Personal, Portable, Pedestrian

Mobile Phones in Japanese Life

By: Mizuko Ito, Misa Matsuda, Daisuke Okabe

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Paperback | 8 September 2006

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372 Pages

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18+

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How mobile communications in Japan became a pervasively personal tool that connects families and friends, creating "always-on" social engagement.

The Japanese term for mobile phone, keitai (roughly translated as "something you carry with you"), evokes not technical capability or freedom of movement but intimacy and portability, defining a personal accessory that allows constant social connection. Japan's enthusiastic engagement with mobile technology has become--along with anime, manga, and sushi--part of its trendsetting popular culture. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian, the first book-length English-language treatment of mobile communication use in Japan, covers the transformation of keitai from business tool to personal device for communication and play. The essays in this groundbreaking collection document the emergence, incorporation, and domestication of mobile communications in a wide range of social practices and institutions. The book first considers the social, cultural, and historical context of keitai development, including its beginnings in youth pager use in the early 1990s. It then discusses the virtually seamless integration of keitai use into everyday life, contrasting it to the more escapist character of Internet use on the PC. Other essays suggest that the use of mobile communication reinforces ties between close friends and family, producing "tele-cocooning" by tight-knit social groups. The book also discusses mobile phone manners and examines keitai use by copier technicians, multitasking housewives, and school children. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian describes a mobile universe in which networked relations are a pervasive and persistent fixture of everyday life.

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"Geert Lovink taught me how to think critically about technology, and I always turn to him for thoughtful and humane analysis. Too few technology writers have any sense of social and cultural context, and too few technology critics have an appreciation of why people find technologies attractive and how they improve people's lives. I recommend Dark Fiber to those who haven't yet learned to think critically about Internet technology and the culture that has grown up around it, and to those critics who fail to see the real advantages afforded by the Internet."--Howard Rheingold, author of *The Virtual Community* and *Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution*

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You Can Find This Book In

Non-Fiction Engineering & Technology Electronics & Communications Engineering Communications Engineering & Telecommunications Computing & I.T.Computer Science Human-Computer Interaction Society & Culture Cultural Studies Science Science in General Impact of Science & Technology on Society

Media Studies

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Editors' Note on Translation	p. xi
Introduction: Personal, Portable, Pedestrian	p. 1
The Social and Cultural Construction of Technological Systems
Discourses of Keitai in Japan	p. 19
Youth Culture and the Shaping of Japanese Mobile Media: Personalization and the Keitai Internet as Multimedia	p. 41
A Decade in the Development of Mobile Communications in Japan (1993-2002)	p. 61
Cultures and Imaginaries
The Third-Stage Paradigm: Territory Machines from the Girls' Pager Revolution to Mobile Aesthetics	p. 77
Japanese Youth and the Imagining of Keitai	p. 103
Social Networks and Relationships
Mobile Communication and Selective Sociality	p. 123
The Mobile-izing Japanese: Connecting to the Internet by PC and Webphone in Yamanashi	p. 143
Accelerating Reflexivity	p. 165
Keitai and the Intimate Stranger	p. 183
Practice and Place
Keitai in Public Transportation	p. 205
The Gendered Use of Keitai in Domestic Contexts	p. 219
Design of Keitai Technology and Its Use among Service Engineers	p. 237
Technosocial Situations: Emergent Structuring of Mobile E-mail Use	p. 257
Emergent Developments
Keitai Use among Japanese Elementary and Junior High School Students	p. 277
Uses and Possibilities of the Keitai Camera	p. 300
References	p. 311
Contributors	p. 341
Index	p. 345
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Personal, Portable, Pedestrian

Mobile Phones in Japanese Life

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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