flagship industries for strategic support as a part of the national economic plan in 2006. Figure 5.4-5.9 LED screens on Teheran Street, Seoul; Masan City; Coex Mall, Seoul; LED panel in Subway Station, Seoul; Seoul City Hall ; Seoul Metro Subway line 3 (From top to bottom, 2007). Interestingly, it is reported that more than eighty percent of LED screens are consumed within Asia as of 2007, where Japan leads the industry as five 268 Japanese companies occupy almost half of the market. 29 It would be an interesting question to ask why the LED screen is more popular or widely adopted in Asian regions, although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to unearth the unique regionality of the LED screen culture. However, it is feasible to ask such questions if there are any inter-relations between the proliferation of outdoor screens in Asian cities and the region-specific concept and formulation of the urban spaces, which might agree or conflict with that of non-Asian contexts. 30 This simplistic binary between Asian and non-Asian urban spaces certainly contains its limitation and the risk of generalization, as after all it is not possible to generalize Asian cities without consideration of their cultural, historical, and geographical specificities. However, the speculation on culturally specific presence and the role of the large LED screen in creating current forms of urban spaces in Asia or at least an Asian model of urban spaces is quite intriguing, considering that the legacy of outdoor visual display or advertising has been upheld as the essential part of urban modernity- more precisely, the western model of urban modernity- since the turn of the twentieth century. In 29 Korean Outdoor Advertising Association, “History of Outdoor Display Panel,” http://www.koeba.com/info/summary.php (accessed in 1 February 2007). 30 The geographical condition of high-density and the compactness in most Asian cities might be considered as one of the factors to affect the different conceptualization and lived experiences of urban spaces. However, I surmise it is historically and socio-culturally specific construction of the public space that could possibly explain the regionality, more specifically, the locality of the outdoor screen phantasmagoria. 269 this sense, the question could be paraphrased as such: Is the proliferation of the outdoor screen contingent on the Asian model of the modernization of urban landscape? Then, the central issue lies in the readdressed question of how the newest outdoor screen technology defines or contributes to shaping the urban space in present time. Narrowing the issue down to the case of Korea, it is clearly culturally specific ways of appropriating– defining, applying, and regulating- the LED screen technology that makes the LED screen stand out as common outdoor screen medium, whose uptake pattern shares similarities with the Japanese as opposed to other western countries. One of the noticeable factors in this process is the issue of regulation since the legal regulations on this new type of screen vary depending on diverse contexts, and most significantly, these variations result from different understandings of the cultural role of the LED screen technology. To begin with, the large LED screen is solely defined as the ‘outdoor advertising’ for displaying commercial advertisements in a traditional sense in the United States, France, and Germany, where the traditional outdoor advertising has an extensive history beginning in the early twentieth century. For example, New York City has very strict rules for installing outdoor advertising so that large LED screens are not allowed anywhere except Times Plaza, which ironically explains why Time Plaza boasts the highest density of electronic 270 screens in the world. This definition of the LED screen as commercial outdoor advertising for private corporations directly conditions the institutional practice of adopting this technology, although there are occasional and exceptional uses of the LED screen as in the case of those in stadiums or theme parks. In comparison to this, when it was first introduced in Japan, the LED screen was mostly adopted by major newspaper companies for their self-promotion, not as much for displaying commercial advertisement for other private corporations, and this legacy of LED screen as a channel for news broadcasting continues until today in Japan. For instance, currently Asahi Newspaper alone owns one sixth of about three hundreds LED screens in Japan. 31 Korea initially followed the Japanese model of the LED screen adaptation, and it is also major newspaper companies that have actively introduced and managed large LED screen businesses up to the present. Like in many other countries, each installment of the large LED screen for commercial use requires official approval from the local government. However, the recent revision of the legal definitions and regulations on the large LED screen in October 2000 reflects its transformed position in the Korean mediascape, which clearly distinguishes the Korean case of the LED screen adaptation from its counterparts. According to 31 Kim Jae-Young, Ibid., 7. ; Though originating as corporate billboards, advertising signs in Time Plaza are also becoming a “a media outlet for the passing public and for the news media itself,” as Trevor Voyer argues, accompanying with the movement of the New York media outlets to the Plaza. – Trevor Boyer, Ibid. 271 the revised law, the LED screen was moved from the category of ‘outdoor advertising’ to the ‘LED display screen broadcasting,’ becoming one of the ‘broadcasting-telecommunication convergent media’ that would be governed under the new broadcasting laws. 32 Interestingly, it was the technical and legal potential of the LED screen to broadcast live video programs that attracted newspaper companies to the LED screen business even before the revised law was passed in Korea, where anti-monopoly laws had prohibited the integration and the cross-ownership between broadcasting and newspaper, limiting newspaper companies’ direct access to broadcast their own content other than through syndication. For example, Digital Chosun, a sub-company of Chosun Daily, the most powerful and popular daily newspaper in Korea, runs the largest nation-wide LED screen network, CityVision, under its wing. In total, Digital Chosun owns six super large- six hundred inches- full color LED screens installed on and around the Chosun Daily building in downtown Seoul, near Seoul City Hall, and produces and distributes its own video news and commercial ads as well as public campaign ads for large LED screens network 32 Newly amended in March 13 2000, the Broadcasting law provision 8 article 4 dictates that the large electronic screen business operators should get business enrollment from the Korean Broadcasting Committee within six month of its initial service. However, due to its convergent nature, a large electronic screen is under multiple regulations by different government agencies such as the local government, Korean Advertising Self-Regulatory Committee, and The Government Information Agency etc. - Yoon Soo-Jin, “Bangsong Tongsin Yunghapui Boepjeokin Yeongu (On the Legal side of Broadcasting-Telecommunication Convergence)” (Ph.d. diss., Law School, Korea University, 2004). 