The Smart Screen and Reengineering Free Time

Mi Young Park
(Independent Researcher)

Abstract:
Is the entrepreneur of the self the ideal of a liberated individual who earns what s/he works for? Anthony Giddens has argued that self-identity has become a personal project that could be resistant to contemporary capitalist society. Yet, the self has become increasingly precarious under neoliberal withdrawals of social welfare and has emerged as the entrepreneur of the self.

The smartphone produces a dominant mode of visuality and aesthetic experiences which socializes the user into the ethic of neoliberal entrepreneurship. The computer screen, often discussed as “post-cinematic,” generates a sense of freedom in the process of interaction with multiple windows, unlike the classical Hollywood cinema spectator who bound to a perspectival position on the screen. The attractions of participation in on-screen activities provide a subject position as both a democratic citizen and efficient labor in the post-industrial age. This paper starts by drawing connections between the perceptual experience of the computerized mobile screen and one’s changing relations to work in post-industrial, neoliberal society. It is the embodied perception of the neoliberal work ethic through interaction with media. Then, it discusses the reconfiguration of free time after the 1997 financial crisis and the rise of self-improvement culture in S. Korea through an analysis of bestselling self-help books. Lastly, it examines the case of S. Korean young mothers’ autobiographical writing on the Facebook app transformed into the management of emotions, that is, self-therapy through a new mode of autobiographical narrative. This case study helps to elaborate the concept of the mobile screen as a temporal dispositif where a user’s free time has become incorporated into a practice of the neoliberal work ethic, of being an entrepreneurial self as well as the expression of the individual’s free will.

Mi Young Park received her doctoral degree from the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She has presented papers at the annual conference of Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the International Communication Association, and Film-Philosophy. Her current research focuses on the relationship between media technologies and the cultures of neoliberalism.