Digital Play

Digital Play PDF Author: Stephen Kline
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773525432
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
In a marketplace that demands perpetual upgrades, the survival of interactive play ultimately depends on the adroit management of negotiations between game producers and youthful consumers of this new medium. The authors suggest a model of expansion that encompasses technological innovation, game design, and marketing practices. Their case study of video gaming exposes fundamental tensions between the opposing forces of continuity and change in the information economy: between the play culture of gaming and the spectator culture of television, the dynamism of interactive media and the increasingly homogeneous mass-mediated cultural marketplace, and emerging flexible post-Fordist management strategies and the surviving techniques of mass-mediated marketing. Digital Play suggests a future not of democratizing wired capitalism but instead of continuing tensions between "access to" and "enclosure in" technological innovation, between inertia and diversity in popular culture markets, and between commodification and free play in the cultural industries. -- publisher description.

Digital Play

Digital Play PDF Author: Stephen Kline
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773525432
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a marketplace that demands perpetual upgrades, the survival of interactive play ultimately depends on the adroit management of negotiations between game producers and youthful consumers of this new medium. The authors suggest a model of expansion that encompasses technological innovation, game design, and marketing practices. Their case study of video gaming exposes fundamental tensions between the opposing forces of continuity and change in the information economy: between the play culture of gaming and the spectator culture of television, the dynamism of interactive media and the increasingly homogeneous mass-mediated cultural marketplace, and emerging flexible post-Fordist management strategies and the surviving techniques of mass-mediated marketing. Digital Play suggests a future not of democratizing wired capitalism but instead of continuing tensions between "access to" and "enclosure in" technological innovation, between inertia and diversity in popular culture markets, and between commodification and free play in the cultural industries. -- publisher description.

Science, Technology and Society in Postwar Japan

Science, Technology and Society in Postwar Japan PDF Author: Shigeru Nakayama
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136154825
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
First published in 1991. The study of Japanese science and technology (especially tech­nology) is a fashionable subject at the present time, and numerous English language works appear month by month claiming to explain the 'miracle' of the recent rise of Japanese technology. Most of these works are, however, seem to be superficial treatments of Japan's recent technological performance, lacking in historical insight. This book is an attempt to introduce a critical examination of the mechanisms by which Japan has promoted science and technology by looking at its post-war historical development.

Dream Super-Express

Dream Super-Express PDF Author: Jessamyn Abel
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503629953
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
A symbol of the "new Japan" displayed at World's Fairs, depicted in travel posters, and celebrated as the product of a national spirit of innovation, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen—the first bullet train, dubbed the "dream super-express"—represents the bold aspirations of a nation rebranding itself after military defeat, but also the deep problems caused by the unbridled postwar drive for economic growth. At the dawn of the space age, how could a train become such an important symbol? In Dream Super-Express, Jessamyn Abel contends that understanding the various, often contradictory, images of the bullet train reveals how infrastructure operates beyond its intended use as a means of transportation to perform cultural and sociological functions. The multi-layered dreams surrounding this high-speed railway tell a history not only of nation-building but of resistance and disruption. Though it constituted neither a major technological leap nor a new infrastructural connection, the train enchanted, enthralled, and enraged government officials, media pundits, community activists, novelists, and filmmakers. This history of imaginations around the monumental rail system resists the commonplace story of progress to consider the tug-of-war over the significance of the new line. Is it a vision of the future or a reminder of the past, an object of international admiration or a formidable threat? Does it enable new relationships and identities or reify existing social hierarchies? Tracing the meanings assigned to high-speed rail shows how it prompted a reimagination of identity on the levels of individual, metropolis, and nation in a changing Japan.

Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality And Gender In Contemporary Japan

Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality And Gender In Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Wim Lunsing
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317793048
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
First published in 2001. This volume is based on the author's visit to Japan in Summer 1986 on his findings about some of the questions he was asked whilst there. He was 25 and these questions centred around asking if he was married or had a girlfriend, when in his homeland of the Netherlands he openly identified as gay. This research is an investigation of how gay and lesbian people, women's and men's liberationaists, singles and other people, such as transsexuals, transvestites and hermaphrodites, whose ideas, feelings or lifestyles are at variance with Japanese constructions of marriage and inherently the construction of life, live in Japan.

