Futures of Learning

Photo of Tokyo by Joi Ito under CC-BY

Japan has long been depicted as a country of gadget-fetishists that are continuously pushing the latest in digital culture, particularly of the marginal and miniaturized variety. Whether it is WIRED magazine’s Japanese Schoolgirl Watch, Time Asia’s feature on Gizmo Japan, or curiosity about Japan’s robot love, Western observers have often focused on technology as defining of Japan’s cultural identity.

These depictions of Japanese culture as both familiar and strange have been a common theme throughout the history of Japan’s intimate relationship with the West. While there are reasons to question the “techno-orientalism” (Morley and Robbins 1995) entailed in some of these depictions of technology exoticism, this image of Japan has been co-constructed by both Japan and its international interlocutors. As we saw in the case of Korea, Japan has worked to develop an identity as a tech-savvy nation, home to cutting-edge technology innovation and digital culture.

In the past decade, with the move towards mobile and networked digital media, Japan’s identity on the international stage has been undergoing a variety of shifts. Since the late nineties, Japan has become known for it’s heavy reliance on mobile media, with the majority of Japanese relying more heavily on wireless, handheld access than PC-based access. Japan is also unique in having a longstanding tradition of certain forms of media, gaming, and technology geek youth cultures that have blossomed with the advent of digital and networked media. Because of these characteristics, more than any other non-Western country, Japan has had a profile as a new media cultural exporter to other parts of the world. These topics will be covered in greater depth in upcoming posts. In this introductory post, we provide some background on the Japan context that has produced these distinctive technology cultures.

Japanese Technoculture in Context

In the decades after becoming an economic superpower in the seventies and beyond, Japan has become increasingly interconnected with transnational cultural and economic flows. Yet most Japanese still consider themselves part of an “island nation” that is racially and culturally distinctive and relatively homogeneous. In the contemporary era, Japan has continuously navigated a complicated identity as having a postmodern culture and one of the most “advanced” economies of the world, while also holding onto an identity as a “traditional” Eastern nation (Ivy 1995). Although 98.5% of Japanese citizens are ethnically Japanese (CIA World Factbook 2008), urban areas in Japan, particularly Tokyo, are increasingly international in character. Further, we have seen the growing exportation of Japanese cultural products overseas, first through video games, and more recently through pop art, anime and manga. In a widely cited article in Foreign Policy, Douglas McGray (2002) dubbed this a rise of Japan’s soft power and “gross national cool.”

In other words, urban Japan is highly cosmopolitan, and porous to international influence, while also being home to a distinctive cultural and technological imprint that is often successfully imported overseas. Over the years, the Japanese government and industries have made efforts to internationalize, with various degrees of success. Japan has been a dominant player in electronic gaming for decades, particularly in the console and handheld game markets. Japanese industries continue to dominate internationally in digital hardware such as cameras and displays, but has fared less well in online content and services. Although J-pop, anime and manga have become highly visible in international youth cultures, they still represent subcultural niche products that are not major export industries for Japan (Ministry of International Affairs 2008). Commentators have described this state of affairs a a “Galapagos effect” where Japan has developed advanced technologies and distinctive content in many areas that are unique to the Japanese ecosystem. Japanese mobile phones and services and much of the gaming industry are cited as examples of this Galapagos effect (NRI 2008).

Demographics and Technology Uptake

As of 2008, Japan has a population of 127 million, of which about 25% live in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Japan has a very high literacy rate of 99.8% with school enrollment at practically 100% (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication 2008). These statistics are one indicator of a national culture that is highly media savvy, which is guided by the cultural trends of the urban capital. Although youth culture is at the center of contemporary cultural trends in Japan, particularly those centered on media and technology, Japan’s is an aging population. As of 2008, 23.5% of the population is under 25 years of age, with 13.8% of the population under 15 years of age. In 1980, the number of those under 15 was 23.5%, one indicator of the rapidly aging population of Japan (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication 2008).

