October 26, 2007

Misa Matsuda: "Mobile Communication and Selective Sociality"

Matsuda, Misa. (2005). "Mobile Communication and Selective Sociality." In M. Ito, D. Okabe, & M. Matsuda (Eds.), Personal, portable, pedestrian: Mobile phones in Japanese life (123-142). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

In this essay, Matsuda draws on survey and interview data concerning how Japanese youth and others use keitai (mobile phones). Of particular note, she points out that youth use this technology to help support a "full-time intimate community" of friends. She situates her findings in a discussion of home life, parent-child relations, and the fears vs. realities of how keitai are shifting social relations. She examines how keitai are used for maintaining connections, how address book size does not match calling practices, how people use screening, and how this form of connectivity affects social network structure (drawing on the likes of Fischer and work on homophily). She points out that the tool is used differently depending on social position. For example, the keitai is a "personal phone" for single people, a "mobile phone" for married men, and a "private phone" for married women. While pagers initially supported friend maintenance over long distances, allowing for ongoing relationships with "former friends" after a move, keitai are much more about supporting pre-existing ties: scheduling rendezvous, calling the family, and making appointments are common uses of keitai.

Quotes:

  • p. 123: As Leopolinda Fortunati (2002:51) points out, using the keitai "is to be reachable not by everyone, but only by those with whom we want to communicate—intimate friends or selected others whom we want contact." In theory, the keitai can be used anytime anywhere, but people are actually fostering relationships with those who they choose to contact.
  • p. 126: Even though the Internet can be accessed with the keitai, most users are merely exchanging messages as they did with text pagers. Hence we can say that the keitai Internet is substantially different from that accessed by personal computers; it is an extension of individual ownership and personal uses of a youth mobile communication medium which has transitioned from pagers to keitai.
  • p. 133-134: Most of the utterances were "yeah" or "uh huh" and other such responses or acknowledgements (Kato 1958). Kato concludes that "small groups of people bound together in the intimacy of family or village didn't require those interactions that we now glorify as 'conversations'" (2002: 176).
  • p. 138: On its own, this data would give the impression that there are extremely large numbers of people with whom youths contact through keitai, but many say they do so regularly with approximately 10 people. The number of registered keitai numbers decreases with age, but there is little variation in the numbers of people contacted on a regular basis (Matsuda 2001a). This suggests that youths have large amounts of "superfluous numbers" in their keitai. Though there is the appearance that youth have expanded their circle of acquaintances with the keitai, judged by their communication patterns, they are mostly making frequent contact with a select few. Upon returning home, they make calls and exchange emails with the same friends that they just saw at school. This round-the-clock set of relationships with an exclusive group of friends is what Ichiro Nakajima, Keiichi Himeno and Hiroaki Yoshii (1999) characterize as a "full-time intimate community."
  • p. 139: As soon as class ends, students pull out their keitai and begin to make calls, contacting those friends who are part of their everyday friendship network.
  • p. 147: Beginning with work on Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft (Association/Community), the contrast between flexible interpersonal relationships, which people can enter and leave as they please, and binding relationships, which are often systemized and organized, has been studied by many researchers. For example, Chizuko Ueno (1994) characterizes ketsu-en (kinship), chi-en (community), and sha-en (sodality) as "obligatory relationships" and the flexible and pluralistic interpersonal relationships in which people choose their friends as "sentaku-en (selective relationships)." What is important here is her characterization of sentaku-en as "relationships born from urbanization."
  • p. 148: In this vein, youths' keitai-supported selective interpersonal relationships illustrate an intersection of the theories of Fischer and Matsumoto. It is not so much that the growth of youths' selective interpersonal relationships are a result of keitai ownership or their identity as youth, but rather that growth is the result more generally of an expanded social network, or growth in the number of people with whom contact can be made.

Category: mobile

Posted by zephoria at October 26, 2007 3:21 PM

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