272 across country. Digital Chosun officially claims that their CityVision business, along with its program provider business, Business&, is the integral part of the Chosun Daily’s movement toward the paradigm of media convergence, for which the government would expectedly loosen regulations on cross-ownership and merge among different sectors of media. 33 Under these circumstances, the ‘LED screen broadcasting’ in Korea is technically approaching the traditional outdoor TV. It encompasses comprehensive ranges of outdoor screens from the large LED screens owned and run by major newspaper groups to small LED screens (panels) installed in various public places, such as public transportation – including subways, public buses, trains and their respective stations-, hospitals, and shopping malls. Commercial in most cases, however, the LED screen broadcasting in Korea shares the responsibility for serving public good as the broadcasting laws mandate the allocation of around twenty to thirty percent of their total air time for the “public campaign or advertisement,” which mostly consists of promotional materials of the local or central government and occasionally official promotion materials for public events. 34 In addition to these private or public 33 Digital Chosun, Press release, 10 April 2007, http://pr.chosun.com/digital/ (accessed in 14 January 2008). 34 Until September 2004, it was mandate to spare up to forty percent of total ads time for public advertisement. While Seoul City dropped to less than twenty five percent in 2004, most of other cities and local governments still upheld to the previous regulations as of 2005. – Kim Jae-Young, 273 advertisements, the large LED screens around City Hall have regularly been employed to broadcast national events such as New Year’s Eve ceremonies and national sports events. For example, in 2007, the metropolitan city of Seoul broadcasted five episodes of the environmental campaign video produced by MTV through 54 outdoor large electronic screens and 988 indoor LED screens in subway stations for two months. 35 Aside from these special public events, mostly it is the outdoor broadcasting operators that produce the content for the outdoor screens. Mtube and Comonet are two of primary operators through which Chosun Daily provides its own informational program, “Galsue” (Fig.5.9). It is reported that Mtube commercialized “subway live broadcasting” service on the LED screen for the first time in the world and since then has provided the service for the Seoul Subway lines 2 and 3. 36 Mtube’s content production and programming strategies are similar to those of DMB service as they combine the migrated content from their allies including major public (MBC, KBS) and cable television networks with original content they produce such as music shows or cinema programs. Most significantly, Mtube’s practice of live-broadcasting important national Ibid., 11. 35 Korea Advertising News, 9 August 2007, http://www.ksignnews.com/ (accessed in 1 February 2008). 36 Choi Heong-Bae, “Jihacheuleseo Joljimago TVreul Boja (No more Doze, Watch TV),” Chosun Daily, 19 October 19 2005. 274 events successfully constructs the sense of ‘liveness’ in a multi-layered ‘mobile’ environment - mobile screen in a mobile transportation for mobile viewers- and thus demonstrates the potential of the LED screen as an outdoor broadcasting medium. For example, during the World Cup Soccer frenzy in 2002, Mtube broadcasted entire matches live. Since then, significant national events such as the ballot counting for the 2002 presidential election and the persecution of the president Noh in 2004 were broadcasted through Mtube. Comonet began subway broadcasting in Seoul subway lines 1,2, and 4 in June 2001. Similar to the Mtube, it mainly broadcasts the migrated content syndicated from its allies (MBC, DongA TV, and AP). This LED screen broadcasting in the subway serves to turn the “meaningless and ahistorical transit” space of the subway into a public space saturated with the dominant discourse of conventional media. In this way, the LED Screens and outdoor screen broadcasting in Korea contribute to complicating the meaning of urban space into ‘multilayered and mediated spaces’ whose concrete and heterogeneous incarnations provide clues to tackling the familiar postmodern proposition of contemporary urban space as depthless non-space. 275 Augmented Screenic Surface: Post-Postmodern Urban Cities Given that the outdoor screen continues the tradition of the outdoor advertisement, its attraction as an illuminating screen panel with moving images dates back to the tradition of electronic spectacle in urban spaces, whose magical attraction of technology was commercially explored in World Fairs and theme parks since the early modern period. In Weimar Surface Culture, Janet Ward cogently explains how outdoor advertising and electric signs exist as decisive features of urban visual culture and thus represent western modernity at the turn of the century, in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the “techno-aesthetics of the urban phantasmagoria.” 37 Ward argues, the “surface culture of Weimar, surface level expression represented by decorated facades with such various ornaments as electric advertising, billboard, posters and display windows” represents what Kracauer and Benjamin postulate as the “neurological concept of modernity.” 38 37 Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany, (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 155-200; Susan Buck- Morss, “The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe,” October 73 (1995), .8; requoted in Ward, 124. 38 Janet Ward, Ibid., 204 ; Benjamin’s concept of ‘shock effect,’ crystallizes his argument about neurological and furthermore spectactorial experience of modernity, and at the same time the historical specificity of cinematic apparatus as a new mode of representation that embodies this condition of modernity and modern experience. Kracauer shares this phenomenological perspective toward modernity but he does not advocate the revolutionary function of cinema as a simulation of shock effect as Benjamin does. - Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” & “On Some Motifs of Baudelaire,” Illuminations. ; Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,” The Mass Ornament, (Harvard University Press, 1995). 