My sister Mimi in Japan Media Review on the social rules of wireless society.
So this is my sister. My younger sister. (Many people think she’s older, because she’s smarter than me.) She chose an academic career where I dropped out of college twice and because an entrepreneur. Our paths went in wildly different directions, but has recently begun to converge as I have begun to dabble in amature academism and her research focuses on the technology and the social issues surrounding the stuff I’m interested in.
Recently she wrote the following article for Japan Media Review. Last night I heard that she had come to give a talk at Stanford about this as well. (She never tells me these things…)
She quotes Howard and Justin. She talks about the mobile phone culture from the perspective of an anthropologist who has been studying the cultural aspects of mobile media for a long time. Lots of cool observations.
Mizuko ItoA New Set of Social Rules for a Newly Wireless Society
Mobile media are bringing sweeping changes to how we coordinate, communicate, and share information.
[…]
Just as Weblogs are distributing journalistic authority on the Internet, mobile media further de-centers information exchange by channeling it through networks that are persistently available to the mobile many.
I recently talked to one of the vendors involved in i-mode and they told me that Japanese girls have around $300 dollars of disposable income a month. $100 goes to food, $100 goes to clothes and $100 goes to their cell phone. The target average revenue per user (ARPU) for i-mode is around 7000 yen ($50). It’s amazing…
[Joi Ito’s Web]