HYPERCORTEX

Personal, Portable, Pedestrian
: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life

Mizuko Ito
Daisuke Okabe
Misa Matsuda

The MIT Press
2005

Available on Amazon.com



[Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life] is out, at last...! I was waiting for the publication, so I ordered this book as soon as I heard this news. You can see the contents and even can download the introduction HERE.

The title of the book is very familiar for me. Mizuko Ito presented her paper, "Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Lessons from Japanese Mobile Phone Use", at International Conference on "Mobile Communications and Social Change" held in Seoul last year. I read her article several times, even summurized and translated it for self-study and sharing with colleagues. The main research field was Japan, but her findings can applied to the case of Korea. I mean, I could understand the experience of myself related to historical/technological/cultural genealogy when I read her article. (I used some pagers from my middle school days, and I bought a mobile phone when I graduated high school.) She conducted interviews/participant observation carefully as an anthropologist, so the readers can learn much things both on theoretical aspect and on methodological aspect.

I think she will visit Seoul again for her project with Art Center Nabi. I hope I can meet her again, moreover, get her book autographed. ;)