276 In order words, outdoor advertising and electric signs function “as reflections of the processes of capitalist industrialization in forms clad for popular consumption, these manifestations are literal and conceptual expressions of surface.” 39 Her discussion of Weimar urban culture provides insight into the way in which the prevalent urban spectacle, the cultural manifestation of the “vernacular modernity,” was revalorized as the dominant “social space” of the era. 40 At the same time, she furthers that this modern visuality in urban space anticipated or contained the ambiguous tendencies of what has been later defined as the condition of postmodernity in academic discourse. In spite of its intrinsic limitations, the issue of postmodernity is relevant to diagnosing contemporary formulations of urban space. On the one hand, many theorists demarcate postmodernity from modernity in the realm of visuality: Modernity’s surfaces, entirely site-and-street-specific yet mobile and mobilizing, have been replaced by the stasis of the fluid mobility granted to our perception by the technologies of television, the VCR, the WWW, and virtual reality, by “mobilized virtual gaze” of postmodernity. 41 39 Janet Ward, Ibid., 1. 40 Miriam Hansen, “America, Paris, and Alps: Kracauer ( and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity,” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,1995). 41 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,1993), 2. 277 While foregrounding ‘mobility’ as the consecutive mode of modern and postmodern visuality, this quote represents the archetypal discourse of postmodernity, the symptom of a ‘loss of reality’ or culture of simulation, following the tradition of Baudrillard and Jameson. According to this tread of argument, as the “techno-aesthetics of urban phantasmagoria” changes along with, what Ward calls, the “invasion of electronic imagery into all things” or “forced extroversion of all interiority,” 42 the surface as “modern stimulation” is replaced by “postmodern simulation,” comprising the condition of postmodernism as, in Ward’s sense, a perversion of surface culture. 43 Here postmodernity is understood as the replacement of modern, the elimination of the value of the content/signified/real/stimulation on behalf of the rootless play of signs/virtual reality/simulation, for which electronic media play significant roles in proliferating the “mobilized virtual gaze.” On the other hand, however, there is the continuity between modern and postmodern visualtiy, as Ward argues that although postmodernity replaces the modern form of the surface culture, it still continues to be surface-oriented, and thus reaffirms the significance of the legacy of surface culture. The contemporary outdoor screen is situated in 42 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash : Bay Press, 1983), 132. 43 Janet Ward, Ibid., 5. 278 this collapsing or ongoing juncture between modernity and postmodernity. Although the issue of the lineage between modernity and postmodernity - whether postmodernity is actually the discontinuation or succession of modernity- is beyond the scope of this section, I would like to tackle the thesis of the postmodern condition of the ‘loss of reality propelled by the electronic screen media’ in order to properly map the outdoor screen in contemporary media culture. To begin with, according to the conventional discourse of postmodernity, the outdoor screen – the direct successor of the outdoor advertising but transformed with electronic screen technology- may seem to represent an archetypal form of postmodern simulation culture. Yet it is important to address that the postmodern discourse fails to consider the specific conditions of cultural spaces - historically, geographically, temporally, and technologically convergent and complex- due to the intrinsic limitations of its west-centric and ahistorical perspective, leading to questions of its applicability. After all, considering the historically uneven development of global cities, it is a few cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles that might fit into the thesis of postmodernity, and even in these cities, the disappearance of street-based “modern urban tactility” that postmodern theorist Paul Virilio hypothesizes does not happen in 279 comprehensive scale. 44 Therefore, it is pertinent to argue that the “interfacade of monitors and control screens” became prevalent in urban space with the development of electronic and computer media, but it is neither the only material surface of the urban space, as Virilio contends, nor a signifier of the absence of reality. 45 Simply put, the outdoor screen (the very technological surface of present time) and the electronically based simulation on the screen do not replace reality but rather construct or more precisely become the new reality, forming part of the “augmented reality” 46 that encompasses all dimensions beyond the modern binary opposition between the content and form, the reality and simulacrum, and the private and public. Guy Debord‘s insight on the significance of spectacle that postmodern discourse subsequently builds on already implies this realistic presence of the spectacle as follows: [The spectacle] is not something added to the real world -not a decorative element, so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very heart of society’s real unreality… (24) Spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image, a condition that was made acute by 44 Paul Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” Zone 1/2, eds. Michel Feher and Sanford Kwinter, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986, 17; trans. Astrid Hustvedt from L’Espace critique (1984). 45 Paul Virilio, Ibid., 18. 46 The concept of “Augmented Reality” was coined and used in computer science in relation to the virtual reality technologies since 1996 and introduced to media studies regarding the issue of ‘media-saturated’ urban environment: See, S. Feiner, B. MacIntyre, T. Höllerer, and T. Webster, “A Touring Machine: Prototyping 3D mobile Augmented Reality Systems for Exploring the Urban Environment,” Personal Technologies, 1 (4) (1997): 208-217. 280 the fact that commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity. (13) 47 At least in the context of the urban space of Korea, the current configuration of the outdoor screen –the LED screen, mobile screen along with more traditional outdoor TVs- brings back the tradition of modern street-based surface in the form of spectacle in a twisted way, as it is the very surface ornament implemented in the urban space that the contemporary flaneur faces. In particular, the LED screen represents a convergent nature of the contemporary spectacle technologies that crosses over the boundaries of the media – not progressively but rather synchronously-, combining the tradition of modern outdoor advertisement and the electric spectacle with so-called postmodern simulacrum. Moreover, asymptomatic as it may be, the prevalence of the outdoor screen in Korea reiterates the intertwined rhetoric between the planned employment of the electric spectacle and the construction of the modern city to the standard of the global city in the early modern period, illuminating the overarching social logic that governs the postmodern simulacrum in continuation of the legacy of modern visuality. If it were electronic signs and spectacle that fulfilled the status of the modern global city, it is now up-to-date 47 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994). 