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Editor Login
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David Lazer
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Recent Comments
- Re: The Social Affordances of Email in Japan and America
By: David Lazer
Date: Mar 19, 2006 5:17 PM
Notification
« NYT magazine article: Can Network Theory Thwart Terrorsts? | Main | Social Networks and the Business World »
15 March 2006
The Social Affordances of Email in Japan and America
During a recent presentation at the University of Tokyo I discussed the social affordances of email. I defined social affordances as the social opportunities and constraints provided by technology. (If you want to read more about this topic, see my co-authored paper : "The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism," in Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 8, 3.) After I listed a number of email’s social affordances, one of the audience members pointed out that those affordances only apply to PC based email. By contrast, there exists a substantially different set of affordances for mobile phone based email. Given that my research is only about the use of email in America, my lack of attention to mobile phone email was intentional. There are not enough Americans using this technology for it to be relevant to my current research. Nevertheless, this comment got me thinking about the difficultly of making cross-national generalizations about the social uses of particular technologies. For example, even though the use of PC email is almost as common in Japan as it is in America, the wide-spread use of mobile phone email in Japan may change how the Japanese use PC email.
My recent co-authored report for the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that American’s use PC email for contacting both strong and weak(er) ties. By contrast, in another paper I find that the Japanese tend to use mobile phone email for contacting their strong ties, and PC email for contacting their weak ties (the paper published in Ito et. al 2005). This suggests that the existence of mobile phone email in Japan alters the use of PC email, even though PC email has the same set of affordances in both countries. I’m now thinking about how the unique combinations of communication technologies available to people in different countries effects their use of PC based email. Any thoughts or references regarding this issue would be welcome.
Posted by Jeff Boase at March 15, 2006 4:17 PM
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Comments
It would not be surprising if there were a certain path dependency in how particular communication technologies were used. That is, even if all countries end up having the same technical capacities, those countries where PC based e-mail gained widespread use first will have systematically different patterns than those where mobile phone e-mail gained faster penetration.
Posted by: David Lazer at March 19, 2006 5:17 PM