Digital Pioneers Cultural drivers of future media culture Sonja Kangas (ed.) Nuorisotutkimusverkosto Nuorisotutkimusseura verkkojulkaisuja 49 Taitto & Kansi: Pauliina Högman © Nuorisotutkimusseura ja tekijät Nuorisotutkimusverkosto/Nuorisotutkimusseura, verkkojulkaisuja 49. ISBN 978-952-5464-99-3 (PDF) ISSN-L 1799-9219. ISSN 1799-9219. Helsinki 2011. Nuorisotutkimusverkosto Asemapäällikönkatu 1 00520 Helsinki puh. 020 755 2653 fax. 020 755 2627 DIGITAL PIONEERS CONTENTS Introduction to communication acrobatics and social tipping networks Sonja Kangas 5 MEDIA USE 8 Youth and their media use: discussion on habits, attitudes and trust Sonja Kangas & Outi Cavén-Pöysä 9 Internet, Youth and Temporary Autonomous Zone in Korea Haejoang Cho 16 Lack of dynamics between online and offline activities among the Japanese: How culture constitutes cyberspace Tadamasa Kimura 40 TECHNOLOGIZING YOUTH 64 Eomjijok – The Korean thumb tribe-reflections of young and urban Koreans’ mobile communication Jukka Jouhki 65 (Virtual) Friends will be (virtual) friends? Are virtual friends as good as”the real” ones? Pauliina Tuomi 81 (Re)making serious connections: Ubiquity and its discontents in Seoul Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi 102 ENABLED BY SOCIAL NETWORKS 117 Social shyness: A cue for virtual youth service among the young in MMOs? Jani Merikivi 118 ”Everything is there” – Internet in the lives of Japanese popular culture fans in Finland Katja Valaskivi 129 Generating value in social game culture Sonja Kangas 142 Endnotes 3 DIGITAL PIONEERS INTRODUCTION The parents of a 15 year old girl urge her to look for a summer job. She does not want to spend the whole summer indoors packing vegetables or selling ice cream, and begins to wonder if it would be possible for her to work in a virtual world. As a Facebook addict and an active participant in virtual game worlds, she wonders if she could create a virtual business of her own. Designing virtual outfits, organizing tours in game worlds or writing for Facebook Vogue could be fun. She could become a brand parasite, making use of existing brands and their online worlds but operating inside existing virtual worlds. That way she would not have to set up an entirely new system for herself and develop her own customer base, but could focus instead on an existing user base and in-community advertising. That way, instead of simply earning a bit of money from a summer job, she could learn about online business, social skills on the net, marketing, punctuality and the constant need for digital creativity, and could improve her self-esteem by doing something unique to make herself stand out from the masses. Collaboration and participation in the mixing cultures of digital media is at the core of the networked activities that our 15 year old jumped into. This book has been written in the same way. Quantitative material from Japan, South Korea and Finland was gathered in 2006-2007. Researchers interested in the subject matter were contacted through different networks, and soon there were more than ten participants. A couple of writers dropped out along the way while new ones joined the group, which only highlights the true collaborative and self-organizing nature of activities from writing all the way to layout and publishing. The articles are all based on the same research data. Some other research materials and literature have also been used. Digital media are central in youngsters’ lives, both time-wise and culturally – creating meanings, strengthening relationships and pondering values. Digital activities are gaining a bigger share of youths’ everyday life. The Internet provides several ways for them to express themselves, find friends or dating partners and likeminded people. It is a mass medium for everyone, providing the possibility of becoming a celebrity, being politically active, joining international networks, watching television, chatting with friends or just spending time online. It is a channel for expressing where I am, what I plan to do and what type of information or contacts I am looking for. Ten years ago young communication acrobatics in Japan, South Korea and Finland were sovereign, fearless and experimental pioneers of mobile phones and the Internet. Back then, mobile communication was new and online cultures were just beginning to evolve. A key finding in qualitative Communication Acrobatics research (1999-2001) focusing on thirty 16- 18 year olds Finns was that mobile phones were becoming survival tools for daily life and a focal media for communication, entertainment and information, alongside other devices and applications. The personal nature of mobile phones was highlighted, while the Internet was used merely for meeting new people. Japanese and Korean communication acrobatics have developed their digital communication and pastime skills by providing real-time communication and multitasking on a mobile. I-mode in Japan and broadband PC