Conclusion

Summary

This edited volume concludes with a discussion of how we answered five questions about technological change in media as they relate to work and play in Northeast Asia. The five questions are: (1) How does digital technology change labour practices and industry structure in electronic gaming? (2) How does play foster subjectivity in a corporation-dominated digital environment? (3) How do analogue and digital technologies afford meanings of work and play? (4) How do work and play in local settings challenge abstract concepts such as intellectual property, data privacy, sociality, and state-planned economy? (5) How are regions created through work and play of media contents and media ecosystems?

It does this by first establishing the theoretical context that explains the relevance of this book to the global technology industry and the transnational media flows that it helps create. It then uses this to organise the book's ten chapters around the five thematic questions that foreground interdisciplinary conjectures in the fields of political economy, cultural studies, game studies, and science and technology studies. This aids our subsequent attempt to explain our conceptualisation of technology, work, and play in the emerging techno-cultural spheres of Northeast Asia.

Here, we lay out the conceptual framework that theorises the daily practice of ICT use in the domains of work and play in Northeast Asia. We begin with our critical understanding of media technology that is comparable to the Western context. An urgent aspect emerges as we examine the consumption of media technology in Japan, South Korea, and North Korea. One major issue is the digital divide in media production and consumption among workers worldwide. Gray and Suri (2019) address the universal concern about class equality in their study of invisible platform workers in the US and India. Their research sheds light on the problem of the growing global underclass that competes as homeworkers who in turn contribute to the utopian dream of a platform economy crafted by the commercial narrative ideologically rooted in Silicon Valley. Similar concern also arises when we look at the issues of users’ embodiment through various forms of media technology. Whether in the form of a DVD, USB, smartphone, location-based gaming technology, console, or arcade, media technology presents an underlining concern that equality and freedom for human development ought to be safeguarded as digital capitalism grows and merits the same degree of critical review of ICT for development in Northeast Asia.