Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life (Hardcover)

by Mizuko Ito (Editor), Daisuke Okabe (Editor), Misa Matsuda (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Lead users play a key role in determining the fate of both technological and industrial development in the digital era. The only way we can fully understand the astonishing development of keitai services is through a multi-perspective analysis of Japan's youth, the cutting-edge lead users of mobile technology. This book is critical to thinking about technological advancement in the twenty-first century."
—Ichiya Nakamura, Executive Director, Stanford Japan Center

"Start with this book if you want to understand the broadest social and technological impacts of the mobile phone. Although focused on the keitai in Japanese society, the authors provide a conceptual toolkit for examining the effects of emerging communication practices across the boundaries of nationality and discipline. This is not just about a technology or the way it is used in one country. It's about understanding one of the most important ways that twenty-first century lives will differ from those of the twentieth century."
—Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

"This is an important book. Through a range of well designed and intelligently contextualized case studies, it both locates and dislocates common assumptions about the singularities of technology and of culture in determining how the keitai is finding its place in Japanese society. Reaching beyond Japan and beyond the mobile phone, the book provides a theoretically rich and empirically sophisticated template for all future work that seeks to understand the nature of sociotechnical change in personal communications."
—Roger Silverstone, Professor of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science

"While Personal, Portable, Pedestrian is packed with an abundance of rich, empirically dense vignettes, what makes the book a refreshing read is the unremarkable, familiar tone with which it frames keitai culture in Japan."
— Xeni Jardin, Wired News

Product Description
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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; illustrated edition edition (August 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262090392
• ISBN-13: 978-0262090391
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #979,253 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an extraordinarily important collection, September 6, 2006

By	a reader (california) - See all my reviews

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Academic gibberish, November 2, 2008

By	Rod Walters "Wheelboarder" (Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life (Paperback)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars you can read for sociology or business, September 17, 2005

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.