hightext

Learning from Japan... or not

Some contrasting news stories on the wireless front:

Vodafone/Bango note that in Japan 70% of wireless data traffic goes off-net, ie outside the portals of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode and its rivals and (hurrah!) are actively going to promote off-net searching from Vodafone Live! Does this mean they'll stop charging more per kB to view non-Vodafone Live! sites though? And will off-net mean, as it does in Japan, mostly 'adult' and 'dating' sites?

Oh no, scrap that, we have nothing to learn from Japan, says Portuguese operator Optimus, we are a more fragmented market. (Japan more fragmented than Portugal? Huh?)

Well, if you don't copy our model, we may have to 'gently persuade' you says NTT DoCoMo, eyeing MMO2 again.

Romancing

Interesting explanation of why Romance languages tend to express themselves in more long-winded ways than Anglo-Saxons would like from Nelson Ascher at Europundits.

Key quote:
"While most of the advantages that the English language has are, I think, in the realm of semantic adequacy, with the ability of its speaker to find the right adjective for a noun or the right adverb for a verb, since our Romance languages are not so semantically rich or precise, we compensate with the richer nuances made possible by our own richness: that of verbal tenses. But while the advantages of English become more evident in as short a space as possible, those of Portuguese and other Romance language need a wider or longer space to unfold, to show themselves."

It's true that it does make reading blogs written by Romance language people, even when they're writing in English, quite hard work and then I feel guilty that I'm being intellectually lazy...!

Filipino blogging and texting

I've just had an interesting e-mail exchange with aMia, who is a Filipino student and blogger. She left a comment on my entry about using LiveJournal as a cultural adjustment tool because she's writing a paper on blogs as an adjustment tool and came across my post while researching it on the web.

I took the opportunity to ask her more about Filipino use of mobiles for texting and also blogs, as I'd noticed in the past that young Filipinos are avid users of texting and blogging - right up there with Koreans and Japanese even though, as she points out herself "our country is still under the category of 'third world'." Of course this partly explains the popularity of mobile phones - they're a lot cheaper than a PC.

But aMia also made the interesting comment that "u should see the way we text, people come up with lotsa things like quotes, jokes, political stands, prayers, etc just to connect or share with other people. i think it's an indirect approach in wanting to be heard." Which ties in nicely with her thoughts on why young Filipinos blog - because "most people are afraid to be judged by people they know" so a blog lets them express themselves semi-anonymously.

Both mobiles and blogs offer a way to express yourself boldly, without being completely direct. I'm guessing this is useful both if you're younger and still not sure of your social circle, but also, to make a huge cultural generalisation, when people are influenced by 'Asian' considerations of not offending and maintaining group harmony.

aMia also pointed me at this blog entry and comments by another Filipino blogger, talking about her worries that she is blogging to please people and her blog now owns her, when she thought she owned it - a concern which strikes a chord with bloggers from any culture I would think.

Hecklesnot

This kind of stuff suddenly makes me come over all monochronous and old European. Trying to give a presentation when there is a hecklebot/IRC feed on display causing sudden unexplained outbreaks of laughter and god knows how many virtual conversations, silent but public snide remarks and collaborative notetaking going on in the audience is bad enough for the poor old presenter/teacher/lecturer. But imagine being in the audience too, and not quite keeping up, always thinking that the joke is forming without you - this would happen to anyone not quite technically literate or linguistically fluent enough to keep up. I really don't see this is as bridging the digital divide at all, just another way of mostly male young geeks reassuring each other about how clever they are.

Just after writing the above I came across this thread on Joi Ito's blog, regarding the echo-chamber and "censorship of the commons" that can occur in IRC communities and blogs. The description that V gives of people's behaviour towards Joi Ito and each other on the IRC community and at ETech (lots of sucking up and an unspoken pecking order) all sound very plausible. And then of course lots of people attack V for saying that on the same thread. I have already heard of someone getting flamed for having the temerity to point out on a Howard Dean blog that a Plan B should be drawn up for using the support he has gained for some other constructive campaigning if he were to stand down from the Presidential race.

I still hope that information and telecommunication technology could be used to help bridge cultures - but clearly this is not going to happen if cultures are adolescent in their reinforcing behaviour.

I've always wanted to be able to do this...

...plot the countries I've visited...

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Brazil, China, Australia and the USA make it look more impressive. Definite gaps with regard to the Middle East, India and Russia and the middle part of Africa. One day...

(Thanks to Tom.)

English still dominates corporate websites

A survey by US research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory finds that nearly 90% of leading firms in the world's largest economies offer English as a second language on their websites.

The survey analysed the websites of the top 25 revenue producing companies in 16 countries from Western Europe, Asia and the Americas, encompassing 28 market segments including aerospace, beverages, consumer products, pharmaceuticals, retail and telecommunications.

One of the authors of the survey said in a previous report that "visitors linger twice as long [at websites in their own language] as they do at English-only URLs, business buyers are three times more likely to buy if addressed in their own language, and customer service costs drop when instructions are displayed in the user's language." However this more recent survey found that companies in Anglophone countries tend to offer English-only sites. 42% of US companies, 50% of British firms and 80% of Australian websites offered only English content. So presumably they might be missing out on gaining non-Anglophone customers? If they are local retailers or utilities, they might not be targetting non-Anglophone customers anyway.

