Keitai mizu 131and Twitter, intimates within everyday practices can connect co-presently. A
picture of a single coffee cup can tacitly signal to someone elsewhere feelings of
longing and co-presence. Through the combination of picture, geo-tagging and
text, such messages can provide ambient ways for intimates to stay co-present
throughout the day. The combination of image, geo-tag, and text can also allow
users to construct their own narratives about place, mobility, and the environment
that challenge conventional stories. Through multiple shared visual, textual, and
geo-locative narratives, these apps can provide us with a more complex picture of
the urban as a site for contestation.
With the growth in mobile apps, we are also witnessing the blurring between
the intimate and the public. While in Western culture the intimate and public were
seen as diametrically opposed through binaries such as public versus private space,
mobile media apps further render the intimate public and public intimate (Hjorth
and Arnold 2013). This sees an amplification of what Lauren Berlant defined as
“intimate publics”—that is, intimacy has taken on new geographies and forms of
mobility, most notably as a kind of “publicness” (1998, p. 281).
However, in a digital material environment, intimate relations are not simply
performed in pairs or bounded groups; rather, they traverse the online and offline;
in that, they are also performed in physical public worlds but in electronic privacy
(for example, when someone privately sends a friend a camera phone image of
him- or herself in a café), and in an electronic public that is geographically private
(for example, when we read personal messages posted to us in a publicly facing
Facebook page or on Twitter, while in the private space of our homes). In each
different culture, mobile media are shaped, and shaped by, the existing rituals and
practices. Specifically in Japan, mobile media have played a key role in expanding
rituals in and around intimacy (Ito and Okabe 2005). For example, in a culture
where sharing one’s feelings face-to-face is not encouraged, mobile media have
allowed for intimacies to be spoken without the embarrassment or shame.
With mobile media entangling the public with the intimate in new ways, this
means they can play key roles in representing how we think about the environment
and issues around sustainability. Social media such as mixi and LINE have been
demonstrative of the role of media to reflect offline intimacies and debates, while
media such as Twitter provides an avenue for Japan’s growing grassroots politics
(Gill, Steger, and Slater 2013).
Increasingly within the educational space, the role of mobile media is being
configured to express this growing user agency. Tools such as moblogs can help
with “flipped” classrooms by making students active in their learning processes.
Within moblog spaces, the process of uploading photographs can see the
distinction between one’s private and public domains of activities begin to blur.
For more constant users of the moblogs, this uploading can contribute to shape and
reshape one’s readiness to engage in the process of face-to-face communication
with community members. It may also expand our tempo-spatial images of a
“classroom,” for example, and thereby generates a sense of togetherness even
when a member’s presence is not available (Kato 2014).