Communication As Symbiogenesis --On the Relationality of Mobile Phoning in Korea
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Communication as Symbiogenesis --On the Relationality of Mobile Phoning in Korea Namsook Park Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Cultural Studies Goldsmiths College University of London 2011 Declaration I declare that the work presented in this thesis is entirely my own. Namsook Park London, August 2011 2 Abstract This study understands communication as parasitic and symbiogenetic. It recognizes an object or technology no less and no more important than a subject, and appreciates the ―process‖ of the ―becoming‖ of both a subject and an object. Media and individuals create and recreate each other. In the symbiogenetic space in-between, what happens is not a physical addition of a technological object to an individual, but, rather, it is a chemical fusion of the two, which holds unprecedented, distinctive qualities that have not been seen from any of the two constituents. Among various communication media, this study examines why and how the mobile phone is particularly parasitic and symbiogenetic. It means an introduction of relational level to contemporary media theories. The mobile phone is itself a symbiosis; it simulates and blends all possibilities from other media and cannot be reduced to the sum of all the media incorporated in it. Furthermore, it extends its machinic quality to human subjectivities. To address the immanent, processual, and onto-genetical effect of the mobile phone on the individual‘s everyday life and the emergence of new modes of subjectivity, this study brings together contiguous concepts and theories (complexity theory and vitalist thought) so that they can converse and resonate with one another, like organisms in symbiogenesis. This transversal of ideas is coupled with the empirical study on the mobile phoning in Korea, which substantiates the fact that individuals constitute their subjectivities through everyday interactions with the technology. It is a present-centered approach based on the enacted and bodily experience of the individual to achieve a real-time understanding of actual users‘ everyday practice of mobile phoning. Users‘ experience and the mobile phone‘s material quality interact with each other, evolving and creating new modes of relationality as elements of their becoming. 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction _________________________________________________6 1.1. Mobile phoning as a parasitic and symbiogenetic communication practice ______________________________ 11 1.2. Theoretical approach _________________________________24 2. Literature Review and Method ________________________________ 34 2.1. Literature review ____________________________________ 34 2.1.1. Socio-political perspectives _______________________ 36 2.1.2. Adoption and user experience _____________________41 2.1.3. Cross-cultural examinations ______________________ 50 2.1.4. Korean context and literature review _______________52 2.2. Method for empirical research _________________________ 60 2.2.1. Overall design __________________________________ 60 2.2.2. Sampling ______________________________________ 64 2.2.3. Diaries ________________________________________ 65 2.2.4. Interviews _____________________________________ 67 3. Parasitology and the Return of the Other ________________________ 70 3.1. A new mode of relationality ____________________________ 70 3.2. The return of the Other _______________________________ 85 4. Nonlinear Symbiogenesis ______________________________________103 4.1. Astringent science ____________________________________ 104 4.2. Vital relationality ____________________________________ 116 5. The Other Relationality _______________________________________ 135 5.1. Open, pragmatic structure ____________________________ 139 5.2. Organic relationality with no tension ____________________ 153 6. Media ______________________________________________________ 171 6.1. Changing space of interactive ontogenesis ________________ 173 6.2. Interlacings create uncharted territory ___________________ 183 6.3. Beyond remediation ___________________________________195 4 7. Mobile Diaries _______________________________________________205 7.1. Management of relationships ___________________________207 7.1.1. Mobile sociality _________________________________ 207 7.1.2. Immanent messagings ____________________________217 7.1.3. Amputation, connection, and translation ____________ 225 7.2. Everyday life with something other than a phone __________ 232 7.2.1. Up-momenting __________________________________232 7.2.2. This is not a phone _______________________________235 7.3. Expressions and experiments ___________________________247 7.3.1. A mobile charm _________________________________ 248 7.3.2. We, creators ____________________________________252 7.3.3. Self-experimentation _____________________________259 8. Conclusion __________________________________________________ 268 Bibliography ___________________________________________________278 5 Chapter 1 Introduction It is raining; a passer-by comes in. … the traveler is asked to join the diners. His host does not have to ask him twice. He accepts the invitation and sits down in front of his bowl. The host is the satyr, dining at home; he is the donor. He calls to the passer-by, saying to him, be our guest. The guest is the stranger, the interrupter, the one who receives the soup, agrees to the meal … The parasite is invited to the table d‘hôte; in return, he must regale the other diners with his stories and his mirth. To be exact, he exchanges good talk for good food; he buys his dinner, paying for it in words. It is the oldest profession in the world. … The parasite invents something new. Since he does not eat like everyone else, he builds a new logic. … He wants to give his voice for matter, (hot) air for solid, superstructure for infrastructure. …, he cheats us; but he invents anew. This novelty must be analyzed (Serres 1982a: 15; 34; 35). The biological parasite enters the body of an organism and absorbs substances meant for the host. At first it presents itself in a negative guise, as an operator which interrupts the system of exchange. As such, it can be considered a malfunction, an error, or a noise which, occurring within a given system, is situated between two positions in an informational circuit and disrupts the messages they exchange. (It is interesting that the word parasite in French has a broader meaning than it does in English, designating not only a biological or sociological parasite, but also static or noise.) Apparently, a parasite therefore elicits a strategy of exclusion—if the system is perceived as primary, the parasite should be treated as an unhappy addition. Serres (1982a: 63-65) argues, however, that the parasite is in fact an integral part of the system and he equates it with The Demon or The Third Man, to emphasize that, by experiencing perturbations caused by the parasite and subsequent integrations of them, the system passes from a simple to a more complex stage. By virtue of its power to perturb, the parasite ultimately constitutes, like the clinamen and the demon, the condition of possibility of the system. In this way the parasite attests to the primacy of disorder within order; to the fact that it produces, by way of disorder, a more complex order. Serres‘ notion of the parasite brings into question the conventional view that treats human interaction as reciprocal, as a process of give and take in which one has to pay in kind for what one receives. In Serres‘ parasitology the relationship between the host and guest is not equal; the guest intercepts roast beef (the dinner) and pays for it with stories, while the host intercepts the journey and offers dinner. These would be two ways of writing the new contract. The parasite institutes an agreement that is unfair, at least in terms of conventional accounting methods; it constructs a new balance sheet. It 6 thereby expresses a logic that until then had been considered irrational, establishing a new epistemology, another theory of equilibrium. In a word, the parasite enables the emergence of new relationships. If the parasite did not exist, there would be only a homogeneous stasis of balanced exchanges, which Serres characterizes as the perfect reversibility of all processes—paradise, without time or history. Only with the parasite, which violates the system of exchange by a logic that is far-from-equilibrium, there emerges an element of irreversibility and thus a mark of the commencement of duration, history and social organization. In Serres‘ theory, the parasite exchanges paradise for a problematic of beginnings, that is, the beginnings of human relations. Serres considers parasiting as the atomic form of our relations. He urges us to face it head-on, like death, like the sun (1982a: 8). For Serres, what is essential in life is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but the system of relations (ibid 198). The atomic form of our relations—the parasitic relation—is intersubjective, because, once we take a closer look at what is happening in the relationship, we cannot say which is which—the host and the guest change places. It is not clear who bears the gift and who suffers the loss, that is, who is the parasite and who is the host. When the host wants the guest to leave, it is the guest who has both his meal and his story interrupted. The difference between the master and the passer-by, the active and the passive, generosity and outrage, good-will and hatred, is blurred.