Mobile Email: Solutions For A Lonely Person
from the why-the-Japanese-use-mobile-email dept
For a while, it was popular to look to wireless internet adoption in Japan to get an idea of what it would be like in the US. Some people thought it was a great model to study, while others felt that cultural differences made it difficult to translate success from there over to the US. IDG has a column written by a Japanese writer trying to explain why text messaging between mobile phones is so popular in Japan. The summary (as far as I can tell) is that it's an easier way for shy people to communicate and to waste time. The best quote in the article: "Before the invention of the wireless Internet, people on a train must've been bored to death, that's why they needed to do things like, reading books." Throughout the article, though, you can certainly see the cultural issues in Japan that has made text messaging so popular, and it's unclear if the same factors will have an impact in the US. A lot of the second half of the article talks about lonely people making connections with other lonely people using their mobile phones. In the US, I think this is already being done over the regular internet, so I doubt that particular factor will have much influence on wireless internet adoption. This doesn't mean, of course, that the wireless internet won't catch on here, but Japan might not be the perfect model to study.
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Hmmmm...
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I just can't figure out why people would want to stay in this "connected" of there own free will.
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cultural differences (or not)
I've never understood why txting is so big in the UK, but the USA doesn't seem to have clicked into it in the same way (if we're considering 'cultural issues' then I'd see UK/USA being closer than UK/Japan).
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Re: cultural differences (or not)
Right. I'm not saying that the only reason texting will catch on is the reason it's caught on in Japan. I was just saying looking at why it's caught on in Japan probably won't be as useful for trying to figure out why it hasn't caught on in the US.
However, maybe it makes more sense to look at why texting has caught on in the UK, since (as you pointed out) the cultural issues are much closer.
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Re: cultural differences (or not)
If I have a Sprint phone, and my friend has a Verizon phone, it takes a certain technical inclination to know that you can bridge the gap by going thru your friends phone via its email address equiv. Not a condusive atmosphere.
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