Bang online cafés in South Korea enabled a rich and youth-centric culture to evolve around digital devices. In all these countries, youngsters’ use of these media has been described as snack size or remix culture in that they combine pieces from here and there, follow several information 5 SONJA KANGAS (ED.) and communication channels simultaneously and utilize active social networks on the net. Ten years ago the Internet was losing the competition with mobile phones because phones enabled easier connectivity with friends. Now mobiles, too, have become online tools, and the net provides a central channel of communication by providing free Internet phone calls, instant messaging services and rich online communities to work or spend time in. It also provides an arena for making oneself heard and gaining acceptance and admiration. This book looks at social networking among the youngsters, covering a wide spectrum of topics from media use, social networking, trust, and friendships to motivational factors. The book also looks at the development of so-called gaming lifestyle. Japan, South Korea and Finland are no longer far ahead of the rest of the world. But do these pioneer countries of the 1990s still have some special qualities that can generate novel digital cultures in the 21st century? Where will the next generation of online brands develop? The first chapter of the book focuses on media use in South Korea, Japan and Finland, highlighting some of the factors that enabled them to generate pioneer digital culture in the 1990s. The Internet is constantly evolving and changing. In the mid-1990s it started to become a more generally used information channel by utilizing the first graphical browser, Mosaic. Back then the Internet was an information highway where binary digits – 1s and 0s – floated along an imaginary information highway. The sources of information were typically large media houses and corporations that had the tools, channels and knowledge to share data. The creation of personal home pages was possible but was not mass media, just stabile information about one person and his or her life and interests. While users typically did not reach a mass audience, publishers had difficulties reaching the target groups they were pursuing. The most common approach was to display a banner on a popular site or portal and hope that users would find that particular service. Consumers were scattered. There were no clear methods or reasons for grouping users until communities such as Facebook, Stardoll and Habbo were introduced. The Internet has now evolved into social tipping networks where anyone can be a central node: a source of information, filter or opinion leader. Becoming a hub is now easy because tools are available to generate meanings. One great example of this is fashion blogs where high school girls write about their style and their latest discoveries in fashion. Such blogs can attract several tens of thousands of visitors daily. And the information provider – a 15-year- old girl from a tiny village in the South Korean countryside – can influence the global fashion industry. At the same time, people have a lot of power to verify and comment on news or others types of information. What should I think about a specific CD, book, game or hotel? Am I hot or not? Instead of reading marketing messages, people log onto a site where anonymous people have rated goods and services. Even though users have no idea who these people are, they still have a radical trust in other people’s opinions because their reasoning is good enough, or, for example, a majority of people have given a particular hotel four stars. It is no longer a one-to-many type of model but a many-to-many or even many-to-one model in the sense that one is just a single person – a “prosumer” as researcher Charles Leadbeater put it. The second chapter delves deeper into these types of topics, focusing on technologizing youth from the standpoint of virtual friendships, and generating trends and subcultures on the net. One can choose to follow blogs, official news sites or other types of sites, or all of them in parallel through web services in which logos and unique layouts are no longer present. The difference or believability and trustworthiness of one source of information compared to another is no longer 6 DIGITAL PIONEERS as clear. The iGoogle home page is an example of such a web service. All information sources have the same font, layout and colors. There is not a single logo on the page other than Google’s. Information is layered and people utilize different layers of media simultaneously. The layers are flattening, and consumers are given the power to choose. A consumer can choose which channels and web sites to follow, and what type of information to trust. According to the survey carried out in Finland, Japan and South Korea, only 10% had a strong trust in the content of traditional encyclopedias, in contrast to Wikipedia.