Digital Art in the Age of Social Media: The Politics of Personalization via Cute Culture

Larissa Hjorth's paper argues that "cute culture," or kawaii, offers an essential analytical lens for understanding personalization, vernacular creativity, and produsage within digital art and the global games industry. Tracing kawaii's roots through Japanese technocultures from the 1970s, and even to a 1000 AD novel, the work contends that cuteness humanizes technology through affective design, gendered play, and localized customization. It situates Japan's "electronic individualism," spanning the Walkman, the Game Boy, and keitai (mobile phone) culture, as central to this shift, and it maintains that the politics of personalization should be mapped through localized cartographies rather than homogenized as a Western or American phenomenon.

The central claim is that kawaii has evolved from a 1970s Japanese youth subculture into a dominant force across digital art, gaming, and social media. Drawing on scholars including Allison, Iwabuchi, and Murakami, the argument examines examples such as Pokémon, Hello Kitty, and Cyworld to show that cute customization functions as affective cultural capital, shaping identity, gender performance, and community. The analysis pushes back against Western interpretations that describe Japanese cuteness as "odorless" or simply postmodern, which it regards as overly simplistic.

The paper's conclusion is that cute culture, far from being merely childish, constitutes a significant and under-theorized mode of engagement in the social media era. The work asserts that Digital Art and Game Studies require fuller contextualization of this phenomenon. Its scope centers on Japanese digital media and consumer culture, with attention to the global diffusion of these practices, and its supporting scholarship spans mobile phone studies, digital photography, globalization theory, and material culture.