Co-presence Café Cultures: Kakao, Games, and Camera Phone Photo-Sharing in Seoul, South Korea

Abstract

A few years ago, Soohyun would have been preoccupied with South Korea’s first social network site, Cyworld minihompy. She and her friends would often meet in their online ‘mini-rooms’ and exchange virtual gifts symbolic of their friendship. Now Soohyun uses Kakao, a mobile social media platform. KakaoTalk allows her to text and talk for free, includes an online chat function similar to a minihompy, and features a whole suite of mobile games, from the multiplayer cafe-simulation game I Love Coffee to the retro-cute match-3 puzzle app Anipang. Significantly, unlike Facebook and other social media services that provide reconfigured mobile apps across devices and operating systems, KakaoTalk is designed specifically for mobile media, and more specifically smartphones, enabling a targeted tailoring of the platform to the particular social, ludic, and sensory affordances of mobile screens. For people like Soohyun, the choice of Kakao was obvious. It afforded her integrated modalities of presence—poly-synchronous, distributed, and ambient—with friends and family across both communicative and playful mobile practices: texting, talking, online chat, and gaming (Figure 7.1).