I often enjoy scanning the "Top 10 Today" news section on IT in Canada, but it's pretty rare that I use the items that appear on it as the basis of a post. One, though, caught my attention, and prompted a couple of follow-on questions that I thought I'd share here.

The article was "Japanese Bestsellers Written on Mobiles," originally published by Duncan Riley on TechCrunch on December 2. It quotes a Sydney Morning Herald story stating that "half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones." According to the Sydney Morning Herald article, the stories, known as "keitai shousetsu" (mobile phone novels), "traverse teen romance, sex, drugs and other adolescent terrain in a succession of clipped one-liners, emoticons and spaces (used to show that a character is thinking), all of which can be read easily on a mobile phone interface. Scene and character development are notably missing."

Reactions -- at least, as reflected in the comments on TechCrunch -- tend to fall into a couple of camps. One is that the Japanese are advanced users of mobile technology, so we shouldn't be surprised that this trend is apparent there before it is seen in North America; other posters add that by its nature, Japanese would be easier as a language for composition and consumption on a cell phone than English. The other line of discussion consists of a debate between people who claim to already be composing substantive English-language documents (a play, travelogues, etc.) on handheld devices, and those who don't believe that such a device would be sufficient for the entire creative process, especially editing.

Poster "Phil" on TechCrunch wrote: "Sure, you can write a book on a mobile phone. But I don't believe you can write a good book on a mobile phone. Editing would be too difficult. What this article suggests to me, is that the Japanese love crappy novels that are really just first- or second-drafts."

This point was reinforced, at least to some extent, in the Sydney Morning Herald article as well. Professor Toru Ishikawa of Tokyo Keio University, says of cell phones as an authoring tool, "the size of the screen also necessitates that authors use short, simple sentences with basic words. If that's how you measure the quality of literature, then yes, the prevalence of writing like this will water down Japanese literature."

I don't think that there's any question that use of technologies such as IM and SMS (and e-mail, for that matter) has eroded language capability as measured by traditional standards. But I'm wondering if there may be a parallel trend illustrated by this article, in which usage patterns and expectations evolve to suit our composition and transmission media. Perhaps, as Professor Ishikawa observes, use of cell phones as an authoring tool "could also encourage writers to be inventive with language in new ways." Perhaps the shift is deeper than that -- instead of writers learning new ways to meet existing expectations, the expectations themselves, for both writers and readers, are re-shaped by the capabilities and constraints of the medium. Or perhaps there's a third explanation -- that short, emoticon-filled literary works are better suited to the preferences of young readers than more "serious" works.

Whatever the explanation for the success of the keitai shousetsu, I think the article provides a useful starting point for an important debate: Are there client devices that are just better attuned to the needs of user populations, so that their adoption of technology (and the content it enables) is gated or accelerated by the client device features, functions and form factor? For example -- are some industries "laggards" in technology adoption because they need a different blend of client capabilities? It has been thought that tablet technology is important in health care, because it provides an analogue for the clipboard. Will this really spur greater use of technology in health care? Is the next wave of technology adoption in retail waiting for a client device that better approximates the way that the business works (e.g., richer handheld scanners) or the way that most of the industry's generally young employees connect (e.g., cell phones)?

Moving a bit further afield, is government IT adoption slowed by the inability to represent multiple stakeholders on an access device in real time, or to efficiently capture and route information through forms-based, workflow-enabled technology? Sorry to go on like this -- but at root, I think this article raises a couple of really interesting questions. Are we shaped, at a fundamental level, by the capabilities and constraints of the client "devices" (PCs and cell phones, and/or pens and notepads, or sketchbooks and charcoals) that we select? And at a purely technological level, is adoption gated by some innate connection between device metaphors and user attributes?

Initially posted by Michael O'Neil on IT in Canada.

Reposted via agreement with IT in Canada.