Mobile Communication and Asian Modernities

Individualization Process in Europe and Implications for Asian Countries

Leopoldina Fortunati , Udine University

Patrick Law, Polytechnic University of Hong Kong

The recent overwhelming appearance and growth of the capitalist system in Asian countries, especially China, with the strong development of innovation and technology that has come along with it, would impose a series of reflections as to the processes that are today being set in motion. It is worth asking if the development of the capitalist economy in the Far East, but above all of the specific relationship that capital is setting in motion, wage relations, will here also involve that process, already clearly seen by Marx, of the progressive isolation of the individual and hence of the development of his/her individualization (Simmel, 1983). In other words, can there be a modernization without the development of individuality (Harvey 1990)? To what extent can other cultural traditions, such as the Asian ones, deviate, modify, block or activate this process?

The aim of this paper is first of all to examine how the process of individualization has developed in Europe, especially in the modern age (Sennett, 1994); secondly, to understand what configurations and characteristics of this process are structural, that is, intrinsic to the process itself, and which are instead cultural and therefore capable of being re-semanticised by Asian, and in particular Chinese, cultures. If it is true, as many scholars have observed, that today modernization is less and less automatically accompanied by Westernization (Cacciari, 1996), the consequence is that the process of individualisation in Asian countries, and above all, China will hardly be a replica of what has happened in Western countries. There will be extensive negotiation among citizens, social structures and institutions on the one hand, and the logic of capital on the other, which will lead – and this is our hypothesis – to an important creolization of the cultural and social significance of the individualization process (Geertz, 1973; Giddens, 1993). The development of the latter in fact will be made even more difficult in China for the traditional Chinese thought has no room for the concepts of individuality or privacy (Whitman, 1985; Law and Peng, 2004). The so-called "freedom technologies/technologies of freedom" (De Sola Pool, 1988), which have found such a favourable environment for their incubation and diffusion in the Western world, where they have served to unlock individualization (especially the mobile phone), may be domesticated in “other” ways in the Land of the Dragon.

Our paper, after a short review of the existing literature on individualization, will go on to analyse the more crucial economic and social phenomena which have accompanied this process in the West (Europe), then will investigate the implications of individualization for Asian countries, and lastly will proceed to a final discussion of the tendency towards individualization in present-day Asian countries.

Personal Communication Regarding Family Group and Public Sphere : Cultural Differences between China, Japan And France

Chantal de Gournay, France Telecom

Based on empirical observation at homes in each country, including computer, landline and mobile uses, this paper will identify different ways of managing privacy and personal relationships, under family and social control. It will focus on space as a cultural paradigm, related to gender and age status in each society.

SMS in China: A major carrier for the private discourse universe

Zhou He, City University of Hong Kong

As Communism loses its tenets as a genuinely believed ideology and becomes a ritualized facet of a regime that strives to prolong and justify its politically and morally shaky mandate, there have emerged two distinct discourse universes in China. One is the official universe, characterized by vagueness, abstractness, ambiguity and indoctrination, and the other is the private universe, characterized by non-hegemonic expressions ranging from radical nationalism to liberalism, materialism and extreme cynicism. While the official universe occupies all the public space of expression, especially the Party/state-controlled mass media, the private universe survives primarily in the oral sphere. As new communication technologies provide new channels for information dissemination outside government’s conventional control, the private discourse universe extends its boundaries to such platforms as the Internet and SMS messages. This paper examines the SMS function of the telephony as a major carrier of deviant discourse in the following aspects: the development of the cellular phone from an interpersonal communication tool to a quasi mass communication channel; the spread of deviant expressions through it; the making of the deviant discourse through SMS; the government’s control over SMS; and the implications of the role of SMS in the evolution of China’s increasingly plural political undercurrents in various discourse universes.

Sexuality Ideologies and Recipes for Practices in SMS Manuals of Migrant Workers in Southern China

Angel Lin, City University of Hong Kong

The migrant workers in Southern China have made extensive use of mobile text messaging, not only to gain the most updated information about the job market but also to create a totally alternative social space in which conservative sexuality and romance norms and practices can be relaxed and more liberal male-female social relations and interactions can be tried out. However, given constraints on their literacy level (with their limited schooling experiences) they rely a great deal on the SMS manuals which are organized as lists of numbered short message texts placed under different topics (e.g., 'Humorous Jokes', 'True Sentiment Confessions', 'Witty Love Letters', etc.). A textual analysis of these manuals uncovers an extremely wide range of sexuality and romance ideologies which constitute a supermarket of radically different norms and recipes for practices co-existing side by side, with the possible effect of constituting radically contradictory sexuality subjectivities within the same community and the same individual.

