Call me a purist, call me stubborn, call me antediluvian, but I cringe whenever I see Internet chat, emails, or text messages that contain more acronyms, numbers, and symbols than actual words. Certainly some web acronyms have made there way into my regular online vernacular (brb and lol come to mind), and I'm am a closet fan of the smiley face emoticon, but by and large I have avoided the trend toward replacing our language with a series of sometimes incomprehensible strings of letters and numbers. I'll even admit that the title for this post is hyperbole (or at least a gross over generalization), but something I read on Gizmodo yesterday made me wince.
Keitai shousetsu are novels composed for and on mobile phones, and they're big in Japan right now. I mean, really big. Of the 10 best selling novels in Japan over the first half of 2007, 5 were originally composed on cellular phones and they sold an average of 400,000 copies each. One of the best selling was "Koizora" (Love Sky), by a woman whose nom-de-plume is Mika. Koizora follows the rather twisted story of a high school girl who is raped and becomes pregnant, has sold 1.2 million copies in the past 14 months, and was recently made into a movie.
To put that in perspective, US Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's book "Leadership," for which he received a $3 million advance, has sold just 836,000 copies since 2002.
Amazingly, though many of these novels are released in serialized form for free via a mobile web site called "Maho no i-rando" (Magic Island), which provides tools for people to write their own mobile phone novels, Japanese youths are still buying them in record numbers when they're published in traditional paper bound form. The reason, speculates one editor at Goma Books, which publishes a number of keitai shousetsu, is that many readers send suggestions and critiques to authors by email while the story is unfolding and end up feeling as if they had a hand in helping craft the novel. For readers, purchasing a hard copy provides a physical keepsake of the work they were so emotionally invested in.
The "novels" being churned out in the mobile phone style are summed up this way in a recent Sydney Morning Herald story:
"Usually they are written by first-time writers, using one-name pseudonyms, for an audience of young female readers - who, in Japan especially, consult their mobile phones so regularly that the habit could be mistaken for a tic. The stories 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."
Emoticons? Spaces? Clipped one-liners? Forgive me for my grimace. Some Japanese scholars have attempted to explain the mobile phone fad as the "evolution of language." Um...
"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," said Toru Ishikawa, a professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo's Keio University. "But it could also encourage writers to be inventive with language in new ways. Language must always evolve."
I think I'm more likely to side with Gizmodo, who suggest that perhaps "this is, in fact, the sign of a civilization in decline." Maybe Doris Lessing has a point...
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Yes, you nailed it. You're an antediluvian, stubborn purist when it comes to reading. Shorthand has been used by a long variety of subcultures since writing began to communicate meaning in an effective way, especially when the medium is limiting (think cuneiform on stone tablets). The limits of the medium can provide an impetus for cr8ivity and don't need to signal the decline of civilization.
What's gr8 2 C, is the user culture of participation in storymaking (I'll stop short of calling it literature, for your sake). And people embracing a new medium to continue an ancient tradition. ;-)
Posted by: briang | December 11, 2007 4:27 PM
I have to agree with Brian. You sound to me like someone complaining that comic books are not literature.
Posted by: Advice Network | December 11, 2007 4:52 PM
This story has been making the rounds as the "wacky japanese tech-culture story of the moment" for a week or so now.
I think there's a much more interesting angle that can be taken with it, especially in light of recent e-book news like the Kindle. Japan has been somewhat successfully transitioning to digital book formats for a few years ago, and this is just another example of that. Get on a train in Tokyo, and you'll notice a distinct lack of thick manga weeklies which used to be ubiquitous. This is because folks are subscribing and reading them on their phones.
Why the widespread adoption?
One reason is that Japanese carriers charge around 9% for sales transactions, and make them super-easy for consumers and simply plug them onto your monthly bill (which you can pay by cash at convience stores for the credit-averse). I may be wrong, but it's my understanding that US carriers charge upwards of 20-30% for similar services, plus they push you to use credit cards or automatic bank withdrawals for monthly payments.
Just my 3 yen.
Posted by: Joseph | December 11, 2007 5:20 PM
Beware of stories of user generated content from Japan.
Japanese UGM is 90%+ anonymous (including blogs), so there is in fact no way of telling how much of this claimed authorship is real and what is fabricated (ghost written with the full intent of promoting the material as UGM crossover content).
In any case, this is just another iteration of UGM content promoted by mainstream media interests in Japan. First we had "densha otoko" (lit. "Train Man") which is claimed to have been born through real interactions on Japan's largest BBS (2ch.net) which became a book, TV dramatization and a movie (all of which were substantially edited from the original), then we had a whole bunch of novels (well, blog post compilations) and TV dramatisations and movies again "based on" blogs (which of course coincides with the removal of said content from their blogs), and now we have a whole bunch of stuff based on moblog content. I can't recall of any cases where the alleged authors have revealed themselves to the media or to the public. The publishers continue to deny direct access to the authors. One or two ultra-paranoid secretive authors I can understand, but when they start proliferating like this, one becomes suspicious, especially when taking into consideration the interlinked nature of the Japanese media.
My major qualm is that most of these productions claim to be accounts of real events in the original format but somehow are transmutated into "novels" when they hit the mainstream. There seems to be an inconsistency which deepens my suspicion that the original premise is manufactured.
As for threatening traditional literature, forget it. Consumers of this type of content are tweens. It is just the current mode of chick lit for the adolescents. It is popular with the targeted audience because it is deliberately styled to resonate with them. In fact, the only thing remarkable about pieces such as "Koizora" pictured in the post is that for an allegedly autobiographical account, the story does seem to have a lot of bizzare twists and turns for one single adolescent girl to experience in one lifetime let alone just several years.
Posted by: fukumimi | December 11, 2007 9:15 PM
I find it interesting that Brian's insertion of web-speak is only used in a single instance, but he had to rely on a standard format to make his point clearly. Innovation in communication is an interesting topic for consideration, but a simplifying to the point of loss of nuance is more of a concern than an interest.
Following the example of a widespread and somewhat comparable phenomenon in pidgen languages, the grammatical construction of a languaga is stripped to the bare minimum. Some linguists argue that this is a language, while others would suggest this is something else. I see web text as a type of pidgen or shorthand. The linguistic evolution of a pidgen (which begins in times of forced inter-lingual cooperation--as with slavery in the 18th century) follows onto a creole, which incorporates a richer vocabulary and syntactic nuance.
The evolution of language is varied, but web-speak, to me, is shorthand for something else.
-Zach (http://www.zachbeauvais.com)
Posted by: Zach Beauvais | December 12, 2007 3:48 AM