Mizuko Ito

Mobile Phones, Japanese Youth, and the Re-placement of Social Contact

The mobile phone is often perceived as an emblematic technology of space-time compression, touted as a tool for anytime, anywhere connectivity. Discussion of young peoples mobile phone use, in particular, often stress the liberatory effects of mobile media, and how it enables young people to escape the demands of existing social structures and parental surveillance. This paper argues that the mobile phone can indeed enable communication that crosses prior social boundaries, but this does not necessarily mean that the devices erode the integrity of existing places or social identities. While Japanese youth actively use mobile phones to overcome limitations inherent in their weak social status, their usage is highly deferential to institutions of home and school and the integrity of existing places. Taking up the case of how Japanese teens mobile phone use is structured by the power-geometries of place, this paper argues that characteristics of mobile phones and mobile communication are not inherent in the device, but are determined by social and cultural context and power relations. After first presenting the methodological and conceptual framework for this paper, we present our ethnographic material in relation to the power-dynamics and regulation of different kinds of places: the private space of the home, the classroom, the public spaces of the street and public transportation, and the virtual space of peer connectivity enabled by mobile communications.

Intimate Connections: Contextualizing Japanese youth and mobile messaging

Ever since NTT Docomo launched its i-mode mobile Internet service in 1999, international attention has been trained on Japan as a hothouse for incubating the future of the wireless revolution. In particular, international technology communities have noted and often celebrated handset design by Japanese electronic manufacturers, third generation infrastructures, video and camera phones, and mobile entertainment. A focus on ever-new advanced technical functionality, however, can often lose sight of the social, historical, and cultural context through which contemporary Japanese mobile media is structured and has evolved. As Harper (2003, 187) has argued, “mobile society is not rendering our society into some new form, it is rather, enabling the same social patterns that have been in existence for some time to evolve in small but socially significant ways.” In this chapter, we analyze messaging practices of Japanese youth as an outcome of existing historical, social, and cultural factors rather than as something driven forward by the inherent logic of new technology.

Making a place for seniors on the Net: SeniorNet, senior identity, and the digital divide

The most recent edition of the annual “Falling Through the Net” report from the U.S. Department of Commerce says that people aged 50 and older are among those groups who are least likely to be Internet users [1]. While we might question whether demographic categories are the most useful way to track Internet use, it’s clear that these categories are dominant in conversations about the digital divide. In this paper, we will follow that thread to look at the digital divide for the category of seniors, based on our year-long study of SeniorNet, an organization that supports seniors in learning about technology. By focusing on seniors as a group, we conform to the discourse of the digital divide. At the same time, we want to open up this discourse, to move outside of its conventional story lines and categories. We are both speaking the language of the digital divide and questioning some of its assumptions.

Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media Mixes

The spread of digital media and communications in the lives of children and youth have raised new questions about the role of media in learning, development and cultural participation. In post-industrial societies, young people are growing up in what (2006) has dubbed “convergence culture”—an increasingly interactive and participatory media ecology where Internet communication ties together both old and new media forms. A growing recognition of this role of digital media in everyday life has been accompanied by debate as to the outcomes of participation in convergence culture. Many parents and educators worry about immersion in video gaming worlds or their children’s social lives unfolding on the Internet and through mobile communication. More optimistic voices suggest that new media enable young people to more actively participate in interpreting, personalizing, reshaping, and creating media content. Although concerns about representation are persistent, particularly of video game violence, many of the current hopes and fears of new media relate to new forms of social networking and participation. As young people’s online activity changes the scope of their social agency and styles of media engagement, they also encounter new challenges in cultural worlds separated from traditional structures of adult oversight and guidance. Issues of representation will continue to be salient in media old and new, but issues of participation are undergoing a fundamental set of shifts that are still only partially understood and recognized.

