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| The New Three Sacred Treasures -- Transforming Communication | |
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The "3 Sacred Treasures" of the royals were the sword, jewel, and the holy mirror. In post-war Japan of the 1960's, they were transformed into a microwave oven, car, and colored TV set. Read the report below to find out what Japanese consumers today consider to be 'to-die for.'
These days, high school students use e-mail or mobile phones to ask their friends, "Where are you now?" and say "OK, I'll go look for you." The frustration of being stood up is a thing of the past. One of the remaining two sacred treasures, the photo sticker machine, has also evolved and improved allowing girls to take pictures of themselves looking their best. In fact, the popularity of particular photo sticker machines is determined largely based on the attractiveness of pictures produced. The third sacred treasure, Karaoke, has become the place where the girls can express themselves. The spread of technology, such as mobile phones, has caused a shift in lifestyle. However, it is now necessary to further improve the hardware, software, and services in response to this change in communication style. Especially among young people in Tokyo, downloading music for listening to on a mobile phone is now commonplace. Music fans must decide which one is the most sacred treasure -- a mobile phone, or one of the specialized mobile music players that can tie into an Internet based download service. Their choice is likely to be based on the quality of the software and services associated with the device. Among the more enthusiastic of fans, music has evolved from something to passively listen to into something to actively enjoy by doing things such as re-mixing and imitating a DJ. Furthermore, DVDs allow them to merge music and video images and re-mix them too, becoming, in essence, VJs ("visual jockeys") instead of DJs. Devices with this functionality are already out in the market. If not addressed, copyright issues can arise when sharing works that include re-mixed images from movies or television programs. However, there have been times, recently, when the music industry itself commercialized music re-mixed by these DJs. If this trend of using re-mixed video images continues to grow, changes in the actual handling of the rights holders of the copyrighted works will need to change as well. This trend is beginning to appear in the home as well. High capacity hard disk-based video recorders are growing in popularity, and pundits predict that it will soon be possible to automatically record an entire year of television programs on any given channel. If this becomes a reality, the next phase is likely to be people wanting to transfer the data to a mobile phone or other device so that they can watch only the parts they want. The whole concept of media broadcasting has historically meant that the images will disappear as soon as they transmitted. But, now, they may very well need to revisit the entire software and service systems of broadcasting.
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| Source: Stanford Japan Cente |
