I also know that beneficial uses of technologies will not automatically emerge just because people hope they will. Those who wish to have some influence on the outcome must first know what the dangers and opportunities are and how to act on them. Such knowledge does not guarantee that the new tools will be used to create a humane, sustainable world. Without such knowledge, however, we will be ill equipped to influence the world our grandchildren will inhabit.
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Shibuya Epiphany
The telegraph, like the Internet . . . transformed social and business practices, but it could be used only by skilled operators. Its benefits became available to the public at large only when the telegraph evolved into the telephone—initially known as the “speaking telegraph.” The Internet is still in a telegraphic stage of development, in the sense that the complexity and expense of PCs prevent many people from using it.The mobile phone thus promises to do for the Internet what the telephone did for the telegraph: to make it a truly mainstream technology.
Because it used the same wires, the telephone was originally seen as merely a speaking telegraph, but it turned out to be something entirely new. The same mistake is already being repeated with the Internet. Many people expect the mobile Internet to be the same as the wired version, only mobile, but they are wrong . . . . Instead, the mobile Internet, although it is based on the same technology as the fixed-line Internet, will be something different and will be used in new and unexpected ways.
—Tom Standage, “The Internet Untethered”
Thumb Tribes
If you want to experience virtual reality without putting your head in a computer, take the subway to Shibuya station and follow the signs to “Hachiko.” Pause near the statue outside the station. This bronze monument to a faithful dog is one of Tokyo’s favorite meeting places. In the 1920s, Hachiko accompanied Professor Eisaboru Ueno to this station every morning and waited for Ueno’s return. Ueno failed to make his appointment the day he died in 1925, but his pet continued to show up at the station until he died 1 there in 1934. People still hold a festival at the statue every year on the seventh of March.1 Like other meeting places such as the clock in Grand Central Station in New York City, the statue of Hachiko is an informal coordination point for urban populations—a social focus identified by sociologist Thomas Schelling as an essential element of every city’s life.2
Hundreds of people mill around Hachiko. Cliques and flocks assemble and diffuse. Couples and octets coalesce, synchronize, and move on. In many ways, Shibuya station resembles every other Schelling point since the Athenian agora. Unlike gathering places of antiquity, however, some of the people milling around Hachiko are invisibly coordinated by flows of electronically mediated messages.
A growing number of people at Shibuya Crossing now divide their attention among three places at the same time. There’s the physical world where pedestrians are expected to avoid walking into each other. Surrounding the crowd is an artificial but concrete world, the city as the all-enclosing environment of commercial propaganda described more than thirty years ago as The Society of the Spectacle.3 Less garish but no less influential than the neon and video of the twenty-first-century metropolis are the private channels of the texting tribes, a third sphere in which bursts of terse communications link people in real time and physical space.
If you turn your back to Hachiko and look across the street at the right time, you will see yourself displayed on one of three gargantuan television screens that loom over the intersection. The giant high-definition screens are, in virtual reality parlance, “immersive.” That is, when you are at Shibuya Crossing, not only are you perceiving an ever-changing audio-video advertainment, but you are also inside it.
The crosswalk works on the scramble system. Every time the lights turn green, 1,500 people cross from eight directions at once, performing a complex, collective, ad hoc choreography that accomplishes the opposite of flocking; people cooperate with immediate neighbors in order to go in different directions. In addition to negotiating split-second coordination with moving strangers, many in this crowd carry on simultaneous conversations with people located elsewhere. When I revisited this place a year and a half after my first encounter with texting, I paused in the center of the intersection during a dozen scramble cycles in order to taste attunement with the hyper-coordinated throngs.
I knew that every technological regime involves people who invent a new tool, people who manufacture and sell it (and their stockholders, and the politicians those stockholders influence), and finally, people who use the technology in ways often unimagined by inventors, vendors, or regulators. Each of these groups owns a different stake and sees the tool from a different perspective. I started my research by interviewing an anthropologist and then met with one of the strategists responsible for “i-mode,” Japan’s singularly successful wireless Internet service. I also talked with scientists, engineers, marketers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and people on the street.
Two graduate students from Showa Women’s University, Tomoko Kawa-mura and Haruna Kamide, and I were joined on the streets of Tokyo by my friend Justin Hall, a twenty-five-year-old American whose cheery willingness to engage strangers compensated for his rudimentary understanding of the Japanese language. Over a number of days, the four of us directly engaged dozens of keitai (mobile telephone) users in an unscientific but illuminating street survey. We started with fourteen-to-twenty-year-olds and then moved on to college-age youth.
A short walk from Harajuku station, La Forêt is a vertical mall catering to young urbanites. The small public space in front of the La Forêt is the informal nexus of the techno-adept, fashion-saturated, identity-constructing, mobile-texting culture. One of the first interviewees we encountered kept her keitai tucked into the rear pocket of her pants. (I noticed a proliferation of tiny pockets in shirts and pants specifically for keitai in Tokyo.) Her hair pointed in forty directions, spliced into carefully composed anarchy by fluorescent-colored baby hair clips. She wore a bow tie. Fashions had flashed through Harajuku like epidemics for decades before texting accelerated the pace of social networking. Our bow-tied informant said that she exchanged around eighty text messages a day, mostly with her three best girlfriends, sometimes with guys. Like many of her friends, she could compose a message with her thumb without looking at it.
We talked with an eighteen-year-old male in baggy purple pants. His hair was casual but immobile in a way that suggested a dab of gel. He wore a camouflage pattern t-shirt and a New York Yankees cap. He messaged guys in his band, “but mostly, my girlfriend.” He sent and received a few dozen messages each day. Sometimes, he and his friends sent each other ringtone versions of pop music.
Some girls wore school uniforms but decorated their keitai with iridescent stickers and phrases written in nail polish. Brands were prominent on clothing and accoutrements, but often in an altered form; logos and team insignia were mixed together, adorned with stickers and patches, toys, and charms.
Some call Tokyo texters oyayubisoku—“the thumb tribe.” Kyodo News service reported a story in the summer of 2001 that revealed an unpleasant side to e-tribalism: Police arrested five teenage members of “Mad Wing Angels,” a virtual motorcycle gang that met via texting, included members who didn’t own motorcycles, and had never gathered in one place at the same time. The leader had never met the four Tokyo girls she ordered to beat and torture a fifth gang member who asked permission to leave the group in order to study abroad.4 Clearly, the social ripples of texting were getting into rich ethnographic territory. It was my great good fortune to know an ethnographer who had been exploring it from the beginning— Kawamura’s and Kamide’s mentor, my old friend Mizuko Ito.
Anthropologist Mizuko Ito has been observing the ways that Tokyo youth use keitai. Stanford graduate Ito, now an associate professor at Keio University, studies “how identity and place are produced through and within digital media infrastructures.” I had known her for a decade; Ito’s brother, Joichi, was the fi
rst person to show me how to create a Web site, circa 1993, and Ito’s husband, Scott Fisher, had been a NASA researcher I had interviewed in 1990.5 I think of the Ito-Fishers as the Tokyo branch of the tribe that lives in the future.
By the time she and I and Kawamura and Kamide conversed in the dining room of Ito’s Tokyo residence in 2001, Ito had been interviewing Tokyo teenagers—arguably the most technology-adept cultural experimenters on the planet—for two years. Ito believes that mobile phones triggered an intergenerational power shift in Japan because they freed youth from “the tyranny of the landline shared by inquisitive family members, creating a space for private communication and an agency that alters possibilities for social action.”6 In Japan, adding wired telephone lines to homes is expensive, but it is less expensive for teens to have their own personal mobile numbers.
“The space of the home,” Ito noted, “dominated by parents, accommodates their identity as child, but not as friend. It is too small, crowded, and saturated with family interests to be an appropriate place for gathering face to face. The home phone once was a means for parents to monitor and regulate their children’s relationships with their peers.”7 Texting made it possible for young people to conduct conversations that can’t be overheard. Ito observed teens using this new communication freedom to “construct a localized and portable place of intimacy, an open channel of contact with generally three to five others.”8 Ito and Kawamura, her research assistant, had interviewed high school and college students, seeking to understand how “keitai refashions the politics of how we view place and time.”9 Explaining that the life of Tokyo high school students is tightly controlled by family and school, Ito elaborated: “Getting a mobile phone grants teenagers a degree of privacy and right of assembly previously unavailable, which they use to construct a networked alternative space that is available from anywhere they are.”10
Keitai-equipped youth use the parts of the city between their schools and homes as the stage for their alternative social space, staying in touch with friends while traveling from home to school, conducting group communications while shopping, flocking to fast-food restaurants or coffeehouses at fluidly negotiated intervals.
Kawamura and Kamide agreed with Ito that although many Japanese youth have more than one hundred addresses in their keitai’s built-in address book, most send the majority of their messages to a small group of three to five peers. The three researchers also noted that many of these messages are of the intimacy-maintaining “thinking of you” variety. The young women they observed casually use text messages to say “good night,” “good morning,” or even “I’m bored.” Similar research, not yet published at the time Ito reached her conclusions, was uncovering similar changes in family power structures in Scandinavia, a distinctly different culture half a world away from Japan.11
Kawamura documented communications exchanged by a group of thirty who were organizing a party at a karaoke bar. “As the date grew nearer, the frequency of messages increased. But only four people showed up on time at the agreed place,” Kawamura told me. However, dozens of others stayed in touch through voice and text messages while they trickled in. “Kids have become loose about time and place. If you have a phone, you can be late,” added Kawamura. Kamide, the other graduate student, agreed that it is no longer taboo to show up late: “Today’s taboo,” Kamide conjectured, is “to forget your keitai or let your battery die.” I later discovered that this “softening of time” was noted for the same age group in Norway.12 “The opportunity to make decisions on the spot has made young people reluctant to divide their lives into time slots, as older generations are used to doing,” agreed another Norwegian researcher.13
Has the definition of “presence” become uncoupled from physical places and reassigned to a social network that extends beyond any single lo- cation? According to Ito, “As long as people participated in the shared communications of the group, they seemed to be considered by others to be present.”14 In Norway, Rich Ling and Birgette Yttri observed that mobile telephone users in the same age group “were still available to their social network even when participating in another social event.”15
It is commonly accepted among i-mode watchers that widespread youth adoption accelerated the spread of mobile Internet services throughout Japanese society (by spring 2001, 90 percent of Tokyo-area high school students possessed a mobile telephone—a technology diffusion that exceeded the adoption of the PC in Japan in both rate and scope).16 Teenagers shared two key characteristics with the wider market of business people and housewives: Most were not already Internet users through desktop PCs, and most viewed keitai as fashion as well as technology. Our informants liked to download new ringtones or query an i-mode site to find out if the boy they just met was astrologically compatible—but none thought of what they were doing as “using the Internet.”
Although major global manufacturers like Sony take their cues from the young early adopters in Shibuya and sell their own cultural pastiches back to them, the street kids already take the capabilities of smart mob technologies far beyond the safe boundaries provided by popular brands. Dmitri Ragano reported from Shibuya on this trend six months after my last visit there:
As the balance of power falls in favor of the Shibuya kids, the technology companies may be increasingly at their mercy. In Japan, young people are beginning to turn away from sites and applications that are officially endorsed by mobile operators and going underground. One dark and strange example of this trend is an independent site called Zavn.net that has gained a sizeable audience and offline momentum with no promotion. The site features a series of original novels about the Japanese phenomenon of enjo kosai in which some teenage girls in metro areas like Tokyo have affairs with middle-aged salary men in exchange for money. The stories of Zavn.net are written in punchy, card-size chapters that are intended to be read on a cell phone.17
According to Ragano, a café in Shibuya and a film have spun off physical world events based on this underground phenomenon—not entirely what the brand makers planned.
Michael Lewis referred to the “child-centric model of economic development” in Next: The Future Just Happened, in describing how the fastest-growing parts of the otherwise ailing Japanese economy derive from teen-centric products and services, from MP3 players and pocket-sized keitai to i-mode mobile Internet services.18 Although today’s 30 million i-mode subscribers come from every age group, Mari Matsunaga, the creative genius who launched this radical service from a staid engineering company, had Tokyo teenagers in mind. I was advised to meet Takeshi Natsuno, the Internet-seasoned marketing executive Matsunaga had hired to help launch the service.
i-mode Uber Alles
In the fall of 2001, NTT DoCoMo’s regal modernist reception room on the twenty-seventh floor of Tokyo’s Sanno Park Tower felt like the capital of a world, the way dotcom deal making at Buck’s restaurant in Woodside, California, felt in 1999 or the way Sony Headquarters felt in 1989. Silent, marble- floored elevators the size of most companies’ waiting rooms disgorge cohorts of prospective partners, contractors, and subcontractors into an enormous antechamber with panoramic views of Tokyo. In the center of the room, three banks of receptionists in identical fuchsia outfits take names and gesture toward the ranks of low, square, black leather benches where polyglot hordes wait on all four sides of each bench.
I came to Sanno Park Tower in search of clues about why this company was succeeding while so many others were failing. The telecommunications giants of Europe watched their stock prices crash at the same time they owed $100 billion for the third-generation wireless license fees they paid governments in the 1990s. Portable analog telephones were the first generation of mobile technology. Digital telephones that made use of Internet-like services like short text messages were the second generation. The coming “3G” generation, which required the purchase of government-regulated licenses to use specific chunks of radio spectrum, was thought to be the breakthrough that would usher in the era of the mobile I
nternet. Although Sweden and Finland granted licenses in “beauty contests” among competitors, other nations conducted auctions. In anticipation of a wireless Internet business explosion, some European companies had staked unprecedented amounts of capital on securing their rights to a piece of the 3G spectrum. Converting those rights into profits, however, was proving to be thorny.
The first 3G trials of wireless networks fast enough for video data to travel in real time to mobile devices was postponed in Europe as telecom infrastructure industries struggled to leap from terrestrial wired networks to wireless media. The hype about the wireless Internet business was beginning to look as empty as the hype about the dotcom industry. There was one notable exception to the failures of wireless Internet schemes. While telecommunications companies faced radical declines in demand after a decade of expansion, one company attracted 28 million users within two years of launching a totally new kind of service. Each of those users pay an average of U.S.$20 monthly for i-mode services—DoCoMo’s version of wireless Internet. I sat with the other hopefuls on the big square leather benches in Sanno Park Tower while I waited to meet the director of i-mode strategy. DoCoMo had launched the world’s first successful 3G trial three weeks prior to my visit.
Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, DoCoMo’s parent company, like AT&T and other telecommunication companies around the world, used to be a monopoly and has always been driven by engineers and bureaucrats. For most of the twentieth century, NTT sold telephone services, licensed headset technologies, and dreamed of delivering services utterly unlike voice telephony. NTT management did realize that the Internet business would be essentially different from the business that had made NTT the largest telco in the world with more than 200,000 employees.19 When the handset technology and communication network technologies matured to the point where NTT was within sight of launching a wireless Internet service, it was the genius of an NTT executive named Keiichi Enoki to hire someone from outside NTT culture.20 He turned to a woman, a non-engineer who didn’t understand computers and didn’t use the Internet.
Smart Mobs Page 3