Engineering Play: Children's software and the cultural politics of edutainment

The late 1980s saw the emergence of a new genre of instructional media, ‘edutainment’, which utilized the capabilities of multimedia personal computers to animate software designed to both educate and entertain young children. This paper describes the production of, marketing of and play with edutainment software as a contemporary example of long-standing tensions between the cultural categories of education and entertainment, play and learning. Like prior efforts to wed learning and play, edutainment was founded on the ideal of broadening access to academic learning. Yet, as it became a mainstream commercial enterprise, it was increasingly targeted towards accelerating the achievement of successful children. After first describing the industry and marketing context of edutainment, this paper describes cases of play with edutainment software in an after-school computer club. The analysis utilizes the concepts of “multimedia genre’ and “participation genre” to read across sites of production, distribution and consumption to examine how genres of entertainment, education and edutainment are constituted through the circulation of and play with media artifacts. As in the case of the industry and marketing context, instances of play with edutainment titles follow certain genre conventions of engagement. Titles that are based on academic content and modes of engagement, even with a wrapper of entertainment style, invite a competitive orientation and interaction focused on fulfilling the minimal conditions for moving ahead and getting credit for completion of a task. Unlike more exploratory or construction-oriented software titles, these genres of software are marketed and keyed to the social demands of middle class achievement.

Mobilizing Fun in the Production and Consumption of Children’s Software

This article describes the relation between the production, distribution, and consumption of children’s software, focusing on how genres of “entertainment” and “education” structure everyday practice; institutions; and our understandings of childhood, play, and learning. Starting with a description of how the vernaculars of popular visual culture and entertainment found their way into children’s educational software and how related products are marketed, the article then turns to examples of play with children’s software that are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork. The cultural opposition between entertainment and education is a compelling dichotomy—a pair of material, semiotic, technical genres—that manifests in a range of institutionalized relations. After first describing a theoretical commitment to discursive analysis, this article presents the production and marketing context that structures the entertainment genre in children’s software and then looks at instance of play in the after-school computer clubs that mobilize entertainment and fun as social resources.

Cemeteries, Oak Trees, and Black and White Cows: Newcomers’ Understandings of the Networked World

The internet, in its proliferating forms, continues to attract an increasingly diverse set of users. Since the explosion of the World Wide Web and the broadening of internet access in the mid-1990s, the internet is no longer dominated by Euro-American software developers, academics, and government agencies. It is currently estimated that 10% of the world’s population is online—an astonishing figure that includes a large proportion of youth in many countries, as well as many seniors like those in our study (Cyberatlas, 2003). Over half of the Internet’s users are from non-English-speaking countries (Global internet statistics by language, 2003). And of course, most of today’s users of the internet are not professionals or students in computer science and related fields, as was the case in the early years of networked computing. Diversification of populations with internet access will continue, as will the influx of internet newcomers spanning a wide social and cultural range. When newcomers make their first online forays, they are confronted with a strange and often incomprehensible “networked world”, a social, technical, and cultural system built up through an idiosyncratic history and shaped by the unique perspectives and backgrounds of early participants. While the technical and social features of the internet are in perpetual flux, many of the deeply embedded technical and cultural assumptions that have been part of the internet since its inception continue to shape user experience. For example, the ASCII encoding of text makes it easy to exchange e-mail or documents in European languages, but it is a real ordeal to do the same thing in Japanese, since ASCII is not large enough to encompass the Japanese character set (Nolan, 2005). Similarly, Lessig (1999) points out that the early design decision to make networking protocols decentralized (so the network itself would be more resistant to total failure) also makes it difficult for corporate interests to police network traffic, as we have seen in recent music industry cases. In numerous instances, the technological choices and assumptions of the early internet are associated with cultural biases of one kind or another. Manuel Castells (2001) argues

UbiComp 2006 Workshops, Part 1

This article presents summaries of four of the UbiComp 2006 Workshops: Interactive Media Systems for Seniors, Exurban Noir, Personalized Context Modeling and Management for UbiComp Applications, and System Support for Future Mobile Computing Applications. The other summaries will appear in the April-June 2007 issue.