281 outdoor screen technology such as the LED screen that defines the landscape of the postmodern global city. The electricity spectacle exhibition is an excellent example that shows how the advent of the ‘technological spectacle’ as a primary modern attraction at the sensorial level is implicitly or explicitly intertwined with the larger institutional or social ideology around the concept of a modern global city. Ward points out that the outstanding adaptation of electricity spectacle in Weimar Germany was a concerted effort “to play catch-up in the race for industrial and economic prestige” of “world- city status” in competition with other urban centers in metropolis such as New York’s Time Plaza and Broadway, London’s Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Plaza, and Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichstraβe in the 1920s. 48 Culminating in the case of the ‘Berlin in Light Week’ in Weimar Germany, the electricity spectacle displayed the technological and economic power of industrial and modern cities since Edison’s incandescent lighting was first displayed at the 1881 Paris Exhibition. Since then, it decorated numerous modern cities along with the boom of the international expositions such as the 1891 International Electrotechnical Exhibition in Frakfurt, the Electricity building containing Edison’s Kinescope at the Chicago Exposition of 1893, and the Palace of Electricity with a façade of thousands of colored light bulbs in the 1900 Paris exhibition. Once the electricity served as a symbol of 48 Janet Ward, Ibld., 101, 102. 282 modern technology to exhibit the power of modern nations, it was dispersed into commercial entertainment sectors such as the theme park. The most famous one in a theme park was Coney Island’s Luna Park in New York, where 1,300,000 light bulbs on the towers provided a nightly visual feast. 49 Recent popularity or the return of the electricity spectacle installation with LED bulbs in several Asian cities including Seoul repeats what the electricity spectacle did for modern urban cities at of the turn of the last century. Enhanced with the newest technology, this contemporary version of electricity spectacle performs the similar mission of putting individual cities on the global map through the power of the spectacle, whether it is designed for promoting tourism or self-promoting the image of the city. For instance, the ‘Lucevista (Light Seeing)’ festival hosted by Seoul City, following the model of the ‘Luminarie (Light)’ Festival in Kobe city of Japan, is an interesting successor of this tradition. Since 2004, Seoul City has held the ‘Hi-Seoul Lucevista’ festival during every Christmas season around the City Hall Plaza, Kwanhwamun (Kwanhwa Gate), and newly recuperated Cheonggecheon (Cheongge Stream). Since the first Luminarie was held in Buchun City in order to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary in 2003, it became the popular public event during the holiday season and for special events across the country, and in most cases, sponsored by local 49 John F. Kasson, Amusing The Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978). 283 governments as a part of their ‘Urban Culture Plans’ or private corporations for promotional purposes. Figure 5.10–5.13 Luminarie decorations in Seoul City Hall Plaza; in Kwanghwa Gate; in front of the DongA Daily building; in Cheongge Stream Plaza, 2007 (from top-left to bottom-right). Pictures above show how the LED bulbs are constructed into decoration panels that imitate the traditional European architecture of castles or churches. During the festival, various shapes of display architectures decorated with the most sophisticated LED bulbs are built on the street or in the façade of the building and stay lit usually for hours in the evening, adding another electronic and 284 spectacular layer to the physical environment of urban space. <Figure 5.10> particularly shows the very physical set up of the location where Click Click Ranger was shot and adequately portrays the significance of this particular location as a cultural center of the city, especially in regard to display of screen technology. The red building on the far left is the City Hall and the large LED screen pictured at the center is the very one employed in Click Click Ranger. The history of the Luminarie or the Luchevista and its transplant to Korea tells a fascinating story about the culturally specific appropriation of technology across the globe, providing a glimpse of the transnational flow and transformation of the legacy of modern spectacle. In 2007, the official name of the Light festival in Seoul changed from the ‘Luminarie’ to the ‘Luchevista’ as Japan, which first used the name of Luminarie for its electricity spectacle festival in Kobe, acquired the copy right for Luminarie as a commercial brand name. 50 Interestingly enough, the Light Festival is said to originate from Europe, especially from Naples in Italy, going back to the sixteenth century’s religious tradition that celebrated the march of a queen and later developed into a religious ceremony to memorialize the Saint. 51 During the festival, temporary architectures with lightings were built, or existing buildings were decorated with 50 Lucevista Festival homepage, http://lucevista.co.kr (retrieved in 10 December 2007). 51 Kim Hyeon-Jeong, Do Jin-Seok, and Kim Jeong-Te, “Jiyeok Munhwa Chukjeroseoui Buchun Luminarie Bunseok (An Analysis of Buchun Luminarie as Cultural and Regional Festival),” Journal of Korean Institute of Ecological Architecture and Environment 6 (2004-2005): 117-130. 285 lights. It is possible that the electricity spectacles in modern European cities such as Berlin in Light were commercial renderings of this religious tradition. Then it crossed the continent reaching to Japan in 1995 when the Kobe Luminarie was first inaugurated as a memorial for the Kobe Hanshin earthquake, with donated materials from Italy, becoming one of the most well-known Light Festivals in the world. Korea imported this Japanese version of Light Festival. The fact that the copy right for the name of Luminarie is acquired by Japan is suggestive in that the borrowed tradition of others turns into a re-modified commodity in the midst of transnational exchange. That is, the materials and technologies for the festival were initially donated by an Italian company along with the tradition of the Light Festival, which explains why most of light decorations are modeled after European architecture, but it was the Japanese-coined name of ‘Luminarie’ that has finally come to represent this type of technological spectacle and eventually crossed the ocean to Korea. In Korea, the original religious meaning or the special commemoration ideal were lost during its transmission, and it was reborn as a festival event that represents the hidden desire of catching up to the glory of old European cities through upgraded spectacle, explicitly expressed in popular media with such headings as “Come on, Champs-Élysées.” 