Comparison with Japan

Happenings in Japan:-

A New Set of Social Rules for a Newly Wireless Society

Mobile media are bringing sweeping changes to how we coordinate, communicate, and share information.
Tokyo in the '80s, telephone cards, pay phones, and urban landmarks were the technologies that coordinated actions on the street.

Now, the keitai (Japanese for mobile phone) has become a social necessity in Japan, particularly among the younger set. According to a survey by the Mobile Communications Research Group in November 2001, 64.6 percent of all Japanese owned a mobile phone. Among twentysomethings this number was 89.6 percent, among those enrolled in college, 97.8 percent, and among high school students, 78.8 percent. The mobile Internet is the most distinctive aspect of Japanese mobile phone use ever since NTT DoCoMo launched the i-mode keitai Internet service in 1999. Youths, again, are the heaviest users of these services, particularly keitai e-mail, where they send text, graphics and photographs between mobile phones.

Out of the micro-level swarm of messages, however, more systematic forms of organization are emerging. A quick Web search will bring up dozens of pages with uploaded Sha-mail photos, ranging from erotic sites to celebrity stalking sites to sites with family photos. For example, the site for the Sha-mail Diary Confederation with 29 writers sharing their diaries of Sha-mail photos. Inspired by Hall's article, Joichi Ito set up a moblog for sending photos from his camera-keitai directly to his blog.