hightext

Predictive texting

Well this sounds like a jolly good idea - predictive texting for your mobile phone that can cope with you mixing multiple languages in the same text. It would be nice to think that the mobile space will develop in a less linguistically Anglocentric way than the internet in general has.

As it happens I was just flicking through the proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2004 which has a paper on this - 'Linguistic Standardization on the Internet' by Daniel Pargman and Jacob Palme. They kick off their article by pointing out how unfortunate it is that the municipality of Hörby (I only managed to get the umlaut on by copying and pasting) in southern Sweden is known as Horby (even its own URL is www.horby.se) in terms of its web presence, and without the umlaut, it means 'adulteryville'.

As the authors point out, there are standard encoded texts that can be used to input such non ASCII characters on the web but "it happens quite often that they do not work the way they are supposed to, and when that happens a very unnatural text will be displayed." Which means lazy types like me just don't bother. I want to bother though, out of respect for my colleagues and clients who have non ASCII characters in their names. The two Spanish facilitators in my Japan Intercultural network have four accents between them, for example...

A bridge in Hörby - no adulterers here, nor murderers, even though we are in Skåne, where Henning Mankell sets most of his detective stories.

Mobile etiquette and mobility

At a recent cross cultural collaboration seminar I conducted for a Japanese pharmaceutical company, one of the Japanese participants wondered why it seemed OK for people in the UK to shout or listen to music loudly on public transport. He also wondered why we did not have rules about queueing in front of train doors and boarding in order of who has waited the longest, standing on the left or right on escalators or moving right inside the carriage so other people can get on. The British participants all agreed that there were rules or norms about a lot of these things and that they too found various kinds of behaviour offensive or annoying on public transport but did not do anything about it.

We agreed that it was partly because of the 'group orientation' versus 'individualism' difference that is often mentioned in East-West comparisons - that we do not want to infringe individual rights by asking people to modify their behaviour. Also, we are worried that we will get an aggressive or violent reaction, and as British people, we hate making a fuss.

I also think it is because in London we have such a mobile and transient population, there is a lack of community spirit or social pressure that can enforce good behaviour, or back someone up when they try to enforce rules and norms. Participants mentioned how they felt noone else would say anything even if they did, or help them if the offender turned aggressive.

So it's interesting that when a 79 year old retiree did get into a fight trying to stop someone from swearing loudly on their mobile phone, one of the reasons he gave was "I've been in lots of different places, but when I heard that kind of stuff coming in my hometown, I thought, 'Somebody's got to do something." Ramsey County, Minnesota (which contains St Paul, hardly a small town...), where the incident took place, is clearly proud of its community spirit and enforcing its own rules and responsibilities - if you look at its website, it says
"Ramsey County is the first and only Minnesota County to be governed by Home Rule; all other counties are governed by state statutes. The Charter is like a constitution for the county. It spells out the duties & responsibilities of the county government." In other words, don't mess with us.

Hat tip to Techdirt, who also point out that the best method of enforcing mobile etiquette is through peer pressure from those around you.

Americans use cellphones to talk, period.

According to an article in the New York Times, American take up of data services on their mobile phones is still low. This is not a new development, as the US has been lagging Europe and Japan on texting etc for a while now, and data services are still expensive and the handsets not so cool.

Mobile Content Report (via Techdirt) says it's because Americans are more garrulous, but the real reason to me seems to lie in the comment made in the article that Japanese and Europeans spend a lot of time travelling on trains, and so use data services to kill time while commuting, whereas car-using American commuters cannot.