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STS: Science and Technology Studies

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito

Research Scientist
Annenberg Center for Communication
University of Southern California

Visiting Associate Professor
Graduate School of Media and Governance
Keio University


LECTURE: "The Social Life of Mobile Media"

Thursday, February 21, 2008
3:30pm – 4:30pm
8417 Social Science Building

Reception to follow


ABSTRACT:
In the past decade, portable, handheld media and communication devices have become a pervasive fixture of everyday life in Japan. In the form of mobile phones, portable media players, digital cash cards, and portable games, people carry digital media devices on their bodies and in their bags as mediators of their social or financial identities and mechanisms for carving out personal media spaces. This talk will reflect on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork on the use of portable media in urban Japan, drawing from studies of portable gaming, mobile text messaging, digital photography, and digital cash and reward card use. The evolving relationship between people, portable media, and urban space provides a window into how digital media and networks are being layered onto experiences of urban space, and have become a fixture in everyday social practices and communication. The use of portable digital media is an example of how people, at least in urban Japan, are increasingly inhabiting an environment that is simultaneously local/physical and networked/virtual in nature.



STS BROWNBAG: "A Conversation with Mimi Ito"

Thursday, February 21, 2008
12:00pm – 1:30pm
8108 Social Science Building




BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is Research Scientist at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. Ito is a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US. Her current research is on use of portable technologies in Japan and digital media in the US. One of her research groups, at Keio University, studies mobile phone use. Ito is also a co-PI on a multi-year project on digital kids and informal learning which is being supported by the MacArthur Foundation. As part of this, she is doing case studies of anime fandoms in Japan and the English-speaking online world. Ito also recently edited a book for MIT Press with Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda entitled, Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life.