Cartographies of the mobile: The personal as political

In a global period whereby the 'personal' is no longer associated with people but with affective technologies (Shirky 2008; Lasén 2004), the old feminist adage of the 'personal as political' takes on new dimensions of meaning. Through the rise of convergent, social, networked media such as Web 2.0 - characterised by Social Networking Systems (SNS) like Facebook - concurrent with the force of user created content (UCC), our experience and sense of place, locality and globality is dramatically transforming. In particular, with the emergence of UCC 'vernacular creativity' (Burgess 2008) there is a need rethink intimacy, creativity, authorship and labour (social, creative, affective and emotional) in terms of how we imagine, share and practise digital storytelling. Through the conspicuous symbol of the mobile media user, we can gain insight into how gender, labour and lifestyle are being reconfigured in the Asia - Pacific region. This is particularly apparent within the realm of Japan's keitai shosetsu novels made on and for the mobile phone) which extend female 'produser' (Bruns 2006) cultures that can be mapped back to 1970s amateur manga (comics) and anime as well as one of the first novels written in the eleventh century. Drawing from my research into mobile media UCC in the region over seven years, I will focus on the ways in which UCC, such as keitai shosetsu, reflect, expand and remediate older media practices.