I’m turning Japanese I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so…

In 2002, I was a clueless high school senior: Fairfield U-bound, bright-eyed and eager…but yet again, clueless. I got my first cell phone when I was 16 because my mom didn’t want me driving around without one for safety reasons. Though my cell phone turned out to help me more socially than on the side of the road, I still didn’t even have an idea as to what text messaging was or how to do it.

Ok, so maybe I can’t totally blame my young, naive self. I’ll just blame America for its knack of always being about 5-8 years behind Japan and Europe in the world of technology. Yeah…let’s do that…

One of this week’s readings was the first chapter from H. Rheingold’s book “Street Mobs”. The chapter entitled “Shibuya Epiphany” exemplified the sheer coolness factor of underground Japanese technology and culture with regards to teenagers’ use of “keitai”, or in English, mobile telephones. As always, the year of publication is important, as “Street Mobs” was published in 2002. In 2002, teenagers in Japan were using mobile phones to create a whole online SMS community, utilizing their mobile phones primarily for texting purposes, yet not limiting themselves to other online functions as well.

Granted, Rheingold does provide much proof as to why this sort of virtual socialization occurred in Japan at the time. Japanese teens don’t have large, private bedrooms, nor do they own their own cars. They don’t usually socialize in public much, and land-line phone use, at the time, was more expensive than keitai. Parents and school are also much more strict on teen individuals in Japan. This lack of Americanized freedom left a social void to fill and keitai usage was the perfect answer. Teens could text their friends all day, every day and keep in touch while they were on the go, especially in large cities. As quoted in Rheingold’s chapter, Pasi Maenpaa and Timo Kopomaa wrote in their own findings that: “The mobile phone creates its own user-culture, which in turn produces new urban culture and new ways of life.” By 2001, about 90% of Japanese teens had mobile phones, which grew steadily and more rapidly than even the PC in Japan. A fact I found astounding was that even though the teens were logged onto NTT/DoCoMo’s i-mode system and sending messages to friends, most of them hardly even thought of what they were doing as “using the internet”. This fact shows how submersed they were in the singular culture of keitai as “cell phones” and only cell phones.

As I think back to 2001, I don’t think even 25% of teens in my high school had a cell phone. Big difference.

Texting became a large part of my life about halfway through my college career…2004. Even then, texting was far from being my primary form of socialization. Americans were always lucky to be able to have many different options in anything and everything we do. PCs dominated our society starting in the 90s, and with AOL’s creation of the Instant Message, we were very quick to pick up online communication. ICQ and MSN were hot on their tracks for battle of the IM world, only further aiding Americans in our digital communication. We had cell phones, and also landlines which weren’t as expensive as they were overseas. Culturally speaking, we weren’t as dependent on only 1 form of communication as Japanese teens were with the usage of SMS and the social freedoms it allotted.

If my generation was polled today, I’m sure texting usage would seem to have skyrocketed compared to our usage from 2001-02. As previously discussed in class and in blog comments, our class alone has shown extreme usage of texting as communication. I’ve provided the example of hating to talk on the phone during the day to anyone and everyone (there are some people I will avoid phone calls from, only to text them later to see what they wanted because honestly, they talk too much).

Maybe the fun Vapors’ lyric that stands as the title of this blog is a little tongue-in-cheek, but regardless, it is extremely interesting how ahead of the curve Japan was for this technology and how the culture of its teens facilitated the growth and emergence of keitai, i-mode, and wi-fi mobile phone connections. With the emergence of technology like the iPhone, it’s inevitable that in a few years, we’ll all be solely reliable on our mobile phones.  And we’ll all be “turning Japanese”…at least a little bit.