Expressing Identity and Sexuality: Comparison between the Use of the Newspaper Media and ICTs by Hong Kong Sex Workers

Garland Liu, Open University of Hong Kong

Sex work, one of the oldest service industries, is thriving in spite of the fact that it is socially and/or legally marginalized (or even criminalized) in many societies. It is regarded by many people as a deviant enterprise either to be tightly controlled or be totally eliminated. As such, those who are involved in the industry would try to conceal their engagements with in the trade to avoid stigmatization and sanctions from society. As a general rule, people involving in the sex industry would like to remain 'in the closet', with one exception, i.e., sex workers who operate in one-woman brothels in Hong Kong. On the one hand, for business reason they have to make themselves known to potential customers and on the other hand many of them have to conceal their engagement with the sex trade to avoid sanctions from society. The traditional printed mode of sex information dissemination has managed to fulfil this requirement of advertising and concealment of personal identity for the Hong Kong sex workers for many years.

Towards the end of the 1990s, the Hong Kong sex service industry has been increasingly making use of information and communications technologies (ICTs), especially the internet to disseminate information to attract potential customers and mobile phones to facilitate communications among those who are involved in the sex trade. This has brought some change to the way sex workers present themselves compared to the days when only the printed media was available. In this paper, we will first concentrate on exploring the similarities and differences in the ways sex workers express their identity and sexuality in the printed media and in the internet and seek to understand the impact that has been made on them and the sex trade as a whole. Second, we will look into the different uses of telephony, including the mobile phone, which help to a certain extent distinguish their personal life from business life and create some degree of control over who and at what time should get access to them.

To gather basic data, the contents of relevant websites identified via the search engines of Goggle and Yahoo as well as those under other relevant local web directories were examined. Also, a survey of local newspapers was made and the analysis was narrowed down to two of them (The Sun and Oriental Daily) which contained the most substantial numbers of advertisement for one-woman brothels under the 'cloak' of 'nursing care' and 'medical treatment'. For data which can help us acquire deeper understanding of the world of sex trade, we also managed to interview relevant individuals such as sex workers and website administrators.

From Personal/Commercial to Communal :Citizen's Media Expression by Keitai as a New Digital "Mingei movement"

Aske DAM

and Kiyoko TORIUMI

, University of Tokyo

Japanese Keitai has mainly developed in two communication spheres: intimate/private fields of conversations, and business/commercial fields of services. The recent third generation technologies, however, have made it not only a telephone but also portable muti-media with such functions as video camera, television, computer, etc. A possibility has emerged that a third communication sphere of the Keitai will develop, a communal and public one. In this inquiry, Dam and Toriumi will overview a contemporary situation of citizen's media expression activities in Japan, and introduce two "critical media practices" intended to develop new communal ways of mobile communication. One is a media literacy program titled "making picture book only by Keitai". Another one is an experimental work, "Keitai bricolage," where they try to redesign Keitai as citizen's tools for marginal arts.

By these examinations, they will explore possibilities and limitations of Keitai as media of citizen's media expressions. Furthermore, they will situate these activities in Japanese historical context, particularly the "Mingei movement" occurred in 1920s, rather than treating them as a whole new trial initiated by the emergence of new information technologies.

Reaching Home by Hand-Phone: Foreign Worker Communities and Mobile Communication in Singapore

Eric C Thompson, National University of Singapore

Mobile phones have been iconic of emergent, affluent middle-class identities throughout Asia. Yet in the first years of the 21st century, mobile phone communication has become much more broadly available and significant in shaping the lives of people across the socioeconomic spectrum. Exemplifying this phenomenon is the role of mobile phones in the social networking practices and cultural identities of foreign workers in Singapore. Domestic and construction workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and Bangladesh number in the hundreds of thousands in Singapore. These migrants face significant structural constraints on their mobility, living patterns, and activities during their often long-term yet permanently temporary residency in Singapore. Terms of their working conditions limit the days or hours that they are free from contractual labor obligations. Most have little choice over where to live – often in an employer's home in the case of domestic workers or temporary onsite shelters for construction workers. In many cases, limited linguistic ability in either English or Chinese (the two lingua franca of Singapore) also constrains their interactions with other residents and citizens of their host nation. Under these conditions, mobile or "hand-phones" play a crucial role for many individuals in building and maintaining a sense of community and connection to others. Through their hand-phones foreign workers in Singapore reach back to their places of origin to maintain a strong connection to "home" while simultaneously reaching out to other migrant co-nationals to create a sense of home-away-from-home within the city-state. The paper examines the commonalities in the experiences of foreign workers of different national backgrounds within Singapore with regard to the central role of mobile communication in their lives, while at the same time highlighting how gender, language, and similar factors shape and differentiate the experiences of each community.