52 Since the prime time of the Champs-Élysées as the symbol of the glorious commercial and 52 Kim Han-Beul, “Illuminating Night, Delicious Night, Seoul Night, ” JungAng Daily, 17 December 2007. 286 cultural center of modern urban cities, what has changed is the technological format that replaced the old electricity-based bulbs. The Luminarie is another variation of what the LED technology has yielded in the rapidly changing arena of new media technology. In this way, <Figure 5.10-5.13> portray the status of the surface culture of contemporary Korea, where the outdoor screen exists not only as a functional medium but also as an ideologically charged urban spectacle and succinctly capture how the contemporary version of the electricity spectacle prevails over the legacy of modern urban spectacle in a non-western context and thus. In this sense, the hypothesis of the “borderless, decentered (coincidentally, postmodern) global city” touted by theorists as a result of the globalization becomes questionable. For example, in her nominal discussion of the postmodern global city, Saskia Sassen argues that the globalization process results in the total decentralization of power out of the city, and thus modern urban space for “flanerie – which was located in the metropolis and itself in turn the main showplace of the nation-state- has since given way to an erosion of national borders and new transnational market place.” 53 However, numerous empirical studies on the actual process of the globalization in diverse contexts have challenged such generalizing assumptions about globalization. A few 53 Saskia Sassen, The Global City : New York, London, Tokyo, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001);Ward. Ibid., 14. 287 exceptional cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas may present the disrupted legacy of the modern city as they inspired the discussion of postmodernity or transformed over times, predominantly materializing the characteristics of postmodernity. In other cases, however, modern and postmodern conditions co- exist in the same physical urban space, overlapping with each other, as in case of Seoul, where the idea of border and nation-state is even more reinforced with the help of new media technologies, as Click Click Ranger adequately exemplifies. In this kind of city with augmented temporalities, the layered spectacle –whether it is pictorial, graphic, and electronic- not only provides the lure of simulacrum but still reinforces the attraction of urban space as the cultural, commercial, economic, technological center. Click Click Ranger’s adaptation of the large LED screen illustrates the multiplicity of the cultural position of the outdoor screen, especially the reaffirmed value of the ‘public space’ created by the outdoor screen and the reinforced sense of nation-state, which seems to conflict with the thesis of the postmodern condition. The mobile screen occupies an interesting position in this complex and layered space of the urban city, situated somewhere between modern and postmodern or outside of the monolithic lineage of this periodization. 288 3. Nomadic Viewer : A Dwell er in the Screen-Wired Urban Space. It is in this context of modern spectacle wherein cinema came into being as a modern entertainment medium while anticipating a postmodern form of visuality. Theorists in the early modern period such as the renowned Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer paid special attention to the relevance of the cinematic apparatus as a cultural mediation or reproduction of modern experience. According to Anne Friedberg’s interpretation, inside of the dark theater, cinema replicated the phenomenological experience of ‘mobile gaze’ that the modern flanerie enjoyed in urban street, but virtually. Since then, this virtual mobile gaze, as Friedberg argues, has expanded into the pervasive “screenic seeing,” a “multi-tasked” seeing involving incidental looking, “cross-cuts,” as it were, between embedded frames, various screen/s and surrounding scenes. 54 Heidi Cooley elaborates this concept of “screenic seeing” in order to emphasize seeing that transpires as looking-at, as opposed to looking-through. She succinctly points out that flatness, even if layered, is what typifies screenic 54 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006). 289 seeing. 55 By taking the moving images out of the physical confinement of a theater or a living room to the street, the outdoor screens in general certainly employ screenic seeing as the primary mode of visuality in contemporary urban spaces of the digital age. However, I argue that the various employments of outdoor screens complicate this concept of screenic seeing as they materialize the practice of looking–at, as a physical part of the screenic surfaces in outdoor places, yet also allow the looking-through, on the condition that the viewer can employ immersive, though momentary, watching of content on screens. Unlike the cinema as a cultural institution that allows a physically immobile viewer with virtually mobile seeing on the screen, the LED screens, especially fixed ones, display moving images on their screens for both mobile and immobile viewers in front of (or facing, depending on their locations) the screens while they simultaneously form parts of a larger landscape as objects (another frame) of screenic seeing. For instance, the ‘visibility as a landmark object’ is one of the predominant characteristics of the large LED screen in Korea, as most of the outdoor LED screens are literally ‘giant’ in terms of their sizes. The very LED screen in Seoul City Hall Plaza employed for Click Click Ranger has a Korean standard size of 12M x 9M, and is situated in the best vantage point for public attention that covers a large surrounding area for its target viewership. 55 Heidi Cooley, “It’s All About the Fit: The Hand, the Mobile Screenic Device and Tactile Vision.” Journal of Visual Culture 3, 2 (2004): 133-155. 