After the US and China, Japan is the third largest broadband country in the word, with 27.7 million broadband lines at the end of 2007 (shivya 2008a). The penetration rate for computers per household was at 85% in 2007. This number represents a substantial increase from the 2005 percentage of 36.2% (Internet Association Japan 2007). Internet access in 2008 was at 73.8% (Internet World Stats 2008). What is most distinctive about Japan from an Internet perspective, however, is the proportion of the population that accesses the Internet primarily from a handheld device. Ever since deployment of mobile Internet in Japan in the late nineties, Japan has led the world in the adoption of IP phones and 3G services . As of 2006, the majority of Japanese the handheld device as their primary way of accessing the Internet (shivya 2008b).

In the blog posts to follow over the next few weeks, Daisuke Okabe and I will provide more detail on these various dimensions of Japanese new media adoption. We look forward to your input and feedback!

References

CIA. 2008. World Factbook: Japan.

Hornyak, Timothy. 2006. Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots. Tokyo: Kodansha International.

Internet Association Japan. 2007. Internet White Paper 2007.

Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McGray, Douglas. 2002. ”Japan’s Gross National Cool.” Foreign Policy. May/June.

Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication. 2008. Information and Communications in Japan.

Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication. 2009. ”Popuation Estimates”

Morley, David and Robbins, Kevin. 1995. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. New York: Routledge.

NRI (野村総研). 2008. ガラパゴス化する日本.

Shivya. 2008a. “Japan: Internet Landscape.” Digital Media Across Asia.

Shivya. 2008b. “Japan: Mobile Landscape”. Digital Media Across Asia.

In the introduction to this blog series on new media practices in Brazil, I discussed how particular forms of new media embody the ethos of carnival, becoming a space where the norms of everyday life are suspended, reversed and reordered and people have a space to “forget” and reframe traditional boundaries and hierarchies. Bar, Pisani and Weber (2007) have made a similar case in their working paper “Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism”. Drawing upon the Latin American context, the authors argue that the three forms of appropriation in the region can be applied to our conceptualization of innovation and appropriation of technology. As they describe,

“At one extreme, we find cannibalism, a radical physical reaction later transformed in a cultural program. Cannibalism is appropriation trough dismembering, absorption, and chemical transformation. It appears as a reference in a Brazil’s Ministry of Culture program conceived to encourage multimedia creativity and open source tweaking. At the opposite end, baroque is a reaction of the mind. It is the appropriation of spaces through filling and layering, and generally does not imply direct confrontation. An infiltration strategy, it begins by occupying the edges, continuing to fill-in the available spaces until it makes the center marginal. In-between, creolization is appropriation through miscegenation, and detour (roundabout), through unpredictable mixing. A process, more than a condition, it does not need to be confrontational but generally leads to new power arrangements.” (Bar, Pisani and Weber 2007:15)

Drawing upon recent scholarship by Brazilian scholars as well as the work by Bar, Pisani and Weber (2007) and McCann (2008), throughout this blog series I have demonstrated how Brazilian’s new media practices reflect a commitment to the value of mixture, resistance and reversal. Examples of this include the Brazilian government’s receptivity to the integration of open source software use in the nations telecenters, the relatively laissez-faire attitude of the state towards piracy in relation to the video game industry as well as blogs, videos and sites such as Orkut and Overmundo to re-route traditional centers for the circulation and redistribution of new media. While this culture of resistance and rebellion may characterize many of the ways in which new media practices and discourse emerge, it is also evident that there are other media spaces where the freedom to experiment, explore and play in a carnival-esque fashion continues to be restricted, the barriers to participation reflecting long-standing hierarchies and inequalities. For example, the creative appropriation of the mobile phone whereby low income Brazilians return calls through the use of the local phone booth reflects as much of the forced creativity that undergirds everyday strategies to survive economically as it does the telecommunications industry to penalize Brazil’s poorest citizens through the extensive tariffs on calls for users of pre-paid plans. Similarly, Recuero (personal communication) notes that sites like Orkut are as much about the display of status and popularity as they are about sociality; upper class Brazilians rarely interact in a meaningful way with residents living in favelas even when they join in the same activity. In other words, and much like studies of the practice of carnaval in Brazil reveals (see Scheper-Hughes 1993, daMatta 1991, Lewis and Pile 1996), new media practices – even of the same media – are diverse and people in different social and economic locations throughout Brazil modes of engagement often reflect these inequalities, locations and dispositions which, in turn, engenders different meaning and interpretations of these practices.