It's difficult to say without paying for the report and reading it in more depth, but I wonder whether they investigated the corporate HQ websites only or also acknowledged that these companies had local websites in the local language at separate URLs (Vodafone would be an example of this).

Having separate websites makes sense in terms of localising for the market, but it is intensely annoying if the corporate website offers much more information in its native language than it makes available in the language of the local market.

Interestingly, the survey found that website design varies little by geography. The authors attribute this to a high degree of adoption of border-hopping technologies like newer browser versions and Flash, and the reliance of larger companies on big advertising firms and designers worldwide. They do not comment whether or not this is wise...

Liar liar phone on fire

Apparently we (read: Americans) are more likely to lie face to face or on the phone than when we use e-mail, according to research about to be published in the New Scientist.

The Cornell University researcher who conducted the study reckons it's to do with whether the conversation is immediate and whether it is recorded. It seems to me it also depends on how you define lying. Certainly barefaced lies would be more likely when the person is caught unprepared in a conversation. You can prepare very carefully for a lie in an e-mail - it can be less of a lie than being "economical with the actualite" as the late British government minister Alan Clarke once put it - copying British civil servant Sir Robert Armstrong's "it contains a misleading impression, not a lie. It was being economical with the truth", said during the Spycatcher case.

Sir Robin Butler (also a British civil servant) claims that he and Sir Robert were merely paraphrasing Edmund Burke (18th century Irish statesman and philosopher) - who according to Sir Robin said "be economical with the truth that you may speak it the longer". The nearest Burke excerpts I can find to this on the web are here - "a wise man will speak the truth with temperance that he may speak it the longer." (which is second hand) and here: "I will not enter into the question how much truth is preferable to peace. Perhaps truth may be far better. But as we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one that we have in the other I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company charity, the highest of the virtues."

Gosh, we Brits (which in this case includes 18th century Irish) have a long tradition of finding virtuous reasons for sort-of-lying, it would seem. And let us not forget Shakespeare, in Henry IV, Part One. Falstaff: 'The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life.'

Dating sites and identity

An article in the online section of the Japanese business magazine Nikkei Business (subscription only) wonders about the connection between Japanese internet dating sites and social software.

The journalist (Kobashi Akihiko) takes as his starting point the coincidence of the recent announcement by the Japanese National Police Agency that they undertook investigations of 1746 cases relating to internet dating sites last year, with the launch by Google staff of Orkut, a social networking service.

The 1746 cases investigated by the NPA represent a large increase on the previous year. There were also 37 more cases than the previous year which had resulted in murder or robbery. Kobashi posits that internet dating sites have a deeper 'dark side' to them than offline dating services. He wonders whether this is because they are used mostly by generations born since the 1960s, the so-called Shinjinrui ("new people" - a bit like Generation Y) who have become so focused on their identities and their individuality, without reference to other people, that they have become over-sensitive to criticism, and withdraw to an inner circle of people they feel safe with. This means that the 'individual self' and the 'social self' become opposed. Not treading on another's individuality becomes the definition of sociability or a socialized person when in fact 'socialization' used to mean being able to change oneself through relations with other people.

He mentions an experiment by a psychologist (Froming? Floming?) in 1982 which showed that people's behaviour changed significantly depending on whether they were in front of an audience or in front of a mirror. In front of a mirror they behave according to their own values, and in front of an audience they try to match other people's expectations. I tried to check this on Google and there seems to be a lot of psychological studies on mirror presence, audience presence and self consciousness but I could not find the precise one he is talking about. Anyway, Kobashi makes the interesting point that the internet is not an audience but a mirror.

People are clicking on the information they want and look only at that information when they go on the internet. They only see what they want to see reflected back at them. On an internet dating site, they are only meeting themselves when they search for someone.

He sees social networking services as something different, however, because other people's opinions are brought into them. He ends on a positive note that perhaps social networking sites will enable socialization and individuality to fuse.

Norwegian rude

Norwegian taxi drivers are insisting that passengers ask first before using their mobile phones. Techdirt comments that this probably wouldn't work in New York.

Initially I thought this was an example of Norwegian egalitarianism - just because I am a taxi driver, doesn't mean you should treat me (and my workplace, as the taxi driver quoted in the article describes his cab) with disrespect. But then Americans are very egalitarian too. I suspect the key difference lies in the dimensions defined by Hofstede of masculine and feminine societies. American society falls in the masculine/small power distance quadrant whereas Norway falls in the feminine/small power distance quadrant. Hence both are egalitarian but in Norway "people and warm relationships are important" versus "money and things are important in the US" and Norwegians "work in order to live" versus Americans "live in order to work."

Broad generalisations of course, as often happens in intercultural theory, but it explains the Scandinavian attachment to the Welfare State and the American impatience with rotten customer service in Northern Europe. As it happens there is another article in the same Norwegian newspaper about how the Oslo taxi company has forced its drivers to sign a contract saying that they will be polite to customers.

