The aim of this study was to examine the validity of data entered in participating subjects' TV, video, and video game viewing/usage diaries.

The participating subjects were eight families with third and fourth graders in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. The amount of TV viewing (total and by TV channel), viewing of video-recorded TV programs, and playing of video games by third and fourth grade children were recorded in the viewing/usage diary and at the same time measured by a viewing state measurement device. The correlation coefficient between the data obtained from the diary and that from the measurement device was equal to or higher than the coefficient obtained in a preceding study, confirming the validity of the data entered in the viewing/usage diary.

This work aims to investigate how Japanese newspapers contribute to community engagement. Ninety percent of households in Japan subscribe to newspapers. Moreover half of Newspaper circulation is concentrated on major newspapers whose head-quarters are located in a few major cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. Nation-wide news and topics are the main content of these major papers. This style is similar to Japanese TV programs. As prior studies have shown, not nation-wide mass media but localized media such as community radio, contributes to community engagement as a part of production of social capital. This study quantitatively investigates the impact of newspapers by comparing them with other media such as TV, radio, magazines, PCs and mobile phones.

The result of the regression shows that the impact of newspapers is different from that of TV. The former is positively correlated to community engagement; on the other hand, the latter is negatively correlated. Although a large part of Japanese newspapers traditionally focus on national news, the result suggests that they also support everyday life activities in local communities. Furthermore, new digital media affects community engagement negatively. The length of PC and mobile phone use negatively correlates to community engagement. The authors discuss factors that could cause these different effects of the above media on community engagement.

Digital Storytelling (DST) is a grassroots movement and a workshop-based practice through which people are taught to use digital media to create short video stories, usually about their own lives. Although DST practices are spreading throughout the world, it seems that little attention has been given to the story-generating process. In running several workshops, we presumed that it was difficult for many people to express their experiences and thoughts in a clear, coherent way, and it is important to rethink how they generate their stories. In this paper, we propose a digital storytelling workshop model for vulnerable people that entails establishing key concepts of “the collaborative story generation” from “pre-story space.”

First, we examined two game-like workshop methods. One of them was a DST program “Media Conte,” in which participants and facilitators co-created the stories primarily through dialogs and card games. The other was “Photo Karuta,” in which participants were required to take photos and interview others to find new perspectives through fieldworks. Both workshops shared the concept of focusing on pre-story space to generate stories. These workshops were developed and modified through numerous attempts, which were conducted by the methodology of “critical media practice.”

At the end of this paper, we depict how the collaborative story-weaving model is developed from the pre-story space and discuss the advantages for vulnerable people using these storytelling methods.

According to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “art” actualizes the “virtual (possible)” which is latent once the world is organized by a fixed method and that “philosophy” conceptualizes the “virtual (possible).” In other words, art and philosophy are regarded as suitable for grasping new experiences that are different from the ones under the existing socially constructed order.

From this perspective, first of all, this paper shows that although early cyberculture describes a utopia of the near future where escape from the body is realized by technologies (as seen in William Gibson's Neuromancer), expressions of new experiences of bodies in our everyday life have become an important part of cyberculture nowadays. Contemporary cyberculture like some kinds of gameplay or cyborg performances contains the actualization of new experiences of bodies in our society with the spread of the electronic environment.

Secondly, this paper examines new experiences of bodies in our society after the spread of electronic technologies based on some game studies and art commentaries. Recently, some game studies and art commentaries have analyzed new experiences of bodies in contemporary cyberculture. According to those studies and commentaries, new experiences of bodies are not only mental and emotional but also physical as well. Selves that appear in the electronic media are not based on the release from the biological body but the reconstruction of the biological body. The new experiences are crucial in making a re-examination of the framework of the biological body and opening up infinite possibilities for interpretation of bodies. Those possibilities invite rethinking and reconstructing the existing order related to the biological body.