An earlier draft of the paper, with Daisuke Okabe, that has appeared in Personal Portable Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. [pdf]
Posted by Mizuko Ito at February 27, 2003 2:59 PM
Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software
Mizuko Ito.
"In a sophisticated and subtle analysis of software for children, the author explores the complex interplay among historical forces, parental ideals, children's desires, the consumer marketplace, and the Zeitgeist."
--Howard Gardner
Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media
Mizuko Ito, et al.
"This is a beautifully written and extraordinarily rich account of perhaps the most important challenge cyberspace gives us: understanding how it is changing out kids and how it might change our understanding of literacy."
--Lawrence Lessig
Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life
Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda Eds.
"This is not just about a technology or the way it is used in one country. It's about understanding one of the most important ways that twenty-first century lives will differ from those of the twentieth century."
--Howard Rheingold
Comments
Hi Mizuko,
Thankyou for posting this work online and I am reading with great interest.What would your comment be to the proposition that young people don't have a greater interest in technology than as has been the case previously(which has always been high as early adopters,given opportunity),it's just that the technology has changed so that it is serving the needs of communication , entertainment, and information gathering so profoundly better than ever before.
Look forward to your thoughts and thanks again.
Jim
Jim, sorry for the slow response on this. I somehow missed that your comment had been posted. I think you are right that the appeal is not technology per se, but is how the technology is embedded in the broader ecology of communication and entertainment. The mobile phone is an interesting case because it confounds the traditional logic that adolescent geek-boys drive technology adoption and was driven forward by teenage girls who found that the new technology fit their social and cultural ecology
do you have a preferred citation for this draft? (while i'm at it, do you have preferred citations for the 4S and the Front Stage/Back Stage papers?)
I missed this comment, sorry. The citation for this paper should be: Ito, Mizuko and Daisuke Okabe. 2005. "Technosocial Situations: Emergent Stucturings of Mobile Email Use." In Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda Eds., Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Cambridge: MIT Press. I don't have a final citation for the Front Stage Back Stage paper yet.