In future research, the challenge will be to understand these practices within the particular social and historical conditions of Brazil as well as their significance in relation to other media practices throughout the world. There is much about about the Brazil case that reflects innovative, if not forward-looking, policies. For example the Brazilian government’s support of open source and Creative Commons, a distinct difference from the Indian government’s recent attempt to copyright traditional yoga poses. Yet, the efficacy of Brazil’s policies are also tied to a strong state that with prominent personalities, such as Gilberto Gil, driving these efforts. Now that Gil has stepped down and President Lula is facing the end of his term in the next few years, it is unclear the extent to which these policies will continue. At the level of research, there are definite ‘gaps’ in our knowledge of new media practices. My training as an anthropologist leads me to wonder more about the informal economy that has emerged around software, video games, mobile phones and new media production. I also want to know more about the practices that are connected to and supportive of people’s participation in Orkut, blogs, LAN houses, the remix of videos and other practices that are often rendered invisible, or partial, in these online milieu. Studies – ethnographic, qualitative and otherwise—of gaming are particularly absent despite Brazil’s rich gaming culture. It is clear that theoretically-driven empirical work needs to be done to extend and challenge existing understandings of new media participation.

A final note. In our early discussions of writing for this blog series, we expressed an explicit commitment to reading the research literature of local academics in the countries we wanted to explore in greater depth. Indeed, and with a few notable exceptions, much of what we know about new media practices in Brazil emerges from Brazilian scholars. The ability to engage in these literatures the span of days and months reflects the fact that many of the scholars involved study and participate in sites such as Flickr, Twitter and Orkut. Many scholars involved in internet and new media research also make a concerted effort to publish drafts of their work online on their blogs, personal websites and other sites in Portuguese and English. Although there are sites like Babelfish and other translation services to ease this burden, access to this material rests upon the good will, generosity and (importantly) the trust of “local” scholars to translate, share and even provide feedback on the interpretation of the innovative work that has not made its way through the lengthy peer review process and into journals and books. Over the next three weeks, Mimi Ito and Daisuke Okabe will continue to follow this commitment to understanding the national and transnational perspectives of new media practices in their co-authored blog series on the new media landscape in Japan.

References:
Bar, Francois, Francis Pisani and Matthew Weber. 2007. paper “Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism” May 15, 2007. Prepared for discussion at Seminario sobre Desarrollo Económico, Desarrollo Social y Comunicaciones Móviles en América Latina. Convened by Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires, April 20-21, 2007. http://arnic.info/Papers/Bar_Pisani_Weber_appropriation-April07.pdf, Accessed May 18, 2008.

DaMatta, Roberto. 1991. Carnivals, rogues and heroes. An interpretation of the Brazilian dilemma. Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press.

Lewis, C and S. Pile. 1996. Woman, Body, Space: Rio Carnival and the politics of performance. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, Volume 3, Number 1(1):23-42.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1993. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

“… te amo sms” By JGil Published Under a Creative Commons License, November 8, 2008.

Brazil possesses the largest mobile phone industry in the Latin American region and the sixth largest mobile phone market in the world (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey 2006; Barrantes and Halperin 2008, Tigre 2008).  As I discussed in the introduction to Brazil, there are 140.79 million mobile phone subscribers spread among 9 operators who receive licenses on a national and regional basis, the most popular being Vivo, a company owned by Telefónica and Portugal Telecom, with 45 million subscribers as of December 2008. 86.6 per cent of subscribers use GSM. ITU numbers suggest that as early as 2003 there were more mobile phones in Brazil than landlines (see also Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey 2006:16-17). Although penetration rates in Brazil have historically been lower than other countries in Latin America – according to Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey (2006:10) in 2004 penetration rates were around 36 per cent compared with 62 per cent penetration rate in the smaller nation of Chile – in September 2008 the mobile phone penetration rate was 73.2 per cent, a number that signals significant growth in a four to five year time span. 81.1 per cent of the entire mobile phone market is prepaid. Within this context, the youth market represents an important and potentially powerful segment of the current subscribers. According to De Chiara (2004), 40 per cent of new mobile phone subscribers were under the age of 25 and, given the relatively youthful age of Brazil’s population, this number is expected to grow. In today’s blog post, I will be focusing upon mobile phone practices in Brazil as they are shaped by a variety of factors, including class, income, geography and other forms of social location. In addition, I explore the economic dimensions of the mobile phone, with particular attention to the ways in which the integration of mobile phones throughout Brazilian may be contributing to issues of economic development.

