Socio-cultural Aspects of Mobile
Communication Technologies in Asia
and the Pacific: a Discussion of the
Recent Literature
Mark McLelland
David Gauntlett, in his foreword to Japanese Cybercultures, notes the tendency in the
anglophone West to ‘assume that people in other countries, using other languages, are
probably doing things with Internet technology that are pretty similar to those
applications we are familiar with’ (Gauntlett, 2003, p. xii; emphasis in the original).
However, as that collection goes on to make clear, particularly regarding mobile
Internet applications, this is not always the case.
As a researcher with a background in Japanese studies, in an attempt to help
undergraduate students think critically about the interrelationship between society,
culture and (new) technologies, I try to encourage them to consider that technologies
have a history and that the meanings underlying their deployment are highly culture
specific. Until recently the (now ubiquitous and quotidian) mobile phone was a
helpful example to use. However, this particular technological innovation is becoming
increasingly difficult to debate in class, since few students can remember a time before
mobile phones and not one grew up in a household (as I did) where the landline
telephone was a seldom-used late arrival. (My mother first rented one solely for
‘emergencies’, of which we thankfully had precious few. Accordingly, that original
phone set lasted my family for 20 years.)
My students look at me with blank expressions when I point out that at the end of
the nineteenth century, for instance, the telephone was regarded by people in ‘society’
as a proletarian device, to be used by servants to telephone orders to florists and
department stores; or that Proust seldom used it (preferring along with other educated
people to communicate via letter). Indeed, in In Search of Lost Time, although the
ISSN 1030-4312 (print)/ISSN 1469-3666 (online)/07/020267-11 q 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304310701269099
Mark McLelland is a lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Science, Media and Communications at the
University of Wollongong. He is the co-editor of Japanese Cybercultures (Routledge, 2003) and Internationalizing
Internet Studies (Routledge, in press). Correspondence to: Mark McLelland, School of Social Sciences, Media and
Communication, Arts Faculty, University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia. Email: markmc@uow.edu.au
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Vol. 21, No. 2, June 2007, pp. 267–277

narrator occasionally uses the telephone to call up the theatre and listen to a live
performance of an opera or a play (a now forgotten service offered to early
subscribers), it would never have occurred to him to have a personal conversation via
such an uncouth medium. (Just imagine Marcel thinking ‘I’ll give Albertine a ring and
see what’s she’s up to’.) Flash forward to today’s permanently wired ‘socialite’ to
understand how our definitions of ‘society’ and the modes of communication
considered appropriate between its members have changed. This example, as well as
others from Proust, including his astonishment at the time/space compression
brought about by new transport mechanisms such as the railroad and the automobile,
is useful in underlining the mutually constitutive relationships that exist between ‘the
everyday consciousness of ordinary people’ and the technologies that surround them
(see Berger et al., 1973).
I also try to get my students to think about the particularities of different
technologies, how they signify in different geographical locations and among different
social groups, through introducing case studies from other societies in our region.
The mobile phone is one gadget that always catches their attention. However, despite
some new and important work that has recently been published about Japanese mobile
communications, we are still awaiting a good general overview of mobile
communications (and other related ‘new media’) in the Asia-Pacific region that
does not constantly refer the reader back to the primacy of European or North
American models. Likewise there is no overview that attempts to theorize regional
influences and flows such as the immense impact that Japanese and Korean
technologies have had on the Chinese market as well as the developing markets of
Southeast Asia.
Why is this so? Castells et al. (2004), in The Mobile Communication Society: a Cross-
cultural Analysis of Available Evidence on the Social Uses of Wireless Communication
Technology, the broadest comparative survey of mobile communications media so far
available, notes the many difficulties involved in producing a useful overview of new
mobile technologies on a global scale. The variety of languages in which mobile
communication takes place and in which research is undertaken is obviously
formidable, but even more so is the pace at which the development and spread of these
devices is taking place; it is almost impossible to keep up. Indeed, as Castells et al.
point out, although it is clear to researchers that the uptake of these technologies will
have profound and diverse effects in different regions, ‘which kind of effects, under
which conditions, for whom and for what is an open question’ (Castells et al., 2004,
p. 2). These are obviously complex and nuanced issues that require detailed field work
and case studies—still sadly lacking for the majority of Asian societies (with the
notable exception of Ito et al.’s excellent collection on Japan, to be discussed in more
detail below).
Given the expensive and time-consuming nature of such research, there is a
tendency for researchers to offer data about the penetration rate of new technologies
and the demographics of their use as well as descriptions of the technologies
themselves and relevant business and government policies. However, as Castells et al.
268 M. McLelland