130 Larissa Hjorth and Fumitoshi Kato
Streams sought to provide ways in which the environment could be reflected upon
as well as affording a space for dialogue. Through discussing the site-specific
mobile game, keitai mizu and its deployment by a group of university students,
this chapter considers how camera phones and moblogs (mobile blogs) operate
not only as a space for personal journals but also as a way for instigating reflection
upon the environment. Keitai mizu renders game players into investigators by
using the camera phone and Twitter as part of the discovery process in uncovering
the natural water streams under the urban cartographies.
In order to examine the role mobile media might play in providing alternative
ways for narrating environmentalism in contemporary post-3/11 Tokyo, this
chapter explores three areas. First, the chapter contextualizes the rise of mobile
media and moblogs in Japan and how this can help to reinvent the environment
and practices of place. Second, we outline the shifting political landscape in and
around environmentalism in Japan. Third, the chapter turns to the case study of
keitai mizu as a way in which to reprioritize the place of the environment through
water cartographies.
Visualizing a sense of place: Camera phone practices, moblogs, and
place
Camera phone practices have become an integral part of everyday life. No experience
is too banal to photograph and share; rather, as Ilpo Koskinen (2007) and Søren
Mørk Petersen (2009) have argued, camera phone practices are ordered by banality.
In their everydayness, they reflect and amplify the rhythm and movements across
places, spaces, and temporalities. Camera phones practice shape, and are shaped by,
different modes for conceptualizing place (Ito 2003; Ito and Okabe 2005).
In second-generation camera phones, apps such as Instagram, geo-tagging—
and thus locative media—almost becomes default. These apps play an active role
in how places are conceptualized, mapped, and experienced (Ozkul 2015). With
camera phone geo-tagging, the temporal and spatial dimensions of places get
overlaid with the social and electronic. Through apps such as Instagram, geo-
tagging outlines the “geographical and temporal identification of a media artifact”
that “suppresses temporal, vertical structures in favor of spatial connectivities”
(Hochman and Manovich 2013).
Location-based services (LBS) are changing how we visualize intimate
cartographies though shifting camera phone practices within the app ecology. With
LBS, Jason Farman suggests the digital map is “a social network that engages
users as embodied interactors rather than disembodied voyeurs” (2010, p. 869).
The combination of digital maps and their augmented reality are not purely
visual (Farman 2010; Lapenta 2011), they are, as Pink suggests, about “emplaced
visuality” (2011). Camera phone practices are key to representing and experiencing
places as playful with co-present others. In this way, camera phone photo taking
and sharing can be viewed as part of ambient play as well as intimate co-presence.
Mobile apps and photo sharing offer key ways of exploring the everyday urban
landscape as a site of environmental contestation. Through apps such as Instagram