Porting Media : Asia

Laikwan Pang, Thomas Lamarre

The Social, the Private, and the Political: The Use of Social Media in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement
Laikwan Pang
This presentation takes Hannah Arendt theorizations of the terms the “social,” the “private,” and the “political,” and it proceeds by juxtaposing Arendt’s political theory with the specific happenings in Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement. The aim of this presentation is to understand the interaction between the private and the political in spontaneous political movements such as the Umbrella Movement, and the focus on social media sheds lights on the movement as a process instead of a product, as a temporary port instead of the final destination. It also helps us understand the movement beyond a narrowly defined campaign for universal suffrage, but it is also a gala for a new generation to make themselves seen and heard against the status quo.

Everyday Media Comportment: Living Between Infrastructure
Thomas Lamarre
This presentation explores the relations between three distinct yet overlapping infrastructures in contemporary Tokyo: broadcast television, mobile phones or keitai, and the commuter train network. The basic aim is to consider the lived experience of polarized medial tendencies between and across these infrastructures. Building on recent studies that explore the continuity (rather than rupture) between broadcast media and mobile social media, this presentation will focus on a basic polarization of tendencies within and across such media — between a one-to-many unidirectional tendency (commonly associated with broadcast) and a point-to-point environmental tendency (usually related to mobile networking) — in order to explore different ways of assembling or “comporting” these tendencies. How are medial tendencies “carried together” in everyday comportments?