Modernity, Distinction and the Mobile Phone

Reflecting what are seen as the two extremes of Brazilian society, academic and popular research on mobile phones in Brazil tends to focus upon the differences between the two segments of Brazilian society—wealthy elite whose consumer tastes tend to reflect interests, tastes and lifestyles of their North American, European and Japanese counterparts (Wilska and Pedrozo 2007) and the lower income areas of Brazil. de Souza e Silva notes that among the highest income populations (primarily located in Rio de Janiero and Sao Paulo), features such as video, cameras and internet access are increasingly popular, but there remain limitations in the types of phones available and the ability to use these features given that mobile phones are expensive and high cell phone tariffs have made the use of cell phones in Brazil one of the most expensive in Latin America (Barrantes and Halperin 2008). As de Souza e Silva characterizes the situation:,

“All these examples show that although high-end services are available, or at least in developmental phase, they still target a very small portion of the population, providing evidence that even within the high-income population, cell phones are still mostly used for voice communication. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that when we look at usage of these high-end services, we are talking about less than 1% of the population.”

Nascimento (2004) also notes that both ownership and ownership of phones with the latest features serves as a means of social distinction among wealthier high school students, possession being the display of status (cited in Silva 2006, see also Nicolaci-da-Costa 2006).  However, parents of wealthy teens also note that provisioning a mobile phone can also be done for safety; among the wealthiest Brazilians, the fear of kidnapping children and holding them for ransom is common and the mobile phone is viewed as a way to keep connected to their children (and other family members), although indications that mobiles are also an incentive for petty theft (BBC2 2006, Osava 2009).

While their phones may lack the latest features, concerns about status also underpin many lower income Brazilians motivation to obtain a mobile phone. For example, Silva (2008), who is conducting research in Florianopolis, Bar (personal communication) and de Souza e Silva (2007) note that the acquisition of a mobile is particularly significant in according a sense of being modern. Because living without a mobile or with an older model mobile is a source of embarrassment and shame, many low income Brazilians will make significant sacrifices to obtain a phone. Some individuals in Silva’s ongoing study in southern Brazil have been so driven to keep up-to-date with the latest phones and fashions that they exchange their mobiles on an annual basis, despite the fact they often never use it.  Many of the participants in her study keep very little credit on their phone and only use it to receive phone calls. According to Osava (2009), “Nearly 81 percent of cell phones in Brazil use the pre-paid calls systems, and a large proportion are used only to receive incoming calls, because their owners never, or hardly ever, purchase phone cards. Therefore the cost of these cell phones was limited to the initial outlay when they were bought. Market researchers Frost and Sullivan (2006) estimate that pre-paid subscribers talk four times less than post-paid subscribers and many Brazilians use the phone to make a call, but drop the connection akin to what Donner (2007) has described as “flashing” or “beeping” in Ghana, Uganda and other contexts. Often when low income Brazilians receive a call, they look at the recorded number and use a public phone to return the call in order to avoid the cost of purchasing a new phone card (Silva 2008, Frost and Sullivan 2006). In some cases, sharing phones has also been noted (de Souza e Silva 2007).

One of the significant differences in the use of mobile phones in Brazil is the difference between mobility and connectivity. In many parts of the United States, East Asia and Europe, mobile phones have been celebrated for the mobility they enable (Ito, Okabe and Matsuda 2005, Ling 2004, Jain 2002). Because fixed line telephony has always been expensive and, for the lowest income populations, almost inaccessible without the use of illegal electrical and telephone connections (see de Souza e Silva 2007), few individuals articulate the value of the mobile phone to the functionality of mobility. Rather, and as we have seen elsewhere in the global south (Donner 2008, Horst and Miller 2006), the mobile telephone is critical for the connectivity it enables. In other words, while the mobile phone complements and extends ones connectivity among high income Brazilians, the mobile phone is the sole form of communication among low income Brazilians (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey 2006). What does appear to be unique about the Brazilian case is the extent to which people still rely upon the existing public infrastructure, particularly pay phones, as an important mode of communication. As Bar (personal communication), Silva (2007) and others have noted, this reflects the mobile telecommunications continued commitment to encouraging subscriptions via phone plans and high-end services.