Reconsideration of Media Literacy with Mobile Media

Shin MIZUKOSHI		,	Masaaki ITO		,
Mamiko HAYASHIDA,			University of Tokyo

Recently, there have been a lot of discussions which insist on the necessity of Keitai (Japanese term of mobile phone) media literacy in Japan, due to the occurrence of various accidents related to Keitai. What is the media literacy of Keitai ? It has mostly been treated as normative knowledge that concerns people's manner in using Keitai in public spaces.

In this article, Mizukoshi, Ito, and Hayashida will try to reconsider the concept of mobile media literacy in a more profound way. First, they will overview traditional concepts of media literacy, and then explicate the difference between mass media literacy and mobile media literacy. Second, they will discuss issues such as materiality of mobile media, its relationship with human body, and organization of space by people with Keitai. Third, they will describe their workshop research, "playing typical scenes with Keitai" where they introduce theories of space and kinesiology. Finally, they will point out the importance of exploring the fundamental dimension of media literacy which has mostly been ignored so far.

Talking and Deliberating on the Media:
From Radio to Mobile Phone

Myungkoo Kang, Seoul National University

The purpose of the study is to reflect on people's talking on the media theoretically from radio to mobile phone. The study will attempt to integrate the theory of rational public sphere with the notion of expressive public sphere in explaining talking on the media. While the rational public sphere is a crucial base of deliberative democracy, social trust, and solidarity, it does not guarantee institutionalization of these ideas. Though people's everyday chatting and talking are neither purposeful nor deliberative, these communicative behaviors are foundations of human and social relations.

Theories of communication need to explain how rational and expressive communicative actions are inter-related in everyday lives. The study will look into people's talking on the different media from radio through Internet to mobile phone.

Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Emerging Literature

Jonathan Donner, Columbia University

In 2002, the total number of mobile phones in use worldwide exceeded the number of land-lines. It took a century to accumulate the first billion landlines, but only a decade or so to do the same with mobiles. Current projections suggest that the world will continue to add mobile lines faster than fixed lines; the majority of next one (or two) billion telephones will be mobiles (ITU, 2003). Though the boom has impacted both the developed world and the developing world, a recent ITU report called "Mobile overtakes Fixed" explains:

"the greatest impact of mobile communications on access to communication services – in other words, increasing the number of people who are in reach of a telephone connection of any kind – can be seen in developing countries." (ITU, 2003) Furthermore, "In countries where mobile communications constitute the primary form of access, increased exchange of information on trade or health services is contributing to development goals; in countries where people commonly use both fixed-line and mobile communications, the personalized trait dif the mobile phone are changing social interaction." (ITU, 2003)

The goal of this brief paper is to review those studies that have begun to emerge that look at key issues around mobile use in the developing world. To do so, we introduce a typology by Orlikowski and Iacono (2001), which can help us conceptualize the mobile at different levels – as a tool, as an object to be adopted, and as a system. In the process, the review will highlight some issues for theoretical exploration

How does the significance of the mobile change when it is used in developing-world contexts?
What differences are there between studying the mobile in developing nations, and studying the mobile in economic development?

Theoretical Approach

Orlikowski and Iacono (2001) introduce a typology of conceptualizations of "ICT artifacts" that is easily applicable to mobiles. Their study drew on 188 articles published in the journal "Information Systems Research" between 1990 and 1999, placing the studies into 5 metacategeories¹. Three of these conceptualizations provide sufficient structure for understanding the current state of mobile research in developing nations:

ICT conceptualized as a tool. These studies treat information technology "a relatively straightforward, unchanging, and discrete technical entity with the focus being on the impacts/effects of this independent variable on such outcomes as information processing, productivity, social relations, and labor substitution" (Orlikowski & Iacono, 2001). O&I caution that these studies tend to under-articulate the nature of the technology, focusing instead on what is "affected, altered, or transformed by the tool". (p. 123)

ICT conceptualized via proxy. These studies "share the assumption that the critical aspects of information technology can be captured through some set of surrogate (usually quantitative) measures – such as individual perceptions, diffusion rates, or dollars spent" (Orlikowski & Iacono, 2001). O&I express similar cautions about these studies, questioning whether quantification of these external indicators provides sufficient insight into the properties of the artifact itself.

