In this dissertation, I interrogate the relationship of the smartphone as a mobile screen technology with time-consciousness demanded of the entrepreneurial self in South Korea since the 1997 financial crisis. Neoliberalism has been largely discussed in terms of the structural shift in economy by the S. Korean mass media. However, neoliberalism is not merely an economic shift, but an overhaul of society, whose impact is rehearsed and reinforced in culture. One of the key elements of this culture is the idealization of entrepreneurism. I explain the rise of entrepreneurship, especially self-improvement as life ethic in neoliberal S. Korea. I also discuss it in relation to the developmental democratic citizenship, meaning that democratization in the late 1980s has been co-opted by the national motto of S. Korea, “economy first” established under dictatorship in the 1970s. Within such neoliberal culture, the smartphone socializes users into relentlessly self-improving subjects, offering what I describe as the “attractions of participation.” I examine the perceptual relationships between the mobile screen and the entrepreneurial self, particularly set up by two specific apps: the Facebook app and a series of the tourist augmented reality apps called In My Hands launched by the S. Korean government to promote tourism in the country. The Facebook app, I suggest, promotes self-therapy that is built through a new mode of autobiographical narrative that joins together fragmented events, experiences, or thoughts in a user’s day with others. Self-therapy is also performed through incessant scrolling and checking. This mode of construction of self-identity is a response to and participates in neoliberal ethic of self-care in S. Korea under the hyper stimulated affective universe of contemporary capitalism. The tourist AR apps produce the “knowledge worker,” i.e., the self-motivated, self-educated and driven intellectual labor of the global gig economy. These apps encourage the user to seek information about heritage sites instantaneously and as if in a game, reconfiguring the user’s relation to the place. I also contrast these apps with contemporary arts practices that pose alternative temporalities in terms of a notion of community and history. I explore Heung-soon Im’s documentary film Factory Complex (2014) and Hyun-suk Seo’s performance Heterotopia (2011), for their surrealistic evocation of the disorientations and contradictions of the neoliberal turn in S. Korea. In conclusion, I suggest the user’s contingent and alternative relation to the mobile screen through individual practices, along with the example of the democratic movement from 2016 winter to 2017 spring in S. Korea. Overall this dissertation develops an understanding of the entrepreneurial individual in a neoliberal world. It elaborates on the contradictions in neoliberalism between individual freedom and the voluntary subjugation to capital by the increasing precarity of life. This dissertation offers an understanding of the neoliberal culture of self-improvement and its relation to the mobile screen in S. Korean context. In addition, this is a theoretical attempt to understand the visuality of the computerized screen. It raises a question computer user is indeed an emancipated spectator occupying multiple perspectives. Lastly, this dissertation provides an opportunity to reconsider a variety of media art practices highlighting interactivity and participation in terms of subjectivity and time-consciousness.

Tout au long de ses évolutions, l'ordinateur n'a cessé de permettre autant la consultation que la création de médias. Mais contrairement à l'activité de consultation, la création de logiciels interactifs demande une certaine maîtrise de la programmation informatique, qui reste le seul moyen de produire des programmes agissant sur une machine numérique. Dans ce contexte, les pratiques artistiques engagées dans la création d'œuvres interactives ne peuvent se dispenser de recourir à la programmation informatique, c'est-À-Dire à la création logicielle. Mais dans quelles situations les artistes se placent-Ils face aux techniques du numérique et à la programmation en particulier ? Cette interrogation, qui trouve de multiples réponses, revient au premier plan lorsque le paysage des appareils numériques de grande consommation connaît un événement majeur. Notre recherche est issue d’une telle situation : à partir de 2007, l’apparition des écrans mobiles (smartphones et tablettes) a été pour nous l’occasion d’interroger le potentiel de ces nouveaux supports dans la création artistique œuvrant avec l’interactivité. Il s'agissait pour nous de faire œuvre avec les écrans mobiles autant que d’en définir les modalités de mise en œuvre esthétique et technique au moment même de leur introduction dans notre quotidien. Nous cherchons à situer une certaine pratique de l’interactivité dans l’art permise par les écrans mobiles et leurs spécificités techniques, en partant de l'hypothèse selon laquelle les écrans mobiles permettent des mises en œuvre artistiques de l’interactivité que d’autres supports numériques ne permettent pas, mais imposent également des créations logicielles spécifiques. / Throughout its evolution, the computer never stopped allowing media consultation as well as media creation. Unlike the consultation activity, the creation of interactive software requires some computer programming skills, as it remains the only way to produce programs that acts on a digital machine. In this context, artistic practices involved in the creation of interactive works cannot avoid the use of computer programming and the creation of software. But what circumstances artists are facing when then work with digital technologies and software programming? This question, which has multiple answers, gain in importance when the landscape of massively produced digital devices experiences a major event.Our research is the result of such a situation: starting in 2007, the emergence of mobile screens (smartphones and tablets) was an opportunity to examine the potential of these new digital devices in the field of interactive arts. Our purpose was to create effective art works with mobile screens to be able to define their aesthetic and technical specificities at the very time of their introduction into our daily lives. We try to situate some interactive art practices that mobile screens makes possible thanks to their technical specifications. Our base hypothesis is that mobile screens allow the creation of interactive art work that other digital media cannot afford, but also require the creation of specifics softwares.

This study aimed to understand the relationship between mobile device screen display size (laptops and smartphones) and text segmentation (continuous text, medium text segments, and small text segments) on learning outcomes, cognitive load, and user perception. This quantitative study occurred during the spring semester of 2015. Seven hundred and seventy-one chemistry students from a higher education university completed one of nine treatments in this 3x3 research design. Data collection took place over four class periods. The study revealed that learning outcomes were not affected by the mobile screen display size or orientation, nor was working memory. However, user perception was affected by the screen display size of the device, and results indicated that participants in the sample felt laptop screens were more acceptable for accessing the digital chemistry text than smartphone screens by a small margin. The study also found that neither learning outcomes, nor working memory was affected by the text segmentation viewed. Though user perception was generally not affected by text segmentation, the study found that for perceived ease of use, participants felt medium text segments were easier to learn from than either continuous or small test segments by a small margin. No interaction affects were found between mobile devices and text segmentation. These findings challenge the findings of some earlier studies that laptops may be better for learning than smartphones because of screen size, landscape orientation is better for learning than portrait orientation in small screen mobile devices, and meaningful text segments may be better for learning than non-meaningful, non-segmented, or overly segmented text. The results of this study suggest that customizing the design to the smartphone screen (as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach) improves learning from smartphones, making them equal to learning from laptops in terms of learning outcomes and cognitive load, and in some cases, user perspective. / text