Economic Benefits of the Mobile Phone

“carregadores e baterias” Photo by fbar March 17, 2007. Published under a Creative Commons License.
Throughout the world mobile phones have had important implications for work and the management of time between home and workspaces. Indeed, Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey ’s (2006) recent volume on mobile communication throughout the world devotes an entire chapter to examining how the mobile phone has changed the relationship between these two dominant spheres of life. Within the global south, a significant amount of attention continues to be directed towards the implications of the mobile phones to contribute to income generation (e.g. Donner 2006, Hammond and Prahalad 2004, Horst and Miller 2006, Jenson 2007).  Francois Bar [fn 1] is conducting research in Brazil on motorbike couriers in Sao Paulo. Bar (personal communication) estimates that there are anywhere from 160,000 to 500, 000 large and small-scale couriers in the city who use their mobile phones to coordinate work in the congested streets of Brazil’s business capital. Primarily young and male, the majority of motorbike couriers work for a range of small and large companies. One of the issues that Bar’s ongoing work explores is the extent to which phone plans reflect and/or shape the economic benefits of being a motorbike courier. As Bar describes, young male motorbike couriers own mobile phones on a pre-paid basis and spend their days waiting for a call from a potential employer. This means that they remain completely dependent on a potential employer to facilitate contact and maintain communication. Notably, those with post-paid phone plans are usually more successful economically than their pre-paid counterparts because they can initiate contact and, in some instance, begin to develop relationships with other couriers who they trust to complete a particular job that is not convenient due to time or distance.

Depending on one’s perspective, the economic benefits of the mobile phone is also reflected in the emergence of an informal economy around the theft, refurbishment, resale and circulation of stolen mobile phones. Indeed, many residents of favelas only purchase phones from individuals in the community who traffic in the theft of stolen and cloned mobile phones. This practice became particularly common with the emergence of Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) that enables users to move SIM cards between devices (de Souza e Silva 2007). In July of 2003, the Brazilian government mandated that all phones should be registered in an effort to prevent cloning of mobile phones (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey 2006) and de Souza e Silva (2007) notes that in 2005 there were efforts to create an “integrated system” whereby phones could not be activated or re-activated in a different state, or by a different operator. A testament to the success of this informal industry, mobile phones made the list of the top items stolen in Brazil in 2007.

Conclusion
While the maintenance of social connections has been highlighted in the foundational work on mobile phones, there are a number of practices in Brazil that have the potential to add new dimensions to the foundational literature on the mobile phones. For example, the continued reliance on voice amongst Brazilians is attributed to cost such as high subscription rates and phone calls. de Souza e Silva (2007) notes that there are difficulties in defining mobile phone culture in Brazil as the formal measures and the division of units of analysis into states or federacions in Brazil often overlook or diminish socioeconomic disparities, such as rural-urban distinctions within states as well as the complex social geography prevalent in Brazil. For example, in some regions mobile phones are actually cheaper and easier to maintain given the cost of maintaining landlines. These distinctions not only reflect geography and population density as well as social and historical variations in different regions of Brazil. For example, in contrast to other regions of Brazil where people tend to make calls to family who live nearby, many mobile phone users living in regions where migration is common more frequently use their phones to call people in other states or regions. For example, Frost and Sullivan (2006) note that in the state of Bahía, “more than half of rural mobile telephony users make calls to other regions of the country; while close to 80% receive calls from other areas” (32). In addition, in the capital Brasilia, mobile phone penetration rates are quite high and recent estimates suggest that there are more mobile phones than people (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey 2006; Silva 2007), a trend which is likely due to the presence of the Brazilian government as well as the ease with which cell phone towers could be integrated within the planned town which is shaped like an airplane (some describe it as a butterfly). In effect, the existing case studies of mobile phone practices in Brazil are interesting precisely because they push back at our understandings of the nature of mobile phone and mediated communication as well as the relationship between place and mobile phones, challenging our understanding of traditional markers of difference (e.g. rural and urban, suburban, urban as well as upper and lower class) may or may not be relevant categories of distinction within Brazil and in other locations throughout the world.

fn 1: Francois Bar chairs the Research Working Group for Investigating the Social and Economic Impact of Public Access to Information and Communication Technology (IPAI) is a five-year, CAD $7.2-million research project sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. http://www.ipairesearch.org. He is also involved in the project Comunicaciones Móviles y Desarrollo en América Latina (CMDAL), with support from Fundación Telefónica. In this project he is working with Manuel Castells, Hernán Galperin and Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol.

References:
Bar, Francois. Personal Communication. Interview Los Angeles, CA October 22, 2008.

Barrantes, Roxana and Hernan Galperin. 2008. Can the poor afford mobile telephony? Evidence from Latin America. Telecommunications Policy 32 (2008) 521–530

BBC2. 2006. Brazil’s Evolving Kidnap Culture. BBC2 Online 13 April 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/4898554.stm, Accessed February 2, 2009.

De Chiara, Marcia (2004) ‘Pequenos e Poderosos Ditadores do consumo’ (Small and
Powerful Dictators of Consumption), O Estado de São Paulo, 30 May, 2004, B, p. 4.

de Souza e Silva, A. (2006). Interfaces of hybrid spaces. In A. P., Kavori & N. Arceneaux, (Eds.), The Cell Phone Reader: Essays in Social New York: Peter Lang.

de Souza e Silva, Adriana. 2007. Cell phones and places: The use of mobile technologies in Brazil. In Harvey J. Miller’s Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access. Springerlink.

De Souza e Silva, Adriana. 2008. Alien Revolt (2005-2007): A Case Study of the First Location-Based Mobile Game in Brazil. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Spring 2008: 18-28.

Donner, Jonathan. 2007. The Rules of Beeping: Exchanging Messages Via Intentional “Missed Calls” on Mobile Phones. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1).
Donner, Jonathan. 2006. The use of mobile phones by microentrepreneurs in Kigali, Rwanda: Changes to social and business networks. Information Technologies and International Development 3 (2): 3-19.

Donner, Jonathan. 2008. ‘Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature’,The Information Society,24:3,140 — 159

Frost & Sullivan. 2006. Social Impact of Mobile Telephony in Latin America Report. http://www.gsmlaa.org/files/content/0/94/Social%20Impact%20of%20Mobile%20Telephony%20in%20Latin%20America.pdf, Accessed November 5, 2008.
Hammond, Allen L. and C. K. Prahalad. 2004. Selling to the Poor. Foreign Policy, No. 142 (May - Jun., 2004), pp. 30-37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4147574, Accessed February 21, 2006.

Horst, Heather A. and Daniel Miller. 2006. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Jensen, Robert. 2007. The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector. Quarterly Journal of Economics August 2007, Vol. 122, No. 3: 879–924.

Jain, Sarah Lachlann. 2002.  “Urban Errands: The Means of Mobility.” Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 2(3): 419–438.

Nascimento, Francisca Silva do. 2004.Os últimos serão dos primeiros: uma análise sociológica do uso do telefone celular. 133f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Sociologia) – Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza, 2004. Texto completo enviado por correio eletrônico.

Nicolaci-da-costa, Ana Maria. 2006. Cell phones: a “God-given gift” for mothers of youngsters. Psicol. Soc.,.19 (3):108-116.
Osava, Mario. 2009. Cell Phones - Democratising Communications. IPS News March 21, 2009. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36094, Accessed March 21, 2009.

Silva, S. 2008. Living with Mobile Phones in Brazil. Material World Blog June 2008 http://blogs.nyu.edu/projects/materialworld/2008/06/living_with_mobile_phones_in_b_1.html, Accessed July 2, 2008.

Teleco. 2009. Estatísticas de Celulares no Brasil: Total de Celulares (Jan/09): 152,4 milhões. http://www.teleco.com.br/ncel.asp, Accessed March 16, 2009.

Tigre, Paulo Bastos. 2003. Brazil in the Age of Electronic Commerce. The Information Society 19(1): 33 — 43

Wilksa, Terhi-Anna and Sueila Pedrozo. 2007. New technology and young people’s consumer identities: A comparative study between Finland and Brazil. Young 15:4 (2007): 343–368