Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use : Steps Toward Technosocial Ethnographic Frameworks

A friend you have not seen for a while, a pet's endearing gaze, Tokyo Tower, a funnylooking stuffed panda, gorgeous parfait at a new café, a classmate who has just fallen into a puddle, a child opening wide for a spooned-in mouthful, or a miniature milk package on an airline tray -the camera phone makes it possible to take and share pictures of the stream of people, places, pets and objects in the flow of everyday life. Around town, and particularly at tourist spots, the sounds of the camera phone’s shutter have become an unremarkable part of the setting. Although the camera phone has only recently become a fixture in everyday life in Japan, already it feels like a familiar presence. It is the latest portable media technology to become commonplace, one more component of the layered information and media ecologies that overlay our everyday experience in urban Japan. This paper reports on an ethnographic study of camera phone usage in Tokyo, based on a diary study of usage patterns. First, we briefly describe the current state of camera phone adoption in Japan, and introduce our methodology and conceptual framework for this study. We frame our study as an example of adapting traditional anthropological approaches to the study of everyday practices that are distributed across real and virtual settings. The body of the paper describes emergent practices of camera phone use in Japan, providing concrete examples from the ethnographic material. Camera phone use is still very much an emergent practice, though we are beginning to see some usage patterns stabilizing. There are indicators of practices of picture taking and sharing that differ both from the uses of the stand-alone camera and the kinds of social sharing that happened via mobile phone communication (Kato, Okabe, Ito, and Uemoto 2005; Okabe and Ito 2003).