Personal, portable, pedestrian : mobile phones in Japanese life / edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-339) and index.

Discourses of keitai in Japan / Misa Matsuda -- Youth culture and the shaping of Japanese mobile media: personalization and the keitai internet as multimedia / Tomoyuki Okada -- A decade in the development of mobile communications in Japan (1993-2002) / Kenji Kohiyama -- The third-stage paradigm: territory machines from the girls' pager revolution to mobile aesthetics / Kenichi Fujimoto -- Japanese youth and the imagining of keitai / Haruhiro Kato -- Mobile communication and selective sociality / Misa Matsuda -- The mobile-izing Japanese: connecting to the internet by pc and webphone in Yamanashi / Kakuko Miyata [and others] -- Accelerating reflexivity / Ichiyo Habuchi -- Keitai and the intimate stranger / Hidenori Tomita -- Keitai in public transportation / Daisuke Okabe, Mizuko Ito -- The gendered use of keitai in domestic contexts / Shingo Dobashi -- Design of keitai technology and its use among service engineers / Eriko Tamaru, Noki Ueno -- Technosocial situations: emergent structuring of mobile e-mail use / Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe -- Keitai use among Japanese elementary and junior high school students / Yukiko Miyaki -- Uses and possibilities of the keitai camera / Fumitoshi Kato [and others].

Print version record.

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.

English.

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