Mobility and sociality in proximity-sensitive digital urban ecologies: ‘Timid encounters’ and ‘seam-sensitive walks’

This paper is a case study of the use of a proximity-sensitive game played on mobile gaming terminals, in Japan and in France, Dragon Quest 9, and of distinctive forms of mobility and urban encounters which emerge around it. We show how players, when assembled together, walk the ‘connected walk,’ that is they adopt a particular gait, slower than the usual walking pace, with repeated pauses which appears as a tentative and exploratory kind of mobility oriented towards the random occurrence of proximity-based screen-mediated events, and therefore both adjusted to and constitutive of the proximity-sensitive hybrid ecology as a serendipitous place, to be experienced as such. With respect to urban encounters, we have identified a characteristic tension, relevant to locative media in general, in which concerns with potential identification and recognition ‘in the game’ contrasts with the interaction order of urban traffic encounters, characterized by ‘civil inattention.’ This gives rise to the phenomenon of ‘timid encounters,’ in which players strive to experience game encounters with other players a few meters away, while trying to elude visual or verbal recognition.     

Professor of Sociology at Sophia University.

Abstract Is the family in industrial Japan the same modern conjugal family created by the Industrial Revolution and the modern welfare state of the west? Is it also shifting toward a post-modern family? This paper attempts to analyze the nature of family changes in Japan by using the “individualization model.” The Japanese family experienced the first wave of change in the first two decades after the world war II from the prewar patriarchal stem family to the modern conjugal family. It is undergoing the second wave of change since the mid 1980s which is characterized as the process of individualization or diversification of the modern family. Though we observe phenomenal changes in contemporary Japan, the family system based on distinct gender roles will not lose its ground unless the industry-oriented family policy and family-based welfare policy become more individual-based.     

李渔戏曲《比目鱼》中刘藐姑的主导性──对于中国古典戏曲中的两性关系的一些考察

本文以《比目鱼》为个案,探讨李渔的描写爱情的剧作所呈现的女性在两性关系中向强势一方转化的新倾向,并通过对其女主人公的自我觉醒意识、她的魅力及其在爱情中的主导性作用的剖析,阐明上述新倾向乃是作品中的市民意识增强的结果。