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Benjamin’s
cultural subconscious-made-real is especially evident
in Japanese video game arcades, cyber cafes (which also
offer late-night broadband networked game play), and
in the cell phone software and service shops where the
dream ghosts of many different cultures are literally
inserted directly into the technology of modern Japanese
society and placed snugly in the
hands and pocketbooks of Japanese users
(Darley). The shift with the cyber café
and the cell phone network game, however, is that the
arcade of cultural exchange has now become completely
virtual, existing no where and everywhere simultaneously.
While these new physical and
virtual Japanese mediums for expression, exploration
and play remediate previous media and communication
methods in the same way that Bolter and Grusin claim
that hypertext and early new media forms remediate meaning,
the spin that Japanese culture places on this process
is that Japanese
culture has always been a remediation machine that
encourages a continual integration of outside cultural
artifacts directly into the heart of the supposedly
“unique” and/or “authentic”
aspects of the Japanese cultural/historical experience
(Napier).
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