" 'Their thumbs have become bigger, more muscular,' said Sadie Plant, author of a new report of 'On the Mobile,' a study of cellphone habits of people in eight major world cities. Talking from Birmingham, England, she said that Japan's 'oya yubi sedai,' or 'thumb generation,' was the most advanced in the world.
'What impressed me in Tokyo was their ability to tap in a message without even looking at the keypad,' she said of her study, which was financed by Motorola.
Television stations in Japan have held thumbing speed contests. Last year, one young woman was clocked thumbing out 100 Chinese characters in a one-minute burst, similar to typing 100 words a minute, a feat normally done with all fingers flying....
Across town, in a white tablecloth restaurant where talking on cellphones is discouraged, Ayako Inaba's right thumbnail — peach pink with little silver stars — silently guided her through the electronic tree in her cellphone display.
'It has changed how I live,' said the 22-year-old fashion journalist who bought her Web-capable cellphone as soon as she moved back to Tokyo from New York last spring. 'We used to say, `We will meet at 7:30 in the Ginza in front of the lion of Mitsukoshi department store.' Now we just say, `Let's meet at 7 in the Ginza....' '
Thumbing through her in box, she read from the text index — a message in English from her boyfriend in Italy, a message in Chinese characters, or kanji, from an old boyfriend in Japan, and a message from a college girlfriend....
Kannon Konno, a 20-year-old college student, paused from perusing her e-mail to watch a middle-aged man pecking at his cellphone with an index finger. She commented drily: 'I think he should use a P.C.'
On a cellphone, speeding thumbs make road kill of grammar and punctuation. Some cellphone companies include 200 pictographs in an electronic vocabulary....
In Japanese, cellphones are eroding people's writing skills. In a poll of 3,000 Japanese adults conducted in January by Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, 27 percent said that the use of computers and cellphones had made their handwriting worse, and 52 percent said they had forgotten some characters. With more young adults reading cellphones in subways, sales of books and magazines in Japan dropped last year, for the fifth year in a row....
Thumbs, the doctor cautioned, should not be belittled. Scientific research indicates that "thumbs dominate a huge area of the brain. In Japan, if you lose a thumb, you are redesignated under our national labor legislation as heavily handicapped.' " [NY Times: Technology]
Tuesday, April 30, 2002
