Digital Youth Conference, Tokyo, and Kill Bill: Sorting it Out (Sort of)

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Our Digital Youth Asia conference kicked off with a welcome dinner held at Gonpachi Restaurant where Kill Bill was filmed.  If I were 13, I wouldn't just upload the photo, I would be sailing from one balcony to another along with Uma, Lucy, and Vivica.  Ah, augmented reality!

Fellow HASTAC'er, frequent contributor and blogger, and excellent Facebook Friend Liz Dorland once wrote me about the difference between immersionists and augmentationists in Second Life.  The latter might be educators or business people or others who create avatars in SL for collaboration, communication, or commerce and who even maintain their own quasi-identities in SL.  The former find the question of RL (Real Life) identity rude as they ARE their Second Life avatars or, maybe more phenomenologically, their SL identities are not their RL selves.  They are immersionists.

At the Kill Bill restaurant, I was feeling pretty SL and alternately (this amuses me) immersionist and augmentationist in the sense that some people I spoke to knew my old identity as a reception theorist and a scholar in history of the book, some knew me as the memoirist of 36 Views of Mt Fuji, some as co-founder of HASTAC or co-PI of the HASTAC/MacArthur Digitial Media and Learning Competition, some as a close friend, some as just some other gal there at the conference with an identity waiting to be unwrapped.  And that's what a welcome dinner is.  Just as my oniony identity has layers, with some known and many others unknown, so was everyone I met a bit oniony, in the best possible sense. We were unwrapping identities all evening as conversation moved in and out of different topics, new relationships to that topic, new situations of self, different kinds of revealing and global positioning and self-identifying:  where do you live? what is your relationship to Japan? what do you work on? what is your home field, current field, original field, interdisciplinary field?  how long have you lived there? is your new book out yet? who is the 'you' who is already disagreeing with the 'you' about to be published? how do you manage that private, evolving thinking with the stasis   (it isn't really, but we pretend it is) of the printed word, the published word, upon which our reputation exists and which propels us into new conferences, new locations, where there are other welcome dinners where the onion, this time, unlayers differently.

The lingua franca of our conversation was English (in deference to us pathetic monolinguists:  note the power of being linguistically deprived in such groups), but the conversation was on many planes at once, with interweavings of life events, humor, Kill Bill references, funny things (omg! that full water glass I'm downing  to stop a cough is sake!), comraderie, spontaneity, and bits of biography of this insanely impressive multilingual, multinational group.  Name tags don't begin to do it in such an originary meeting of the extraordinary.  

In the taxi home, a new friend told me about writing a white paper on digital youth for the Taiwanese government.  She also told me about her thirteen-year-old daughter's mobile phone use and one favorite trick of sending a photo of herself in a place, at an event, to her best friend, who sends her a photo of herself in the same place, and then they customize and exchange a photo of both of them at that event.  My wise friend said, "They share an imaginary event."  And a memory.  She also said, "They don't use New Media or participate in it---they are New Media."  That connected with a dinner conversation with the new friends from Australia, Korea, and Barcelona about immersionism and augmentationism, words shared with me by my FB friend Liz Dorland.  I was about to end that sentence by typing "whom I've never met."   But I caught myself.  I've learned something from all these interactions.  I have met Liz.  Surely that was her swinging from rafter to rafter at Gonpachi Restaurant as much a part of our conversation as I was.  That's immersion, no?  Not in SL, but RL . . . a distinction, my friends, that I find a bit rude.  *_*

It's 4:30 am Tokyo time.  I can't even blame this late night blogging on jet lag since I escaped it in RL . . .   but I woke up so excited from these conversations, with such anticipation of tomorrow, that I had to connect the dots in BL, Blogging Life.   I'll be doing that off and on for the next two days.  I've been warned there isn't a wireless connection so it won't be Live Blogging but Delayed Blogging.  

But RB, DB?  I've written a lot about the personae of blogging . . . but there's another avatar we deploy at conferences:  that person up there at the podium with the power point and the new red jacket?  You don't need SL to have an avatar.   It's not just about space, but also time.  So, again, RB  and DB? Come on, that distinction is a bit antiquated, arbitrary, artificial, naive, reductionist, determinist, and, dare I say it?, a touch rude.  This So-Called Life is, literally, all over the place.

Time for the scene where I swing from balcony to balcony at Gonpachi.  Some call it sleep. Lights out, camera off, inaction for a few more hours.  So to speak.  Gambatte kudasaii, everyone! 

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Special thanks to Pahtz on Flickr for sharing this photo.  Pls click on the image for other photos and full documentation of this one.