The LA Times uses the announcement of the iPhone as an opportunity to talk about how cell phones are integrated into everyday life in Japan.
Keitai form a cyber social network in a highly mobile society. To wait for a light on a Tokyo street corner or to ride a train is to see crowds of people with their heads down, thumbs pumping as they send photos, write text messages or play online games on their phones. Increasingly, they are reading books and manga, or comic books, on their phones too.
article at LA Times
The piece is a good reminder to anyone about how different forms of communication and types of text are emerging as technology changes the way people interact with media and each other. A course on writing fiction might benefit from a short activity where a short novella written for a non-traditional publishing medium, such as a cell phone, is written by the students and compared with a short story written for the web or print publication.
Wired.com also recently featured an article specifically on cell-phone novels as an emerging text form in Japan; the novels are sometimes written on cell phones. Most are around 200 to 500 pages (or screens), each containing 500 Japanese characters.
Last month, the site held the world's first mobile phone novel award -- with the cooperation of heavyweights like NTT DoCoMo, D2 Communications and video-rental giant Tsutaya.
While most of the 2,400 entries were romance novels written by women in their teens and early 20s, other popular genres included horror, sci-fi and fantasy. The Outstanding Achievement Award went to a man pushing 40 who told an apocalyptic tale of the last 24 hours on Earth.
"A mobile phone novel boom is definitely in place," said Magic iLand spokesman Toshiaki Itou. "And these are people who hardly ever read novels before, never mind written one."
Next summer, the company will debut software that allows mobile phone novelists to integrate sounds and images into their story lines.
article at Wired
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