1. Introduction: Social, mobile and locative media @ Asia-Pacific Part I: Locating the Mobile 2. Locating Intimacies of Place and Gender (Seoul) 3. Spectres of Mobile Intimacy: Mobile media in crisis management of 3.11 (Tokyo) 4. The Place of Intimate Visualities: Ba ling hou, LBS and camera phones (Shanghai) 5. Intimate Distance: Sociality and identity in the face of diaspora (Manila) 6. Generations, Mobile Intimacy and Political Affect (Singapore) 7. The Place of the Domestic: Smartphones, women and labour (Melbourne) Part II: Intimate Publics and Mobile Intimacy 8. Intimate Publics, Communities and Networks in an Age of Mobile Social Media 9. Topographies of the Intimate: Mobile publics in the Asia-Pacific 10. Emplaced Presences: Visual cultures of embodied intimacies 11. Conclusion: Intimacies of the social, mobile and local

Larissa Hjorth is Associate Professor in Games at RMIT University, Australia.

Michael Arnold is Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Media across the Asia-Pacific region are at once social, locative and mobile. Social in that these media facilitate public and interpersonal interaction, locative in that this social communication is geographically placed, and mobile in so much as the media is ever-present. The Asia-Pacific region has been pivotal in the production, shaping and consumption of personal new media technologies and through social and mobile media we can see emerging certain types of personal politics that are inflected by the local.
The six case studies that inform this book-Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Manila, Singapore and Melbourne-offer a range of economic, socio-cultural, and linguistic differences, enabling the authors to provide new insights into specific issues pertaining to mobile media in each city. These include social, mobile and locative media as a form of crisis management in post 3/11 Tokyo; generational shifts in Shanghai; political discussion and the shifting social fabric in Singapore; and the erosion of public and private, and work and leisure paradigms in Melbourne. Through its striking case studies, this book sheds new light on how the region and its contested and multiple identities are evolving, and concludes by revealing the impact of mobile media on how place is shaped, as well as shaping, practices of mobility, intimacy and a sense of belonging.
Employing comprehensive, cross-disciplinary frameworks from theoretical approaches such as media sociology, ethnography, cultural studies and media and communication studies, Online@AsiaPacific will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian culture and society, cybercultures, new media studies, communication studies and internet studies.