A Second Kodak Culture in South Korea's Cyworld

Sydney.
The final keynote session at Mobile Media 2007 for today starts with Dong Hoo Lee. Her focus is especially on the impact of camera phones on public practices in Korea, and the emergence of geospatial imagery which they have made possible. She compares this to the original moment of 'Kodak Culture', which focussed on playfulness, mobility, and spontaneity as incorporated into leisure activities and embodied in the figure of the 'Kodak girl'; through it, cameras also became tourists' identity badges, and snapshooting became the foremost activity for the travelling public, and shaped public spectatorship of tourist locations.

Do digital cameras bring about a second 'Kodak Culture', then, further intensifying the early promise of the Kodak culture to enhance the pleasure of people on the move? At the same time, does the changed materiality of digital photography transform the nature of the photographic performance, shifting from the oral performance mode of post-phototaking 'show and tell' to a more diverse range of uses for the outcomes of digital photography? Photosharing now takes place in a more variety of environments, and increasingly especially also in the context of the geospatial mapping of photos using Google Maps, Flickr, and similar services. Such new maps enable the development of new imaginative geographies, potentially transforming the ways in which people make sense of the world and engage with it.

Korea is one of the testbeds for such emerging environments; it is one of the world's most networked nations, both in terms of Internet access and mobile phone use; some 41% Korean users have experience in using blogs or the blog-like 'mini-hompys' on the leading Cyworld hosting service. The use of photos as a substantial element of blogs and the public enthusiasm for digital photography have grown in unison in this environment. Cyworld offers a 'Story Map' mapping service, highlighting such developments.

Various forms of access to gespatially mapped information and photos are available through this service. The Story Map is a gateway to archives and personal information, but it provides an uneven surface of old and new scenes which reproduces not only touristic sightseeing attractions, but also highlights new forms of information - places of consumption and private spaces, must-visit places as according to non-standard new criteria, and a 'long tail' of geospatial images which do not conform to touristic commonsense. This creates a collective collage of images representing a wider, heterogeneous range of personal perspectives than is common in touristic photography.

Such practices represent collective spatial memories in process; they provide a non-chronological, visual biography of a place, personifying it through photographic practices. This is also open to administrative and commercial colonisation by the established institutional interests governing a space, however. Overall, at rate, what happens here is the development of a multi-layered geographical image archive; the map acts as a platform where visual moments and memories are clustered to form a fluid geospatial imagery.

Technorati : Cyworld, Flickr, Mobile Media 2007, geotagging, mobile, photography
Del.icio.us : Cyworld, Flickr, Mobile Media 2007, geotagging, mobile, photography