290 The mobile screen, on the other hand, complicates this mechanism as it moves with moving image contents that often enable the viewer to be spectator and not on-looker. Unlike the fixed outdoor screen, it not only requires its viewer to be physically fixated on a specific location with the screen in his hand for the duration of his watching, whether he is in the subway or at the corner of a coffee shop - unless the viewer is watching while he walks- but also hardly participates in the surrounding landscapes due to its small size and its nature as a personal medium, not a displayed public screen. It is possible that its presence is shared by others around the viewer but it does not occupy the physical space that outdoor TV or the large LED screen demand. Hence, while it surely proliferates the screenic seeing for its viewer with possible alternation between the screen and the surrounding scenes, in spite of its comparatively inconspicuous material presence, it also allows the viewer to carve their ‘private quasi-theater’ out of the public space as suggested in chapter IV. Considering this aspect of the mobile screen as a predominantly personal medium, how does its presence and function in outdoor spaces relate to that of the outdoor screen as a medium to produce urban spectacle? 291 Spectactorial Resid ence: Mobil e Publicization vs. Nomadic Privatization In mapping outdoor screen culture, the issue of the ‘place’ and ‘space’ appears pivotal, as in the discussions of preceding new media technologies with regard to their anticipated effect of generating new social behaviors, which potentially might alter the material and ideological parameters of the ‘location’ where the subjects reside. The development of modern broadcasting media such as radio and television brought an increased awareness of mobility and social changes, not just as abstractions but as lived experience, and led to a major redefinition in practice and theory of the function and process of social communication. The creation of separate spheres of the private and public spaces and the reaffirmation of this division through various cultural and technological discourses and practices is one of the tropes that the paradigms of western modernity and modern society represent. In particular, discourses of modern and postmodern visuality have proposed that screen media serve to create the tendency of disappearing public space and the proliferation of private space, rendering the boundary between the public and private flexible, if nonexistent. As a newest form of a private medium but potentially in public space, the mobile screen embodies the tensions inherent to existing outdoor screen media, most prominently the outdoor TV, in relation to conventional media practices. In this regard, the legacy of television and its transformation to outdoor TV sheds light 292 on the discussion of the ambiguity of the mobile screen as a predominantly private screen. Many scholars have argued that since it was invented as a modern entertainment technology, traditional television initially served the ideological function of reconstructing the ideal of family and domestic space as the center of society as opposed to the public space, particularly in urban centers. 56 However, it is also equally addressed that television as a trope of modern social communication technologies provides the ‘connection’ that could compensate for the geographical “mobility of agency” of individual viewers stationed in their private domain, by delivering “information across the space, over distance, and through the time.” 57 In this context, challenging the conventional social formation of media practices, with its mobility and connectivity, the mobile screen appears as a destabilizing technological innovation that disrupts the prevailing industry models and media practices associated with the dichotomy of private and public media. To begin with, the use of the mobile screen intensifies the ‘privatizing effect,’ which I introduced as the tendency of Nomadic Privatization in earlier chapters, to the extent that it allows the user to privatize the public space, 56 Particularly in post-war American context, see Lynn Spigel, Make a Room for TV, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992). 57 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology as Cultural Form,(New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 15. 293 disrupting the conventional boundary and thus embodying some of conditions of postmodernity. However, the study of the outdoor TV shows that diverse forms of actual televisual experience in outdoor places in fact construct the space into a materially and ideologically constructed one, not merely a non-space produced through distraction, through the subjects’ specific appropriation of the TV screen and his/her environment. Click Click Ranger’s deployment of the large LED screen well-illustrates this site-specific nature of the outdoor TV, in Anna McCarthy’s sense. However, embodying the condition of distraction as its fundamental premise, the mobile screen extends the ‘site-specific’ meaning of the outdoor TV experience into the more minute level of a ‘situation specific’ one. On the one hand, the mobile screen is an “anti-ubiquitous territory machine” as Mizuko Ito defines. 58 For instance, in the context of the Japanese mobile phone (keitai) use, Ito argues that the “salience of the personal and discourse of intimate [that keitai communications provides], mobile text and visual communication can colonize even communal places where telephony would be frowned upon.” 59 Without question, the mobile screen allows the user the freedom to shut him/herself out from the surrounding environment momentarily, as studies of the typical subway commuter’s use of mobile screens 58 Mizuko Ito, Personal, Portable and Pedestrian : Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005), 9. 59 Mizuko Ito, Ibid., 14. 294 demonstrate. 60 On the other hand, ironically the mobile screen also provides the user with the physically unconditioned access to the ‘ubiquitous network’ at his disposal, ‘ubiquitous’ defined as “sociotechnical practices of using and engaging with information technologies in an ongoing, lightweight, and pervasive way.” 61 Therefore, while this ubiquitous connection lets the user ‘cocoon’ in his/her personal spheres, it also invites the user to be connected to the public networks, quenching his/her desire for being connected to a sense of community, exemplified by findings on Korean mobile TV and the popularity of ‘live’ broadcasts. In this way, the very private mobile screen also turns into an “indiscreet technology” that projects its presence visibly in public space. 62 This ambivalence was already contained in the traditional home TV and outdoor TV, but the mobile screen proliferates this tension as the meaning of screen-use becomes contingent on the specific situations of the individual viewer. In this regard, the ‘nomadic’ movement of the viewer is not entirely free from social regulations or from the strategy of space because his/her movement is conditioned as much as empowered by the capitalist logic or dominant 60 Jan Chipcase Jan, et al, “Personal Television: A Qualitative Study of Mobile TV Users in South Korea,” Nokia Research Center: Japan, 2006, http://www.janchipchase.com/mobiletv (accessed in 25 April 2008). 