Technosocial situations: Emergent structurings of mobile email use

  • Ito M
  • Okabe D
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Abstract

The integration of mobile phones into social life is still in its infancy in most parts of the world, triggering a set of sociocultural convulsions as institutions, people, and places adapt to and regulate its use. As is typical with technologies that alter patterns of social life, the keitai has been subjected to an onslaught of criticism for the ways in which it disrupts existing norms of propriety and social boundaries (Matsuda Introduction, this volume). While celebrated as a technology that liberates users from the constraints of place and time, it has equally been reviled as a technology that disrupts the integrity of places and face-to-face social encounters. Sadie Plant (2002: 30) writes that "even a silent mobile can make its presence felt as though it were an addition to a social group, and . . . many people feel that just the knowledge that a call might intervene tends to divert attention from those present at the time.” The case of heavy keitai email users in urban Japan provides one window into the new kinds of social situations (taking a chapter from Goffman, 1963), or more precisely, technosocial situations (adding a chapter from technology studies) emerging with the advent of widespread keitai use. This chapter reports on an ethnographic study of keitai users in the greater Tokyo area, examining new social practices in keitai email communication, and how they are constituting technosocial situations that alter definitions of co-presence and the experience of urban space. The central argument is that keitai participate in the construction of social order as much as they participate in its destabilization. After first presenting the methodological and theoretical framework for this study, this chapter presents three technosocial situations enabled by keitai email: keitai text chat, ambient virtual co-presence, and the augmented flesh meet.ii

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APA

Ito, M., & Okabe, D. (2005). Technosocial situations: Emergent structurings of mobile email use. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, 20(6), 257–273.

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