Women's Creation of Camera Phone Culture

Abstract

A major aspect of the relationship between women and the media is the extent to which the new media environment is shaping how women live and perceive the world. It is necessary to understand, in a concrete way, how the new media environment is articulated to our gendered culture, how the symbolic or physical forms of the new media condition women’s experiences, and the degree to which a ‘post-gendered re-codification’ can be realized within a new media environment. This paper intends to provide an ethnographic case study of women’s experiences with camera phones, examining the extent to which these experiences recreate or reconstruct women’s subjectivity or identity. By taking a close look at the ways in which women utilize and appropriate the camera phone in their daily lives, it focuses not only on women’s cultural practices in making meanings but also on their possible effect in the deconstruction of gendered techno-culture.

Keywords

• mobile communications
• mobile phones
• women and media
• camera phones