Luarnet

Cultura keitai

March 30, 2006 on 5:43 pm | En Análisis |

KEITAI: TALKING TO THE GURUS. Interesante entrevista con Howard Rheingold y Mizuko Ito sobre el teléfono móvil en Japón (conocido como keitai). Howard Rheingold señala los aspectos más sociales, destacando que los usos más interesantes de esos dispositivos los inventan los propios usuarios cuando los adaptan a sus necesides. Por ejemplo, el SMS no se diseñó pensando que sería usado por los jóvenes para comunicarse:

Keep in mind that the original operators who enabled SMS, the killer app for teens and mobile phones, had NO IDEA that it would either be popular with youth or would be a revenue generator. The engineers build the SMS specification into the GSM standard, When young people got their hands on a medium that enabled them — for the first time! — to communicate directly with their peers without parents or teachers overhearing, they started using it. The ability to send a few words to a friend, instead of initiating a phone call, became both economically and socially attractive to others. But keep in mind as well that the whole 3G model was created by the same operators who formerly had no clue that people would use SMS for social communication. The PC, the Internet, SMS, and DoCoMo were all successful because the users, not the manufacturer or operator, invented uses for the technology. Handset manufacturers have been slow to catch on, as well — isn’t it weird that the first millions of cameraphones were sold without a single-click mechanism for sending pictures to your online gallery?

You can be sure that the most important applications of the next generation of mobile culture will be those that are adopted or appropriated by kids on the streets of Shanghai or Milan or Rio, not those that are invented through focus groups in skyscrapers.

Mizuko Ito se centra más en usos concretos y en los contextos de la utilización de móviles. Sobre la edad para el primero móvil comenta:

Until recently, entering high school was generally the time when you got your first mobile. Nowadays it is becoming more and more common for middle and even elementary school kids to have them. I think it will continue to become more pervasive among younger ages, though it is teenagers who will probably continue to be the heaviest users. Generally, the research shows that parents buy younger children mobiles because of the perception of risk, but of course they get used for social uses. There are already mobiles targeted to children that are specially designed to be easier to use, to be able to get locational information, or to have a limited number of numbers that they can call. But they haven’t been terribly popular at least so far.