61 Geoff Cooper, “The Mutable Mobile: Social Theory,” Wireless World: Social and Interact ional Aspects of the Mobile Ag, eds. Barry Brown, Nicola Green and Richard Harper (London: Springer- Verlag, 2002),24. 62 Geoff Cooper, Ibid.,24. 295 ideology in a given society. As Click Click Ranger aptly demonstrates, the use of the mobile screen is fundamentally preconditioned by the service operators’ networks and their institutional practices. It systematically invites the user to create ‘public space’ through his/her mobile phone imaging and reinserts or augments it into the ‘private space’ of the mobile screen viewer, and in this sense characterizes another tendency of mobile screen use, what I call mobile publicization. Through its particular strategy of converging mobile phone screens (for imaging and exhibiting) with other screens, Click Click Ranger enables the interplay between ‘mobile publicization’ and ‘nomad privatization,’ and thus demonstrates the constantly shifting public and private dimensions of mobile screen experience. That is, in Click Click Ranger, the meaning of ‘private imaging,’ the assumed quality of the mobile phone imaging, constantly changes and acquires additional dimensions as the captured images travel across diverse screens: from private imaging to public exhibition on the outdoor screen, and back to the private viewing on mobile TV. In this circulation, mobile phones and mobile TV, which represent personal screen devices, are mobilized into the formation of ‘public space’ via television. When the show is eventually broadcast in mobile TV, the flexibility of the public and private space becomes more intensified, in that the previously established and spatially fixed ‘public’ dimension of the large LED screen in City Hall Plaza is disrupted as the 296 individual mobile TV viewers multiply the meanings of space for themselves depending on their diverse viewing situations. This tension between the ‘spatially-fixed or spatially governed’ and the ‘situation-driven and agent- governed’ creation of the meaning of space in the use of the outdoor screen is what the mobile screen brings to the long legacy of outdoor visual culture in urban space. Most of all, this ambivalent or collapsed mode of the mobile screen use redirects our attention to the significance of the network that connects and coordinates the atomic presence of the mobile screen. In this regard, the network is an ultimate reality in our time, not so much the metaphor of the postmodern space-time that erases modern spatial and temporal boundaries as the metaphor of ‘multilayered reality’ of the digital age. The boundary between public and private spaces is not just blurred; rather it is augmented/layered/permissive. Screens are becoming more and more the vehicle to carry the ‘delivered or downloaded’ moving image content – whether it is film or television shows or commercials clips- through networks. Ubiquity of the screen hence parallels the ubiquity of the networks. Therefore, the true meaning of individual digital multimedia content and the screen media itself depends on the situation-specific personal viewing experience in a particular networked place, through interdependent technologies, and across social arrangements. Now, the emphasis 297 should be put on how individuals or social groups have access to and move to and from the place(s) where they engage mobile screen media in their everyday lives. Overall, in these complex ways, the mobile screen constructs abundant layers of the screenic surfaces of urban space and thus extends and augments the experience of modern flaneurie to the postmodern nomad viewer within myriad realities of screens, with screens around, above and in his hands. 298 Conclusion Now, Cinema is in your hands and television is on the street. Screens are everywhere. Looking back to the early history of the mobile screen, in 2002, when ‘mobile cinema’ was first introduced in Korea, I was baffled by the ambiguity of this term. It seemed that the unlikely combination of cinema, the familiar and age-old medium, with the mobile phone, the most recent new technology, generated a kind of uncanny effect. It was either too familiar or too alien. The familiarity of the term itself made me feel that I already knew or at least could easily understand what it was. At the same time, however, cinema on the mobile phone was a completely new concept and innovative product by then. The secret of this uncanny effect lies in the intricate relations between the three parts of the term, ‘Korean Mobile Cinema’: Korea, mobile phone, and cinema. To put it literally, Korean mobile cinema means that now cinema can be experienced through the mobile phone in Korea. To the eye of the media scholar, it signals the birth of the new hybrid form of media content and screen experience born out of the marriage between the new mobile technology, and the old conventions of the cinema, in the historically and culturally specific context of Korea. This study attempted to investigate this uncanny advance of the mobile 299 screen and the mobile cinema –original moving image content on the mobile phone- within a concrete and particular operation of media convergence, that is, the multi-faceted meaning of the mobile screen as a ‘networked personal screen medium’ in tandem with diverse dimensions of media practices: the mobile screen as a symbolic icon of nationalist economic development, the mobile screen in the long legacy of cinematic tradition, the mobile screen as a personal television, and the mobile screen in urban spaces. Embodying the paradigm of media convergence, the mobile screen moves across many boundaries embedded and perpetuated in conventional media practices, between media defined by their own specificities, private and public space, indoor and outdoor, producer and consumer, and the local and global. Its zigzagged crossing eventually reaches the broader cultural phenomenon of the digital age, that is, the advent of the ‘networked public.’ However, mobile screen culture in Korea reveals seemingly contradictory yet parallel implications of the networked public: public as a symbol of techno-nationalism vs. public as an agent of personal media and DIY (Do It Yourself) culture. On the one hand, the investigation of the discursive trajectory of the developmental history of the mobile screen technology in Korea reveals the underlying social discourse that substantiates it as a economic and symbolic vehicle, constituting the ideal of the ‘networked public in wired Korea’. The 300 techno-nationalistic mobilization of the mobile screen technology in Korea articulates the mechanism in which new media technology is defined, appropriated, constituted, and circulated in particular ways out of the tensions, interactions, and negotiations between the local and global. According to the media translation of this social discourse, the images migrate from micro screen to macro screen, from private space to public space and vice versa, and as a result, individuals are interpellated (if I may use this term) to occupy the position of citizens. As long as the mobile screen remains a compatible industry in the global market, the strong nationalist discourse attached to mobile screen technology will facilitate fast and eager adoption of ever-evolving mobile devices and dissemination of new media services. Yet countries which dream of being the next IT-power houses will also continue, as they have been, this rhetoric of techno-nationalism. In this sense, cross-cultural studies of mobile screen culture will further explicate junctures where the diverse local adaptations of the mobile screen overlap and diverge. The future of Helio, a transnational mobile screen venture, is of much interest in this regard. Helio’s technological and cultural migration from Seoul to Los Angeles or New York, global cities where the transnational flows of the technology, people, objects and images intersect with the creation of national identity, will solicit multi-faceted meanings of the ‘mobility’ and 301 ‘networks’ that it provides for multi-cultural users – the social, national, and global networks in the dissemination of mobile screen culture. On the other hand, mobile screen culture parallels the emergence of MySpace, YouTube, and their various global equivalents such as Cyworld and UCC sites, including Pandora TV in Korea, forming part of the network culture. Individual’s creation, sharing, and experience of multimedia content through online communication and personal digital devices are increasingly overtaking the hegemony of the conventional public media system. This study of mobile screen culture began specifically asking how the technological and aesthetic uniqueness of the mobile screen is related to this changed mode of spectatorship, in particular, the uniqueness of youth activity using mobile phones and personal networked media for screen experiences. Textual and contextual analysis of mobile multimedia contents and cultural creation and use of the mobile screen reveals the centrality of participatory youth culture with digital media, which is indeed presupposed from an industrial perspective as the precondition for the success of mobile screen media service. Hence, while the mobile phone and mobile screen devices may be central in youth culture as a channel for expressing identity, youth cultural activities also constitute the nature of these technologies. The question that will follow up this study is to what extent the mobile screen redefines young people’s experience of visual culture or vice versa. Though its 302 current configuration and significance is insinuated throughout the discussion of this study, the next step is to delve into concrete cases of the actual use of the mobile screen, including other un-networked portable screen devices, and to locate patterns, modes, and preferences of engaging with the mobile screen in specific settings of the subject’s daily life. The micro-level empirical research of youth mobile screen culture will illuminate the particular ways in which the changed delivery, display systems and diverse formal tactics that mobile multimedia contents employ in order to attract the nomadic viewer might affect the interaction between the screen, contents, and users within current visual digital culture. Eventually forming part of cross-cultural studies of youth digital media culture, this future study will also be pertinent to elaborating on the unique position of youth culture in Korea, a contested terrain where the tensions provoked by the digital divide, according to generational gaps, is intermingled with the celebratory expectation of its prosperity. No other generation of youth in Korea, or the rest of the world, has had such cultural power through the use of technology at their stage of youth and they are continuously making up the rules of its use ad hoc. While mobile technology is a symbol of national pride, and touted as a new economic frontier in the competitive global market, Korean youth – who are called ‘Digital Generation’, ‘Cyber Sinillyu (new human species: 303 new generation),’ ‘Thumb tribe,’ and ‘Netizen (Net + Citizen)’ - are also elevated to the position of future hope, social agents who are compelled to continue future national development with the vision of an ever-evolving IT Korea. Thus, scholarly focus should be on how to define and analyze the social, cultural, and imaginary ‘space’ within which youth activities carry out the cultural specificities of mobile screen technology. As mobile cinema and mobile TV exemplify, this space is born out of the turbulent converging drive that blends disparate agencies - the political, cultural, industrial, artistic practices- and discourses into a new vision. At least during the early years of the mobile screen venture, there were hints of the excitement or anticipation for the new possibilities of creating ‘unprecedented new’ out of the ‘familiar old’ practices. Excitement over the potential of new mobile screen technology has not yet met its due. The simple addition of ‘mobile’ to familiar media genres magically expects to render familiar into unfamiliar. Repeating what the history of every new technology has proven in its burgeoning period, the very first generations of mobile cinema and mobile drama came out of this techno-cultural atmosphere under the charming spell of ‘new.’ Yet these supposedly new creations of moving images paradoxically have proven that our age-old conventions of seeing are not ephemeral and do not sacrifice their ways into oblivion. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Ok, Hye Ryoung (author)

Core Title Screens on the move: media convergence and mobile culture in Korea

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/25/2008

Defense Date 05/21/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag digital media pratice in Korea,global media,media convergence,mobile phone content service,mobile screen,mobile TV,OAI-PMH Harvest,outdoor screen,personal media

Place Name Korea (countries)

Language English

Advisor Kinder, Marsha (committee chair), Ito, Mizuko (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email hexeok@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1413

Unique identifier UC1222833

Identifier etd-Ok-20080725 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-204735 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1413 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Ok-20080725.pdf

Dmrecord 204735

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Ok, Hye Ryoung

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu