Relocating the mobile

Seoul: the place of the bang

In South Korea (henceforth Korea), online, social and mobile media spaces are helping to progress Korean forms of democracy (Kim, 2003: 325). For Korean sociologist Kim (2003: 325) and anthropologist Cho (2004), the rise of a specific type of democracy in Korea has been supported in part by new technologies such as mobile phones. As a location, Seoul has often been discussed as a pioneer of games, mobile and social media. But these adoptions of online media need to be contextualized within broader sociocultural practices. For example, the success of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and one of the oldest social media sites – Cyworld’s minihompy – needs to be situated alongside the technology (i.e. high broadband rates), housing (the fact that many young people live in big apartment blocks with their parents until they are married), work practices (Korea, in general, has one of highest working hour weeks) and traditions (the significance of intimate, familial connection in the form of the ilchon and the social space of the bang [room]).

The usage of technological spaces is not about substituting the virtual for the actual but rather about supplementing actual relationships. In Korea, face-to-face (f2f) meetings have always been pivotal to social capital; the relevance of technology is linked intrinsically to maintaining f2f social capital (Hjorth and Kim, 2005). This is maintained by two key concepts that link the social with the spatial – ilchon (1촌, familial relationship) and bang. The ilchon, like the bang, is another notion that reflects a Korean sense of relationship both traditionally and in contemporary technocultures. In the dominant and long-lasting social media Cyworld minihompy, ilchon is both an analogy and a practice. Cyworld’s success has been, in part, attributed to dominant lifestyle trends in Korea such as the ubiquity of high-rise blocks of flats and the easy accessibility of broadband coverage. The importance of Cyworld is demonstrated by the fact that over one third of Korea’s 48 million people regularly use their own and visit friends’ minihompy.

With world-renowned technonationalist (West, 2006) and broadband (OECD, 2006) policies, Seoul provides a perfect backdrop for exploring the possibilities and limits of urban mobile gaming as a hub for both mobile media and gaming innovation. With 50.2 million registered mobile phone users (Korean Communications Commission, 2010), over 20,000 PC bang gracing the second levels of most commercial buildings, and with over one third of Korea’s population spending hours per day online in the dominant SNS, Cyworld minihompy, one could be mistaken for believing that online identity and relationships were surpassing offline sociality. Once upon a time, the use of mobile and social media was prohibited for male youths doing their 2-year military conscription in Korea. However, in the last couple of years, the government has come to recognize the significant role games can play in imparting ideologies and knowledge building. Rather than new media interrupting their education, games are seen as a pivotal part of the training regime. This deployment of what has been called ‘serious’ games in military service needs to be situated within Korea’s broader technoculture. Specifically, in a country in where there are three television channels dedicated to games and where pro-leaguers (professional players) can earn up to US$1 million dollars and are treated like popstars, the three characteristics of games as mobile, social and locative take a specific path in Korea. But this gaming phenomenon has been nurtured as much by traditional notions of place as the technonationalist policies.

In Korea, one can find various forms of the bang – jimjilbang, PC, DVD and norae (music) – that highlight the way in which space in Korea is rendered a ‘place’ through sociality. In Chee’s persuasive ethnography on PC bang and the politics of online multiplayer games, she argues that these spaces are social spaces that are viewed as ‘third spaces’ between home and work (2005). For Korean youth, most of whom still live at home before getting married, these third spaces operate as private spaces to connect with other people. As Huhh (2008) observes, PC bang ensured the success of online games in Korea by nurturing both the culture and the business side of the industry; thus the online game is seen as synonymous with the PC bang. According to Choi, the bang is an independent space for the sharing of ideas that is ‘static in form, yet flexible in functionality’ (2009: 93). In other words, the bang does not have a predetermined purpose – instead the occupants sharing the space actively determine the use.

Like the redeployment of the bang into modern settings and relationship scenarios, so, too, has the ilchon been rebranded and repurposed by new media. In Cyworld, friends are called ilchon, a concept once used to denote one degree of distance from family members in a traditional Korean kinship (i.e. one’s mother is one’s chon). Cyworld has rebranded its cyber-rooms with the notion of ilchon and non-chon to infer ‘friends’ and ‘nonfriends’. Ilchon can gain more access to their fellow ilchon’s information and be invited to visit their cyber room. Non-chon can only gain cursory access. Cyworld minihompy is a great example of an online space that not only intersects with the off-line but provides numerous subspaces (or bangs) to archive and share off-line experiences. From the uploading of selca (self-portraits via camera phones) with friends, to images and videos of food cooked or eaten, to virtual objects given to each other’s mini room (a virtual room in which friends’ avatars can visit and share), Cyworld minihompy has provided one centralized form of the online amongst all the other SNS services (i.e. me2day, which is like Twitter). Once a upon a time, Cyworld minihompy dominated Korea’s online culture for over a decade. Now its 18 million users have left in droves for Facebook.

Although Koreans have, in the past, placed much trust in technological spaces such as the Internet as a site for reliable information and democratic communication, the online is still no substitute for offline sociality. It should also be noted that this trust is linked to the fact that users have to register their offline citizenship details when joining SNS like minihompy or online games (Hjorth and Kim, 2005). However, in 2009, a shift in relation to Koreans’ trust in the online began to change. In fieldwork conducted from 2009 to 2011, survey respondents began to voice ambivalence and distrust towards the online. This was initiated by the Minerva incident early in 2009. After the arrest in April 2009 of blogger Park Dae-sung (known as Minerva) for his posts that commented on President Lee’s financial administration, many younger Koreans were suddenly seeing the democratic space of the online being transformed into a government-regulated dark space. According to some reports, Minerva – or the ‘Prophet of Doom’ – was charged and acquitted for spreading false information that supposedly intentionally depressed market sentiment (Abell, 2009). Minerva even predicted the foreign market fluctuations including the Lehman Brothers’ collapse.

Examples of corporate überveillence have a strong history in Seoul. One of the most explicit examples was the Samsung SDI scandal in 2004, several years prior to the uptake of locative media as an integral part of the smartphone phenomena. As Lee notes in his detailed study of the scandal, Samsung SDI fell under suspicion for supplying workers with illegally cloned mobile phones to track the location of activist workers trying to organize a union (2011). According to Lee, the Samsung SDI mobile tracking scandal was indicative of several factors in the Korean context: ‘the pre-mature political state; the Korean form of crony capitalism known as chaebols (large family-owned monopolistic conglomerates); and control-driven electronic devices containing tracking technology’ (2011: 114). Lee continues:

In sum, the control of workers in Korea has not been brought about by private corporations alone but rather by the confluence of business interests, the underdeveloped political system, the societal lack of interest in privacy, and the self-monitoring mobile culture. It was these political, economic and socio-cultural conditions in Korea that led to the use of mobile tracking to violate workers’ rights, and that has allowed the crime to go unpublished. … The Samsung SDI case eventually was left as an unsolved – legally, ethically and socially – in Korean society, with the intent that no one should ask who the real eavesdropper was. (2011: 115)

In the case study to be examined in this article, the tacit importance of the kajok (family) was manifest in the adaption of traditional forms of sociality – especially the shared space (bang) and relational identity (ilchon) – into contemporary media settings. Many respondents seemed to be grappling with feelings of ambivalence towards governmental or corporate surveillance that, in turn, made them revise localized notions of privacy (which had been previously based on a kajok kukmin philosophy). While the convergence between social, locative and mobile media in Seoul feeds into older traditions about spatial (bang) and relational (ilchon) presence, the privatization and commercialization of these features by companies such as Samsung have created particular tensions and ambivalence.

It is with this growing sense of ambivalence towards the online that I situate my fieldwork into locative media in Seoul. In Seoul, various forms of technological mobility – from phones to cars and trains – have for a long time utilized locative media. Increasingly, it is impossible to find a car without a GPS that alternates between locative and televisual modes. So too, streets are full of young people gazing into their mobiles as the device leads them to their destination. This looking through the device to experience the geography, as it is woven through the electronic, is a key feature of what Luke (2006) defined as the phoneur. However, such an idea ignores some of the ways in which users are resisting the ubiquity of such media – a trait that became amplified in my fieldwork over the three years.

In this article, I am reflecting on preliminary interviews and surveys conducted in 2011 when locative media was becoming mainstream, or at least an obligatory part of mobile and social media in Seoul. First, I contextualize this phenomenon in terms of first-generation (characterized as ‘experimental’) mobile games in Korea. I then turn to Korean examples of LBS – flags, SeeOn and IN – that are the Korean equivalent to Foursquare; that is, these LBS involve a series of ‘check-in’ performances where users can see their friends. In this study, I explore motivations for use and nonuse and how this reflects localized notions of place, specifically signified by overlaying the ilchon with the bang. Drawing from a case study of 10 respondents, equally split between male and female, aged between 20 and 40 years, I consider some of the ways in which LBS users are reflecting upon media practice as part of everyday experiences.

Picture this: at a crossroads of camera phone practices and locative media in Seoul

Given the innovation around mobile media in Seoul, it is not surprising that first-generation urban mobile games were developed in its city space (Hjorth, 2010). In particular, the Korean interdisciplinary collaborative group, INP (Interactive N [and] Practice), was pivotal. As part of a series of different mobile games orchestrated through the South Korean new media centre, Nabi, Urban Vibe presented a variety of games that drew from earlier board games such as chess. In Shoot me if you can (2005), a chasing game involving camera phones and (Multimedia Messaging Service) MMS-ing, two teams were pitted against each other, in which the aim was to ‘shoot’ all the opposing team members without being shot. Drawing from the video game genre of first person shooter (FPS), Shoot me if you can replaced guns with the camera phone, and bullets substituted by photos. Pictures of the opposing team members were then sent back to the master who decided who won. Drawing from urban game innovators, Blast Theory(2005) (UK), Shoot me if you can consisted of members running around a busy shopping district of Seoul, Myeong-Dong.

While Urban Vibe explored the social dimensions of urban mobile gaming, INP’s latter project, Dotplay, went on to foster a much more ‘serious’ dimension by exploring an idea of critical play through hardware and software hacking. Dotplay as a group focused upon public workshops and community collaboration that sought to challenge conventions around mobile media and games, especially by evoking hacktivist and subversive techniques akin to the situationist international (SI) tactic of dérive. A dérive is an unplanned and experimental journey through urban spaces to create new ways of experiencing the landscape. SI theorist, Debord, used the dérive as a mode of political intervention. Like Debord, Dotplay’s activities are undoubtedly political.

Dotplay is a great example for teasing out one of the central tenets of new media debates: what role technology should play in constructions of society, culture and art. As a network of media artists, technologists and cultural researchers – Yangachi, Shim, Kim, Park, Min, Rhee and Choi – Dotplay sought to provide real free services. The members are both pragmatic and yet ironic in their development of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) workshops for mobile hackers. The idea of users as hackers plays on the so-called UCC (User Created Content) revolution of which South Korea is supposed to be one of the world leaders. According to the document supplied in their workshop, ‘The Dotplay Workshop provides access to hack mobile phones, physically and conceptually to intervene into mobile device[s], [and the] environment in a physical, social, cultural, political manner in order to creatively re-intervene [into] the mobile’ (2007). In the face of criticisms about locative media games for political possibilities (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011: 106), Dotplay provided a great example of mobile media as a site for sociopolitical exploration.

The personal dimensions of mobile media as a site for political exploration is implicit within the history of camera phone practices in Korea. As Lee (2005, 2009) has observed, camera phone sharing and picture taking is an overtly female preoccupation that is linked to gendered modes of play that link place (bang) to intimacy (ilchon). Korean camera phone practice has long been seen as the prerogative of female users and has been viewed as a source of empowerment (Lee, 2005, 2009). Female users not only take and share more photos, they also partake in numerous genres from selca (self-portraiture) to pictures of the mundane, like food eaten, and so on. This gendered visual culture bleeds over into LBS as female users tend to deploy more personalization – i.e. UCC – when they check-in to places. Interestingly, for female users of LBS it is the connection and play with camera phone images through LBS that creates new avenues for socializing and reimagining a sense of place. However, in LBS, the empowerment of women sharing camera phone imagery takes on another dimension in light of LBS’s potential ‘stalker’ elements (Gazzard, 2011). While notions of privacy in the Korean context differ dramatically from those in the Anglophonic context, women are often the victims of LBS’s potential for stalking (Cincotta et al., 2011). On one hand, female respondents noted that LBS encouraged an increased proliferation of camera phone images that sought to link place and sociality in artistic ways (i.e. new smartphone applications like hipstamatic that render camera phone photos to look like old analogue ones) and unique ways. On the other hand, surveyed respondents were also mindful that these geospatial visualities could be taken out of context by strangers. As boyd has observed in her studies of young people’s use of social media in the United States, many are overtly deploying strategies to maintain semipublic privacy in what she calls ‘networked publics’ (2010). However, notions of ‘networked’ and ‘publics’, have a different cartography in Korea than in the United States. Instead, localized notions like bang and ilchon are perhaps more accurate depictions of networked media dynamics in Korea rather than in the United States.

