Submitted by Industry Comment on Thu, 30 Mar 2006 13:23

Luca Pianigiani interviews Howard Rheingold and Mizuko Ito about the mobile communication revolution taking place especially in Japan.

Some cultural events need a deep analysis or we risk to perceive just their superficial lines. As in a caricature, we take the most evident details and emphasize them, without reaching its inner heart. If we want to go beyond these limits, we need to dedicate a lot of time to these events, or, on the other hand, ask to the people that invested their time to study and find the answers to those questions.

We chose this way to talk about one of the most important phenomenon that connect digital technologies and Japan: we're talking about the mobile phone, the "keitai" as Japanese people call it (and which also means "something very personal to take with you").

We examined our library and found two books that dedicated a particular attention to the universe of the keitai: "Smart mobs" by Howard Rheingold and "Personal, portable, pedestrian - Mobile phones in Japanese life" by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda. These books helped us in understanding the phenomenon, but we thought that this article would have been better if we wrote it with them, the gurus. So we interviewed Howard Rheingold and Mizuko "Mimi" Ito and discussed together about the main features of the revolution of the mobile communication, expecially in Japan.

HOWARD RHEINGOLD

The mobile phone has become (expecially in Japan) the center of many people life, expecially between the young ones. Keitai succedeed in arriving where the computer wanted to (but still hasn't). The cause of this success is in the dimension (a mobile can stay in a pocket, so it can go anywhere with us, while a computer is way bigger) or in the use we make of it, which is really personal (while a computer is often shared with family members or colleagues)?

The Keitai IS a computer. Every mobile device in the world, ten years from now, will be a computer more powerful than the one you have on your desktop. Why? Because it is very expensive to build a chip fabricating plant and turn out the first chip, and very inexpensive to turn out the next trillion chips. The chips are just silicon and knowledge, so once you sell today's most powerful chips at a high price, it makes sense to sell even more of them at a much lower price, giving people new ways to use the chips, now that they can afford them.

The difference in the way we use desktop computers and the more intimate devices in our hands and pockets is more important, and yes, it is a personal device -- an intimate device. However, because it is linked to the Internet, and because it contains a computer, the mobile device that is now owned by more than 2 billion people worldwide has the potential to evolve very quickly. Those people who tried the 64K green-on-green-screen PCs of 1980 would have had a hard time visualizing PhotoShop, and Google was unimaginable when the Internet was text only on a black and white screen in 1990. Tomorrow's device won't be the PC as we know it, the mobile phone as we know it, or the Internet as we know it -- but an unexpected hybrid with properties of its own. Smart Mobs was about the property of the new medium that first became obvious -- the ability to organize collective action on new scales, at new paces, in places where it couldn't be organized before.

The mobile phone opens a world of communication which is wider than the physical world surrounding us. We can play, flirt with people very far from us (and that may be even unknown). It lets us arrive near many people, while remaining far away from them. Is this one of the success keys of mobile phones in Japan which looks (at least seen from the outside) like having a culture between shyness and transgression?

Don't obsess on Japan. Yes, teenage girls in Harajuko and DoCoMo's designers and marketers were very successful in creating a new cultural regime around mobile phones, but so did people (and in many places, they started with teenage girls) in Brazil and Italy, Pakistan and Sweden, Estonia and Indonesia, Philippines and China. Many new social forms that are peculiar to a place are amplified by new technical capabilities, and new social possibilities arise that are very similar across cultures. Communication media have always enlarged our ability to transmit knowledge and communication across time and space, from the alphabet through the printing press to the telephone.

The mobile has (maybe) opened the first economic business model based on teenagers: while it is used by everybody, its power is in the services successful between the teenagers (ringtones, music, images, etc). Now we're entering the 3G era, made of contents and services that are apparently dedicated to a wider and adult audience, such as movies, songs, etc. How do teenagers live this new technological era? Are they attracted by it or don't they care because too different from their digital life?

Keep in mind that the original operators who enabled SMS, the killer app for teens and mobile phones, had NO IDEA that it would either be popular with youth or would be a revenue generator. The engineers build the SMS specification into the GSM standard, When young people got their hands on a medium that enabled them -- for the first time! -- to communicate directly with their peers without parents or teachers overhearing, they started using it. The ability to send a few words to a friend, instead of initiating a phone call, became both economically and socially attractive to others. But keep in mind as well that the whole 3G model was created by the same operators who formerly had no clue that people would use SMS for social communication. The PC, the Internet, SMS, and DoCoMo were all successful because the users, not the manufacturer or operator, invented uses for the technology. Handset manufacturers have been slow to catch on, as well -- isn't it weird that the first millions of cameraphones were sold without a single-click mechanism for sending pictures to your online gallery?

You can be sure that the most important applications of the next generation of mobile culture will be those that are adopted or appropriated by kids on the streets of Shanghai or Milan or Rio, not those that are invented through focus groups in skyscrapers.

