Don’t look to Japan for the mobile future
It’s pretty common among mobile technology geeks to point at how the Japanese use their mobile phones as a view of the future of the mobile in the west. According to anthropologist, Mizuko Ito, that’s not necessarily the case. In a typical example of technological determinism:
In conversations about technology in Japan, the assumption is that there is something inherent in a particular technology that makes it get taken up in a particular way, and it’s not inherently culturally specific. But at the same time, if there is something that seems different from how other countries have taken up a technology, it gets attributed to the cultural strangeness of the Japanese, i.e., if the Japanese don’t use cell phones like people in the U.S. it must be something cultural.
This is the falacious argument that if a technology succeeds then it was something in the technology but if it fails (to replicate successes) then there was something social that caused the failure. Ito says that a better explanation is to look at the “technological trajectory” in each country as a way to explain the differences (and similarities).
The U.S. is an incubator for advanced PC Internet technology, and Japan is at the other end of the spectrum. The reason the Japanese are doing more diverse and cool things with their mobile phones is because they’re depending on them more as their primary information devices. It will continue to be an incubator for interesting mobile technologies, but is certainly not the site were you should look for everything IT.
I remember, about… five or six years ago? there was alot of talk about instant messaging with cellphones being a phenominon in countries like Japan and some northern European countries, at a time when it was not yet popular in the U.S. Then, the opinion was that the cultural personality tendancies had something to do with it. The idea was that people in some cultures ‘tend’ to be more out spoken and extraverted while people in other cultures tend to be shy and intriverted. The article (don’t ask me who wrote it, its been a while) implied that text-messaging was more popular where ther were larger numbers of shy people. I guess they consider Americans to be more “in your face” extraverts (although we aren’t all that way). The question I have is, even if this cultural tendancey is true, can there be a back lash? Will some technologies generate less social
(more-intraverted) people or do they just attract intraverted people? or is it all just a load of bull-hockey?
Comment by Bill Discher — November 28, 2005 @ 9:07 pm
Bull-hockey — nice
FWIW, Usage of mobile phones in Australia looks a lot more like phone use in Northern Europe than it does in the US. Until a few years ago we had more mobile phones per capita than anywhere except Finland. And you can’t tell me Australian’s are “shy”.
I think the reason mobile phone use looks different in the ‘States than elsewhere has more to do with the way the carriers have stratified the market (so I understand) than “cultural personalities”.
Comment by Ben Kraal — November 28, 2005 @ 9:29 pm
I found this information helpful, thanks very much.
Comment by japan — July 17, 2006 @ 4:46 pm