The relationship between bangs and ilchon clearly foregrounds the use of, and motivations for, locative media in Korea. From flags – which is part of Cyworld and neatly links into and extends the ilchon network of minihompy – to SeeOn, LBS in Korea are used to overlap the ilchon onto the bang. Users transform bangs into meaningful spaces by overlaying the ilchon. Friends, family and associates become part of the co-present journey as they render bangs into places increasingly through the mobile platform. The redeployment of the bang and ilchon through LBS reflects the increasing pressure for the young to be part of Chalnajok (Cho, 2009). While ‘Chal-na’ means ‘instant’, ‘jok’ refers to a ‘tribe’ (Lee, 2009). In a country long familiar with the deployment of GPS via mobile phones and cars, locative media provides a natural combination of the mobile and social. In Cyworld flags, we see a connection between mobility and immobility through creative and situated sociality. Occasionally, the pressure to be part of the Chalnajok meant some respondents felt compelled to take and share pictures despite feeling apprehensive. One female, Nara Ara, aged 27 noted:

Sometimes I don’t want to take endless pictures and share them. I may be feeling sad or be having a bad hair day. But then when I get pictures from my friends this makes me want to return the feelings.

For another male respondent, Chang-Hee, aged 20, LBS provided a good way to find friends in his physical proximity. He spoke of how many of his female friends seemed much more active in LBS. As Chang-Hee observed, ‘many of my girlfriends seem to be so visible on Flags. They always seem to uploading pretty pictures of themselves with friends at cool places. I feel lazy in comparison.’ Here, the public performativity of Chalnajok constructs divides between those who are active versus ‘lazy’. Female respondents seemed less happy to be viewed as lazy and thus more active in maintaining the Chalnajok so prevalent with Korean contemporary culture.

For a female respondent Hyunjin, aged 28, participating in a girl culture was less of an issue when compared to the way in which LBS changed how she experienced place and co-presence. She stated:

Here place is clearly a shared experience, reflecting the Korean bang. I use it [LBS] to share my feeling or beautiful photos with others whenever I visit new places. Or sometimes I use it [LBS] when I’m curious who is in the same place with me. … I think using it [LBS] changes the way I record a place rather than the way I experience a place. Getting points or stickers makes me to think about the places more meaningfully.

Indeed, LBS are clearly demonstrating the ways in which ‘intimacy’ and ‘publics’ are overlaid in different ways. Here, the notion of intimate publics addresses the growing ubiquity of affective and personal modes of engagement in the blurring of public and private spaces in SNS (Hjorth and Arnold, 2011). As boyd and Marwick (2011) observe, social privacy in networked publics involves new types of strategies as well as reflecting emergent attitudes to privacy as not something we possess but something we continuously maintain. In other studies, boyd (2011) has been quick to identify transformations in the blurring of distinctions between public and private through SNS.

With LBS we are seeing how mobility, like intimacy, has taken on new geoimaginaries, most notably as a kind of ‘publicness’ that is also embedded in the private. However, it is important not to generalize about ideas of the public and private, given the fact that these terms have different means in various sociocultural contexts. However, in the case of Korea, notions of public and private do not translate so well. This is epitomized by the bang that is neither entirely public nor private but rather a vehicle for its occupants’ will. In Korea, we are seeing mainstream LBS practices being used to reinforce a sense of intimate publics in the face of mobile intimacy that both reflect and transform localized notions of relational presence in the forms of ilchon and bangs.

By overlaying the socioemotional with the geographic and electronic, locative media suggest the value in reconceptualizing theories that are concerned with the interactions and intersections between co-presence, place and intimacy. While the second-generation LBS are in their infancy, this article suggests that more nuanced studies are needed if we are to understand the complex and multiple ways the second-generation LBS are playing out at the sociocultural level. Given the realities that LBS have implications for notions of privacy, identity and place-making, we need to locate them historically as well as socioculturally. By contextualizing the rise of locative media in Seoul – from the first-generation experimental urban mobile games to the second-generation mainstream LBS – this article has attempted to understand one example of relocating the mobile. That is, the growing significance of localization of place in the face of locative media. In Seoul, one way to map this phenomenon is through the importance of place (bang) and relational presence (ilchon).