The mobile phone is becoming more and more like an aerial (satellite) that lets us communicate with other people, but also within a community interested in some kind of information (texts, images, videos). While these communities (smart mobs) are growing, there's also a wider scenery of global and real-time information that competes with traditional media, maybe even with a stronger power than the Internet (because there are nets of people that share ideals and life philosophy and that communicate with a mobile phone which is faster and more global than a computer). How will the media react? On the Internet they try to create something similar to blogs, but with the mobile phones they just try to make money with low value news programs. Will they change?

Traditional broadcast media have lost their monopoly on information. People no longer have a few newspapers and radio/tv channels to choose from, but hundreds of t housands of sources -- and social networks to spread information that was once broadcast through carefully crafted advertising campaigns. And mass media always seem to see a future that is much like the past -- TV as we knew it, but viewed on your telephone screen. If that is how the future really turns out, it will be the first time that a medium like a telephone, PC, Internet, SMS, Minitel was used for the purposes its designers intended.

Is the mobile mail the evolution of sms? The impression is that the two models of writing are very different, do you agree? Do you think that the sms-generation will go on using sms and that the mobile mail will be (is) used by people for their job? What's happening in Japan?

Social and business media will continue to have separate evolutionary paths, I suspect. What's happening Japan -- and elsewhere -- are small intimate networks who exchange a photstream as well as a stream of text messages throughout the day, more to stay in touch and maintain a shared perception of experiencing time from different places than to communicate in the traditional sense.

MIZUKO ITO

The term "pedestrian" plans on both the meaning of "while walking" as well as the meaning of "ordinary and everyday." You are certainly right that the mobile phone gets used in many forms of transportation as well as in stationary locations, but part of what our research suggests is that there are aspects of Japanese mobile phone use that are somewhat distinctive and have been optimized for pedestrian contexts where people are moving between public transportation and walking. The dominance of text messaging over voice in Japan is keyed to this more pedestrian modality, in contrast to voice communication which is more appropriate for the car or other private settings like the office or home. Text messaging is an ideal form of communication for moving about crowded and noisy urban centers, in the interstices of engaging in other activities, and in trains, buses and restaurants where we don't feel that voice communication is appropriate. The second meaning of pedestrian is directed towards the sense that mobile phones have become part of the taken for granted background of everyday life in Japan and is no longer considered a new or disruptive technology.

In your book you say that taking the social use evolution of mobile phones as a "template" for other countries might be a mistake. Do you think that mobile technology won't make different cultures more near to each other? I mean... won't the "old" Europe and the USA become more Japanese using mobile phones more and in a more intimate way? If not, what are the different trends?

I think that there is a certain amount of convergence that will happen between high tech contexts like Europe, the US, and South Korea as adoption continues and as phones start becoming more like computers. For example, in the US, with the spread of devices like the Blackberry, Treo, and Sidekick more and more people are turning to text messaging even though it was slow to take off originally. On the other hand, there are likely to be resilient differences. Japan will probably continue to have a larger population that relies primarily on a handheld computer and mobile text, and in places which have had earlier adoption of PC Internet, where the handheld will be a secondary portal to the network, and there will likely be a greater reliance on PC origin modalities like instant messaging. The historical trajectory of adoption, differences in cultural norms, as well as different urban and transport infrastructures will continue to produce differences in use even as technology capabilities become more evenly distributed.

But the more significant and resilient difference will be between these high tech contexts and developing contexts, where the mobile phone is not only the first informational device for many people, but the first telephone. While we are only just beginning to see research on adoption is contexts like India, China, and Africa, it is clear that the patterns of adoption and use are quite different and are likely to remain different for some time.

The average mobile phone user age is getting younger, you say that in your book. Which is generally the age of the first mobile? Do you think it will decrease again, in Japan and in the world, in the future? Do you think it's caused by parents' sense of insecurity or the deside to let them "free" without loosing contact even while far from each other? Do you think that new "only for children" mobile phones will be created?

Until recently, entering high school was generally the time when you got your first mobile. Nowadays it is becoming more and more common for middle and even elementary school kids to have them. I think it will continue to become more pervasive among younger ages, though it is teenagers who will probably continue to be the heaviest users. Generally, the research shows that parents buy younger children mobiles because of the perception of risk, but of course they get used for social uses. There are already mobiles targeted to children that are specially designed to be easier to use, to be able to get locational information, or to have a limited number of numbers that they can call. But they haven't been terribly popular at least so far.

Why the i-Mode system hasn't reached the same success all around the world? (In Italy it's offered by a carrier, but it never received a big interest...)

In Japan, the reason why i-Mode and the mobile Internet was adopted so widely, at least initially, was because it solved some of the problems of text messaging between different types of handsets and different providers. Unlike in Europe. short text messages could not be sent between all different handset and provider types, but with the mobile Internet, you had an option that was cross platform. Once people decide to subscribe, they move onto to different uses like the web, but text messaging was the driver of adoption and was worth the small additional subscription fee.

This article was writtten by di Luca Pianigiani
www.jumper.it

If you enjoy the interviews, we suggest you to check Howard Rheingold's and Mimi Ito's websites, and to buy and read these interesting books they wrote:

Smart Mobs: the next social revolution
by Howard Rheingold

Personal, portable, pedestrian - Mobile phones in Japanese life
by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda.

This article was first published in the February issue of Italian magazine "Digital Life Style".