DREAMWORK: Cell Phone Novelists, Labor, and Politics in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

In 2007, the number of cell phone novels posted on the popular portal, Magic Island, reached one million—a figure that has puzzled observers worldwide. Although critics ubiquitously interpret the writing and reading of cell phone novels as an escapist pastime, I see the cell phone novel movement as a response of young people to their incorporation into a precarious labor regime and their exclusion from collectivities (e.g., workplace and family) that offered their parents key resources for self‐determination. Building on textual analysis and interviews with cell phone novelists, acquisition editors at publishers, and creative professionals at cell phone novel portals, I make the following arguments. First, I claim that the cell phone novel phenomenon reveals a curious paradox. The more young people become part of a precarious workforce, the more they seek self‐fulfilling work that they are willing to perform, even if they do not receive pay for the work. Second, I demonstrate that the digital‐media economy capitalizes on this trend. Although Internet portals, such as Magic Island, promote the writing of cell phone novels as an opportunity to pursue self‐fulfilling and potentially lucrative work, these portals only acclimate youth to accept precarious employment and unpredictable work conditions. Last, I conclude that young people recognize in cell phone novels the potential to function as the medium of the political. Cell phone novelists do not simply voice their generation's anguish over their disenfranchisement. Rather, by writing these novels, they produce a conjuncture at which writers and readers come to understand themselves as new collectivities and begin to develop critical insights about work, solidarity, and future. [youth, labor, politics, cell phone novels, digital media, Japan]

Issue-oriented hackathons as material participation

“…While hackathon participants often embody subjectivities such as those of tinkers (Faulkner, 2000; Waksman, 2004), geeks (Dunbar-Hester, 2008; Kelty, 2005), or even hackers (Perlman, 2004; Rosner and Bean, 2009; Soderberg, 2010), these subjectivities fail to define the events themselves. In yet other ways, hackathons expose trends in global innovation, capitalism, and labor under neoliberalism (Funahashi, 2013; Lukacs, 2013; Van de Poel, 2008; Van Oost et al, 2008).…”

The real digital housewives of China’s Kuaishou video-sharing and live-streaming app

“…Alternatively theorised as ‘emotional labour’ that ‘requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’, it calls for ‘a coordination of mind and feeling and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honour as deep and integral to our individuality’ (Hochschild, 1983: 7). This labour ‘integrates processes of capital accumulation with practices of self-determination by further blurring the line between paid and unpaid work’ (Lukács, 2013: 48). Scholars use emotional/affective labour to explain the work of nursing, air stewardesses, nannies and sex workers (Chen, 2018; Hochschild, 1983, 2003) and to frame studies of human relations with plants (Archambault, 2016), empathy (Bubandt and Willerslev, 2015), maid cafés (Galbraith, 2013) and moral neoliberalism (Muehlebach, 2012).…”

Intimate Disconnections

“…Broader trends have expanded the symbolic and functional meanings of the phrase, such that it has come to represent the general risks of disconnection. From people living alone, to workers untethered from full-time positions, or young people primarily communicating through technology, the new lack of social ties creates and extends social problems (Hommerich 2015;Iwama 2011;Luckacs 2013;Tachibanaki 2010;Ueno 2009). Reflecting Japanese media narratives, particularly after the triple disasters of March 2011, Allison (2013) links the restructured labor market with government (non)responses to the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns under "precarity. "…”