What Japanese Women Talk About When They Talk to Their Computers

According to an article in the Mainichi News, a Japanese national newspaper, forty percent of young Japanese women talk to their computers. Here's the url:

http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20070623p2a00m0na009000c.htm...

Now, I talk to my computer too (and I'm glad no one can hear me at my most frustrating moments or see me give it a little pat when it pulls off a particularly inspired writing day). But no one, to my knowledge, has done a story about what American women say to their computers or how many of us talk to our computers. (There was a time, in the 1990s, when half of the academic books written included an acknowledgment to one's new computer or software program . . . There was a year when I was traveling nonstop when I thought I should dedicate my next book to a brilliant new suitcase on wheels that seemed infinitely expandable and unstoppable. But then I'm told pilots talk to their planes and I know sailing aficionados who have long and complex conversational relationships with their boats. Thanking the inanimate is hardly anything new.) Anyway, the Mainichi Shinbun doesn't address the question of whether young Japanese men talk to their computers or whether older men and women do. Since they don't ask the question, I am going to make a wild stab here that the article is more about the fantasy life of Japanese men (what do all those young girls do? what makes them tick? aren't they cute, talking to their computers like that?) than an ethnographic sampling of the disproportionate amount of time that young Japanese women (v. Japanese men, older people of all ages, other kinds of young women, etc) spend chatting up their laptops, so to speak.

But let's say that forty percent of Japanese women do speak to their laptops----what are they saying? And how are they saying it? You use different grammar and vocabulary in Japan if you talk to an elder, to a member of the opposite sex, to a superior, to your boss, a sibling, a parent, a grandparent, the emperor, etc. Do you talk up or do you talk down to your computer? Do you use a different form of address for your desktop than for your laptop (is one older, more important, closer to you than the other)? In a relational language, where everything is about the speaker's relationship to the person addressed, what exactly is the relationship here? The Mainichi article isn't a study, it is the beginning of some very interesting questions. Now, I'm going to pat my desktop, maybe bow to it, and bid it sayonara as I return to my day's other work . . .

[This adorable Beckoning Cat was captured by my friend, game theorist and accomplished WoW player Doug Thomas, on a recent trip to Japan. Thanks, Doug!]