Personal, Portable, Pedestrian

Geert Lovink taught me how to think critically about technology, and I always turn to him for thoughtful and humane analysis. Too few technology writers have any sense of social and cultural context, and too few technology critics have an appreciation of why people find technologies attractive and how they improve people's lives. I recommend Dark Fiber to those who haven't yet learned to think critically about Internet technology and the culture that has grown up around it, and to those critics who fail to see the real advantages afforded by the Internet.

Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

This is an important book. Through a range of well designed and intelligently contextualized case studies, it both locates and dislocates common assumptions about the singularities of technology and of culture in determining how the 'keitai' is finding its place in Japanese society. Reaching beyond Japan and beyond the mobile phone, the book provides a theortetically rich and empirically sophisticated template for all future work which seeks to understand the nature of sociotechnical change in personal communications.

Roger Silverstone, Professor of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science

Lead users play a key role in determining the fate of both technological and industrial development in the digital era. The only way we can fully understand the astonishing development of 'keitai' services is through a multi-perspective analysis of Japan's youth, the cutting-edge lead users of mobile technology. This book is critical to thinking about technological advancement in the 21st century.

Ichiya Nakamura, Executive Director, Stanford Japan Center