Cultures of personal ambivalence : A case study of college students' uses of the camera phone and Cyworld's mini-hompy

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The role of technologies within contemporary Korean urbanity and everyday life cannot be underestimated. In particular, the cell phone and the dominant Internet SNS (Social Networking Systems), Cyworld's mini-hompy, have been a steady diet for Korean college students since the early 2000's. Both cultures epitomize emerging socio-technologies in everyday Korean urban life; that is, the integral part of technologies in practicing and participating in everyday contemporary culture. As such, the convergent phenomenon between cell phone and internet cultures has attracted attention from scholars from various disciplines.
With the introduction and popularity of the camera phone, the study of the cell phone has grown to a multimodal activity encompassing many forms of identity and identification. Much of the literature has explored the role of the camera phone in constructing, maintaining and revising forms of identity and sociality [1]. One of the important factors that separate the camera phone from other photographic media is the pivotal role of the sharing, storing and saving in determining meaning [2].
In the rise of global technological convergence, the cell phone epitomizes both convergence and divergence [3]. This is particularly highlighted by the role of sharing, storing and saving camera phones. How we contextualize, share and store our camera phones images is subject to the local. In the case of Korea, the convergence between camera phone practices and mini-hompy cannot be underestimated. Thus, through the studying of the coordination between mini-hompy and camera phones we can gain greater acuity into the emerging forms of camera phone imagery and new forms of visuality. It is with this in mind that this paper will explore the context of Cyworld mini-hompy as a frame for recreating residual and emerging forms of UCC (user created content) imagery for Korean college students.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Abstract
• Clicking cultures: an introduction
• A brief snapshot of camera phone literature
• Outlining of sample study
• 3-D life: the 3 D's of personal photography in the culture of personal ambivalence
• Other observations: the hardware
• Concluding remarks...
• References