Customer Reviews

Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you work in the mobile communications space and you aren't Japanese, you probably ought to have a copy of this book. It provides a wealth of data and references on Japanese mobile phone use that have been hidden behind the language barrier for too long. (NB: This is sociology and anthropology data we're talking about, not marketing data. It's data about how people do things and think about things, not how many widgets they bought last year.) Mimi Ito has done the community (particularly the research community) a huge service by getting this collection published.

In Japan and Europe, cellphone usage is higher than in the United States. Thus to an American reader, this book can be interesting on several levels. Perhaps as a sociological commentary on how Japanese society has accepted and accomodated the pervasive use of the phones. To an extent not currently seen in much of the US, except possibly amongst teenagers in large cities. The book is a fascinating read of how quickly an technological item has become part of the fabric in Japan. The passages on phone etiquette also suggest what might also eventuate here.

On a business level, the book can be used for ideas into future usages, in Japan or elsewhere. If you are trying to find a novel business involving cellphones, it helps to study a society that has taken them further.

One method in interaction design is to get a clear picture of who is using your product. This book shows who that person is (or was) for SMS. As a mobile app developer, this book helped put a personal face on my market.

I first heard about this book from Trip Hawkins, during a mobile track of the Game Developer Conference. This was before the iPhone came out. While the iPhone may have changed how mobile apps are built and sold, this book remains a classic.

What I learned from PPP was how a teenage Japanese girl began to use her pager and ketai. I learned how she, and others like her, became the social nexus of a new phenomenon. Now, with carriers transitioning from SMS to data plans, this book helps me to ask the question: "who's the leading way" - in a way that might yield a useful answer.

This is THE source for understanding japan keitai/mobile culture from early 90s to current. And authors investigate different aspect of keitai in japan life which do help me understand how it is, and why it is.
With current issues, Nokia pulls out of japan recently, and iPhone's user are very unhappy about iPhone ( less than 7% iPhone users really like it). All the questions can be answered by this book partially.
But this is not a great book by lacking the compare and holistic view as normal anthrography research dose.
Anyway, it's worth reading.

I have been fascinated by cell phone adoption in Japan for some time. This is a very well researched book on the topic, but it reads just like a boring college text book. This could be due to the fact it was translated from Japanese, but don't let this stop you from buying it.

The first sentence of this book goes "The three terms personal, portable, pedestrian point to technological imaginary(1) embedded in the social and cultural specificities of Japanese mobile phone use, interpreted on a transnational stage". Hello, what? This is a very inauspicious start to a book, because it is pretentious, academic gibberish. And it carries on like this for 310 pages.

Since all that can be said about Japanese mobile phones can be summarized in about 10 pages, the remaining 300 pages are filled with the sort of coma-inducing pap that is required of people working at universities.

Chapter 8, interestingly, is entitled "Accelerating Reflexivity". I found my reflexivity decelerating quite horribly after the third sentence, and if I hadn't flung the book away quickly, I fear it would have slowed to a complete standstill.

I don't know if there are any better sources of information about keitai use in Japan, but I'm sure that searching for them will prove more rewarding and less numbing than trying to plough through this tiresome exercise in publication list padding.

(1) An academic note (itself opaque) in the very first sentence spells trouble.