In the city, they go “pit pit pit”: Digital media’s affordances and imagined (dis)connections in a rural Japanese community

Abstract

This project explores how lower class individuals living in a small rural Japanese community employ digital media in their daily lives and how this use of technology shapes their sense of self. Drawing from ethnographic research, it considers the locally specific ways in which individuals have embraced digital technology and how the technology’s “imagined affordances” intersect with their cultural, regional, and class identities, both locally and in relationship to national and global contexts. It argues that despite community members’ active use of digital technology, numerous barriers (both imagined and actual) continue to limit their ability to fully engage in digital culture and discusses how these barriers lead to a sense of simultaneous connection and disconnection from both urban contexts and an imagined global community. It concludes that more carefully situated local accounts of digital praxis are a necessary step toward developing a deeper understanding of the digital world.

Intensification, discovery and abandonment: Unearthing global ecologies of dis/connection in pandemic times

“…In relation to the latter point, this article has unsettled universalistic and taken-for-granted assumptions regarding the meanings and motivations of dis/connection. It has illustrated how dis/connective practices are shaped by privileges, imbalances, divides and inequalities that are particularly intense in the context of the Global South (Darling-Wolf, 2020;Lim, 2020;Pype, 2019). Experiences of disconnection are contextually situated and defined by the specific social circumstances that people face in their local settings and by their status, social class and access to reliable technological infrastructure and stable connectivity.…”

“…This kind of reductionism is paired by another issue, that of universalism. To a certain extent, as a growing number of scholars has started to recognize (Darling-Wolf, 2020;Lim, 2020;Pype, 2019;Treré et al, 2020), so far digital disconnection studies have tended to privilege certain kinds of populations of white, educated people with relatively high purchasing power in the West. This results in the disregard on the one side of the dis/connective practices of the less privileged and on the other side of the manifestations of dis/connection in the Global South.…”

‘You are just dealing with machines’: Negotiating the spread of digital media from a small Japanese town

“…I returned to the community in the summer of 2018 with the goal of exploring how its members negotiated the changes generated by this shift. One component of the project, on which I have reported elsewhere (Darling-Wolf, 2021), investigated the imagined and vernacular affordances that emerged through individuals’ involvement with digital media. A second aim was to more broadly consider the relational, perceptive and affective dimensions of the relationship of the members of the community to digital media 2 and the role of the imagination in this negotiation.…”

Mapping a pluralistic continuum of approaches to digital disconnection

“…This involves understanding the power dynamics and inequalities entwined in digital disconnection that go beyond the individual level (Kuntsman and Miyake, 2022; Van Bruyssel et al, 2023). From the material (Adams and Jansson, 2023; Bozan and Treré, 2023) to the cultural (Darling-Wolf, 2021; Fast, 2021), these structural dimensions are seen as overlooked from post-positivist perspectives, and thus call for interpretivist lenses to examine their meaning and effects on society. Yet, since interpretivism implies a dialog between the meanings produced by the actors under study and the meanings produced by the researcher (Benzecry, 2017; Reed, 2011), and because of the inherent distance (or lack of it) between them (Corbin Dwyer and Buckle, 2009), it relies on critical self-reflexivity and positionality during data collection and analysis – limiting the generalizability goals that post-positivist approaches aim for when seeking to understand what explains digital disconnection.…”