| This dissertation examines the present of the mobile screen culture on the move in the legacy of screen media and its aesthetic and cultural significance within our contemporary and global mediascapes, focusing on commercial Mobile Phone Multimedia Content Service and Mobile TV developed in Korea since 2002. It defines mobile media (such as mobile phones, mobile TV and portable devices) as personal screen media and probes their position in the transition of our techno-culture heading toward media convergence. Through the reading of histories of media (particularly digital and mobile phone technologies), telecommunication policy, actual mobile multimedia content (mobile cinema), users' practice, and institutional and social practice, it investigates how new mobile screen is defined, appropriated, and constituted in culturally specific ways in Korea, resonating with and contributing to the construction of global mobile screen culture in the digital age. Throughout this reading, this study consistently challenges techno-deterministic understanding of new media and rethinks conventional boundaries embedded in conventional media practices and discourses: the premise of independent medium specificity, myth of the new as opposed to old media, division of the private and public or the domestic and outdoor, the local and global, and so on.;The multi-faceted meaning of the mobile screen as a networked personal screen medium lies in a historically, socially and culturally specific operation of media convergence in tandem with diverse dimensions of media practices: the mobile screen as a symbolic icon of nationalist economic development, the mobile screen as the latest digital venue in cinematic tradition, the mobile screen at the center of youth digital culture, the mobile screen as a personal television, and the mobile screen in urban spaces. The chapter topics---screen, infrastructure, aesthetics, industrial practice, and space---are meant to locate the mobile screen at the intersection between historical trajectories of screen media and the culturally specific appropriation of mobile technology, a juncture where the synchronic and diachronic development of mobile screen technology converge. Its zigzagged crossing eventually reaches the broader cultural phenomenon of the digital age, that is, the advent of the 'networked public.'... |
