Leo Kacenjar
Research Methods
Boundaries and Global Approach: Spatiality in Keitai Research
The Keitai offers constant connectivity to alternative social environments and a uniquely personal attachment to virtual, imaginary, and physical realms. The use of these mobile devices constitutes an exclusively Japanese, yet multi-national techno-social phenomenon. It is not surprising that qualitative research on Keitai culture must reflect on connected issues of research boundaries, multi-sited approach, and connotations of globalness in scale. Personal Portable Pedestrian (PPP) addresses Keitai use with praxis that extends beyond traditional notions of research spatiality, while maintaining an appropriate lens on Keitai, as trans-national object.
Many of the articles published in PPP confront the unique multi-spatial reality of Keitai interaction. In addition to the mobile, multi-tasked “Nagara” lifestyle, the effervescent social connectivity of Keitai and the personalization of the object allow for constructed projections of self to occur across space and time. On the way to or from school, a typical youth may be walking her bicycle home, while talking to friends in person, connecting via short message service to friends in other neighborhoods, and emailing her significant other through email. At one moment the youth and her friends exist in many realities with many different personal identities.
While European and American use of mobile technology increasingly mirrors Keitai culture in Japan, the introduction to PPP isolates the Keitai as a unique element of Japanese techno-nationalism. However, the global nature of this phenomenon is further abstracted by the Western hemisphere’s preconceptions and fetishment of Japanese society. The international applicability of Keitai culture is left for the reader to determine, but the research’s global sensibility is felt throughout.
PPP’s research methods, which are frequently made transparent, grapple well with the complex spatiality of Keitai use. Many traditional qualitative research approaches must be deeply reconsidered to maintain effectivity in lieu of Keitai’s multiplicity of sites and vernacular. Most of PPP’s authors take a revised ethnographic approach fused with heavy textual analysis.
A major challenge with conducting ethnographic research on Keitai or any mobile digital technology is coping with the interconnectivity of spaces. This raises a challenge of research boundaries, where to start and stop, but also of site and immersion. Traditional ethnographies have been conducted as immersive, observational experiences, where the researcher assembles systems of social meaning over long periods of time. This places heavy emphasis on choosing a site very carefully, and maintaining observation for an extensive duration. Keitai culture challenges the traditional praxis because sites may geographically change, be multiplicative, virtual, or fleeting.
Christine Hine writes about this issue in Internet Inquiry. To ascertain the most meaningful information from this diversity of site, researchers must act reflexively, being careful not to separate technology from the context of cultural complexity. She writes that engaging with multiple sites is often a must, but that the researcher need always be careful to engage appropriately in each sector. Hine purports that, “Ethnography of the internet [or any digital phenomena] can, then, usefully be about mobility between contexts of production and use, and between online and offline and it can creatively deploy forms of engagement…” (Markham, 11) Many of PPP’s writers address the spatiality of Keitai in just the reflexive, context aware manner Hine suggests.
Misa Matsuda, Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe’s exposure of their research methods specifically reveal a reflexive, multi-sited ethnographic approach. Matsuda’s Discourses of Keitai in Japan begins by contextualizing the book’s Keitai research methodology as both exploring the connection of technology production and use, but also public and personal spaces/connectivity. Okabe and Ito’s writings, Keitai in Public Transportation and Technosocial Situations deal specifically with Keitai’s complexity of space. The prior reports ethnographic study on public transportation, a fluctuating space with complex social rules, in combination with user based diary studies. The latter, conducted Keitai interviews and observations in the college setting of Fujisawa Campus, near Tokyo, but also refers to the same diary process as the prior. Both purport that the personal Keitai usage diaries allow for exploration of “settings being constructed by mobile phone communications themselves”. (Ito, 258) The research methods behind these writings clearly transcend site immersion in the traditional sense, employing just the sort of transparency and reflexivity of which Hine prescribes.
Another spatial, methodology challenge revealed by Keitai culture is the globalness of research issue. The meaningfulness of research in lieu of globalness is discussed in length by Annette Markham’s writing in Internet Inquiry. She asserts that true global scope and applicability is probably impossible. She recommends that researchers operationalize their terms, contextualize themselves within their research, and attempt “global sensibility”. The goal is not work that is universally applicable, but work contextualized by reflexivity and socio-historical placement that becomes empathically connectable across vast audiences.
PPP addresses the globalness of Keitai culture throughout the book, but Mizuko Ito’s Introduction specifically grounds the authors’ collective approach. She writes that there are many texts comparing mobile cultures internationally, and that Japan’s unique technosocial sphere is often left out. She explains the work and research of PPP is exclusively dealing with Keitai culture as a techno-nationalist feature of Japanese society. Keitai culture is further contextualized as a product of Japanese industrial expansion, but also as the result of continuous interplay between social and technical dynamics. This approach offers easy access to Keitai culture, within its unique setting. It advocates the phenomenon as unique, yet personally applicable to non-Japanese.
The research approach taken my PPP extends traditional research practices to provide the most utility in analyzing mobile technologies. The transparency and reflexivity of the research makes the book an archetype for dealing with the nascent requirement of multi-spatial ethnography. PPP’s attention to its scale in lieu of globalness works to make universally accessible this uniquely Japanese techno-culture.
Works Cited
Ito, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe, Misa Matsuda eds. Personal Portable Pedestrian. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Markham, Annette N., Nancy K. Baym eds. Internet Inquiry. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc., 2009.
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