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Like many fields, visual literacy is enamoured with digital cameras. They are convenient for classrooms, can accelerate learning, and can facilitate research where verbal language cannot. However, exclusive use puts at risk the possibility of experiencing affordances of other photomedia. This paper argues for diversifying photomedia used in research. While it recognises that digital cameras have a role to play in developing visual skills, particularly when resources are limited, it posits that sole use of digital cameras obfuscate other possibilities for expression. Adopting autoethnographic description, affordances were considered of three photomedia as used during a rephotography project along Japan's north-eastern coast between 2019 and 2022. Setting out photomedia literacy as a competence that complements rather than competes with a range of other literacies (e.g. media literacy, digital literacy, information literacy), the paper concludes with challenges for any scholars thinking that digital cameras are convenient one-stop solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shinzo Abe, Japan's former and longest-serving prime minister was assassinated on 8 July 2022. As the world expressed sorrow of the human tragedy, nationalists in China were celebrating the disappearance of a hardline Chinese hawk with great enthusiasm. When a Chinese journalist sobbed for Abe's death during a live report of the assassination, the surging anti-Japan sentiment exploded and soon developed into a hashtag-based nationalist protest attacking Abe and the journalist. Drawing from cyber nationalism and hashtag activism literature, the author coined a concept 'hashtag nationalism' to analyze this protest, the interactions between state-led nationalism and popular nationalism, and the role of digital media in the public-state relation. This article also generalized three affordances of hashtag – interconnectivity, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity – to approach the role of social media in digital activism from a relational perspective. Finally, the analysis revealed the discursive and networked nature of hashtag nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project ethnographically explores how individuals in a small Japanese town negotiate the changes brought about by the increased omnipresence of digital technologies in their everyday lives. It delves into the affective dimensions of individuals' imagination of a global digital order, of the impact of digital media on social organization, and of their own sense of place in a globalized world. It demonstrates that while digital media's connective affordances help reduce the sense of isolation stemming from the community's geographic position, conflicting feelings of dis connection, alienation and loss simultaneously arise in its members' broader relationship to the digital world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New media forms often open up new understandings of aesthetics. Japanese comics (Manga), and animations (Anime) arose in a time of limited social constraint. This allowed them to explore unmentioned topics and develop new aesthetics that involve Fan Service and the Glimpse. Fanservice is the random and gratuitous display of a series of anticipated gestures common in Manga and Anime. These gestures include such things as panty shots, leg spreads and glimpses of breast. In their valorization they indicate a deep philosophical concern with the status of personal experience. These vagrant moments of libidinous possibility underwrite the anticipation of sensual fulfillment; they indicate the genuine access of the personal to a realm and/or moment of reality in which the physical and the imaginative are co-extensive. The connection between the eye and desire is re-established in defiance of the general requirement in society to deny the Glimpse. The Glimpse, in its mediated form as Fanservice, confirms the imagination as the dimension of the interpersonal: someone else also already understands the glimpse. This is perhaps the "darker" freedom because it offers to forgive the otherwise unique nature of vantage (I alone could see from where I stood). What I see you could also see; how I see you might also see. The Glimpse affords a new aesthetic understanding of being within the transitional world of the adolescent. Gibson, JJ. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin. Marcuse, Herbert (1979.The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Erica Sherover, trans. London: Macmillan. Mulvey, Laura ([1975] 1992): "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Screen 16 (3): 6-18. Schodt, Frederik L. (1996). Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock Publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]