Metablog

Mobile Phones, Japanese Youth... by Ito et al

This paper is an examination by Ito and Daisuke into the use of mobile phones by Japanese youths. Each participant (some of whom are not 'youths', but are parents of 'youths') are asked to keep a diary for a few days about their mobile usage scenarios.

The key investigation is into 'power-geometry of space-time compression'; mainly a way of determining how ubiquitous access to email via mobile phone changes the structure of communication. As a class of subjects, youths were judged to be effective due to previous investigations into youth practices of mobile communication by Grinter et al (see our reading list). The youths in this study had approximately 2x more traffic than the rest of the population in this study.

The Ito paper is divided into three main discussions:

• Mobile usage in the home - most of the subjects live at home and spend a predominate amount of time there; they will not go to other people's houses, but instead send messages to their friends; may discuss television shows they are watching or whatnot with their friends
• Mobile usage outside the home - due to the lack of privacy and space in the typical home, many Japanese youths socialize in public places; most of the public transportation forbids voice communication, which thereby implicitly sanctions text communication; coordination of physical meetings are done in an ad hoc manner; text communication can still occur in classroom scenarios - some schools are more permissive than others about allowing it in the classroom
• Mobile usage norms - there is a feeling of 'peer' pressure to quickly respond to messages by the youths; replies within 30 minutes or less is usually expected unless they are asleep; feelings of sadness when don't reply in time

Here are the questions and comments I have from the paper:

1. How does the at-large societal norms usage dictate mobile usage? Ito cites a bunch of prior work done in European countries which has similar results as this paper. But, as Ito mentions later on, the US has an entirely different societal norm for landline phone access. My conjecture is that the US might be an exception here - the larger family houses (allowing both for the privacy of teens and the ability to have friends 'over') and cheap land-line access may inhibit the same type (and rate) of adoption of mobile usage in the US as the Japanese/European teens.
2. By the same token, most of the research is done in urban settings. In non-urban settings, there aren't that many places to congregate. I'd be curious to see if the coordination aspects of the communication are different when not in urban settings - are they not as fluid? Issues like, "Are you coming?" would still be relevant; but performing ad hoc determinations of where to meet may not be as applicable in this context due to the limited choices of where to meet.
3. To me, it seems that there are a lot of situations where voice communication is not allowed; and that is precisely where the majority of the text communication occurs. For example, at the home, the youths either can not talk to their friends (at dinner, spending quality family time, etc.) or do not wish to talk to their friends (do not wish to have their parents know whom they are talking to). At school or on the public transportation systems, voice communication is expressly forbidden (phones get taken away or fined) - again, the predominate use is of textual communication. Therefore, I think the situation (structure?) prohibits the use of voice communication - non-verbal communication is the only alternative.
4. The most stunning aspect to me is evolution of this genre from the previous habits of Japanese youths. Ito reports that many of the college-age subjects used to carry pagers during high school and used them to communicate - now these same people have replaced the pagers with mobiles which allow two-way communication; similarly, the participants in high school often used their mobiles to communicate during class - this has replaced the 'risky' venture of passing paper notes back in forth. I think the fundamental genres may not have changed, but their medium has. These kids are doing exactly the same types of activities kids twenty years ago - but they have adopted the 'best' technologies in order to perform these activities. There is some value added by these technologies (mainly reducing the latency of the convesations and allowing them at a distance); but fundamentally new? I'd say not.