Consider the refrigerator. The changes this appliance brought in its wake are monumental. Thanks to that big humming machine in the kitchen, the range of foods that we are able to eat has expanded, illness connected with food spoilage has decreased, and our lives have become more convenient. We seldom bother to think about refrigerators, though, because they have become one of those things that have, to quote sociologist Haruhiro Kato, "become utterly unremarkable and ubiquitous presences."
Kato, however, was not commenting on refrigerators. He was writing about keitai, the portable communication devices (to call them telephones is to ignore much of what these versatile machines can do), which, for young Japanese, are as necessary, and essentially uninteresting, as the magnet-covered boxes that cool our cola.
One suspects, therefore, that the volume in which the above quotation appears, "Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life," the first book that treats this subject to appear in English, may also be one of the last. A collection of academic papers about keitai could soon seem as far-fetched as a collection of academic papers about refrigerators.