cellphone novels

 Cellphone novels are quite a hit with Japanese female demographic, as outlined in this article. This might sound strange to westerners who until recently considered a bare-minimum camera phone as a luxury item and live in places where bluetooth still isn't the standard on many laptops and cellphone models being offered. As the common stereotype suggests, North Eastern Asia in general is in state of some unusual acceleration of integration of technology into the basic fabrics of the society, starting with the higher than double the concentration of robot population density in Japan compared to anywhere else in the world and my Grandpa in Korea who knows how to install custom firmware for the GPS in his car, which isn't all that unusual in that country.... Sigh. The level of technological proficiency in America is difficult to understand since most of the high-tech being used in Eastern markets came right out of American universities, like MIT media lab and NYU ITP program (I attended their show yesterday and took bunch of pictures. Quite a blast. I might post something someday. The pictures are on my flickr account). 

Anyway, back to the cellphone novels, it's an interesting concept. Now I know somepeople are already scoffing at the notion of having a fully pledged novella that's actually written on a cellphone for a cellphone... That would be shortsighted for a number of reasons. It's like comparing a full length essay and a poetry based on their length and word count. Cellphone novels are written to be brief, to be read briefly on the go... Most people don't hang onto their cellphones when they're in their homes. They read it when they are using subways and commuting from work, a bit of breaktime between classes and etc. Within the constraints of the medium people found a unique way to convey coherent story and characters the readership can sympathize with (which is probably one of the reasons why cellphone/microprose novels aren't catching on with the European/American crowd. We need a whole new set of word use and prose styling to write a decent microprose novella, and not that many people are working on that)... We are looking at a medium that's adapting to its physical manifestation like a living being, originating from something familiar (full size fiction), yet turning into something else that only retains superficial similarity to its origin while developing an entirely different DNA of its own.

What I am really excited about cellphone/microprose fiction isn't in being able to write stuff down and read on a cellphone. We've had that in some form since 90's, late 80's if you consider some of the experimental works limited to college labs.
Rather, I am excited about the streamlining of the story writing medium this change represents. Even those people who needs to go to work everyday and don't have the time to sit down and write a full-prose novel might be able to tell a decent, compelling story using certain techniques and vocabulary. What kind of story will people be able to write if they can spend less time writing and more time imagining it?