Tamagotchi

Definition

Tamagotchi is the name of a Japanese pocket pet that simulated social and material needs. The Tamagotchi became a household name shortly after Japanese toy producer Bandai released the small egg-shaped computer into the hands of millions of adoring youth. The technology, developed in 1996, by Aki Maita, would see sales of over 70 million by 2008.

Pocket pets had characteristic cries that would interrupt class if not turned off. Caring for the pet was fairly simple. A tiny creature would appear on screen after the egg was turned on. By pressing the three buttons, the owner could feed, bathe, discipline, or amuse the pet. If these four actions were done in moderation and at a fairly regular pace, the creature would eventually evolve into a better animal. If the creature was poorly cared for, it would either die or evolve a sickly weak animal. Some parents expressed "concern because the device constantly calls the user to it with penalties for ignoring its signal, including death, starvation, and sickness, effectively keeping the device in the child’s consciousness at all times and interfering with other, potentially constructive, activities”

The Tamagotchi as Harbinger of Technosocial Connectivity

It could be said that the Tamagotchi pet was a technosocial training wheel for the later adoption of the mobile device. The structure of the cell phone is very similar to that of a pocket pet. The interactions between teachers and students who used pocket pets in class was a harbinger of technosocially mediated days to come, when cell phones and Facebook would become a normal part of the everyday class experience.

The three main buttons and display on a cell phone echo the functionality of friendships and texting. The shape relative to the human hand, the buttons on the front, and the display are all similar. And, like the digital pets needs to be fed periodically, so do friends. Sometimes the phone can be reset. There is a call and hang up button, and a menu of options to browse. In the cell phone model, there are multiple pocket pets in one device. Each one is the representation of a contact or friend, which must be maintained by feeding (talking or texting with the contact).

In the same way, the cell phone constantly calls the user to it with penalties or ignoring its signal. Missed parties or business deals reinforce responsive behaviors and maintenance strategies.

Text messages, phone calls to friends, and E-mail now live on many students’ mobile devices, making cell phone use in school almost completely necessary to stay in touch with friends. This makes cell phones a real-life Tamagotchi, where multiple creatures exist inside each device, and relationship maintenance becomes a push-button system.

With Twitter, celebrities can teleoperate – that is, they can connect with followers and fans without actually having to see them in real life. The celebrity’s actual body is protected from access by fans through the digital technosocial interface of the social network architecture.

“Now they swarm in large colonies, safe inside gigantic, lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines”. Since speech that was normally only accessible to the auditory, proximal world of the analog social network has now become digitized, opinions can now be indexed in real-time, without the need to travel to different times and spaces in order to glean that information. Statistical samples can easily be accessed by listening into a market channel for clues about how a product is performing.

One tells the self, “the more my social “stuff” gets spread around the web, the more places it shows up, the more uHaul storage units I have to purchase to store its essence”. Or if one just lets it go by, realizing that it is much too fast to comprehend -- then what happens? Does it lose less value? The social self becomes increasingly fragmented in this respect.

Further Reading

• Transcoding the World: Haraway’s Postmodernism, Jonathan Crewe, Signs, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Summer, 1997), pp. 891-905, Published by: The University of Chicago Press, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175223).
• Zizek and the Tamagotchi