Manga Discourse in Japan Theatre

Manga Discourse in Japan Theatre PDF Author: Yoshiko Fukushima
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113677274X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
During the Japanese 'bubble' economy of the 1980's, the youth of Japan began to exert unprecedented influence on Japanese culture through their spirited patronage of certain art forms previously deemed subcultural or avant-garde. Among these were manga (Japanese comics or animation) and shogekijo (Japanese little theater). These art forms, while very unlike in the manner in which they were produced and disseminated, can be shown to exhibit a common language: manga discourse. This discourse presents the ludic, image-oriented, and seemingly infantile but simultaneously transhistorical language. The range and meaning of these discursive forms as they are related to changes in the forms of shogekijo in Japan between the 1960's and the 1980's are explored here, using the work of Noda Hideki and his troupe Yume no Yuminsha as example.Founded in the early 70's in the dark recesses of the University of Tokyo, Noda's troupe blossomed into a major component of the theater boom of the bright leisure-oriented 80's. The question which Noda's theater raises for those who seek to define Japan's modernization in the arts is how something defined as instinctively 'little' could become so big? In line with its predecessors in the avant-garde movements of the 1960's and 70's, the 1980's shogekijo borrowed from popular theater of the pre-modern period, in reaction to the western - and script-oriented shingeki, and from modern comedy in early twentieth century Japan.But unlike its avant-garde predecessors, it eschewed direct political confrontation with the power holders and consciously sought to expand its audiences through capitalistic means. Japanese youth born in the postwar generation could be led to appreciate the anti-shingeki message of shogekkijo, Noda predicted, only if it could be put in the playful and fantastic language of manga discourse. In some ways, this counterintuitive movement to youth subculture fulfilled shogekijo's mission to return theater to its Japanese roots and thereby complete the process of a truly Japanese modernization in the arts.

Re-made in Japan

Re-made in Japan PDF Author: Joseph Jay Tobin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300060829
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Colonel Sanders, Elvis, Mickey Mouse, and Jack Daniels have been enthusiastically embraced by Japanese consumers in recent decades. But rather than simply imitate or borrow from the West, the Japanese reinterpret and transform Western products and practices to suit their culture. This entertaining and enlightening book shows how in the process of domesticating foreign goods and customs, the Japanese have created a culture in which once-exotic practices (such as ballroom dancing) have become familiar, and once- familiar practices (such as public bathing) have become exotic. Written by scholars from anthropology, sociology, and the humanities, the book ranges from analyses of Tokyo Disneyland and the Japanese passion for the Argentinean tango to discussions of Japanese haute couture and the search for an authentic nouvelle cuisine japonaise. These topics are approached from a variety of perspectives, with explorations of the interrelations of culture, ideology, and national identity and analyses of the roles that gender, class, generational, and regional differences play in the patterning of Japanese consumption. The result is a fascinating look at a dynamic society that is at once like and unlike our own.

Climatic Media

Climatic Media PDF Author: Yuriko Furuhata
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478022434
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
In Climatic Media, Yuriko Furuhata traces climate engineering from the early twentieth century to the present, emphasizing the legacies of Japan’s empire building and its Cold War alliance with the United States. Furuhata boldly expands the scope of media studies to consider technologies that chemically “condition” Earth’s atmosphere and socially “condition” the conduct of people, focusing on the attempts to monitor and modify indoor and outdoor atmospheres by Japanese scientists, technicians, architects, and artists in conjunction with their American counterparts. She charts the geopolitical contexts of what she calls climatic media by examining a range of technologies such as cloud seeding and artificial snowflakes, digital computing used for weather forecasting and weather control, cybernetics for urban planning and policing, Nakaya Fujiko’s fog sculpture, and the architectural experiments of Tange Lab and the Metabolists, who sought to design climate-controlled capsule housing and domed cities. Furuhata’s transpacific analysis offers a novel take on the elemental conditions of media and climate change.

The Bleeding Edge

The Bleeding Edge PDF Author: Bob Hughes
Publisher: Between the Lines
ISBN: 1771132914
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description


Postwar Japan as History

Postwar Japan as History PDF Author: Andrew Gordon
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052091144X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Japan's catapult to world economic power has inspired many studies by social scientists, but few have looked at the 45 years of postwar Japan through the lens of history. The contributors to this book seek to offer such a view. As they examine three related themes of postwar history, the authors describe an ongoing historical process marked by unexpected changes, such as Japan's extraordinary economic growth, and unanticipated continuities, such as the endurance of conservative rule. A provocative set of interpretative essays by eminent scholars, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century Japan and the dilemmas facing Japan today.

Japanese Higher Education as Myth

Japanese Higher Education as Myth PDF Author: Brian J. McVeigh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317467027
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In this dismantling of the myth of Japanese "quality education", McVeigh investigates the consequences of what happens when statistical and corporatist forces monopolize the purpose of schooling and the boundary between education and employment is blurred.