Ito, Mimi. 2003. “Mobiles and the Appropriation of Place.” Receiver 8: Mobile environment.

An article for Vodafone's Receiver magazine on mobile phones and place.

Mobile phones are transforming the experience of place and co-presence for a wireless generation of Japanese youth. In the past, physical co-presence generally defined who one was socially and interactionally accountable to at any given time, interrupted occasionally by a telephone call or a beeping pager. Now that mobile phones have become a norm for youths in Japan as elsewhere, distant others are always socially co-present, and place – where you locate yourself – has become a hybrid relation between physical and wirelessly co-present context. My research group at Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus has been conducting ethnographic research on mobile phone use, detailing how, when and where phones get used. We see mobile phones as "somewhere, someplace" technologies that are intimately tied to the experience of particular settings and places.