ICT conceptualized as an ensemble. These studies treat technology "as a socio-technical development project, as a system embedded din a larger social context, as a social structure, and as enmeshed with a network of agents and alliances" (Orlikowski & Iacono, 2001). They argue that this conceptualization, though relatively rare in the sample of articles they examined, is the one most equipped to handle "ubiquitous, emergent, and dynamic technologies" (p. 130) in an interdisciplinary way.

The review casts an interdisciplinary net, including development economics, telecommunications policy, user design, political science/critical analysis, cultural anthropology, sociology, as well as communication research.

¹They found two additional categories: 1) a nominal conceptualization of ICT, where the technology itself was not central to the article, referring to it in passing only, and 2) a “computational” conceptualization, focusing on the “underlying processing capabilities of the technology, expressed through the construction.

References

ITU. (2003). Mobile overtakes fixed: Implications for policy and regulation. Retrieved 29 October, 2004, from http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/ni/mobileovertakes/Resources/Mobileovertakes_Paper.pdf

Orlikowski, W. J., & Iacono, C. S. (2001). Research commentary: Desperately seeking "IT" in IT research - a call to theorizing the IT artifact. Information Systems Research, 12(2), 121.

Modernity and 'Post-Mobile' India:
An Odyssey from the Global to the Glocal

Ravi K. Dhar, Surbhi Dahiya, Jyotsana Attri, GGS Indraprasth University, Delhi

This study was carried out with the objective of analyzing the impact of the cell phone revolution on the transformation of the Indian society and to examine if that could constitute 'modernization'. To this end, the study was divided into four parts. In the first part an attempt was made to understand what constituted modernity for a 'developing' country like India. In the second, an attempt was made to assess the nature of mobile phone penetration in India. In the third, a sample survey of mobile phone use was analyzed for its implications for the transformation of Indian society. In the fourth, the results of the survey were correlated with the parameters of Indian 'modernity'. The study argues that despite all attempts at 'modernization', the Indian society continues to remain poised on the dividing line between the 'traditional' and the 'modern' and that the two cohabit the mental as well as the cultural space of most Indians. The study further revealed that the spawning of cell phone culture in India had taken place across a wide spectrum of social and economic stratifications, making it a people's media. The survey revealed that the pattern of mobile phone use showed that this new media had helped cement the traditional relationships that had come under a strain due to the economic transformation of the country. At the same time, it had created new relationships unique to a globalised scenario. In this respect, the cell phone culture had helped coalesce the global and the local into a glocal cultural landscape. Finally, the study attempted to show how the wildfire spread of cell phones had only contributed to the quintessentially Indian 'brand' of modernity.

Mobile Phone and its impact on Empowerment of Women in Rural Bangladesh

Salahuddin M. Aminuzzaman, University of Dhaka

The introduction of the Village Pay Phone (VPP) -a mobile phone service in rural Bangladesh represents a unique experiment in high-tech communication in a traditional, low-tech setting. Access to telephones had been a rarity in rural Bangladesh before the introduction of the VPP initiated by the Grameen Bank. VPP has been operated by the women beneficiaries of the Grameen Bank with view to enhance their income, empowering them socially as well as to address ‘information poverty’ at the rural level.

The paper is based on the findings of a longitudinal study to assess the efficacy of the Village Phone (VP) scheme in ameliorating the 'information poverty' of the villages that have obtained access to mobile phones.

The findings of the study showed that at the individual level, the VPP has contributed significantly towards income generation, enhanced the status and image of the VPP operators (women beneficiaries of Grameen Bank) both at the family and community levels. Introduction of VPP has also narrowed gaps between cities and villages by enhanced communication among family members and narrowed the inter-personal communication gap between men and women. Economically, it increased business transactions and flow of information. The introduction of a high-tech device in traditional communities has also addressed the ‘information poverty’ significantly.

