Cell phone users create a new literary genre

Cell phone users in Japan have been successful in creating a new literary genre, called the cell phone novel. According to this article, last year five out of ten of Japan's best-selling novels were originally cell phone novels republished in hard copy form. The novels are composed on cell phones, then uploaded to a web site as a work in progress, where readers can access and comment on the regular instalments. A number of factors seem to be contributing to the success of these novels:

1. A high penetration rate of cell phones, combined with unlimited data plans since 2004
2. A reading culture (for the younger generation that is) that prefers simple stories like those in the Japanese manga comic books
3. A number of urbanized areas where long commutes (for example 2 hours one way) are fairly common

If the novels are compared with more traditional forms of literature then, predictably, they incorporate a lot of the features of instant messaging/chat:

[The writers] used expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuances were lost on anyone over the age of 25.

According to their critics they also seem to draw on the features of the comic book genre:

In cellphone novels, characters tend to be undeveloped and descriptions thin, while paragraphs are often fragments and consist of dialogue.

No doubt these textual features are in part due to the peculiarities of writing on a cell phone (small screen size, limited space to convey the message) and in part due to the fact that most of the writers tend to be young women (familiar with chat conventions). I particularly liked the question raised at the end of this article: is it possible to write a cell phone novel on a computer? Established cell phone novelists have now turned to the keyboard, and some claim to be able to discern the results:

“Since she’s switched to a computer,” he added, “her vocabulary’s gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer.”

For me, the story provides some interesting evidence of how genres can emerge given the right blend of technology, social and cultural factors. It also invites some questions about language standards, and language use in different contexts. Let me know if you see anything else like this out there.