Sen, BiswarupSt. Louis, Christopher2024-01-092024-01-092024-01-09https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29088The mobile phone—in its present form, the smartphone—has become a ubiquitous part of everyday life. We use it to facilitate personal and professional communications, access entertainment media, and purchase goods and services, among other things, and yet it has become so thoroughly familiar that it is seen as unremarkable and we take its presence for granted. These meanings of mobile media—what it is to be used for, and in what ways—are not intrinsic to the form of the mobile phone itself or the natural outcomes of technological development, but are instead the result of significant processes of negotiation of meaning that have occurred and continue to occur throughout media history.This dissertation is a media genealogy of the keitai denwa (lit. “mobile phone”) in Japan from 1997 to 2007, when the keitai denwa emerged and transformed from a limited office technology aimed at professionals to a commonplace fixture used by people of all ages to facilitate the experiences of everyday life. Drawing from a range of contemporary print media, this dissertation shows how the keitai was constituted as a discursive formation through media representations, and how these changing representations subsequently helped shape the expectations of what mobile media could do, for whom, and how. As a media genealogy, the dissertation attends to the social and technological conditions of 20th-century Japan which made it possible for the keitai to emerge and assume its particular form, at the same time contesting mainstream Western histories of media and the Internet that frame the keitai ecosystem as an inconsequential, geographically-limited failure. Instead, I argue that what we have come to understand as “mobile media” today is an assemblage of affordances, expectations, and cultural meanings that are the result of the contingent negotiations and technological developments that were in constant play during this period of media transition, and that understanding how discourses of keitai and mobile media became established in this period is vital to our understanding of mobile media today.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Internet historyJapanese media historyJapanese mobile phonekeitai denwamedia genealogymobile mediaElectronic Thesis or Dissertation