Yutaka Iida "City & Media: Past, Present, & Future"

Fashion Tech News invites guest supervisors from various fields to bring cross-disciplinary features that ponder the future of fashion and technology. In the fourth edition, we welcome Yutaka Iida, an associate professor at Ritsumeikan University’s College of Social Sciences and a researcher in media studies. The theme for this article is "City & Media: Past, Present, & Future."
 
Currently, our surrounding media environment is being increasingly digitalized, bringing significant changes to urban culture. Additionally, various companies are promoting virtual communication platforms—so-called metaverses—creating an entirely different ecosystem from traditional urban cultures. Amid these changes in urban and media environments, how is the consumption of media content, advertising methods, and the way goods are bought and sold evolving? By unraveling the past and present interrelationships of media and urban culture, I would like to contemplate their present and future.

Understanding Cities & Media Through History

How Media Technology is Integrated into Society

I originally came from an engineering background, specializing in robotics. Later, rather than focusing solely on developing new technologies, I became more interested in the process of forming societal consensus on how to implement new technologies—essentially contemplating how to integrate new technologies into society. This led me to study the sociology of technology, science and technology studies, and eventually realizing that media studies aligned closely with my interests. Currently, I am particularly engaged in media studies through the lens of the history of media technology, viewing media as a complex entity of technology and society.
 
One of the characteristics of media studies from a humanities perspective is its critique of technological determinism. The world is full of expressions suggesting that new technology changes society and humans. For example, ten years ago, it was said that Twitter changed politics, and more recently, that big data and NFTs change the economy, AI changes work, and dating apps change romance. Claims that the metaverse will change human communication are similarly prevalent. Still, especially when considering digital media, we cannot purely perceive the "newness" of new media. Thus, when stating that something "changes," comparisons with old media are inevitable.
 
For many years, I have been interpreting and analyzing various phenomena surrounding new media, and my method remains historically oriented. My research is based on the idea of learning from past examples to apply to the present, rather than narrowly focusing on only what is happening right now.
This approach, I believe, is extremely useful for understanding current cities and media. I focus more on the technology that supports media rather than the content of the media itself.
There's a saying, "History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes," often attributed to Mark Twain, though its origin is unclear. People who develop new technologies often focus on their revolutionary and novel aspects. However, through my work in the history of media technology, I've realized there's a repetition, and it seems like technology evolves in a spiral pattern.
 
When I say I research history, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm always covering ancient topics. It's already been a quarter-century since 1995, the so-called "First Year of the Internet," and now the internet itself is a subject of historical study.