If You Can't Afford a Room of Your Own, Buy a Mobile Phone

Raul Pertierra, University of the Phillipines

This paper examines notions of interiority, individualism and privacy in relation to mobile phone use. It explores whether cellphones generate new communities of intimate discourse including strangers. The paper also links individualism with globalization processes, involving both mobile phones and the Internet. Examples are drawn from the Philippines but the paper will also address issues raised in the theoretical literature regarding the new communications media. It will look at how the new communications media reproduce cosmopolitanism and locality.

Mobile Middleclass Muslims:
The Portable Aspirations of Indonesia's Finger Top Generation

Bart Barendregt, Leiden University

Quite some recent scholarly work has focused on the emerging Asian middle class, the often locally specific ways in which global goods are consumed, but also how these processes have triggered the aspirations of the less well of (cf. Mazarella 2003). Certain commodities come to stand for desired lifestyles and are hence prominently displayed in the house or worn at the body. Heryanto (1999) has pointed out that a country like Indonesia where the middle class only recently has come to the fore again, the overemphasis on the symbolical dimension of this consumerism is even more striking: Indonesians even use the special verb 'life-styling' in which style tends to become more important than life. In spite (or particularly due to) the Asian recession of the late 1990s the symbolic value of consumption becomes the more important. (Chua 2000:16). This presentation will look into the symbolic value of the cell phone to Indonesia's finger top generation (generasi jempol), as well as highlight some of the localizing practices in which the cell phone has been recently turned into something genuinely Indonesian, becoming part of the lifestyle of a newly evolving Islamic chic.

At the turn of the 21st century Indonesia's Muslim Malay middle class is slowly carving out a public sphere for and of itself. The cell phone and other small mobile media increasingly have become carriers of the notion of what modernity means to this Muslim Malay Middle class and their symbolical value is played out in the realm of youth culture, film and song, or such new literary forms as email novels or what today is called cybersastra (lit. cyber literature). In the popular imagination the cell phone has embodied a sense of euphoria but also certain moral anxieties: foreshadowing the Philippine EDSA cell phone revolution (Rafael 2003; Pertierra et al 2002), Indonesia's 1998's student's protest was already dubbed the Revolution of Small and Mobile Media, signaling the democratic hopes that are often projected on newly introduced media. On the other hand, a more doomy side of the new media is often portrayed in popular ghost stories and gossip magazines, seemingly tempering much of the before mentioned enthusiasm.

Cell phones are today used in functional ways that often lead to the re-interpretation of all sorts of everyday practices. In the Indonesian context one can, however, not overstress the ongoing representational value of mobiles. A large range of Indonesian language cell phone magazines caters to a young urban middle class crowd that has find its latest toy to express their being different, while malls and special campus shops specialize in gadgets or ringtones. While there is as yet no Indonesian cell phone brand to boost nationalistic sentiments cell phone practices more and more are localized in such a way as to provide them with a particular Muslim Malay flavor. This presentation while look into some of these new Mobile Middleclass Muslim practices

The Internet and its Young Users in Hanoi, Vietnam: Approach from Theory to Practice

Bui Hoai Son, Division of International Culture and Information, Vietnam

The Internet, officially introduced in Vietnam in 1997, became a real boom in the early XXI century. The characteristic of Vietnam's Internet market is that most users are young. This technology is still new to many groups and is sometimes seen as a form of "American temptation" or a means to disseminate the American way of life.

Doing research on the effects of the Internet on youth and forecasting its development in Vietnam is significant. Hanoi, the cultural and political centre of Vietnam, where the youth easily absorbs new ideas and technologies, is an ideal place to do a case study.

To know how the Internet affects young users in Hanoi, we considered several viewpoints: 1) the relationship between social context and Internet usage; 2) social capital and Internet usage; 3) differences of Internet usage; and 4) the theory of imitation.

This study suggests that it is necessary for Vietnam to popularise Internet use. Although the government has its own policies and development objectives, it can avoid bureaucratic paralysis by giving priority to the following: providing infrastructure (computers, high speed line), training more information technology (IT) professionals and developing Vietnamese websites, including those that are appropriate for young users. Media can also be used to promote the positive aspects that the Internet brings to society, as well as encourage young users to access helpful websites for their education. The research outcome shows that young users who have learning and communication difficulties in school often end up accessing inappropriate websites. Consequently, we suggest the following solutions: 1) disseminating information in citizen lectures or in class meetings about how the Internet brings benefits and negative influences; 2) bringing these contents into social activities; 3) setting up educational websites for students; 4) having more extra-curricular and leisure activities so that the youth has more chances to communicate face-to-face with each other.

