Culture Connect examines how culture has influenced the take-up of mobile media services in Japan, and asks why the situation has played out differently in Australia. Departing from Paul Levinson’s idea that the mobile phone will become an archive of every user’s most important information and memories (the ‘mobile hearth’), this work will examine the culture surrounding the use of the mobile phone, and specifically mobile media services, in Australia and Japan.
Mobile media is a constantly evolving area, and a brief history of its development will be traced. The introduction of SMS will be looked at, and the way in which people have used the technology both historically and in contemporary times will be discussed. The thesis also investigates the introduction of mobile Internet services, along with some of the reasons for their initial failure.
The thesis will then investigate mobile media use in Japan, beginning with an historical overview detailing what is known as the ‘pager phenomenon’, where Japanese teenagers adopted the alphanumeric pager as their own device for mobile communication. The mobile phone technologies of i-mode, location based services and mobile TV will be discussed within the Japanese context, and the very intimate and personalised nature of the mobile phone will be analysed, along with how this plays out in mobile media services offered.
Mobile media use in Australia will then be examined, from the point of view that Australians are enthusiastic users of mobile phones, considering there are more mobile phone subscriptions than wired phone subscriptions, but mobile media services have failed to excite. The failure of mobile media services like Optus Networker, Telstra Mobile Loop and i-mode will be looked at. As the most recent failure, the reasons why i-mode did not achieve its desired success will be looked at closely. Mobile media use in Australia is only beginning to take off now, and the future of the medium in Australia will be looked at, drawing on interviews with experts in the industry.
Finally, a comparison between the cultures of mobile media use in Japan and Australia will be made, to show that despite having access to very similar technologies, users in both countries have come to use their mobile phones for accessing mobile media in very different ways. For Japanese users, their phone is their own personal and private entertainment centre, and as they are accustomed to using media on their mobile phones, the small form factor is not an issue in how they use media, making technology like full television broadcasting over mobile phones likely to succeed in Japan. In Australia, the mobile phone’s role as a media device is still developing, but it is likely to be an intermediary between other media devices like computers and large screen televisions. It will receive content for displaying on these other devices. At the same time, it will be used for creating and sending user-generated content which will take the form of services like mobile blogging and instant messaging.
Culture Connect is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