The issue raised by another commenter on the Techdirt article, of why mobile phone conversations should be viewed any differently by the taxi driver from overhearing conversations between two passengers in the back of their cab, has been one much debated by sociologists looking at mobile phone usage. I'm trying to remember where I saw an analysis of this - of why mobile phone conversations are somehow more intrusive and offensive to people nearby than overhearing other people's face to face conversations... I'll link to it when I find it.

Finnish and Estonian cultural background books

I always try to read a book from whichever country is the "host country" for the person to whom I am delivering intercultural training.

At the end of last year I was working with a Japanese engineer in Finland, so I read The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (of Moomin fame), which gives a good picture of the Finnish love of being on isolated islands during the summer.

I also read The Czar's Madman: A Novel, by Jaan Kross. The central character, Timo von Bock, is a fictional 19th century baron, and the story is narrated by his brother-in-law as a journal. It is set in Estonia, but is still relevant to Finland, not only because they are neighbouring countries but also because both were ruled by the Russian Empire at the time.

The book is clearly a metaphor for Kross's own experiences of imprisonment in Soviet labour camps. Beyond this, as a historical insight, as with Tolstoy, it alerts you to how multilingual educated upper class people were expected to be in Europe. Timo has his wife and her brother learn Latin, French and Russian in addition to their native Estonian. They only speak Estonian amongst themselves, in order to exclude Russian eavesdropping, and it is seen as the language of peasants.

Kross makes it seem like the journal really existed, but I have not been able to verify this. However my mother's maiden name is Bock, and her uncle traced back our Danish family to Kurland in Estonia, to Raadsherre (lord of the manor?) Paul von Bock, born in 1510. So if Timo did exist, he was almost certainly a relative of mine.

There is also a Bock House in Helsinki, built in 1763 by the merchant and magistrate Gustav Johan Bock, which I couldn't resist photographing with my cameraphone during my visit.

Adobe bloatware

Putting text into Adobe Acrobat pdf format has been one of the few ways to be absolutely sure that people using Japanese operating system computers can read files created by people using computers with other language operating systems. It's noticeable that many Japanese websites offer their press releases and brochures in pdf format, to ensure maximum readability.

Alas I have had to uninstall Adobe Acrobat version 6.0.1 as it always crashes my Opera version 7.3 browser with my CPU running at 100% usage levels and doesn't seem to work too well with IE either. Apparently version 6.0.1 will allow me playback multimedia content and read e-books. I really don't care about that, I just want a quick, reliable document reader. So I'm back to version 5.0 and right clicking pdf files to save from websites rather than trying to open them on the spot. It's not just me that's cheesed off either. 70% of CNET user reviews give it the thumbs down too.

Translating loss

After being refused entry to the cinema with my friend Polly because her 6 month old baby was deemed in danger of corruption from a 15 certificate film, I went to see "Lost in Translation" with the hubby instead. This did not prevent me from falling in love with Bill Murray (again) and I was also pretty taken with the film.

I agree with the main review and most of the comments here on Chanpon.org, an online group I belong to of bicultural "Japan plus one other culture" people. It was good to see Mimi Ito's review as I wanted to get a Japanese person's perspective. As she says, Lost in Translation isn't really about Japan but I would say that the plot - unconsummated love accepted in a fatalistic way - is very Japanese.

To add to the comments on Chanpon and elsewhere that there were moments, the prostitute scene in particular, which stereotyped Japanese pronunciation and behaviour to the point of being insulting, I also thought that it was unlikely Japanese people would really blabber on in Japanese to a non-Japanese as portrayed several times in the film. In particular I would imagine the hospital receptionist would try his hardest to communicate in whatever English he could muster. The ad director might also have tried some English beyond "it's Suntory time" in directing Bill Murray, although he may have felt it would be beneath his dignity to lose face speaking bad English. You would have expected the translator to make a much better attempt at translating what the ad director said than she did, but perhaps she was not a professional interpreter. But then if any of this had happened, it wouldn't be "Lost in Translation" would it?

PS Here is a translation of the ad directing scene.

PPS Asian Media Watch have launched a campaign to stop Lost in Translation getting any Oscars. Weary sigh.

PPPS Just wanted to point out that the writer of the Guardian review (which made so many in the UK take on the idee recue that the film is racist), Kiku Day, is not actually Japanese. She lived in Japan for ten years and I would guess decided to change her first name to Kiku (chrysanthemum) on the strength of this. (Later correction - it turns out my guess was wrong - she tells me she is "a Danish national, but my mother is Japanese, my father American Caucasian, both changed their nationalities to Danish and Swedish. I am born in Harajuku, Tokyo, Japan. I lived there til the age of 6, and then moved to Denmark
where I spent the rest of my childhood, teenage years until I moved to Japan, where I lived for 10 years. I have since then lived in Switzerland, UK and now USA.")
I stick to my guns (although she beats me on 10 years to my 9 in Japan) that the film makes more fun of the lost, clueless, inept Americans than it does the Japanese, and in any case the film is not really 'about' Japan.

PPPPS Big long debate in the comments section of Joi Ito's blog here.