Let's Manga

Anne Allison (Duke University, Department of Anthropology): Digitality, Affect, and Home: Net-Cafe; Refugees in Japan

The study found that about 35% of people were influenced by a manga to get into their hobby. By contrast, anime and movies came in at around 15% each, novels at 14.5%, games at 11.5%, and TV dramas at 8.4%.

A notion of participation leads to a conceptualization of the imagination as collectively rather than individually experienced and produced.

While the boosters, debunkers, and the panicked may seem to be operating under completely different frames of reference, what they share is the tendency to fetishize technology as a force with its own internal logic standing outside of history, society and culture. The problem with all of these stances is that they fail to recognize that technologies are in fact embodiments, stabilizations, and concretizations of existing social structure and cultural meanings, growing out of an unfolding history as part of a necessarily altered and contested future.

I propose three conceptual constructs that define trends in new media form, production, and genres of participation: Convergence of old and new media forms; authoring through personalization and remix, and hypersociality as a genre of participation.