In this paper, I would like to focus only on the Internet and its young users in Hanoi, Vietnam: approach from theory to practice.

Mobiles, Local Connectivity, and Negotiation of Asian Modernities

Harmeet Sawhney, Indiana University

Communications technology has long occupied the minds of development theorists as a vital development tool. However, their thinking has had a decided long-distance bias. The fascination in the 1970s and 1980s with the development potential of satellites, the definitive long-distance technology, is especially revealing of this bias. In general the debate about technology choices tends to get framed as that between one long-distance technology and another, e.g. flexibility of satellites versus the rigidity of terrestrial systems. The possibility of deploying communication technology to enhance local communications is not even given a thought (Samarajiva and Shields 1990). This long-distance bias in technology deployment is reflective of a deep-rooted assumption about the development process that connectivity to the outside world will modernize isolated backward areas. Exposure to information from outside via communications technology is seen as having a psychologically broadening effect that lifts backward peoples from a particularistic mentality to a universalistic one and thereby facilitates modernization. Within this context, the spread of mobile communications in the rural areas in Asia is interesting. While mobile technology allows long-distance communications, it also greatly strengthens local communications both within individual communities and between neighboring ones. Over the last few years there have been many cases reported of mobile technologies facilitating the disruption of local hierarchies (e.g. farmers bypassing the local middleman) and collective action in the form of political protests. This paper, drawing on the literature on cooperative movements, will explore how these bottom-up processes will help rural populations in Asia negotiate their own modernities.

Locating the Mobile Customisation and Gender in Asia-Pacific Region

Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University/University of Melbourne

This paper is based on ongoing research into the role of gender in the customization of mobile phones in the Asia-Pacific region. In this region we can see diverse penetration rates, subject to local cultural and socio-economic nuances. In places of high penetration such as the four tigers – Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong and Seoul – one can see the ubiquity of customising modes as consumers/ uses try to "domestic", "personalise" and familiarise the device into the rhythms of the everyday. Some see customisation – such as cute characters hanging inside and outside the phone – as a "fashion" that will decrease as telecommunication companies focus the objects into niche profiling. To others, the very practice of customisation is an articulation of the consumer as "bricoleur" ("handy person" according to Levi Strauss,1972[1966]; Hebdige, 1979) or "producer" (Wilhelm et al. 2004) integral to the appropriation of any cultural artifact into the logic of the local, micro and everyday.

As the region moves unevenly into 3G mobile technologies, what are some of the distinguishing features? What does the plethora of mobile accessories and content – adorned with cute character customization – say about gendered identities and local vagaries? This paper will consist of sample surveys conducted with users in various case studies in the region to note some of the enduring and transitory modes of contextualising and domesticating mobile technologies. In other words, locating the mobile…

Asian Modernities and the Rethinking of Mobile Phone Culture

Gerard Goggin, University of Queensland

Despite their global spread and influence in many societies, the cultural dimension of mobiles phones has been relatively neglected by theorists. Moreover it appears that concepts used to understand mobile phone culture have been derived from western versions of modernity. Accordingly, my purpose in this paper is two-fold: to offer an account of mobile phone culture; and to draw on work on Asian mobiles and modernities in doing so.

In the first part of the paper, I examine mobile phone culture as it has developed internationally, and look at the key concepts customarily used in popular culture and cultural theory to apprehend it. Secondly, I develop a theory of mobile phone culture drawing upon the 'circuit of culture' approach developed in a study of a different technology of mobility, the Sony Walkman.

In the third part, I review the case of short messaging service (SMS), and consider the different characteristics of SMS adoption and use in different countries — contrasting the enthusiastic takeup of text messaging in the Nordic countries, Australia, or the Philippines, with the case of Hong Kong where text messaging was not (initially) popular. Fourthly, I contrast SMS with two other mobile messaging technologies, Wireless Access Protocol (WAP), developed in Europe and North America, and i-Mode, the Japanese technology central to its'mobile Internet' experience, noting the cultural differences associated with these technologies.

In conclusion, I reflect upon the implications of revisionary Asian recastings of mobiles for emerging and future incarnations of this extraordinary technology.